Parallel Stories — Further Explanation
When students are given a situation and are allowed to be creative and smart I hear such good lines from them that I can hardly believe that I have not heard them before. Surely a brilliant author would have thought of that by now!
And when it works, there is effortlessness. It is Zen in the best sense, open and alive, and the class itself is creating a story in the moment. We create completely different, vivid characters. For a few moments, we believe it.
We have a sense that we have just created a great story, and it was just for this class. We are only on chapter three and according to my year long curriculum plan we should have completed the book at least by the end of February. That plan is not working out.
The other day students acted out stories asking their parents for money, as a parallel story to the upcoming chapter (chapter 3 in Patricia va a California). The basic story/problem is this:
A student needs money and asks a parent for it.
So we have the problem and we know the direction of the story—convincing the parent to give her the money. We also know when the story is done—when she convinces the parent to give her the money the story is over.
The ability to ask for money is a real skill that will help them in their lives far beyond my silly class. So paying attention and thinking this through will help them. Most will get that this will help them in their lives. Some of the more abstract thinkers will see how this can help them in the future too. If I point it out and we talk about it, almost all of them will see how this could help them and that will help with engagement and attention.
Suddenly the questions and the parallel story and the reading of the chapter become important to them. Kids don’t tend to think about the process of successfully asking for money very much, at least my own daughters don’t. My own children tend to either demand money, or whine about it, or ask and then pout until they get it. Very rarely do they think about how the parent might be feeling. They don’t have a strategy for overcoming objections either. In the upcoming chapter, Patricia models a good way to present one’s case. She models empathy, overcoming objections, and dealing with opposition. This is a gold mine for kids, if we will just take some time and point it out to them.
Patricia can show them that they need a plan. They need to take their parents’ feelings into account. They need a good argument. They need to keep themselves under control and not pout, not try to emotionally manipulate the parent.
So in class the story looks something like this. I pick a girl to be the daughter that needs money. I let her decide who she will go to ask for the money. It is usually a father. So I have a girl and her father. I pick a girl to act because in the novel it is a girl and her father and this sounds crazy, but I think that some of my slower students will be able to read and understand more easily if they see a girl acting and then read about a girl in the story. Maybe I am not giving the slower students enough credit, but a lot of them HATE reading. I think they might hate it for many reasons, but one reason may be because they have rarely connected with a text. I am trying to flesh out a text for them. Our acted out story is going to connect them experientially to the text.