In this episode, Zac talks with José Vilson about how he shapes his practice in the math classroom, why he hates “wrong answers,” and how education became his life. You can find José at www.thejosevilson.com.
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In this episode, Zac got to talk with teacher Cori Saas in discuss her iterative inquiry into the role of stories in her life and in the classroom.
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Each spring, a group of SLA juniors leave the familiar confines of Philadelphia for the foreignness of Flagstaff, AZ. They go as part of an independent trip where they and 10 students from Flagstaff raft down the San Juan river for four days, experiencing nature and America in a way few people will ever have the chance. Along the way, they stop, disembark their rafts and study collections of ancient petroglyphs left by Native Americans in a time long forgotten.
While archeologists have theories as to the meanings of these alien pictures, we don’t quite know for sure. Each year, students stand near the walls and wonder at the remnants of a people and what they have left behind.
Story matters.
This is most obvious in English and language arts classrooms. Built on narratives, fiction and non, their purpose is to connect story to its parts and parts to story while helping students access both the whole and the pieces so that they might interpret the world. Story most clearly and forthrightly matters in these classrooms. One would be hard pressed to find a contrarian ready to stake a claim in opposition to this fact.
Where we fall down in appreciating story but where it is no less necessary is in the classrooms not officially demarcated as the homes of stories. Math, science, even history classrooms are often thought to be devoid of story or of the requirement of story.
Here, though, is where stories are most necessary.
They need not be the stories of content. While helpful, it is not required that students know the stories of Pythagorus or Euclid. If they learn them, fine, but they are not required.
What should be required, and what should weigh on the heads of all teachers are the stories each of their students lived before they became part of this grade and this class in this school. What were their math, history, science, English, physical education stories before they walked into our classrooms?
Almost inevitably, we fail to ask for our students’ stories of prior experiences in school with specific regard to whatever subject matter we’re charged with transmitting. When those stories are exchanged, when a student finds an unlikely mechanism for alerting her teacher to the story of how she came to think of her self as always deficient in math, we have few mechanisms for honoring those stories.
Instead, we charge through, foolhardily focused on curriculum timelines and learning objectives for our students without concerning ourselves with our own learning objectives – understanding where our students are coming from and how we might tailor our practice to meet them at the end of their last stories so that our chapters might be more fulfilling.
This is difficult work. It requires the asking of questions to which we might not like the answers. Each year as an English teacher, I heard new students exclaim that they did not like reading, abhorred writing and didn’t even want to consider whatever it was we might consider “classics.”
The instinctual response was not surprising – put so much of all of their aforementioned hatreds in front of them that they couldn’t help but be overcome by wonder at how wrong they were to dismiss those pieces of school that had been part of stories of the failure, difficulty, and embarrassment. Not surprisingly, when I gave room for this instinct, it ended poorly.
When I gave room to their stories, though, and listened for the pieces of previous classes that had hindered my students’ ability to access content and learning, I was able to change my practice and consider thoughtfully how that year might tell a better story than the last.
It is an understandable reflex of the classroom teacher to assume the blank slate of the school year applies to whatever subject area for which she is responsible. This is not so, can never be so.
Given this, we must listen to the stories our students bring with them to our classes. We must listen to them as the first and most important pieces of data available to us in crafting learning experiences that might lead to better stories for whomever is responsible for our students after us.
The broader the ocean of knowledge, the vaster the shores of ignorance.
The other day, I stumbled on the Harvard Stories project.
The Harvard Stories project offers all members of the Harvard community the opportunity to record, share, and preserve personal stories relating to their experience with the University…and by the end of 2012, the site will allow members of the Harvard community to upload and share their own stories.
When I return to campus, I’ll be stopping by to find out how I can help with the collection of stories from the Harvard community. It also got me thinking about the value of this Story-Corps-esque approach to harvesting institutional memory.
There’s value in any institution creating a space for the collection of stories of members and their histories with the organization.
