"It's Really Quiet Here"

"Teacher Tom, it's really quiet here."

I was sitting with the three-year-old at a table. There were puzzle pieces in front of us, but we were just goofing around, making no effort to assemble them. Objectively, it wasn't quiet. There were children squealing, laughing, and low-key bickering all around us.

If an adult had said this, I'd have likely sought clarification, "What do you mean, it's really quiet here?" But when I listen to young children, especially when they say something confounding, I try to give myself a moment to let their words sink in, to contemplate what it is they might mean before responding.

Young children are still learning to express themselves through language. Often what it sounds like they're saying is really an effort to express something else entirely. A boy once told me he was going to "drown the baby," an alarming thing to hear, until I figured out that he wanted to try the experiment of dropping a toy baby into a bucket of water to see whether or not it floated.

Maybe this boy was trying to express the concept of it seeming "relatively quiet." Maybe he was talking about our stillness at the puzzle table in comparison to the motion around us. Maybe he was talking about his own internal state, a kind of internal quiet. I even wondered if maybe he was expressing something about his sense of hearing. (I covertly checked his ears; after all, young children sometimes stick random objects in there!) I considered what I knew of his home life, the morning leading up to this moment, his particular passions and interests.

He was tracing the shape of a puzzle piece with his finger. Without looking at me, he asked, "Can you hear it?"

I told him the truth, "I don't know."

"You have to listen really hard."

I nodded, still wondering what we were talking about.

A pell mell of children frolicked past us, a couple stopping to consider our puzzle before moving on.

"It's really quiet here," the boy mused in their wake, maybe to me, but while looking at the ceiling, "but sometimes it's hard to hear because of all the noise."

In that moment it clicked for me. I sang, "Within the sound of silence . . . "

His head whipped around toward me, "I know that song! Mommy plays it in the car! . . . Did you know silence means quiet?"

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