Hearing voices

This evening I've been hearing voices--and I don't want to make them shut up.

A year ago I tried a new method to get my students responding to literature in writing: over the course of the semester, they had to e-mail me 250-word comments on their reading 25 different times. Next month I'm giving a conference paper about the results of this experiment, so I've spent some time revisiting those students' reading comments in order to count and classify them. I wanted to find out what percentage of their reading comments could be classified as analytical (about half) and whether that percentage increased over time (yes).

The data will make for an interesting paper, but the best part of the experience was that in revisiting 472 e-mailed comments, I heard the voices of those students as clearly as if they were standing right next to me--and they were pretty good company. When I originally received those messages, I read them piecemeal and never looked back; today I skimmed all 472 messages and saw an amazing depth of insight and growth in understanding over time, along with a significant amount of confusion, creativity, and silliness. I wanted to thank the students who wrote all those messages, but even more, I wanted to keep the conversation going.

The experiment was such a resounding success that I'm trying it again this semester with another class. Soon I'll have a new set of voices vying for attention, sending last year's voices even deeper into the mists of memory. Today it was good to set those voices loose one more time before closing the file on them forever.