Having spent a month and a half teaching, I can safely – and sadly – say that young people these days do not know how to listen.

I know kids like to talk to each other in class and there’s nothing diabolical about that. I was quite bratty when I was in school. And apart from getting into trouble regularly, I used to start talking to my friends whenever what the teacher said was not captivating at all. But whenever I wanted to pay attention, I had to give it a 100 percent. If I’m whispering to a friend while I’m at a lecture, or even if I’m tapping my feet or flapping my pen on my notebook rhythmically, it means that I am not listening.

But it seems like kids today are different. They were born into different forms of technology that we had to grow into as adults. Things like computers and mobile phones are their mother tongue, while sometimes I often find myself struggling to come to terms with what is a foreign language for me.

I’m trying to think of a scenario of how these kids must do their homework. Do they work on the essays I ask them to do at home while they are going through photographs on Facebook and watching something on TV and sending messages to their friends on their mobile phones and listening to a bit of music as well? I’ve tried that a couple of times myself, but that’s usually when I want to show my parents that I’m working when, in truth, I’m not doing anything. It’s impossible for me to get anything done with that level of distraction.

In fact, I am so bad at this whole multitasking thing that I can’t walk if I get a phone call on my mobile. Actually I don’t anymore because I’ve tripped, fallen and injured myself more than once. Has it ever happened to you that when you’re on the phone with someone and you can’t really interrupt them or tell them to pause and right at that moment somebody comes into the room asking for something and you have to respond to them with some elaborate gesture of your hands? I’m sure you’ve managed that. Whenever this happens to me, in my frantic attempt to be polite to both, I end up not being able to listen to either.

So maybe the truth is that young people these days do know how to listen and they can do it better than me while they are doing something else on the side. Maybe kids nowadays cannot concentrate on just one thing. What a waste to only be listening to the teacher speaking! If there was a big television screen behind me where the white board is and channels were being changed every two minutes, then maybe it would help them listen to me better.

I, for one, can’t handle the ghun ghun, bhun bhun bee like noises they make in the classroom when they talk to themselves because even that is too distracting for me. And that’s what I tell them hoping they will sympathize with me and stop talking.

Ms. Sumi teaches English to high school students. When she isn’t in the classroom, she likes to read novels, write poems, and spend time in the kitchen. She is also a great appreciator of wildlife and considers spiders, cockroaches and leeches as some of her favorite insects.

www.parakhi.com/blogs