I was talking to Lynn in Canada and she was asking about using story scripts, how it can be easy to stay to stay too close to the story and tell it instead of asking it. She said this:
…I’ve been trying to use my own scripts, but I’m telling instead of asking, and I can’t seem to find the spot for their input that makes good sense…
This question lies at the heart of storytelling. I wrote back to Lynn:
If I get observed I like to use a story that I know will fly. I especially like Anne Matava’s
Afraid Of The Package
The Refrigerator
The first one is really great. Here it is:
Afraid of the Package
receives a package
wants (doesn’t want to) open it
is afraid of
Tyler receives a package from Chuck Norris. He doesn’t want to open it. He is afraid of the package. He goes to his mother and asks, “Can you open my package?” His mother does not want to open it. She is also afraid of the package.
Tyler goes to Jennifer Lopez. He asks, “Can you open my package?” Jennifer does not want to open it. She is not afraid of the package, but she is afraid of Chuck Norris.
Tyler goes to the Hippy Policewoman. He asks, “Can you open my package?” The Hippy Policewoman is afraid of the package and of Chuck Norris. But she must open the package. It is her job. She opens the package.
Now, what do we do with this story so we don’t end up just forcing it on the kids? How do we ask it?
Well, we just start out with Step One as we usually do, telling the kids what the three structures mean in English, and then we sign and gesture the three structures. We all know how to do that. We have them close their eyes and all of that. We really fluff the energy in the room up during closed eyes, as Susie has shown us.
Then, after establishing meaning and signing and gesturing, as the last part of Step One, we PQA the structures. We do this to make it easier for the kids to decode the coming story. This is the original kind of PQA, not the Circling with Balls kind that we do at the beginning of the year to personalize our classrooms.
Do we PQA “receives a package?” It might work if you ask “Did anyone receive a package lately?” but I would avoid it in a level one class. Do we PQA “wants to open it” Not really, it’s not something that we can PQA – it doesn’t speak to me as PQA material anyway. But we can PQA the third structure, “is afraid of”. So we just spend a few minutes asking the kids what they are afraid of. If they know how to play the game they come up with all sorts of funny shit. That is a great question and could easily go places, in which case you could save the package story for another day. The question packs emotion, and such structures work well in TPRS. It is also one of the questions on the questionnaire on the back of the Circling with Balls card. Anyway, once you have PQA’d that, then you just look at the first line in the story:
Tyler receives a package.
Now you ask in L2:
Class, there was a …….?
and pause and ask girl? boy? monkey? whatever. DO THIS STORY AND ALL STORIES IN THE PAST TENSE. DO RELATED READINGS AND SPIN DISCUSSIONS THE NEXT DAY IN THE PRESENT. IN THAT WAY YOUR STUDENTS LEARN PRESENT, PRETERITE AND IMPERFECT FORMS IN ONE YEAR, thus aligning our instruction with the new state standards here in Colorado that are coming fast to all states.
Wait for the kids to fill in the blank. I would wait until someone said boy, to stay roughly in alignment with Anne’s story. When the kid said boy, I would praise them. They would be thinking that they are making up the story.
Remember, your job now is to loosely align the kids’ suggestions (two words of English maximum or answers in the TL, either one) with Anne’s story. Don’t go too far from her story, but keep accepting cute answers. You will need to have the rules on the wall for this to work, and the moment a single kid breaks one of those rules you stop the story, and go into English and make it crystal clear that those rules will be followed during the story. Do this each time a child inappropriately uses English, especially. If you don’t, don’t even any of this.
Now, if you see what you have done here in the first word, you have begun to align with Anne’s story. (See Sample Stories to TPRS in a Year! – near the back of the book – for more details on how to do this).
Now look where you are – you have asked your students “what there was” and they said “a boy” and you are starting a story. So now get a boy up and acting. Just have him come up and stand next to you. That’s all he does. Class interest goes up a notch at this point and the pressure of doing a story just went down a notch. All systems go at this point.
Now, you will just continue to align with Anne’s story. Here is the sentence you have from her script:
Tyler receives a package from Chuck Norris.
Anne has underlined Tyler and Chuck Norris. She has NOT underlined “a package”, so that is a non-negotiable word. By not underlining it, Anne is telling you to leave it in the story that is being created – “a package” is needed for the story to work. But, you have two variables in that sentence and you must get them both personalized as per the kids in your class. If you don’t, you end up telling the story. The last thing that a kid wants to hear from you right now is:
Tyler receives a package from Chuck Norris.
Who is Tyler? Who is Chuck Norris? So, all you have to do is find out the name of the actor who is standing there next to you, the Tyler in the story. Ask the class that question. Of course, at this point in the year, the kids all know “what is his name” so just get that fact out of the way and get a name.
