What is it like to be silent in a noisy classroom?

In short, everyone speaks at intervals, and the occasional multiple intervals that come together make the classroom a little quieter, and everyone stops talking one after another, thinking that the teacher is coming, so they are quiet. Suppose there are 60 people in the classroom, and everyone is talking, with an average of 30 people speaking every second, and suppose that this average number of people talking makes the average decibel of sound in the classroom reach 80. There are always some coincidental times, for example, if there are only 25 people talking in the classroom every second in a certain three seconds, and the decibel level of the voice drops to 70, not everyone will realize the decrease in the ambient volume, but there are always some people, if just one person feels that something is wrong and will send a message to the people around him that "the teacher is coming", then he and the people around him will be quiet, and then the volume in the classroom will be lowered by another notch, so there is a domino effect, and finally it will be quiet.

Everyone has a pause cycle when they speak, maybe it is for ventilation, for example, some people are 3 seconds, some people are 7 seconds, when many people keep talking, there will always be several people pause at the same time, or even all pauses when a certain cycle coincides, so that a collective silence is formed. In the evolution of social animals, some individuals first discover the danger and run away, those with herd mentality will immediately follow, and those who think independently need to observe before drawing conclusions, so death, after elimination, the rest are herd mentality. When a few people are silent, the people around them are in a herd mentality, and they will follow the silence and observe whether the head teacher comes to the back door, this behavior spreads, and it becomes a collective silence phenomenon.

Since the teacher's patrol is a definite event, this also means that if the teacher has not come to the class for a period of time, the probability that he will come to the class in the next moment is increasing. And it takes a long time to go from a few people in the classroom talking to almost the whole class talking, and the voices get louder and louder. The need to complete this process means that the teacher cannot be present in the classroom during this period, otherwise it will enter the next cycle.

In other words, when there are a lot of people talking and the voice is loud, there is a high probability that the teacher will come to patrol the class. Since there is a penalty for speaking during class, people will become alert to avoid being punished, and they will stop talking as soon as they notice the teacher's appearance. In other words, everyone equates the cessation of talking with the appearance of the teacher.

So once someone around you suddenly stops talking, then you will subconsciously stop talking, and then due to the chain reaction, in the end, in a short period of time, everyone suddenly stops talking. That is, the classroom suddenly became eerily quiet.

In any group of people, whether in a classroom or a waiting hall, whether they are studying or resting, a sudden loud noise will cause a momentary silence in the crowd, a real silence, a conditioned reflex behavior born of fear. This instinctive response is also present in many animals. Suddenly pushing open the door of the coop, the chicks will quickly gather to the farther end of the house and quiet down out of fear.

In animal experiments with mice, the mouse's fearful behavior was also expressed in a static manner. When the door was slammed open, the rat chamber suddenly fell silent, and the mice showed the same reaction regardless of whether they were kept in a cage or in a different cage, indicating that this silence is an instinctive individual fear response rather than dependent on the environment and other animals' social behavior.

It was a very terrible experience, sometimes the teacher is like this, when the students are making noise, and when the fight is over, it suddenly becomes silent and quiet, and then many students will turn back together to see if the next class teacher appears in the back, if the class teacher does not come then continue to fight.

To put it simply, as mentioned in Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, this phenomenon is the result of a positive feedback mechanism. At some point, the whispering is quieter than normal, and a part of the alert speaker notices and stops talking, resulting in a quieter voice and a complete silence. This mechanic doesn't require everyone to stop talking at the same time, just a relatively quiet opportunity.

Personally, I agree with this theory.

I used to experiment with my friends. In the self-study class, a few people sitting close to us chatted, and the noise became louder and louder, attracting the people around us to start chatting as well. If the atmosphere is warm, a few of us suddenly shut up, look down and do our homework to see if the classroom will be quiet.

If we calm down and talk suddenly, we will see if there will be a situation where "the whole class breathes a sigh of relief and suddenly becomes louder". Step 3 was expected to emerge spontaneously, but we wanted to see if we could trigger it on our own. In the experiment, we reached step 2 and the whole class was still chatting.

