Last week, I lost my voice for four days. (Actually, as I write this, it is Day 5 and my voice is coming back occasionally, fading in and out like an AM radio. By the time this post goes up, it will be “last week.”)

I didn’t even feel sick particularly. I had taken a shower, then gone outside with a hat over my wet hair to move my chickens into the garage because the temperatures were in the negatives. Turns out Grandma was right: don’t go outside with wet hair. By about 48 hours later, my voice was getting froggy, and the next day, it was gone.

I’m a Latin teacher. You see my dilemma.

I had always disliked talking to people (nearly always women) who whisper everything they say. Unless there is a baby sleeping in the house, these women always gave the impression that they were so much more elegant, refined and nice that I could never hope to compete. (And I couldn’t. I am naturally blunt, with a rich, resonant, rather loud speaking voice.) Now I was one of them. For the first day or two, I couldn’t make myself heard at all. After that, if I really forced the air out, I would sound like a tracheotomy patient … or like our President when he’s about to make what he considers a really telling point.

The first thing I found out is how terrific my students are. They happily complied with me teaching by mime. They helped read passages out loud to one another. They were far, far more cooperative than usual.

I know that someone is immediately going to make the point that this is why I should lower my voice to a whisper whenever the classroom becomes loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The problem with that is that is that you have to keep it up for quite a while before it starts working. Also, I don’t like to inflict a raspy whisper on my interlocutors as a matter of course. It sounds, frankly, unpleasant.

I actually had to whisper a lot more to my family at home than to my students at school. So much of what happens in the classroom is based on routines and chants that they already know. All I had to do was indicate the chant or poem or verse, and they could say it. At home, things are more organic. Needless to say, my family found the whisper unpleasant.

Second point: The instinct to match your interlocutor in tone and volume is really, really, strong. My students tended to whisper back to me, even though they knew they did not need to. Anybody I encountered in public, such as at the library or the diner, tended to do the same. Many of them, by the way, clearly found this annoying, which leads to the third discovery: I’m not the only one who feels shushed by people who whisper.

I hope you all don’t mind this personal-story post. I enjoy reading personal stories by the bloggers I follow from time to time.