Look Around Everybody On Mute
Look Around It's Me and My Crew, Big Energy
Dear Friends -
I’m back! Took a hiatus here in order to write & present "Going Out: The Practical Life of the Elementary Child” at the 2023 MANC conference and then needed a bit more time to finish the wonderful compilation of Dr. Montessori’s essays, notes, and lectures in “The Child, Society, and The World.” I finished the book on the plane on my way back from Oakland in late October, after staying with a friend recovering from a surgery. I mostly finished this letter from Nashville, where I traveled with my sister while she completed some lab coursework, and added the finals thoughts from the long and luxurious Thanksgiving weekend at home.
At 17 pages in I was mostly feeling embarrassed by how little primary source text I’ve read up to this point in my career. Reading here has made the reference text from my albums and the RAM in my brain seem like the cheap version of an oil painting rendered for digital compared to a standing before an original - coherent and referential enough to understand but missing the bite, clean edges, and size:impact context.
And now after finishing (two months later) I’ve transformed into an insufferable monster, snapping photos of paragraphs to spam my colleagues on Teams and dropping long quotes in as many conversations as possible. This reminds me of a passage from The Child, Society, and the World….*flips furiously through cornered pages*
So rewind with me back to the Year of Our Lord 1938, The Netherlands. I can’t get over the story of the first discovery of the ‘lesson of silence’ or what we now refer to as the Silence Games for the 3-6 yos.
Spicy Maria (the version of Maria responsible for all of the mic drops in this book, and those to come I hope) reflects on how surprised she was to learn from an incidental game that “children love silence to an extraordinary degree…[which is] particularly surprising because we have the impression that where there are children there is noise, that children are almost a personification of noise.” hot pepper emoji.
But Montessori notices that, after bringing a baby into the classroom and suggesting that the children may want to play a game being as still as possible as to not wake the baby that they held their legs close & tight together. When she suggests that they can’t breathe as quietly as the baby they became serious and held their breath. That when she checked in to see if they liked that game and wanted to play it again, they did indeed.
Points she’s making:
insistence that she stumbled into this understanding about children and experimented to confirm her happy stumble. Ok.
how much she, personally, enjoys silence. Bet.
how it takes the distinct practice of silence to build an awareness of noise. Damn.
Questions I’m asking:
Have I (or you) ever had one idea about children and then stumbled into a new understanding or discovery?
This is more of a placeholder question, as I wait for my notably poor personal memory to catch up with me and answer when I least expect it. I think I am quite often surprised by children because I have very few fixed expectations, but mostly have relied on the understanding discovered or observed by others to inform what I am likely to observe. What are the chances that I’ll see something brand new?
But it also seems that as we adults reflect on our childhood we inevitably recall parts of ourselves that seemed invisible - undiscoverable - to the adults around us. That’s not just me, right? Why didn’t anyone know that when I carried around the huge non-fiction paperback about elephants that I wasn’t really into elephants, I was into people thinking that I was smart enough to read that big ass book. That really long bus rides and after-school care completely overwhelmed my little introverted nervous system. That when I got shin splints that hurt so badly I couldn’t stand up after squatting to access my locker I didn’t really want to quit cross-country/the only ‘team sport’ for which I had ever found myself qualified I probably just needed some better shoes and training.
Were these undiscoverable bits my secrets, Justin? And in their undiscoverability, my personality was etched?
Or would those parts of us have been more easily recognizable to the adults if they had not perceived us with fixed ideas or expectations about who ‘children’ are and therefore who we, individually, were?
I’ve been listening to the Office Ladies podcast for the past couple of years and in addition to the wonderful rewatch notes, the hosts also sprinkle in some really insufferable acting and writing aphorisms like the specific is universal.
What are children trying to show us about themselves that we’re not understanding as reflective of a universal norm because we’re hyper focused on the specific behavior? Or, where are we missing out on understanding the children’s behavior as an expression of their secret in favor of understanding them as a tendency to the norm?
What can I (or you) bring awareness to that allows for deeper sensitivity?
We didn’t even know how loud we were walking until we became aware of silence.
What is this an analogy for in our work? Where might we want and consent to the concrete practice of one thing in order to attune us to its inverse? I’ll circle back around to add in the comments and hope you will too.
Where does the cooperation for making silence in early childhood show up in the elementary years and on?
Threw this softball to myself. Maria is basically saying: To make silence, a child must experience wanting and then consent their behavior to meet the want. Silence doesn’t simply happen in the absence of noise or behavior, it only exists in the explicit making.
When children connect their inner wanting and consent, we might think of this as obeying internally.
And it is this internal obeying they can grow to trust when it’s time to understand the work they want to do in the world (unrelated to pay, she talks about later, and Tom touches on here re: work) and with whom in the world they will work in cooperation.
In the most impressive recent cultural example of explicit silence-making, ye olds can find the #mutechallenge from Beyonce’s 2023 world tour on IG.
During the song Energy, when Beyoncé sings, "Look around, everybody on mute," crowds of 50,000 people have ‘challenged’ themselves to go silent until she picks up the next line.
Video after video from the big cities show either perfect adherence and crowd exhilaration or random hoots & hollers followed by crowd rage, depending on the ability to cooperate. To obey internally. To understand the assignment.
For your listening pleasure:
Maria also points out that mass silence is typically only expected of a crowd during a short and uncomfortable mourning period. How beautiful that Beyoncé has facilitated the practice in cities around the world where thousands of people are coming together for the singular purpose for celebration of music & dance.
So good, right? The Renaissance album was “A Love Letter To The Black Queer Roots Of Dance Music” and if you don’t know, now you know. #blacktranslivesmatter
Thank you, Tom, for the perfect suggestion to kick off the project. Catch me dropping references like I’m an influencer with an affiliate link. What’s next?