That’s the trouble with silence: it may be the silence of meditation (as in the case of Our Lady), but it can also mean being checked out. And while naturally the results of getting checked out students to talk are, well, really bad classroom conversations, it’s not clear to me that this is worse than never having those conversations at all.
Admittedly, calling students cold for their first
reactions to a text is not the best way to get them to practice deep thought—it’s
a great was to get them to practice tongue-wagging. Is there some way for them to practice
thinking first, to prime the pump, as it were?
Writing is one possibility—if a student writes about a
text, it may help them to talk about it too.
But then the problem simply moves backwards: the student who is
idea-less in the classroom is liable to be equally so in the dorm room, as I
know to my sorrow and chagrin.
Where do good ideas come from, anyway?
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