Thinking
By Lisa Timm, Assistant Head: Teaching and Learning
Earlier this term I had the privilege of seeing some of our students speak at the English Roundtable event, of attending the MFL conference on Human Voices in a Brave New World, and, very recently, of listening to the brilliant evening on Sisterhood for the Ibba Girls’ School. What struck me in all of these moments was the same thing: the emphasis on human connection that the study of literature and language brings. Again and again, I saw how words allow us to reach out to others, to understand and to be understood.
That made me think more deeply about my own relationship with language, and how it connects us, makes us cohere, and makes us unique and different all at once.
I grew up with German parents in Spain, so languages have always been central to my life. I went to a British school and now live and work in London, so there are three European languages more or less constantly in my mind. When I was home visiting my mum last year, she reminded me of something that puzzled her for years. In the absence of any Spanish family, she had always tried to speak Spanish with me in public so that it would feel natural, but I would absolutely and categorically refuse to reply in Spanish, even though I was perfectly happy to speak Spanish with friends and other people.
It was only last year that I could finally explain to her why. In my mind, the “me” that spoke Spanish felt so different from the “me” that spoke German that, at the age of five or six, I simply could not make those two selves belong to the same person. When I then went to a British school, I spoke primarily English at school, German at home, and Spanish in my social life. Over time, I began to get used to these three versions of myself and, for a long time, I stopped thinking about them.
That changed when I moved to the UK. Having lived here for about fifteen years now, I have noticed that the language I instinctively think in used to be German and is now English, and I cannot help wondering whether that shift has changed who I am.
So I wanted to use this assembly to explore how the language we use to communicate shapes who we are, and how who we are shapes the language we use.
Ironically, it has been quite hard to find the right words to explain exactly how language affects me, so I am going to borrow some other people’s voices. One of them is Eva Hoffman, who wrote a memoir called Lost in Translation about her childhood move to the United States from Poland in the 1950s. She writes that when her friend tells her she is envious or disappointed, she tries “to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling from which it springs”. That image captures why I feel so strongly that the words we choose, and the combinations in which we choose them, have such a profound effect on how we are understood. Words have neat dictionary definitions, of course, but when we put them together we rarely use them to mean only what they literally say.
The history of language itself fascinates me. Long before humans could read or write, they could tell. As Dr Linscott reminded us last week, people told stories not only for entertainment but as a map for understanding reality. Stories carried morality and values, a community’s history, even survival knowledge. For most of human history, if you wanted to pass on wisdom, you did not write a book. You told a story.
At NLCS, many of these stories are first encountered through texts in classics and literature lessons. But it is worth asking how you preserve the history of a culture, community, country or even a continent that has relied primarily on oral transmission, as many African and Asian cultures have done, especially where colonisation and language loss have left deep marks.
That brings us back to languages in the plural. Language is central to cultural identity. To let languages die is to let cultures die. It is estimated that around nine languages die every year. That might not sound like a lot until you set it alongside another statistic. Roughly half of the world’s population speaks just twenty languages. The other seven thousand languages are spread only among the other half of humanity.
When we look at a map of endangered languages, we can use our geopolitical knowledge to read the patterns: where languages have been suppressed, where people have been displaced, where economic power makes one language more “useful” than another. Our students will be familiar with those beautiful untranslatable words that exist in one language and not in another. They give us tiny windows into the priorities different cultures have now and have had historically.
I have been reading a lot about whether, or to what extent, our language shapes how we think. The most fascinating example I have come across is how different languages imagine time. Most languages use spatial metaphors for time: in English we look forward to the future or back in time. In Mandarin, the spatial relation is up and down, so “next week” becomes “down week”. In Aymara, a language of the Andes, the past is ahead of you and the future behind you because, like the ground in front of your feet, you can see the past but not the future.
While globalisation might be simpler if everyone spoke a single language, it is precisely the differences in our languages that make the world a rich place. Life is not really about efficiency. It is about nuance and ambiguity and about trying, endlessly, to understand ourselves and one another.
At this point, it is worth asking what all of this has to do with life at NLCS.
For me, the answer sits in a simple but powerful idea. A language that is not spoken is dead. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, in German, “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt” which we usually translate as “The limits of my language determine the limits of my world.” He was talking about literal language, but the idea holds more widely. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie echoes it in her TED talk on The Danger of a Single Story, where she explores how power can create one dominant narrative that flattens all others and how essential human connection is in resisting that.
Every member of our community has the responsibility to be deliberate and conscious about the way they communicate. More than that, we all have a duty to each other and to ourselves to try our best to be authentic, to share our ideas, thoughts, beliefs, our identities, so that no single story, stereotype or dominant voice is allowed to define us.
Over the last year, as teachers, we have been reflecting on that responsibility and on what it means in practice at NLCS. We call this work Raising Voices.
Raising Voices is our oracy strategy, but it is not only about formal public speaking. It is about the dialogues our students enter into every day, the intent with which they listen to others, the choices they make when they express themselves. It is about the diversity of people involved in conversations, the good listeners, the ones willing to share lots of ideas, the quiet discerners who can tell a fragile argument from a robust one. Raising Voices is about giving students opportunities for deliberate practice, and the support and encouragement they need, to find their own voice with which to express their ideas.
We have built on the opportunities students already have to speak in public and tried to diversify them. Academic presentations for symposia, EPQ or McCabe presentations sit alongside the Year 10 comedy workshop, Loose Canon, or the Year 12 BrainWaves talks, where students offer four minute insights into topics as varied as bioengineering or why we might hate ankles. When we stop to think about the different ways people speak in different contexts, or we watch others doing so, we begin to notice the sheer range of skill and thought that goes, often intuitively, into adapting a voice.
Research from Cambridge has helped us to build a framework that describes the kind of journey students are on as they develop their ability to speak, however publicly, with impact.
One of the best and simplest places to practise is in lessons. Speaking up in class is a form of public speaking. Modern life is relentlessly focused on answers, but conversations where everyone simply waits to deliver their next clever thought, without engaging with what others have said, are not really conversations at all. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying: “If I had one hour to solve a problem I would spend 55 minutes finding the proper question.” So students are encouraged to listen carefully to their teachers and their peers, to think about a question they could ask, ideally one without an obvious answer or with no single answer at all, and then to ask it.
The worst possible outcome of Raising Voices would be that all our students end up speaking smoothly in exactly the same way. Authenticity sits at the core of this work. I go back one last time to Eva Hoffman, who writes about hearing in other people’s speech both their hesitations and their authority. In the end, she suggests, we do not all want to speak the King’s English. Whether we speak Appalachian or Harlem English, Cockney or Jamaican Creole, Polish or German or English or Aymara, what we want is to feel at home in our tongue. We want, as she puts it, “to be able to give voice accurately and fully to ourselves and our sense of the world.”
That is what Raising Voices is really about. Helping each NLCS student to find a language that lets their world be as wide, as rich and as fully their own as it can possibly be.
