Listening Habits

“Tap, tap, tap.” is what you hear as your elbow partner is writing their pencil against the table. The tapping continues to go on until the teacher says something important then there is a moment of silence. There are many bad listening habits out there, it’s just finding them within ourselves, but everyone else as well. A bad listening habit that one may obtain is finding a subject that it too boring or dull. In order to pay full attention, you need something worth giving the attention. Another thing that poor listeners do is make fun of how the speaker is; meaning they either don’t like the way they look, speak, or act. It doesn’t matter who or how it comes out; what matters is what comes out. One last poor listening habit is trying to take every single detail down. You’re just writing a lot of useless information because you and I both know that you won’t go back and read it all. I myself am guilty of having some bad listening habits as well. One of them is that I get really excited about one part of the presentation that I completely blank out on the next part. I need to work on keeping focused on the entire presentation. A second bad habit that I contain is that I get lazy so I only listen for the most important facts and write them down. I should be alert throughout the whole presentation that way I can get more then the facts, like the little details. The last poor listening habits that I have is that I get distracted extremely easily. No matter how fast a distraction distracts me, I need to fight the urge to let it get to me! Luckily, there are ways to help us become better listeners! One way is to guess or predict what the presenter will say next. This will help us be engaged in the presentation and get something out of it. Another helpful idea to try is to point out the supporting materials, along with being engaged. This will also help us get better studying material. One last habit that will be great to get into is summarizing while the speaker is taking a break. Summarize what they said in your mind to help you keep track of what they are talking about. No matter with all of the bad listening habits, we can easily change them. Not only will this help us in high school, but it will also help us in college. Better listening skills along with other college readiness skills will help us walk into our future pretty easily. All it takes is the willingness of the student themselves to give that little extra push!

Ellis
Brisa
Period 7th
August 15, 2012