We repeated step 2 again, and I also hinted that another group of people who were chatting nearby had come, and finally everyone was quiet. Then I started chatting again. Then the teacher called me out to chat.

In the past, when we were studying on our own, we were noisy, but the amazing thing was that our homeroom teacher could often find out a few first offenders accurately at the first time (I felt deeply, so I was punished countless times), and then there was a punishment similar to a penalty station. Later, we learned that the head teacher often watched through the crack in the back door of the classroom, or hid in the corner of the window to observe, so that for a long time, as long as a figure floated by the window, the classroom was immediately silent.

When I was in junior high school and elementary school, there was a constant quietness that everyone was all about! In the absence of any change in the environment! I understand this situation as, "sudden collective self-vigilance mechanism"!

In other words, everyone suddenly felt the need to prevent the sudden appearance of the teacher in the same situation, so they collectively banned them.

Sometimes it's because you see the frightening head teacher's face on the glass at the back of the classroom, and sometimes it's just the person with the loudest voice who doesn't speak, and the other people don't speak anymore under his influence, and then everyone is quiet.

The landlord's question is very new, and everyone will even think that this is also a problem. And this is silent for a short period of time. I hope to have a psychologist explain the explanation.

I remember when I was in junior high school, as the class president, I was leading the class to start a big discussion, but immediately they all quieted down, and a buddy told me that the head teacher was coming, and I didn't believe it, so I said, impossible, he came and I eat. Before he could finish speaking, the teacher pushed the door and came in. And ask me, what are you going to do?

This interesting phenomenon will occur during our school days, for example, this class is a self-study class, and we have just started to make noise in the classroom, because there is no teacher in this class, only your homeroom teacher may come to patrol, and the head teacher's dog-legged squad leader and deputy class leader are also leading everyone to talk together.

Doing things that shouldn't be done in the right place and time is a weak heart. What's more, our opponents are very strong, whether it is the teacher or the chengguan (because of the need for analysis, the chengguan and the teacher have to be put together, don't shoot me, everyone don't shoot me, supervision is their job, they will try their best to catch us and punish us.)

Another reason is that everyone has a time to breathe when they are talking, and you can't talk when you are ventilating, and if everyone is in the same time interval at this time, it will cause this phenomenon and cause your class to suddenly be quiet without the teacher being present.

When we are in class, we often encounter a very funny and ridiculous phenomenon, that is, when the teacher is not there, we study on our own. In the study room, there are various voices of students. To say something ugly, it's like a vegetable market.

But I don't know why the classroom suddenly became quiet, as if everyone had discussed it!

I think it has something to do with the fact that teachers often make surprise checks.

We all know that when the classroom is very chaotic, the teacher will not suddenly push the door open and enter the classroom, but look at the window at the door to see who is talking. Therefore, when a student sees the teacher standing in front of the window, he will suddenly sit down and not speak, and when other students see the performance of this student, they will roughly guess that the teacher may be at the window**, grabbing the student who takes the lead in speaking.

Everyone is suddenly quiet, and it's understandable for this kind of thing. It must be when everyone is talking nonsense. I'm afraid that the teacher will surprise the inspection, causing the students in the class to suddenly become silent in the original noisy state.

I think it should be very loud when everyone talks in the study room as a group

When some of the students are not talking and studying. The sound will drop down immediately, because some students think that the sound comes down because the teacher is coming, so everyone will suddenly become quiet. This responds to that sentence, and everyone thinks that the law is not responsible for the public.

If I say it's okay when they're all talking, and if it's just me talking, I definitely won't say it.

It's also possible that you suddenly hear a strange sound

This kind of behavior is still relatively common. For example, when everyone is having a great conversation. Suddenly, a classmate was singing. Everyone will definitely stop chatting and quietly listen to what this classmate is singing.

I think everyone who has been to school has encountered the above behaviors. This situation is just a very interesting memory for us.