Teaching With My Mouth Shut

An Introductory Note:

This piece describes a method of teaching in which the teacher (that’s me) projects typed words on a screen rather than speaking.  One of the unintended benefits of this method is that there ends up being a written record of the class, both what I “said” and what the students said or wrote.  For the purposes of this writing, I have used a serif font to indicate words that I or the students projected, and the sans serif font for the body of this meditation.  All names (except mine) have been changed to honor the anonymity of my students.  The transcript and meditation below represents about 15 minutes of an hour long lesson.

Teaching With My Mouth Shut

A few days ago I started doing this thing in my classroom where, instead of speaking, I merely sat at my little desk in the corner with my computer plugged into the overhead projector and I typed.  I did not speak a single word.  I was entirely silent except for the clicking of my fingers on the keys.  I didn’t even really look up at them.  I merely wrote:

Get out a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.

Then I waited.  The kids who were looking at the screen immediately did what the screen asked them to.  I continued to wait.  The kids that weren’t looking at the screen continued to chat with their peers, and then this interesting sort of cascade went around the room when I wrote this:

Julio, please take out a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.

One of Julio’s table-mates noticed his name, and tapped him on the shoulder, pointing towards the screen at the front of the room.  Julio smiled, and took out a piece of paper and a pencil.  Then I deleted his name and left the instructions up, highlighting the sentence and then underlining and de-underlining it by pressing command-U in rapid succession.  Pretty soon the whole room was busy opening their binders and getting out their materials.

In about a minute, the whole room was ready to write.  (A note on efficiency: this only took a little bit longer than it normally takes with me or Laura issuing verbal reminders about taking out paper and pen or pencil and putting other things away.)

Then I wrote:

Today we are going to write FIVE word sentences.  And we’re going to use a new kind of word: the ARTICLE.

Please raise your hand if you think you know what an article is.

A bunch of hands shot up.  I sat and waited for about fifteen seconds, longer than many of the kids wanted me to wait.  They like to be called on (at least the ones who like to be called on), and they like to be called on fast.  I looked out of the corner of my left eye and “called” a name.  The child said what she thought, and I wrote it verbatim as she said it.  The direct transcription of what the child says is an essential component of this “method.”  It is tempting (I have been tempted) to paraphrase or correct what the child says before projecting it, but I have tried very hard to resist doing that for many reasons.  I put my responses, when I chose to respond, in brackets.  I also indicated the speaker by typing the child’s name with a colon, as though everyone in the room were taking part in a play.

Abby: It’s a word that modifies a noun.  [Nope.  An ADJECTIVE is a word that modifies a noun.]

Cory: It’s something that gets written about in a newspaper.  [Yes.  “Article” is what we call stories that get published in newspapers.  But I’m thinking about a different article.  I’m thinking about a kind of word.]

Any more thoughts?

Benji: It’s a word!   [Yup. It’s a word.  But I think I’m just fishing now, and the fish I’m looking for doesn’t seem to be in the pond, so I’m just going to tell you.]

The articles in English are: A, An, The.

A collective gasp rang out through the room.

Cool.  So now we’re going to write sentences that use articles, nouns and verbs.  Like this:

Article-Noun-Verb-Article-Noun

I need an example.

A bunch of hands shot up.  I picked a name at random from the seating chart.  A bunch of children who had been waving at me groaned.  I typed Enrique’s name, and waited for him to come up with a sentence.

Enrique: The horse ate the cow.  [Yup.  That’s a good example.]

Ok.  So for THREE minutes, we will write sentences like the example.
ON your mark.
GET set.
GO.

They wrote for three minutes.  I gave them one minute reminders.  I usually circulate during this time, but because I was being silent, I didn’t.  I wasn’t ready to break character yet.  I sat there, watching them write until the time was up.  Then I wrote:

Thanks for writing everyone.  I am going to call on seven writers at random.  Keep your hands down.  I am going to look down at the seating chart, not at you.

Tyler: The butterfly killed the lion.

Aislyn: The TV hid the remote.

PJ: The horse ate the fly.

Marni: The snake ate the snail.

Drake: The cat slapped the dog.

Athena: The tree ate the monkey.

Ron: The cat ate the food.

Thanks, everyone.  You can put those back in your binders.


I first tried this out because one of my students is deaf.  She has a cochlear implant, but I know that, even on a quiet day, it can be hard for her to hear instructions, even when I wear the little microphone she gives me each day at the beginning of class.  So I decided I would try to write down and project all the instructions and as much of the class discussion as I could.  I had no idea how powerful an organizing structure it would be.
    Since that first attempt, I have done a couple of variations on it.  I have given one student a microphone (our class has this funny PA system) and have that student read what I type, so the kids get to see it and hear it, and though the words are, in fact, mine, it feels to them like they are listening to their peers.  When the students read the sentences they each use the microphone, and then they pass the mic to the next reader.  This got many of the kids up and moving around the room, something they sort of naturally gravitate towards anyway.  There is something captivating about the microphone.  Some of them love it.  And some of them hate it.  But it has sort of changed the dynamic in the room, and as my loyal readers know, my fifth period class needed--desperately needed--a dynamic shift.
    Some of my sixth graders thought something was wrong with me--that I’d lost my voice or something.  A few of them recognized that it was a kind of game I was playing.  Later, when I broke character and began to speak again, a few of them asked me: “Why did you do that, Gil?”
    And I turned the question back on them: “Why you think I did that?”
    Susan put it best: “Maybe because we get bored listening to teachers talk all day.  And we might listen to one of our classmates better than we might listen to you.”