Noise

When, where, and how much?

Photo by Elyas Pasban on Unsplash

When I taught English, my classroom was tight in some ways and loose in some ways. I suppose that some stickler for order could come in during prep for a debate or presentation and see students sitting on tables or lying on the floor and wonder if there was any order in what looked like anarchy. And the more I got into UDL, the more my “room” became less just the real estate of my actual classroom and more the classroom, the area outside of it, and maybe the landing of any nearby stairways, as students were no longer all doing the same thing at the same time. “You walk into Mr. Hamann’s room before you walk into the actual room,” one evaluator once said about me, in a complimentary fashion.

There was one way, however, that I never was anything other than old school, and that was in noise.

I never, ever got to the point where I handled extraneous noise well.

This was most important in times when someone was talking and the class was expected to listen. This sometimes meant listening to me. Because I lectured so rarely, if a kid was talking while I was talking, I’d usually be able to say “Can you listen up for just a few minutes? I promise that you’ll get the rest of the class to talk.” The thing that got my goat the most was when I would notice somebody was talking while I was talking. I would go through the steps:

1. Quietly wait.

2. Wait while wearing the teacher glare.

3. Wait while pointing the teacher glare directly at the offending party.

only to have the kid talk again when I started again. “The rule is no talking while someone else is talking,” I said. “The rule is NOT that you can talk while someone else is talking as long as you do it more quietly than the person who is talking.” Repeated violations of this were a persistent and large annoyance that added many gray hairs to my head.

Even more troubling to me was if kids would talk while one of their classmates was talking. This was a level of disrespect that I could put up with when directed at me, but not at a classmate. Too rude! One at a time, kids. One at a time.

This preference for quiet at these times did not mean I had a silent classroom. Far from it. My go-to activities (seminars, structured academic controversies, debates) tended to require some noise, both in the preparation and execution. So once I had done a little David Letterman-style bonding and given them the day’s instructions, kids could spread out physically and open up a little bit vocally. But when the room required it, I would be pretty strict.

As I have seen classrooms throughout my career, going all the way back to my pre-student-teaching visits to teachers and stretching through these eight school years of coaching, I have learned that there are teachers with more tolerance for noise.

One teacher, Mo, was one of the most brilliant teachers I have ever seen. Kids loved her and learned from her at deep, extraordinary levels. And when she was talking to them, there were side conversations, messing around, inside jokes, and…noise. It was a noisy classroom. A popular math teacher I knew early in my career, Shannon, was the same. Kids were messing about, playing eye games, cracking wise. They also were learning math.

At some point, I decided that it was folly to ask any teacher to be like me or for me to be like another teacher. I just need to be able to concentrate, I would tell kids, and so I’d appreciate quiet while I talk or while I’m trying to listen to somebody else. They were understanding, and if they weren’t, I would work on the culture until I fixed the problem. Meanwhile, some of my neighbors would just blitz through the noise like a football gauntlet machine. When I sub for those teachers, I say “Hey, I have a lower tolerance for noise than Ms. Mo does…can you stay quiet while I talk, please?” and it worked well enough.

I am currently in a situation where I am working through my prior perspectives about noise in the classroom.

This year, we have a sudden increase in super-noisy classes, that, to me, feel super-disruptive. There is an epidemic of kids who will just talk to each other, out loud, no matter what is happening in the room. They don’t whisper, like kids in past years might have. They simply, while something else is going on, talk to the kid next to them (or even the kid five desks away). It is mystifying: I’ve never quite seen behavior like this before. They either do not understand that sound travels, do understand but don’t know how to talk without vibrating their vocal cords together, or simply don’t think that it matters that the kids around them hear whatever is happening in the room.

It just feels different this year. Roughly 8-12 kids are the worst offenders, but there are another fifty or so that will play along, while their remaining classmates are finding themselves stuck trying to work in an environment that is consequently rough and ragged.

One colleague rightly pointed something out to me…that the idea of a quiet classroom might be a cultural construct with European roots. Kids who are reported to the office for loud disruption are way, way disproportionately kids of color.

I am aware that I have unconscious bias. I am aware of stereotypes that African-American kids are perceived as “loud.” I am certain these stereotypes bleed over to kids from Latino backgrounds. So I have to be aware that I am pre-wired to hear and interpret noises differently depending on who is making them.

But as I am faced with the current cohort of kids (a large majority of whom are White, for whatever that’s worth, including many of the loudest kids), I am wondering whether the need a classroom to be quiet–even silent–is a cultural construct or a brain-based need.

One of the biggest things we teach kids across the curriculum are not just rules, but when rules are shifted, bent, or even ignored. Without much effort, I can come up with situations in English, Social Studies, Science, Math, and World Languages where kids have to understand that a hard-and-fast rule in another situation needs to be completely shifted in a new time and place.

Given that so many of the students I am watching right now–for whatever reason–need lessons in how to behave in a classroom as much as they need lessons in the stuff on the state tests, I am thinking they need a strong look at what sorts of sounds they are making and when and why those sounds are acceptable. I have seen a couple of spots where this is especially important.

The first: music classes. Choir and band. There is no room where the entire experience is as dependent on what we all can hear. When the choir director is working with the sopranos or the band director is working with the clarinets, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation for the other students not to be making any noises at all. The success of the group depends entirely on what everyone can hear. Now, good teachers (like the choir and band teachers I work with) will give kids a chance to chat and socialize: maybe with a quick touch-base at the start of class or with some inside jokes between songs. But while music is being made? It is not culturally insensitive to ask for no noise at all in that situation.

Also, there are times every now and again where things need to be silent. When I had kids read, I knew there were some readers who, whether because they were really into the reading or really struggled with it, wanted a completely silent environment to do their reading in. So I typically would have the kids divide themselves into an “aloud team” and a “silent team.” I would send the smaller of those teams to the hallway to work and hang back with the larger group in the room. This had the benefit of being based on student needs. Kids who needed silence got it; kids who wanted some noise, or to chat a bit, or kids who wanted to have most of their thoughts out loud (“Wow, this Victor Frankenstein family is super cringey”), got to do that in a non-disruptive, academically appropriate fashion.

This leaves the third, more squishy situation of noise during work time. Can it get too loud as kids are sitting making maps, preparing posters, or having small-group discussion? It seems to me that this is an I-know-it-when-I-see-it moment. It reminds me of the wonderful “they’re fucking with our boats!!” moment I saw last year. We can celebrate the learning of our loud kids while simultaneously working on their behavior, including their noise levels. Kids loudly and raucously meeting a learning target are still meeting a learning target. Might they be doing it in a way that negatively impacts kids at the next table (or in the next room, or in the next ZIP code)? Maybe. In that case, the kid has a learning gap that the teacher can meet: how to be aware of the needs of the kids around them.

Teachers should be able to use their Spidey senses to know when they are asking for too much quiet and too much sitting still, of course. Kids dislike sitting silently for an hour as much as I dislike sitting silently for an entire faculty meeting. But I don’t think it’s too restrictive to teach students what kinds of noise are appropriate at what times, and have them understand the switching of those rules. As one teacher I saw recently said to her students, “you need to understand the line between chit-chat and chaos.”

Sometimes we need it to be silent. Sometimes we can be loud. And always–100% of the time–we need to be thinking of the needs of those around us.

So, what’s your take on noise? What classroom noise do you enjoy, what do you tolerate, and what do you flat-out ban?