"Yelling Boy," by Wendy Wolters Hinshaw is a reflective examination of her interaction with an undergraduate student in a section of first-year composition. The reflection, a painfully frank and honest look at Hinshaw's own teaching, is rendered in stark terms—no music and no soundmarks of the classroom (Shafer, 1977), no chalk sounds on a blackboard, no scraping of chairs as a class session ends, no rustling of papers or announcements of assignments due. This piece, a memory of what took place in a “dirty grey office,” is focused on a single exchange that happened across a “small teacher’s desk." It takes three minutes for Wolters Hinshaw to recount in its entirety.

The power of this audio memory rests in the midst of its plainness, its silences. Hinshaw relates a narrative of a young man who insists on telling his own personal story on his own terms, despite her carefully considered assignment, her firm theoretical grasp of teaching goals and media representations, and her attempts to steer him toward what she hopes might be a more complicated and nuanced examination of his family photographs:

I ask again in my best teacherly tone, “What do you think are the larger implications of this family album?” Although he has no idea what the “larger implications” are of his collection of pictures, the larger implications of our conversation are becoming very clear: I'm asking him over and over again to look at his family photographs my way, and he’s getting madder and madder.

In her reflection about this incident—a key event in her development as a teacher—Hinshaw deploys a “register of knowledge” (Walker, 2003, p. 161) that differs from in subtle ways from that which is used in writing. By performing her story, Hinshaw re-lives the acoustic memory for listeners. She recalls her own words, imitating the pedagogical tone of voice she used; she speaks the words of Yelling Boy, protesting loudly, as he did, “these are just my family pictures. This is just me.”

The significance of such a performative moment, Julia Walker (2003) points out, lies in its embodied nature; it is an expression deeply felt, “registered within the body’s viscera.” (p. 160). Hinshaw (2007), herself, in reflecting on this essay notes,

I think I felt more vulnerable in this assignment than I had in any assignment I can remember; partly this was due to the fact that we were modeling our essays after the “This I Believe" project on NPR, and so I was forced to figure out what I believe and talk about it in front of everyone. But telling my story in an audio essay also meant putting myself there, really boiling myself down to that moment and talking about it out loud. I didn't have the comforts I typically rely on in a written paper—this was shorter, there was no room for citation or other scholarly voices to help contextualize and soften the experience I was sharing. It was really just all riding on my voice.