listening

I always find it interesting to talk about the types of listening. Of course discriminative listening is to vital in children learning their language, but I also like to think that it comes into play with my dog, who I speak with more than 97% of humans. He understands just chooses not to listen because his dad taught him Selective Listening. Selective listening, an annoying strand of Efferent Listening in which an individual does not hear what they do not want to hear. This listening form is prevalent in males ages 0-130 and is to blame for 100% of the chores around the house that don't get done because my boyfriend didn't "hear" me. I digress.

I think Efferent and Critical Listening, (note not selective), while vital, is hard to teach and assess. This combined with the fact that people always think what they are saying is important so people must be listening to them, often makes us over look listening all together. I think that teaching different strategies of note-taking along with listening is the most effective way to teach how to listening.

I am torn on assessing listening. I believe that we should assess it, however not for a grade. We should assess to see how affective our own teaching is. We should also assess listening, to see which of our students learn this way, and which ones would benefit from other ways of receiving information.

Oh propaganda. I was quite surprised when I realized we were learning about it. I automatically associate propaganda with WWII. Being the daughter of a marketing professor I have the opposite reaction to commercials than Dr. Duncan, I believe none of them. This is actually a serious issue. For example, not only did I think the Sham Wow should have been called the Scam Wow, but I actually believed it would be so nonabsorbent that it would actually spread liquid around instead of picking it up (leaving me crying on my kitchen floor after trying to clean up spilled dog bowl water for three hours). Like I said, it's an issue.

I think that teaching propganda in the elementary school is very important however. As a child I wanted everything I saw, because I really believed that the trampoline shoes would allow me to jump to the sky. Once I actually convinced my mom to get me the skate shoes that had wheels on the bottom of them (they were skates AND shoes!!) These were generation one skate shoes mind you, and my dreams were crushed when I landed on my butt for the 27th time because one set of wheels (it varied which side) decided they wanted to be shoes and not skates. The loss of control I felt when I realized that I could not control a pair of shoes with a personality disorder not only made me lose faith in every advertisment, but I believe contributed to the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that I have been working through in therapy since.

In order to help our students understand all facets of our language, and to save their parents money on both the expensive cheap-toy and therapy front. I think teaching propoganda is important. And any student would be thrilled to learn about it by creating their own camercial or watching camericals in school. When fun meets learning is when students want to come to school--and isn't that the goal?