Listen!

What is your career plan?

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said”

Peter Drucker

When I completed my Early Childhood and Childcare education, I had to work in a preschool for a few months. Back in those days, the student-teacher ratio was almost 1 teacher to every 5 or 6 kids, so I had to focus my attention on the 5 children under my care and help assist the others if they required anything. In the initial part of the year, the children were grouped based on the languages they could communicate in and towards the end of the year, typically, the kids had favorites and would pick the teachers or Didi, they would like to hang around with. I could not speak Marathi, and the Didi who worked with me would handle the children who came from Marathi families. I used to work with children who had already been introduced to English, or who came from families that spoke Hindi.

Every morning was drama in real life, with children fighting to come to school leaving the comfort and familiarity of their homes and favorite toys. There was this one child, who used to get dropped off by his father, who only spoke Marathi, and for some reason, this child took an instant liking to me, so he would come and hold my hand and would never let it go. He was my shadow for the duration of the classes that day. He did not understand anything I said. I did not understand anything he said, but we were comfortable in each other’s company. And that became a ritual every day. I had no idea what was communicated to the parents when he reached home, but he was hesitant to come into school if he did not see me at the gate. This is where I started thinking more about language and communication and its importance in life.

Communication has always fascinated me: how to ask for or find something relevant from among the millions of other things vying for our attention. And communication among kids is astounding in its simplicity. Especially in a class of 20-odd children, coming in from various backgrounds and speaking different languages, understanding, and interacting with the many verbal and nonverbal cues they use – always had me wondering how these connections were made. I spent a lot of my time watching and observing what children say and how they phrase a request, and this helped me understand the value and importance of the words and tone used.

That little boy taught me about trust. He did not understand me. He did not know me. There was a Didi, who could talk to him in the language he understood. Yet, he ignored her and was stuck to my side. We hit it off. For the next three months, he was my shadow. We communicated using gestures and gesticulations. An almost 6 ft tall teacher and her super petite, delicate shadow who only spoke Marathi. Our first Parent-Teacher meeting was interesting because the parents could only communicate in Marathi, and I did not know the language. But the little boy became our interpreter, and our meeting was full of gesticulations, smiles, and giggles. The parents were thrilled at the small changes they had started seeing in him. Preschool children are sponges that absorb everything that is around them, verbal and nonverbal. This child had started to pick up a few habits from the activities we conducted in class like cleanliness and patience to wait his turn. This child’s development and understanding often made me think about the what, the how, and the why of communication.

With my kids, the understanding and development were assumed to be due to in-utero interactions. They had heard me talk and communicate and understood it naturally. But with the children in the school, I had no idea what their in-utero environment was like, so their learning probably was something new they learned post-birth. And this has always been fascinating.

By the same logic, communicating with pets would also use some of these cues. Because animals don’t understand human language, training them and teaching them a particular behavior or reaction to certain words could use the same learning curve. Maybe, we should compare this learning curve for both pets being trained and children just learning to communicate to see how they learn something new or different. The best part of the learning here is that teaching preschool children and training pets is making them listen to understand. And that is a lot of fun. I have raised my kids with precise logical explanations of what we do something or why we avoid something, and interacting with teenagers today, I can confidently say, that I am often at the receiving end of all the logic I taught them, but I’m not complaining, because it lets me know that the children are thinking through why they want something and why they prefer something else. By this time, children have learned to listen to reply. Unfortunately, this is not something I thought about or considered when I had my pets, and maybe it should be what I research and understand next. But thankfully, pets will continue to listen to understand and behave a particular way, and not listen to reply.