Now that you are not teaching in FRONT of the classroom during the lockdown, have you pondered about certain aspects of your teaching life?

When forced to remove yourself from your normal day-to-day activities, you often start to see things in a new light. At least it got me thinking about listening skills in the classroom. And it hit me. 

As teachers, we often take it for granted that our learners have the ability to listen and understand.  

We seldom take time to sharpen our listening skills as we get older. We seldom check for understanding.  

As teachers, we just carry on teaching and assume that those who want to learn will listen and those who are ill-disciplined will fiddle and fall behind. We are SO WRONG.

Listening is as much a skill as is talking.  

In our syllabus, we spend quite a bit of time on speaking and very little on listening.