Recently, I was listening to Hilltop Hoods’ new album Fall From Light. On the track Rage Against The Fatigue, there’s a deliberate three-second silence between the words “cliff” and “hangers.” The first time I heard it, I thought something was wrong. But it was intentional — and it made me think about silence in teaching. In classrooms, silence is often treated as failure. When we ask a question, many of us wait less than a second before rephrasing or answering ourselves. Yet in doing so, we may be cutting off the very student voices we most want to hear…