Listening...

Listening...it sounds so easy, but it can be so hard. The ability to hear is something that most of us are born with. The question is, are we born with the ability to Listen? Some people make a profession out of listening to people. They are psychologists, operators, doctors, etc. Listening is an integral part of everyone's life. Teachers listen to their students. Students hopefully listen to their teachers. Employees listen to their bosses and hopefully bosses listen to the needs of their employees.

There are a couple different types of listening and how you listen is determined by your purpose for listening. I think many people take the ability to hear and listen forgranted. Listening allows us to gain knowledge from other people's ideas and opinions. We are able to perform tasks by listening to basic instructions. Just hearing the information isnt enough. Having the ability to focus on the information, take it in, and remember it, is a very important skill.

Propaganda is a large part of our everyday life and it plays on our ability to listen. We are subjected to the opinions of many different people trying to persuade us to believe one thing or another. Propaganda has been used for many, many years. I think it is something that teachers tend to leave out of their lessons, or just cover once a year. I think there is valuable information in commercials or ads that can be used by the teacher if he or she is creative enough. Posters can be turned into history assignments, math problems, etc.

I enjoyed our propaganda activity last class period. I think it was a good way for us to learn about the different types. Not only did we get to pick examples of each type, we were able to include examples that we liked. Being able to share our examples with the class was important because we were able to show the class our accomplishment while also showing them something about out personality.