Sometimes silence is key

Young Chang

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which a Daily Pilot reporter

visits a campus within the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and

writes about the experience.

COSTA MESA -- Levi Prairie drops his head on his desk. He sits upright

again because he knows he should, but fidgets and wiggles and slumps down

and then rises up again.

Finally, he throws his arms across his neighbor’s desk and drops his

head there.

Nicholas Mataele, 9, is unfazed by the invasion. He continues punching

random numbers into a large, white calculator. Under the desk, of course.

Levi, 9, wears a red sweater with white stripes down the shoulders. He

has paired it with gray cargo pants and a plaid shirt untucked beneath

the sweater. His look is timely.

And he has that stare -- the complex, amused kind. He’ll be one of the

cool kids later. You can tell.

But for now, no one really understands cool versus uncool in Kaiser

Elementary School’s fourth-grade class. Everyone runs out for recess to

get to the handball wall first, and everyone laughs when the teacher does

something funny.

And everyone raises their hand.

Even Levi.

“How do we feel when someone listens to us?” asks teacher Dee Mattern.

The lesson is about active listening -- how to do it, how it makes

others feel and how significant it is for good communication.

Nine hands shoot up. But no one waves, strains, flails or cries “me,

me, me!” Just little hands and silence. This is their proven technique.

Mattern picks Christina Sandoval.

“You feel like you can understand each other, whether you’re a boy or

girl,” she answers.

Elizabeth Cramer explains what just happened.

“You can’t say ‘hey choose me!’ ‘cause then she won’t choose you,”

said the 8-year-old. “You have to be quiet.”

Her friend, Lauren Thagard, nods. It’s common knowledge. The teacher

picks one person at a time and if you want to answer the question, the

last thing you want to say is “pick me, pick me!” she adds.

The consensus is out: it’s cool to be called upon.

Levi agrees. He answered a couple questions this morning, a feat

considering how many others competed for the privilege to speak.

Not much else in the fourth grade has changed in a generation.

There are still more pencils than pens -- at least in this

fourth-grade classroom. The desks are still rectangular with a hollow

storage space inside.

But there appears to be an unfamiliar trend at Kaiser Elementary’s

Room 21: class participation.

Levi says answering questions is actually fun, and he has enough

confidence to try.

The Levis of my fourth-grade class never would have said that.

FYI

WHO: Students Dee Mattern’s fourth-grade class

WHERE: Kaiser Elementary School in Costa Mesa

WHAT: A lesson in listening