The closest we can come to achieving telepathy is through reading what someone else wrote.  Not only is it straight out of their mind, like their speaking is, but we can also reread it and be thoughtful about it, which we can't do with speech.

Also, the more writing we have from someone, the more the writing reveals the way their mind ticks.  That's a reason that I become a little nervous when one of my students or parents says that they are reading one of my short story collections.  They might find out more about how I think than they would be comfortable with!  After all, I can't write about a thing without thinking about the thing, and I think about a lot of things.  Not all of them are classroom safe.  I worry that a parent or school board member might read what I've written and then think, "This person shouldn't be working with kids."

Okay, I'm not all that worried, but I do think that some times.

Which brings me to kids' journals.  I require 1,000 words a week.  Even though I tell them that there is no teacher/student confidentiality implied with the journals, and that they shouldn't write anything in the journals they wouldn't want someone else to read, like confessions of felonies or their plans to blow up the school, they still do.  Inside of a month, many of them use the pages to write about their most personal thoughts.  I find out about college plans, relationships with parents, ideas on politics, their crushes and hates, and whatever else crosses their minds while they're pounding out 1,000 words.

I read stuff that makes me feel like I'm reading privileged information; I read stuff that throws me violently into the TMI world; I read stuff that makes me laugh, and I read stuff that scares me.

An exercise that I've done with kids who think they don't write well, is to go through their journals with a highlighter to make a "found" poem.  What I'm looking for are interestingly worded utterances that seem related to each other.   Sitting with the student, I'll go through the journal, asking the student to highlight the cool sentences.  I'll highlight some too.  Then we take the sentences and, without changing any of the words, rewrite them as a poem.  We'll discuss line breaks.  When we're done, we inevitably have something that is interesting, blows the student away, and it is ALL their own writing.

Writing in the journals isn't just about writing, however.  It's also, or maybe even mostly, about the person.

Last year I read a journal where a student described in detail his involvement in breaking into a local sporting goods store.  It turned out he'd been arrested for it and was now on probation, but at the time I was afraid I had just discovered a confession to a crime.

I read a journal once where the student wrote at length about how attractive he thought the ideas behind Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" were.  I talked to the counselors about him.

Once I had a student who was both very religious and moral (and vocal about it), but she dressed like Brittany Spears on one of her sleazier days.  There was some dissonance between her speech and her appearance.  She wrote a long journal entry about a dream she had of riding a horse bareback, up and down the hills.  And up and down.  And up and down.  I quit reading her journals.

Another student wrote at length about how much he hated his father and what a horrible person his dad was.  His dad found the journal after several months of entries and read it.  Ouch.

I've read journals from kids who are sleeping with their boyfriends or girlfriends.  I agonize over whether the parents know or not.  I'm certainly conflicted about writing "Okay" at the end of the entry, which I normally write if the entries are long enough.

Most of the time, though, reading the journals is just interesting.  What a great exercise for young writers, to write a lot, and what an opportunity for me as a writer to do some mind reading.  Hopefully the reading makes me a better story teller.  Hopefully it reveals to me more about the human experience than I would have if I wasn't a teacher.