Just remember that it must be a name connected to some of the PQA you have already done, to a Circling with Balls card, to anything that the kids can relate to as reflective of the life of your school or your class, or the pop culture, or anything that is interesting to them.
Maybe a kid suggests Zack Efron. What kind of mood are you in today? Does that suggestion resonate with you? If so, accept it and immediately heap praise on the kids. The kids whose answers you have rejected don’t take it personally – I even say that an answer is “stupid” from time to time, which we all think of as funny and nobody takes personally, but that is just me.
They don’t take it personally because I have already told them that the reason I want to hear a lot of answers is because my job is to give my students a lot of repetitions in the TL so that they can learn the language. The kid whose answer is accepted gets a look of appreciation from me each time their suggestion comes up during the story, or as often as I can remember. This quick look of appreciation with a little smile is my way of sending approval to individual kids.
In TPRS classes, we approve of kids. We invite them into a game. We don’t bust their chops. Hopefully, by now in January, we have indeed in fact taught our kids to do what Blaine calls “play the game” – in which they come up with cute answers that make the class go. I always tell the kids that I am a boring person, so I need them to come up with good stuff. There are always a few kids who are experts at this in each class, and they are usually kids who are not recognized in their other classes for their weird senses of humors. But boy can they be funny. I have one kid in my seventh period class who just comes up with stuff that make me double over in laughter at times, and he keeps his face straight when he does it. He gets low grades in his other classes.
Remember to make the kids say “Ohhh!” when you tell them that Zack or whomever received a package. I don’t care if we spend the entire class period on establishing this first sentence. We are going to parallel Anne’s story with personalized information provided by the class – we are not going to tell it but we are not going to leave it entirely either. We are going to ask the story.
After you get the hang of this process, of working from a good story script that has been written around the weird interests of teens in a conscious way by a real story script writer (it’s just like Hollywood, the best stuff can always be traced to the best writers), you will see that in each successive sentence it gets a little weirder, a little more personalized around the kids in the class (because THEY are providing all the cute answers to the underlined words in the script), and the thing kind of turns into a hot air balloon getting off the ground, with a bunch of laughing people, you included, in the wicker basket.
I will repeat what you wrote that started all of this:
…I’ve been trying to use my own scripts, but I’m telling instead of asking, and I can’t seem to find the spot for their input that makes good sense…
Well, the spot is the underlined words in the script, do you see? The underlined words make the whole thing simple for you. At some point you won’t need underlined words, but for now they will work for you. That is why I asked Anne to write her first book (two more books on the way by summer, by the way!) using this powerful and useful underlining technique.
(Anne herself writes her own stories with blanks, but for some weird ass reason, the way my own mind works, I like to work from a script that has an underlined specific word as a variable, so when she sends me scripts, or publishes them in a book, she just sends me the story with the details her own German classes came up with, so in those stories we are getting basically finished, told, stories from her classes in Maine – that is where those stories come from.)
Now, look at the next part of that first sentence in the script – “from Chuck Norris”. It’s another name, so ask the class who sent Zack Efron the package. You may have to ask:
“Class, who sent the package to Zack Efron?” or “Who sent it to Zack Efron, class?” (I am throwing object pronouns all over the room now in January and it’s working.)
You’ll probably get a bunch of blank stares on that. Don’t freak out. Don’t blame them for being stupid. They are not strong on the verb “to send”, that’s all. Blank stares are your friend. They tell you that the kids don’t know what you said, that’s all. Some teachers think that their stares mean that their class sucks, and they quit TPRS and run to the safety of the book. How silly and how cowardly. Just stand in there (and send yourself an inner smile of warmth and admiration for daring to change a miserable ass way of teaching to make what we do more interesting for kids), and say, in English:
“Class, remember that whenever you don’t understand it is my fault and all you have to do is make a fist with your hand and hit it into your other hand and I promise I will walk straight to the whiteboard behind me and write both the French and the English, every time you don’t understand, so that you know that you will never be confused in a story. If you don’t understand it is my fault – I am either going too fast or not writing the stuff on the board, or both. All you have to do is make sure that I know you don’t understand.”
Your students MUST BE TRAINED to do that. The fist in the hand is a requisite for TPRS to work. Or sometimes they just say in L2, “What does that mean?” Either way on that, but the fist is easier. That is Jason Fritze’s idea, and it is only one of the hundreds of ideas he has had to make TPRS better over the years.
Stephen told me that he thought that the fist had to make an audible sound, but it doesn’t – our eyes are always on our kids in this process so if they make a fist we see that motion and respond immediately. As soon as I see a hand move to make a fist I start walking to the board to get ready to do a Point and Pause.
Also, there is the mega-important hand check in keeping in touch with how they are doing. Every five minutes, tell them to close their eyes and put up fingers. Ten is perfect comprehension. If you are going slowly enough, they are all above eight. Really check. Look at every kid. If any are below eight, recycle what you have established. It won’t hurt the others to hear it again. This is called a Hand Comprehension Check.