It’s the evolution of the yearbook. Relaxing the curatorial conditions for inclusion, the space would simply ask members to tell the stories of how they came to understand the mission of the space and their part in that mission.
Perhaps one essential question guides the process. Maybe it’s a list of core values. It could even be a mission statement.
I can’t help wondering at the almanac of identity a school would have after a semester’s worth of story netting.
Think of the information available to a student’s future teachers. Think of the time capsule for future students.
Think of the stories of who we are and how those stories could shape our understanding of that identity.
Surely, there’s a broom closet somewhere that’s waiting to become a story capsule.
On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
– Alfred de Vigny
Stories have always fascinated me. My family trades stories like currency. From the garbled message from my cousin Milo explaining why the book I sent him was so important to my great-grandparents’ and now grandparents’ recollections of where we come from, stories matter in my family.
When I interviewed to teach at SLA, I was asked to describe my dream class. I was nervous and unprepared. I have no idea what I described. Now, though, I am teaching it. Second semester, for two years now, I teach a class called Storytelling to SLA seniors.
As I’ve explained before, Tuesday afternoons, I set up the class like a performance space, heat a percolator of coffee and one of hot water for tea. I set out cream and sugar and cookies. Beside them, I have a tip jar.
At the front of the room is a microphone. Beside it is a table with a small sound board and a laptop.
For two hours at the end of my Tuesday, I sit at that table and listen as my students share and explode moments of their lives in our weekly class story slams. Built around the rules of Philadelphia’s First Person Arts Story Slams, the rules are simple.
Three random audience judges scoring on content and presentation.
Five random storytellers.
No more than 5 minutes.
No notes.
True stories.
Tuesday, I woke up with a Daylight Saving Time hangover. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to leave their bed. I dragged through much of the day. Then, during lunch, I remembered – slams.
I set up the room, bought the supplies and greeted the students as they filed in.
Describing the stories would fall short. There’s something at once vulnerable and empowered as my students stand behind the mic and share parts of their lives the people in the room have usually never been privy to.
I’ll stop here and let you listen to two selections from this week’s slam around Malice.
No matter the discipline, story should be the currency of our classrooms.
Ralen and Freda by MrChase
For a while now, I’ve been following @IAM_SHAKESPEARE on twitter. The idea behind the account appealed to me – tweeting every work of Shakespeare, line-by-line.
I’m fairly certain I was teaching my Shakespeare class at the time and all juiced up on The Bard.
Initially, Shakespeare was following me too. Not anymore. The realization that my writing had lost his attention, faux or otherwise, was a bit of a blow to the ego.
Then again, I’m struggling to remain interested in what cyber-Bill has to say. Every now and again, I’ll catch a key line from a work I’ve read and feel the self satisfaction of recognition. Most of the time, though, I’ll see something like the recent, “Farewell. Our countrymen are gone and fled.” I’m not sure what to do with that.
The narrative wasn’t built for Twitter.
This is not to say Twitter wasn’t built for narrative.
Most recently, the exploits of the fictitious Rahm Emanuel, @MayorEmanuel, have shown the medium can do more than answer its initial question of “What are you doing?”
As revealed in a recent story from The Atlantic, Chicago writer/professor/punk zine publisher Dan Sinker used the account to build an entire world for what could be described as his Nega Emanuel.
In his analysis of Sinker’s work, Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal writes:
When you try to turn his adventures into traditional short stories or poems, they lose the crucial element of time. The episode where the mayor gets stuck in the sewer pipes of City Hall just does not work when the 15 tweets aren’t spaced out over 7 hours. It’s all over too fast to be satisfying. There’s no suspense.
This is 4-D storytelling, and I’m fascinated.
@MayorEmanuel existed as a stand-alone narrative with no tie-in or marketing behind it.
In the lead up to the 2000 release of the film adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, fans could receive e-mails from the film’s main character Patrick Bateman. It was 2000 and e-mail was still super cool. I was working at my university’s student paper at the time and remember the daily discussions as the e-mails arrived in our movie columnist’s inbox.
