A teacher-turned-storyteller describes his program for getting reluctant
readers to read.
By Tim Jennings
I'm a professional storyteller; I tell (without a book) folktales from the
vast and timeless repertoire of Euro-Asian-American "oral literature."
When I go into schools to tell stories, the most frequent question teachers
ask me is, "How did you ever get started doing something like this?"
The answer is simple: I did it to survive.
Some years ago, another teacher and I set up and ran an alternative educational
program for 12 unusually difficult state wards, aged 10 through 16. The
kids had been abandoned, or removed from their families because of neglect
or abuse. They were poor. They came from treatment centers, orphanages,
and the streets. Most had been in foster homes, from which they had been
rejected as being unbearable. Many hadn't seen the inside of a public school
for years.
Considering the mill they'd been through, it was not surprising that they
were badly damaged people, and damaging to be around. Routinely and remorselessly,
they lied, stole, broke things, threw tantrums, and abused one another.
All were intolerable in ordinary classroom situations. A few could read,
but rarely did so. Three could read very simple third grade material. The
rest were nonreaders who had been in special programs as long as they'd
been in school.
If kids can't read by age 12, you either give up and do something else with
them, or you take a deep breath and make literate children your main goal.
We didn't need to be back-to-basics fanatics to choose the latter course,
and it turned out that the kids themselves wanted a "real school,"
with reading, writing, and math.
This expressed desire, though, was more a reaction against being "special"
than a clearheaded determination to work. Sure they wanted to read-- almost
as much as they wanted to love and trust an adult. But their experience
was that adults were not trustworthy, and that special programs did not
work. And so the kids had not only given up, they fanatically, explosively
resisted any temptation to try again. Perhaps this was our main reason for
teaching literacy: if against all expectations these kids found themselves
reading, then other possibilities might also begin to appear conceivable
to them.
A Futile Beginning
Base one in learning to read, I thought, was listening to stories read aloud.
I'm pretty good at reading aloud, and looked forward to some enjoyable sessions.
I expected difficulty on all other fronts, but here I thought we could relax
and learn what reading was all about.
I was quickly disabused.
All the kids felt that being read to was demeaning-- baby stuff. The nonreaders
actually seemed provoked to feelings of physical discomfort by the steady
stream of words. They squirmed; they whispered and punched; they got loudly
indignant with others for squirming and whispering and punching. I'd have
to stop and intervene, the thread would get lost, and the exercise-- which
was all it ever was-- would end miserably. I tried everything to make it
work, including a hard-nosed "If you come to listen to a book, then
you sit there, and you listen to the end." All I got from that was
a broken window.
After nearly a year of this nonsense, I found myself returning from still
another useless trip to the library with a van load of kids, all carrying
the books that they had either picked out at random or sulkily agreed to
examine, but that in any case would be forgotten until it was time to return
them. After the wrangling and book dropping subsided, there came the subdued
movement of settling in, and I suddenly remembered an ace I had up my sleeve.
I knew a couple of folktales, and I could tell them pretty well. I hadn't
tried them yet on these kids; I was shyer about storytelling than about
reading aloud, and was afraid of getting my feelings hurt. But what could
I lose? I took a deep breath and laid my card on the table.
"Anybody here want to hear a story? I know a good one."
"No, we don't want to be read to," Red said instantly. Jeff and
Arnie turned their backs.
"I'm not talking about reading. I mean, I'd tell you a story. No book."
There was a pause. "What kind of dorky story is it?" Jem asked.
"It's about a boy named Jack."
"Oh, yeah, I know. Dack and dah Beantawk. Duh dee-duh dee-duh."
"No, you never heard this one."
"What," (withering scorn) "did you make it up?"
"No, it's very old."
"Then how do you know we never heard it?"
"I just know, that's all. It's about three brothers. It's called, 'Dimwit.'"
No comment; nobody wanted to commit himself.
"Hey, does anybody want to hear it? I won't tell it if nobody wants
me to."
Jem muttered something.
"What?" I said.
"I said, OK, go ahead and tell your dorky story."
"Once there were three brothers," I began, as the kids looked
out the windows at the gray, slushy landscape. "Their names were Tom
and Jack and Will. Jack was the youngest, and his two brothers couldn't
stand him."
Clara giggled. "It sounds like my sister. I hate her, and she hates
me." (This is what Clara always said on the subject of her sister.)
