Master of Ceremonies

I think that we tend to be overcritical of ourselves when stories don’t work. We think we are the master of ceremonies in some kind of circus. But we’re not. In any social setting, the quality of the interaction, the conversation, the art of it, depends on who is in the entire group.

Our kids lack social skills in classrooms. It’s not their fault, it’s just the way it is. Most have had little training in the art of conversation at the dinner table – if that exists any more. Social media is here now, so that interacting with a real human being, let alone an adult, is not something kids are trained in anymore. Can you say Smart Board?

It’s amazing we get through our stories at all. Some classes have the chemistry for it, and that is usually due to a handful of kids whom we call sparklers who have been raised in a way that they know how to communicate and give to a group and laugh. Most kids can’t laugh, though, it seems.

Anyway, let’s give ourelves some slack as we gear up to go through the hardest part of the year again. I find myself giving myself more and more slack if the story doesn’t work. My expectations are lower. That is a good thing. My job is to deliver the CI, and that’s it. Anything else is gravy. We don’t have to be the big star. Let’s get over that one.

One good thing about boring stories is that they tend to follow the script much more to the letter which allows us to just cut and paste the entire story and just replace the variables from each class. When a story is more interesting, it meanders more* and is harder to just cut and paste for each class so it takes us a lot longer to prepare the readings. So boring can be good in terms of saving us time in preparing the readings.

*Of course, when stories meander too much, we go out of bounds and that is a big problem. There is such a balance to keep the story in bounds and yet make it interesting. Oh well, nobody said that this was going to be easy right?