Speaking the Same Language

One time, I sneaked into a  Music and the Brain conference at Harvard Medical School. Thinking, “I am smart, I like brains, I like music--I took a neuroscience class at Harvard, and I can play the piano, this will be fun!" 

While I recognized they were speaking English, they were not speaking a language I understood. So I sat in the dark, straining to focus harder, blinking up at their presentations, trying desperately to understand what exactly any of these words meant, and what I got out of it was a very stinging feeling that I was not that smart.

Trying to get to work using the bus on my own for the first time in Germany. Or the second. Or the 8^th. I ask in my embarrassing German, “Eine Tagskarte, Bitte” (One day ticket, please), and place a few euros on the shelf. And the exchange that comes after is painful: 

The bus driver gives me very specific instructions, then stares blankly while I clearly don’t follow them, and in those moments, I want to say, “I’m so sorry. I'm trying. I’m not stupid, I promise! We just don’t speak the same language.”

I am now teaching little humans. And while I am no Harvard neuroscientist, there is a language barrier between the English I’m speaking, and the English these small people are able to speak as they grow. Including the ones for whom English is their first language.

But I want to remember that feeling I had in that neuro-music conference. Or the feeling I have every time I try to speak German. How small it can feel.  And as I’m going along in my classroom, trying to align the tongue we speak, I want to make them feel like they’re not small, but growing.

I’m learning how important a virtue patience really is. And how wonderful the end product worth investing—a world in which we can understand one another.