Out Loud

We’ve been playing host to Mei and Boon from Singapore since Monday, and they’ve just gone back. As always, having Boon around was most productive in terms of opening up wide-ranging conversations and a discussion regarding the virtues of hearing stuff read aloud, provoked by Mei noticing my Master and Commander CDs, proved particularly interesting.

To my surprise both our guests talked about how much they don’t appreciate the experience of being read to. Now I take it for granted that the general populace would regard being read to as one of life’s finer experiences and still find myself at quite a loss as to how there are those who might and do think otherwise. So I need to consider the possibility that one of the few absolute certainties I hold to regarding what works in a classroom and should take place there is not quite so certain or absolute or both.

This (previously) absolute certainty is or, rather, was, that students, of all ages, should be read aloud to, regularly. And what should be read aloud is, well, broadly speaking creative stuff – poetry, drama, fiction – material that in some sense benefits from performance. In what sense do I consider doing so educational? To be honest I’m too lazy to bother to figure out what good it does. I just know it works in terms of keeping the troops fruitfully occupied and kids seem to like it. I liked it when I was at school, though there was precious little of it in the early years of secondary school. But up to that point it regularly featured in lessons. Curiously we did a great deal of it at ‘A’ level and no one seemed to think it odd. Quite the opposite. We got through whole swathes of the first half of Emma.

One thing it does is to create a sense of a shared experience. Somehow a text seems to mean more when listened to by a whole lot of people together. The experience often generates an excitement that goes beyond anything an individual would be likely to experience. Even when it doesn’t, when a novel is simply going down well enough to be accepted by a class, there’s still a sense of happy acceptance that accompanies the reading aloud lesson.

As far as I can tell in Singapore there is no tradition of such reading at all in schools. I asked Fi Fi the other day whether she was read to in primary school at all and the answer was a simple no, never. Sad really. A sort of built in deprivation. Maybe that’s why Mei & Boon find it impossible to relate to the idea of the experience.

And now for something completely different: we’ve just had to chase a monkey off our roof. Just one more of the trials of home ownership.