We saw the new Harry Potter movie the other night. I didn’t like it as well as the last one. A velocity issue, I think. The previous one I recall as being quietly menacing; this one was things coming at you fast with loud scary music. One line, however, endeared this one to me. The villain, a bureaucrat acting as teacher, tells the students at one point that something, a new textbook I think, will help them pass the examination, and that is, after all, the point of education—to pass the examination. She is convincingly portrayed as a truly awful person and yet one we are all familiar with, and her statement seems the logical extension of the No-child-left-behind philosophy of education.

 

I told my friend Judy Fjell some educational observations of mine—she teaches music in public schools—and she asked me to write them up for her. I pass them on to you, because they are about the parts of every child that get left behind when test scores mean everything and only reading, writing and math are tested—not science, not the social sciences, and most certainly none of the arts.

 

WORD WEAVING

Around 1982 I was in a project in a number of Bay Area schools where a few classes in each school were given extra storytelling, both from pros like me and from the classroom teachers who had attended workshops we gave. At the end of a year, the children were tested, along with same-grade children who had not had storytelling. The storytelling children were very slightly better in reading scores, vocabulary tests, recall of story elements, etc., but not in statistically significant ways. The statistically significant difference came in the following test. The children were told a story they hadn’t heard and then asked what happened next. The control group typically answered “Probably the same thing,” or “I don’t know...she didn't say.” The Word Weaving group typically added new, imaginative story elements.

 

The teachers also reported that in their observation, their classes’ listening skills improved more in the year they did storytelling than in previous years. Some teachers reported that the storytelling seemed particularly useful in drawing out shy and ESL students. I had an example of that in one fifth-grade class with several ESL students. I had just done a string-trick story, then, on impulse, I made the cat’s-cradle opening and asked if anyone would come up and do it with me. An Asian girl came up, and we went through the whole sequence. I thanked her and she sat down. As I was leaving, the teacher told me she had just come to this country, had been in school about a week, and this was the first time she had volunteered to do anything.*

 

VIDEO STORYTELLING

Also in the eighties, I flew to Indianapolis to have four stories recorded by a videotape company that was putting out a series of eight or so storytelling videotapes. I asked for a fifth and sixth grade audience and that’s what I got.

 

A few months later, I got a phone call from the company. They wanted to add some drawings here and there in the stories on my tape The marketing people felt they were needed because in test showings the children didn’t keep their eyes on the screen. I explained that in storytelling they didn’t need to. Sometimes they were looking at me, sometimes they were looking at scenes from the story in their mind’s eye. The guy didn’t buy that. I told him about a five-year-old newcomer at a library story hour who seemed too busy looking all around him to take in the stories. Then at the next story hour, his mother reported that he recounted all the stories to his father. You can’t tell by looking if they’re listening or not. He still felt they needed pictures. I got very loud. We had several loud phone calls. Luckily I was at a week-long storytelling workshop and got lots of support from the other tellers.

 

I explained to the guy that his test was not valid for video, that it was for a different medium, TV, where the station is selling the kids’ eyes to the advertisers, but he is selling videos to the kids’ parents, and the test should be whether they want to view the tapes again another day. No dice. I threatened to bad-mouth the videos in my workshops and classes.

 

Finally, he said he would not have pictures inserted in my tape because the stories were for older kids, but he would put them in the other tapes.

 

“SINK” STORY

I was in a training weekend for artists in residence in Idaho schools. The trainer said, “I’m going to say a word and I want you to note the first thought that comes to your mind when I say it. The word is ‘sink’.” Then she asked us what our responses were. Somebody saw the noun, a kitchen sink. Somebody saw the verb, a ship sinking. I (mostly a kinesthetic thinker) thought a downward motion. The professional musician among us saw a recording studio. Huh? Well, he explained, he heard ‘synch’.

 

The leader asked if anyone had seen the written word, SINK. Nobody had. But that’s the main way we expect kids to learn, she said, and we think the arts are dispensable.

 

In fairness, I have since met one person who says she sees words running under her mental image screen like news flashes on TV, and she said she’d met two others in her life who think that way, but they seem to be a small minority. Anybody out there have this experience?

 

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Some years ago, I went to a “Kids in Creeks” conference at Mills College. In one of the big auditoriums there, a series of teachers was presenting work they had done with kids in creeks, all very impressive. Then a group of fifth graders presented the work they had done the previous year in fourth grade. The state provides a list of creatures endangered in each county. Of several in Marin, they chose a tiny shrimp that lives in the streams. Because cattle had been trampling the foliage that shaded the streams, the poor little shrimp were huddled under highway overpasses for shade. The kids campaigned to get ranchers to fence the streams. Kids also raised money for native plants they would plant to replace the trampled ones.

 

 

 

©2007 by Nancy Schimmel

 

*A report on the Word Weaving storytelling study was published by the two foundations that funded it: Effects of Storytelling: An Ancient Art for Modern Classrooms. Catharine Horne Farrell and Denise D. Nessel. ©1982, The Zellerbach Family Fund and the San Francisco Education Fund.