Listening With Ears or Mouth?

I have successfully conducted another Motivational Talk today, attended by about 1,300 students in Yuying Secondary School. Thanks to Mrs Lim-Foo, Head of Department of the English Language, of Yuying Secondary School, for coordinating this talk and making it a reality. She was assisted by Ms Ida. Mrs Lim prefers to have the talk held at the beginning of the year so that the students are motivated right from the start. That was a brilliant plan.

Yuying Secondary School was founded by the Hainanese Community in 1910 as a Chinese medium high school. The school mission is: "To develop our students to be confident, upright and resilient individuals who possess the ability to face future challenges and the commitment to contribute selflessly to school and society."

It took 12 minutes for the 1,300 students to settle down in the big hall. But, throughout the entire one-hour talk, I was impressed with the good discipline the students have in maintaining the necessary silence. They were listening attentively, so were the teachers. The teachers indeed showed very good examples.

Besides speaking on many other points, I shared the meaning of the Chinese character "TING" which means "Listen", by analysing the character in both the simplified and the traditional form. The older generation of Chinese learners learnt the traditional form while the newer generations learn the simplified one. The way the characters are written is presented below:

In the traditional form, the left portion of the character shows "the ear" while the simplified form shows "the mouth". Both characters mean "LISTEN". It seems that in the early days, people listen with ears; now, people listen with "mouth", i.e. while listening, they talk at the same time, or they talk most of the time. This phenomenon is common among the students. Well, I think we need to go back to basics. Listen with our ears. We can hear much better.

After the talk, a teacher came forward to me and said, "I have heard many motivational speakers, they were good, they too shared their experience, but, so far you are the best. You were able to capture the attention of the audience."

Wow! She really made my day. Thank you, Teacher!