Can I Get An [Eye] Witness???

During Friday's English II class I ran a little experiment. Unbeknownst to my students, I had arranged earlier in the day for one of my colleagues to "interrupt" class in order to borrow something from me. During the "interruption", my colleague and I exchanged a little banter and then she was on her way. Fifteen  later, I handed out a piece of paper to the students and asked them to interview the person sitting next to them, asking them to recall everything they could remember about that interaction.

Whereas some students could recall many details of the experience with great detail, others were less confident in their memories or were confident about details that were entirely wrong. I performed this experiment because, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the narrator is seeking accounts from eyewitnesses about an event that took place nearly twenty years before. We, as readers, might get frustrated by the conflicting memories of different characters until we realize that we ourselves are not invulnerable to misremembering something.

This very issue is something that people in the world of criminal justice deal with every day, and psychologists are constantly evaluating the validity of eyewitness testimony as well. For this week's blog post, I want students to not only reflect on the experiment that I ran in class today but also to watch the video (produced by the National Science Foundation) below, and offer their thoughts and impressions. What about the experiment that I ran in class surprised you? What did you get right and what did you get wrong? What did you learn from the video? Was any of the information offered new or surprising to you? How do you look at eyewitness testimony differently now and how will this impact your reading of the novel?