I just wanted to spend a little more time with Marilyn Cooper's emphasis on listening. As described in her piece--both in how she articulates the way she hears--the limits and possibilities to that hearing--and in the way she describes the role of listening closely to what is possible in our own contexts, strikes me, really, as an argument for empathy and concensus. I hear a little of Wayne Booth's admonitions as they were laid out in _Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent_; I hear a frankness and humility in admitting that her expertise doesn't mean she has answers; I hear also the need to extend our ears beyond the sounds of our own ideologies, to, as it were, 'willingly suspend our disbelief' so that we can appreciate the desires and anxieties of our students; I hear the need not to argue our positions with the kind of well-meaning authority, and thus naivity, she sees in subject of Varnum's study; and I hear too, echoes of Cynthia Selfe's keynote, of the need for vigilance about what might be in the ever expanding electronic matrixes that increasingly define our literacy, our workplaces, our economies, our communities, and our assumptions and views of reality. For me, ironically enough, the reminder to listen serves as reminder that there are speakers, individuals with needs both corporeal, spiritual, intellectual, and pyschological, individuals who, no matter how they may have been shaped and constructed by social forces, still have can and do speak, still make decisions that have consequences and reverberations, still need to feel that what they say and do can matter, can be heard, and can make things better.