The Tale Tapes Turn Ten

It was often the worst of times. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was the bear of Freshman English. Kids struggled. I struggled. It was long, complex, dense, and difficult.

In the winter of 2006, I had been teaching the novel for more than a decade. I had developed techniques that helped students understand and even come to love this very challenging novel. I always started on the second chapter and saved that famous opening for after they got to know Lucie, her father, Jarvis Lorry, and Miss Pross (but had not yet met Charles or Sydney). Breaking the plot into it smaller bite sized pieces made the story easier to follow. I enlarged the pages and put them on butcher-block paper so that we could reread together and share our annotations. It was work, but it worked.

The most important strategy was reading aloud. When we read together, we could ask questions, make connections, and use both our eyes and our ears. The lights went on the most when I read aloud and stopped every few sentences to explore and explain.

However, if we did this with the entire book, second semester would end in late July. The book was too long to read aloud in its entirety. So I chose carefully. I picked the most confusing chapters to read together. But it wasn’t enough.

When I finished my grades for first semester in the winter of 2006, I tried an experiment. I sat in front of my computer and began to record Dickens’ classic and include the type of comments and guidance that I used when we read aloud in class. I called these audio annotations.

If I had known the scale of this experiment then, I would have given up immediately. Since then, I have considered recording some of Shakespeare’s plays, Frankenstein, and a few other texts and never been able to climb that mountain again. I don’t know if I ever will. My ignorance of the scale of this project made it possible.

Two months before my students would even purchase the book, I sat in front of my computer, picked up a microphone, and started reading and explaining. I recorded the audio in iMovie because I didn’t know how to use anything else. I then converted it to mp3 format using a different program.  Many times I had to rerecord parts when the phone rang, I messed up, or one of my children can running into the room. It took a long time.

I would record when I had free time at home. Often, this was when my children were sleeping or otherwise occupied. After listening to the Tale recordings, my students always ask if someone in my house plays the clarinet. No, I told them, that was a beginning violinist! Others asked why I was typing as I talked. That wasn’t me, I tell them. My child was doing homework on the computer behind me. I took advantage of whatever free time I had.

By the time my students started reading Tale in late March, I had recorded the entire first book and half of the second book. I was stunned at how listening to my recordings changed their understanding. The conversations and activities in class were of a totally different nature than they had been before. Students came in feeling confident. They had a much more clear comprehension of the plot, characters, and even some of the complexities of the text. It was amazing and transformative. And the recordings were still not completed!

I was struggling to keep up. By the time we were at the end of the second book, I was only a few days ahead of my students’ reading schedule. In one of my regular meetings with my department chair, I told her that I would stop my recordings at the end of the second book and let them read the final book without me.

“You can’t do that, “ she told me. “You are training readers. Your recordings are helping them to practice the skills that strong readers use.” So I kept on recording until I had completed the entire book. When it  was all in the can (so to speak), there were almost eighteen hours of recorded Tale teaching.

Something else shocked and surprised me. Students shared the recordings with their friends. Suddenly, students who were not in my class were listening to me. I remember walking down the hall and seeing a student wearing earphones point to his ears and then point to me! It was a little unnerving.

Eventually, the entire Freshman English team embraced the recordings. They became a primary way that we helped students navigate this most challenging work of literature. Students I did not know talked to me about them in the halls. Parents (including my colleagues) joked about hearing my voice coming out of their children’s bedrooms! This year’s class is the eleventh group to use the recordings.

Reading together is powerful. Reading and exploring literature together is even more so.

At the end of this month, my freshmen will ride up Shooter's Hill with Jarvis Lorry and Jerry Cruncher. They will put on their headphones and, instead of pop music or game sounds, they will hear a discussion of British literature. Ten years later, these recordings still work wonders! Recording Tale was a far far better thing than I have ever done. It is far better teaching technique than I have ever known.