Doing such checks at the beginning of the year is most critical, as it shows you your kids, the ones who somewhat defiantly put up only 1 or 2, who need immediate parent contact, who are perhaps not equipped for a class where they interact with the teacher. This can get emotional for visual kids who want to find fault with us, and if we aren’t careful it makes us defensive, so we make the call in August. If the kid is incapable of the social interaction necessary for TPRS to work for them (God bless them!), then you want them out of that room before it is too late – they can poison a class and they are wrong to do so, but it is the teacher’s job to move heaven and earth to make sure that they and their parents understand how the class will operate. Act in August is my mantra, and the hand comprehension check is a big help in getting the game going properly, and a big part of this entire asking a story process. Once those negative kids, in August, see all of their classmates putting up eights and above because you are going so slowly, they magically fall in line. Lynn wrote me an email about this and I am going to ask her permission to put it here. Lynn is very honest.
Now, after you have written down:
Who sent Zach the package?
in both L1 and L2, you get an answer and voilà there you are at the end of the first sentence. It took about five minutes for all of that. Or, as some of us do, it took 20 minutes, because we stupidly got into English side conversations with our kids about some bullshit that came up during the above process. Or some kid came in late and screwed it up. Or there was a fire drill. Or a kid whom let banter in English all year has cut the story down with his little side comments. And you let her. No, you must absolutely stay in L2 and they must absolutely stay in L2.
Jim or someone recently said here that they have noticed that even a little English – except for the two allowed words as per rule #7 – can totally ruin a TPRS class and I totally agree. So, either follow the rules (downloadable poster on this site) and laser at them each time they are needed (if you do it right in August andSeptember you won’t need them for the rest of the year) and get some discipline in your TPRS class or stop claiming that you do TPRS, because if you don’t follow the rules, then you are in point of fact NOT following the rules and you are letting havoc create itself in your classroom and so you are, indirectly, sending a message to Blaine and Susie that you don’t respect their work in TPRS enough to do the process (it’s not a method) properly and you thus join the ranks of the 99 out of 100 people who claim to do TPRS, but really are nothing more than walking advertisements for the received idea that TPRS is whacky and does not work. The wringwraiths who love to attack TPRS love to have people like you in their buildings, people who tear down TPRS by doing it shittily (I am not talking to you, Lynn, I just went into the impersonal “you” in this rant). Those wringwraiths – that’s what they are – get a ton of TPRS criticism mileage out of classrooms that are run that way. But I seriously digress. Let’s get back to the story. Really, this answer is about done. I have tried to answer:
…I’ve been trying to use my own scripts, but I’m telling instead of asking, and I can’t seem to find the spot for their input that makes good sense…
by talking about how you follow along a story script by asking for answers to underlined variables, by clarifying things with Point and Pause, by requiring students (put your eyes on your students’ eyes on this) to tell you if they don’t understand, and by working, picking, your way through the story one sentence at a time, working with your students together in this creative process that, to me, is like the formula for Coke, Blaine’s formula, and the rest of all the stuff in TPRS should be regarded as fluff compared to this core process, the Three Steps.
So, from here, you and your kids have probably created something like:
Zack Efron received (note again: story written in present but you ask it in past) a package from Megan Fox or the principal of your school or whomever.
Now, you glance, right there in class, at the script, and see the second structure in this sentence. You feel happy, because if you can make it through one sentence in a story script you can make it through all of them:
He doesn’t want to open it.
Do you see any underlined variable in there? Then, personally, I would tell the class this:
“Class, a little secret!” They have to lean forward and slam their foot down on the floor in unison for me on all secrets) and I would then lean back into them and say:
“Class, Zack is afraid of the package!”
I would whisper it. 75% of my little Fauntleroys would immediately get the screen saver going, but I wouldn’t let them. I would make them make the fist sign and I would make eye contact with every kid who DIDN’T DO THEIR JOB by asking for clarification via the fist move. I would convey my upset that I said something and they didn’t ask for clarification. I would tell them in English, if I had to, that “our class won’t work if you don’t do your 50% by asking for clarification on everything you don’t understand”. Then, when they were all doing the fist move, I would then seem pleased and ceremoniously go to the board and write down in BOTH languages (we use Point and Pause to avoid SAYING English in class – writing the English is just fine):
was afraid of (again note use of past tense)
and continue to work my way to the next variable from Anne and go, sentence by sentence deeper into the story. Anne usually ends up underlining the entire third location in her scripts, and one easily understands why – by that time there are so many variables that the kids have come up with that the story is now, in location 3, in its own goofy place, and so the story gets real wide at that point. (I only get to third locations in 90 minute classes).
Good luck with this, Lynn, and let me know how it goes, if you use this story on Monday.
