voices in and of the world

Evidently, this post is late…

But in reflecting back to our time spent in the classroom on a cold March 31st, I realize that my forgetting to post about it in and of itself was telling. The classroom space didn’t enter into the conversation at all; it simply existed, and we ignored it in order to focus in on the ideas at hand. When we are outside, birds and dirt and insects join in on the conversation with their own languages and metaphors, offering up comments through song and movement, speech that derails the human-centered “me.”

There is a thoroughly different quality of sound in our classroom. Voices reverberate, but they don’t carry. The outside world is shut out, and our thoughts are shut in. The silence, the closed-off feeling of the classroom to the outside world, can almost be deafening—too sterile of a retreat from the world. How are we to be more implicated in the messy, entangled world when our physical voices are bounded by walls?

Maybe, when we make time to be outside, we might take a few moments to register the different kind of silence in our new space? And perhaps we could be sure to open some windows when inside the classroom space to let in the medley of sounds of the world beyond those walls?