Three-Two-Talk

The activity in class that interested me the most was the 3-2-1 talk on the historical letters of note we analyzed over the weekend. The portion of it I found most intriguing was how some people had more questions than comments and others had more comments than questions. For example, Lucinda read a letter from an 11-year-old girl to Abraham Lincoln about growing his beard. She told him that he should grow a beard to make his face look less slim so people would be more confident in voting for him. The little girl mentioned how she would vote for him and if he grew a beard she could convince her family to vote for him. From this Lucinda had many questions on why a girl would feel so inclined to write this, as well as why she thought the beard would make a difference in his political popularity. I had determined, after thinking for a bit when she finished talking that because the letter was less descriptive and explanatory, it was easier to come up with questions. Since the little girl did not really explain why she felt the beard would make a difference, or why she even wanted to write in the first place, it left Lucinda and the rest of the class open to question her motives and opinions. On the other hand, my letter was extremely clear with both the letter’s explanation and the words in the letter itself. Therefore, I had practically no questions which led me to think in more abstract ways for my questioning. The letter I selected was from Eleanor Roosevelt to the DAR as her resignation when the women’s group denied a female African-American singer the opportunity to perform. In the letter Eleanor told them several times she was resigning and that she explained that it was due to them denying Marian Anderson the chance to perform. This clear reasoning and explanation made it practically impossible to give some obvious questions that came from reading the letter. To combat this I decided to think more about the things that I had a reaction to, whether it be interesting, surprising, or confusing, and then made questions based on my comments. For example, I was interested as to why Eleanor spoke so lowly of her work in the DAR, which led to a question of whether she used this low thinking to resign without a fight from the DAR or she just felt useless. Throughout the class, I noticed several other students spoke either with more questions like Lucinda, or more comments like me. This made the class very interesting and kept the conversation varying throughout all the 3-2-1 talks.