Having read a somewhat strange short story in a very strange way

Although only nine people posted responses to the story by Sunday, as the prompt asked, almost everyone had posted by this morning. I don't know how many people will have had a chance to read other folks' responses; certainly no one will have read all of them. We'll take the first part of this afternoon's meeting to consider them.

What I'll ask, first, is for everybody to read through the responses to a couple of sections (everybody will get two different printouts, each containing all the responses to one section of the story), and quickly highlight or underline three or four phrases, sentences, or passages that you think particularly interesting, or worth talking about. If you see a pattern among the responses, explain what pattern you see at the bottom of the last page of each set of responses.

Put your name at the top of the first page; I'll collect these after we're done, and look for issues we didn't get to.

We'll take some time as a class to talk about the story, and I have a bit of information to throw into the mix which may give us something else to talk about.

A note, and a bit of an apology

In the fifth section of the story, there was a typo (actually, I think it was a scan-o): where the text of the story said "donor" it actually should have said "doctor." What I find amazing about this was that I used this same story in a sort of research study many years ago (and in a conference presentation and book chapter about the process), and the error was in that study as well -- and I didn't notice it then, and didn't notice it now, till I was rereading the section in the printout. I don't think it affected people's readings of the whole story radically, but it certainly did -- if they noticed -- affect the way a lot of people responded to that section.

This, by the way, is the reference to the book chapter:

"What Happens When Our Students Read, and What Can We Do About It?" In Reading Empirical Research Studies: The Rhetoric of R esearch, ed. John R. Hayes, Richard E. Young, Michele L. Matchett, Maggie McCaffrey, Cynthia Cochran and Thomas Hajduk. 45-73. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992.

If you're interested, it's on line: http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/whathaps.htm .