Regina Johnson
07/22/2014
Thomas Baggerman
COMM/200

I remember first starting college in 2007. I was straight out of high school and never really wanted to attend college so soon. But it was more of my parents’ expectations for me to go, so I decided to go to a local community college. I sat through lectures in which I just could not seem to get into. I did not know if it was the professor’s way of teaching or I wasn’t able to comprehend. I was having troubles with my classes and it seems nothing I tried help solve my issue. My grades were a reflection of my failure and no matter what, I still cannot sit and listen to a professor just talk all day; I would prefer to read the material for myself in order to grasp the information.
I would find myself hearing everything but just not being able to collectively remember what had been said as if it was never said to me at all. Like it went into one ear and came out the other. To this day I find myself listening but at the same time not listening because it never seems to stick with me. Sometimes I would feel as though my professor was rambling instead of sticking to the subject or issue at hand which kind of made things all over the place for me. This made it pretty difficult to grasp the information he was lecturing.
Out of my years attending school, on ground, was a struggling experience. According to Beebe within twenty-four hours after a speech we forget more than half of what we heard I class. Then the next day we forget more than half of what we do recalled and now only remember about a quarter of the information that was said to us. That is amazingly terrible to realize the information that we think we grasp is not completely downloaded in our minds. There are few listening barriers that can prevent us from listening efficiently.
Here are a few listening barriers/listeners, the self-absorbed, unchecked emotions and the criticizing speaker listener. The self-absorbed listener is self-explanatory; this is a listener who only thinks about oneself. Now when conducting conversations with a self-absorbed listener it is very difficult to sustained a conversation. The reason for that is your ideas, stories and experiences do not apply to the self-absorbed listener. According to Beebe this is called conversational narcissism. “A focus on personal agendas and self-absorption rather than on the needs and ideas of others” (Beebe 127). Beebe also believed that the self-absorbed listener develops selective listening; pre-forms bias, prejudice, and expectations cause us to hear what we want to hear, instead of actually hearing the speaker.
Selective listeners can very well be offended or miscomprehend a person’s ideas, experiences and other person emotions. Now for the uncheck emotions listener; when emotional arousal interferes with communication effectiveness (Beebe 128). For example, these listeners are effected by words, more so the emotional ideas that can cause an emotional eruptions in the listener. According to research when you are in a good mood a person would focus and be more attentive when listening to information than being in a negative mood.
Therefore, if said listener were to receive an emotional noise to create an emotional arousal and it did not received positively the listener could start to criticize the speaker. This creates an ambush listener; a person who is overly critical and judgmental when listening to others (Beebe 128). This person is waiting on the edge of their seat to argue, criticize and debate in what the speaker has said. These listeners may appear listening but waiting on that moment to rebuttal or critique the speaker on what he or she has said. According to Beebe, there superficial factors such as clothing, body size and shape, age that can interpret the message said by the speaker.
I believe that each of these barriers may have played it role of me miscomprehending the message by my instructors. If I don’t find the material remotely