I’d read epistolic fiction before, but this was something new. It was sent out at the author’s pace, not the readers’. As Madrigal pointed out, suspense was built as a function of how the story was told.
The seniors in my Storytelling class are writing short stories now influenced by one of the human emotions as described by Aristotle. They’re crafting stories the way generations before them have composed texts. Though they’ve moved from paper to the screen, the process and the format are largely the same. I see and understand the value of the exercise. There’s a holding on to the roots and the tradition of writing stories (and I love Fiddler on the Roof as much as the next guy).
At the same time, Singer won’t be the last person to bend Twitter or any other social network to his will. I’ll be remiss in my duties if I don’t offer up these online spaces as playgrounds for the telling of the stories my students are writing.
It’s incredibly simple to ask them to write stories and post them to class blogs. They’re already doing it here and here.
Only doing that, though, would be tantamount to art teachers forbidding their students to use perspective in their painting. Story can have a depth and breadth to it online far beyond the linear nature of the page – be it paper or web.
The future of writing and literature has too many possibilities for me to force them to write in the past.
I’ve begun thinking of ways to encourage my students to start playing with new media as mechanisms for delivering their stories. One of the essential questions for the class asks, “How is a story affected by how it’s told?” The answer to that appears to be shifting before our eyes.
It is indeed true…I do not write at all, my not writing is taking on dimensions.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
April 19, I’ll be floating down the San Juan River in Utah with a group of high school students. It will be my third rafting trip in as many years. I can’t wait.
Last year’s trip took us down a stretch of the Colorado River. Returning to the San Juan means calmer waters and a chance to see some amazing petroglyphs.
I remember standing, staring at them two years ago.
Our river guides were explaining their pre-historic origins and importance as sacred relics to the native peoples of the areas.
“What do they mean?” I kept asking.
As seasoned as our guides were, they admitted we could never know, but only guess at the stories being depicted.
As a collector of stories, this saddened me.
One of my G11 students, Luna, IMed me this afternoon to share something she’s been working on as part of the Stones project my kids are collaborating on right now.
It frightened me.
My formal training and experience is in the realm of reading and telling stories linearly. I’m not talking analog versus digital. My training, the stories I’ve been told work along line from beginning to end.
What Luna created starts to push against that.
It spiraled and flowed and moved. Readers can choose where they enter the text and in what direction they move from there. It has an order and sense to it, but those elements can be freely ignored.
I’ve never taught her that. I’ve not taught any of my students that.
I rally against digital storytelling for the simple reason it shifts the focus from the story to the medium.
I’ll continue to do so.
Digital storytelling, at least what I’ve seen, asks keeps the standard structure, adding images and sounds.
The Anasazi, Ute, Navajo and their archaic pre-cursors understood the implications of telling a story in pictures centuries before VoiceThread or Prezi came on the scene.
In fact, they did it better. Watch most digital stories online and consider how closely they are influenced by standard narrative structure. They remain beholden.
Stare at an ancient petroglyph, though, and realize there are ways to tell and read stories that have been lost to us. That loss opens the door to their re-creation.
I’m uncertain how to do that.
I worry I don’t do enough to help my students see words, language, reading, and writing as more than just skills, but to help them see those things as art as well.
Arts programs around the nation are being reduced or cut. Unofficially, it is because they are untested subjects. I’m fortunate to work in a subject whose survival is protected by standardized testing. Unfortunately, that protection also threatens its existence as an art.
I don’t know if the tools exist to help my students tell stories outside a traditional linear narrative. As a standard point of entry, PowerPoint does much of the early work of reinforcing the idea the tales we tell must move along a thread (voice or otherwise).
I’m unsure how to prepare my students to balance the traditional linear intake and creation of stories while giving them room to play with the ideas that because this is the way they’ve always experienced stories, doesn’t mean they can’t find a better way.
I don’t know how to teach myself that either.
I do know we can teach stories better.