meant to be portable. It had a cheap plug-in microphone, which told me I should be listening to and recording others. And it ran on batteries so I could go anywhere I wanted to capture sound. It's really one of the only gifts I remember getting as a child. I instantly fell in love with recording sound.
Figure 1.1 My first tape recorder.
Source: Monica Brady-Myerov's family photo.
My recording didn't go far beyond my family. I mostly cornered my sisters and interviewed them. I conducted a hard-hitting investigative interview with my two-year-old sister about the neighbor's dog. I thought I was a reporter. I wanted to be the 60 Minutes leading female journalist of the time, Barbara Walters. I would also secretly place the recorder under the dining room table to capture the “adult” conversation. Even at that age, I knew listening was a way to learn something new—maybe even something adults wouldn't tell me. I only have one remaining cassette tape from this time, which I've now preserved digitally.
My love of sound and journalism started to come together a few years after I got that tape recorder for Christmas. Our family would take long drives in the summer to visit relatives in Massachusetts. It took 14 hours to drive from Kentucky to Massachusetts. Being in a car with five kids was tedious for everyone, especially my dad, who was always the driver.
My father loved news and would always play CBS news at the top of the hour on the radio. But there were very few all-news stations at that time. And there was bad reception when you were driving through the mountains of West Virginia. That means there were long stretches in between the top of the hour news bulletins and he wanted to hear more news. So he brought along his newspapers. As a daily subscriber to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, there was plenty of news to read. But how to hear it?
My father saw a creative solution. He told his kids that anyone who wanted to read the newspaper to him while he drove got to sit in the front seat between him and my mother. This was back when the front seat was a bench that could fit three people. Today it seems dangerous.
I saw my opportunity to escape the chaos in the back seat with my three sisters and one brother. I was the second oldest, and the only volunteer. My older sister was a bookworm and preferred reading silently to block out the noise.
I sat unbelted in between my mom and dad in the front of our station wagon and read the newspaper out loud. My dad would glance over from the road and poke his finger at the next story he wanted me to read to him. I learned how to follow a jump in a newspaper story and read with some interest and emotion. Looking back on this experience with the knowledge I now have of how hearing words and content strengthen reading and learning, I am sure these experiences had a huge impact on my learning. I know they influenced my career choice. I wanted to be an audio journalist.
But I also learned that at any age, reading to someone is a gift of sharing, love, and intimacy. Hearing another human's voice, expressing words in their own unique way makes you feel closer. You could be a kindergarten teacher sharing a picture book at circle time or a middle school teacher sharing Harry Potter chapter by chapter. Do not underestimate the impact of your voice on your students and their ability to listen.
WHAT AUDIO JOURNALISM TAUGHT ME ABOUT LISTENING
By the time I entered college, I knew I wanted to work in audio journalism. My love of audio was deep and abiding. Working in the news department at the Brown University college radio station was an obvious choice; it gave me the training and practice I needed to become a reporter, along with an official reason to hear and share people's stories. I considered my role as a reporter to be that of a teacher. My reports taught my listeners something about the news of the day.
My college station was a unique commercial rock station run by students. It meant the news department of 95.5 WBRU in Providence, Rhode Island did not cover college campus events. We covered local and national news including murder trials, corruption, and politics. I even had the budget to take a team of reporters to cover both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1988.
At the heart of all the stories I covered and what I was learning about audio is that hearing people's stories is powerful.
THE INTIMACY OF AUDIO
What captivates me about audio is the intimacy of the medium. Listeners can hear emotions first-hand. Anger, joy, concern, desperation, and regret. They all sound distinct in someone's voice. You can hear someone struggling not to cry, and then their voice cracks and they break down into tears. You can hear the shock, relief, and joy of someone receiving good news they didn't expect to get. Imagine right now what these emotions sound like. Maybe you are imagining your mother telling you a dear relative passed away. Or your best friend telling you she just got engaged.
Listening to audio sharpens your ears and senses and transports you into the story. I can type “sigh,” and you can imagine what it sounds like. But hearing someone mourning the loss of their loved one and saying “I am going to miss them so much” and then deeply, audibly sigh, can't be fully captured in print.
Listening to audio stories can help to engage students in stories, in literacy, and in learning. You may know this from watching kids, mouths agape, listening to you read aloud, voicing each character with expression, adding drama to your delivery to create suspense. You may not realize how much more you can do to incorporate audio into your teaching with similar effect.
Class Activity: Listening to Emotion
In the stories below, your students will be able to hear the emotion. You might spark reflective conversation after listening to the story together with some general follow-up questions: How do you think the person in the story feels? What emotions do you think that person is feeling by listening to the tone of their voice? What do pauses sometimes tell you about how a person is feeling? Do you think your voice sounds different whether you are happy or sad?
Elementary School Students: The story “50 Years After She Was Struck By Lightning, Reconnecting With The Girl Who Saved Her” is a conversation between two older women who have an emotional reunion. [1]
Middle/High School Students: The story “Trying Not To Break Down—A Homeless Teen Navigates Middle School” is full of emotion from a boy who is homeless and working hard to succeed in school and life. [2]
The story “How a Stuffed Toy Monkey Reunited a Holocaust Survivor with Relatives” is a moving conversation between a father and son about what really happened to his family during the Holocaust. [3]
The audio and additional teaching resources can be found at https://listenwise.com/book.
It's hard to get the same kind of intimate connection through just the written word. In fact, it might take a paragraph to explain in detail the emotion someone expressed in one word through their voice. And it will never capture what it sounded like to actually be there.
Previously, I studied abroad in Kenya and lived in Nairobi for the summer working as an intern for Reuters, a leading international wire service. As an intern, I mostly organized files