David:
I've just sent "Differentiated Learning in the Statistics Classroom" to the Journal of Economic Education....

I can't remember enjoying a final revision process more. I took another look at each of your comments as well as other feedback I received and felt great pleasure participating in the resulting back and forth. Such a respite from the brutality and negativity of most referee reports!

Papers can always be improved - and this one would certainly be better had I found more effective ways of responding to your comments - but I am grateful to you for the quality of what I have now submitted.

I appreciate the luxury of having multiple comments, sometimes contradictory, to weigh. I frequently use peer reviews in my courses; my experience with you this fall leads me to require two peer reviews for each paper - both to provide the experience of multiple perspectives, but also to allow for situations when a particular reviewer has as yet developed limited helping skills.

The other two major blessings I've received from our collaboration this fall:
1) Hearing regularly from each of you: It's been wonderful keeping you all a regular part of my life.

2) The commitment to produce something by the first week of the month: It is too easy for me to set aside one bit of work to pursue the multiple enterprises that engage my interest. Commitments to others are more binding than commitments to self (at least in my experience).

My biggest regret is that I have done so little to engage in conversation about our work - almost every comment about almost every piece of writing is a potential opening to further exchanges and growth. (It's what I understand happens on Serendip, on email listserves, and these evolving blogs we are starting to hear so much about.) But, in my experience, conversation competes unpredictably for time with other endeavors, other obligations. It felt like all I could do was get my writing and (however incompletely) comments on your work out to the group. The lag between sharing work and sharing comments also has inhibited my sense of being in conversation.

Our agreement to let this be a joy, not a burden, has been very freeing. The sense that anything we share with one another is something that would not have graced us had Barbara not proposed the idea.

So, the only reason for sharing regrets is in the hope that there are ways of reducing them.

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