Voices

In their own words, here is what StoryCorps is:

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.

Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and on our Listen pages.

Regular readers might recall that I'm a big fan of StoryCorps, (in fact, I have even used some of the recordings in my classroom as part of the memoir unit) and every week I look forward to sharing a couple minutes of someone else's life. When they gave the teaser at the top of the hour this morning I sat bolt upright in bed. This morning on StoryCorps we"ll hear the story of triplets, blind from birth...

Wow! There can't be too many of them! I thought, and indeed I was correct. It was a recording of some of our former students. Nick, Leo, and Esteban are in ninth grade now, but working to meet their needs when they were in middle school, especially sixth grade, turned our worlds upside down. Those guys left a huge mark on our school.

Listening to the two minute edit of their interview, I was struck mostly by how much was left out of the story. What they said was true, but I knew personally it was incomplete, so much so that it almost seemed inaccurate to me.

To be honest? I was a little annoyed, and for a moment, I even questioned the entire premise of StoryCorps. But then I realized that such inconsistencies actually embody the spirit of the project. Every voice matters, because we all hold a piece of the truth.

The Point

We've had a student who has been out since before Thanksgiving with a nasty infection. Thankfully, she returned today ready and willing to jump right in and try to pick up where she left off. Always a brash kind of a personality, she took me a bit by surprise when, after watching one of the class's favorite StoryCorps animations, she raised her hand. "What was the point of that?" she sniffed dismissively.

Fortunately, her classmates were able to explain the meaning of the SC motto:  

Every voice matters.

Listening Skills

Every year, I teach a unit on memoir, and this time I've incorporated some Storycorps materials into the short pieces my sixth graders analyze. For years I've listened to the edited versions of these recorded conversations every Friday morning on NPR. Many, many times I am moved to tears, but it wasn't until I drove past the mobile recording trailer every day for a month that I thought of using them in my classroom.

The Storycorps folks, in addition to archiving all of the interviews at the Library of Congress, have some great education materials on their website, as well as some animated versions of a several of their more popular interviews.

In my class we go from transcript to audio recording to animation. One of the students' favorite pieces is a son's remembrance of his father who worked up to sixteen hours a day as a school custodian to support their family of 13. The anecdote he relates, while very accessible to the students, also contains some old-fashioned versions of things they have contemporary inklings of, specifically store credit and bottle deposits.

We have had some interesting conversations about those issues, but none have been as lively as when, in order to help them relate to how hard that guy was working, I mentioned the possibility of a longer school day or year. The shock of such a suggestion must have damaged their ears because a couple of class periods later? Someone was circulating a petition to stop it.