can you hear the sound of your own voice?

This afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with a student.

This particular student, we will call him Yoshi, thought it was time that we just close our text book and have free conversation today. I like Yoshi for this reason. Whenever I see him on my schedule for the day, I instantly feel my day has become more worth while. He is always quick to speak and ask teachers about their interests and their lives. Today, told me more about about his life, his work, his family and how he feels about all these things. The thing I love the most about my job is that I get to ask people as many questions as I can, and help them to express themselves in a way that is meaningful and useful.

Tom was especially curious today about intonation, or how we use our voice to communicate meaning. Tom has been getting frustrated lately because he feels he lacks english grammer and that he is affraid that he speaks like a child. I assured him that, if anything, he could probably teach me a thing or two about english grammer. I then told him that often, when we lack the words to say, we can use our tone of voice to gloss over our mistakes or shortcomings. I'm just realizing now what a profond thing this actually might be. How our tone can actually speak for us.

There is power in the way we use our voices, I think. Have you ever stopped to listen to yourself talk? Have you ever thought about what you sound like? I think doing this job has made me realize how much my job sometimes is not really about teaching english at all. Because, lets be honest, when we all learn something new, I've heard that we actually only really remember about 30% of the actual content of a persons speech. What I do know is this...any teacher that I had in university, I probably won't be able to recall the exact words they said, but I will always remember their tone of voice in my head. Because this is what resonates. There is meaning attached to the words. If I can be an affirming and encouraging voice to my students, then maybe this is all that matters.

Today, when talking with Yoshi, I felt like I somehow became alive in my speech. Learning that its not only our voice that we speak with, but its our tone, our eyes, our head, our body. These are almost the things that really speak for us. This is what people hear, so to speak. I don't know...still hashing out these ideas. Just something I felt I need to remember for myself, I guess.