"There were a lot of things the two brothers didn't like about Jack,
but most of all the way he'd pick stuff up-- anything, garbage-- and put
it in his pocket. So they called him Dimwit, and pretty soon everybody else
did too.
"Now, the king of this country had a daughter..." The tale wound
on, and by degrees, the kids started looking at me. After about five minutes
Sam started whining about his seat and I took the necessary risk. "Look,"
I said, "I can't tell this story if other people are talking. I lose
track. Do you want to hear it or don't you?"
Another pause, then Jem spoke. "Shut up, Sammy," he said.
The story ended just as we pulled into the driveway. The kids burst back
into the world, screaming like jays.
Folktale Magic
I wondered why the kids had been so taken by this story, when all my earlier
efforts had left them cold. I have two answers to that question:
First, the presentation was new. I had told a story rather than read one.
My kids hated to read aloud so much tot they didn't believe it could be
something anybody would really want to do. When I read aloud with an appearance
of relish, they automatically assumed that I was faking, a practice as despicable
to them as it was familiar. But they did like to talk and joke, and so could
accept my enthusiasm for telling a tale that was, to me at least, genuinely
worthwhile. Further, whereas written literature employs many literary devices
that require a deceptive degree of listener sophistication before they can
be accepted as natural, an oral tale sets up no such stylistic barriers
to understanding and enjoyment. The oldest folktale can be told in language
the listeners easily grasp.
Second, the folktale itself has a kind of Darwinian magic to it. It has
survived over the centuries, and has the authority that goes with vigorous
old age. Its elements (in the case of "Dimwit," the hateful brothers,
the stubborn princess, the arbitrary king) speak to the real experiences
of adults and children alike with a directness modern writers of "relevant"
stories could only envy. All phony or extraneous allusions have long ago
been sifted out. The folktale has been refined into an almost ideal "non-literate"
literary form.
After that memorable car ride, requests for more stories weren't slow in
coming. I didn't always oblige, choosing my occasions carefully, but soon
I'd told all the folktales I knew two or three times. Gerry, a new student,
came to my rescue. He brought me a book that had sat ignored on the bookshelf
all year. "Look," he said, pointing to the spine. "It says
'Jack Tales.' Get it? 'Jack Tales!'" He opened the book excitedly and
tried to read a sentence: but the dialect proved too difficult. The pictures
were interesting, though, and he recognized some of the tales I had told.
"Tell us some of these other ones," he said. I explained that
I couldn't tell one that I didn't already know, but that I'd be glad to
read a few aloud. He didn't know any better: he agreed readily, and some
of the other kids came drifting over.
I read through the whole book (Jack Tales, by Richard Chase, Houghton Mifflin
1943) in several sessions. The kids were as pleased as I was, and demanded
more. I pulled out Grandfather Tales by the same author, and we read that
too, followed by some of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. From these it was a
simple step to CS Lewis' Narnia books, then to JRR Tolkien. One day we read
from The Hobbit for two and a half hours, all of us piled on the couch,
my arm around Sam, Jem turning the pages. I sensed we were home free.
"You can learn to read here."
The step from listening to reading and writing was neither automatic nor
easy, but it was POSSIBLE. The kids began to relax enough for my coworkers
and I to get an idea of what they could and couldn't do. Instruction in
the mechanics of word recognition and sentence comprehension took on new
purpose and life. The kids would read with me, one-on-one or in small groups;
and they started reading stories to one another. Sometimes we had three
separate story groups going at once.
Writing class took on new interest too. Even the slowest kids began to wake
up and write, word by painful word, fantastic stories of their own. Some
of the stories were read aloud to the whole class. Soon we had enough material
to begin putting out a school magazine, which was kept on the shelves with
he other books. Kids took to browsing through the shelves and finding books
they liked, elements from which cropped up in their own writing. Arnie undertook
a long serial, which his audience made sure he didn't abandon; every time
he completed a new installment, the class demanded that he read the whole
thing from the beginning. This became a common practice. Al, a kid who usually
tired after reading one paragraph aloud, ended up with a 14-part saga that
finally took him 20 minutes to read aloud, slowly, stumblingly, but to the
end. The kids applauded him.
Which leads me to another point; the kids were getting nicer. Where before
one student would draw strength from putting down another who was weaker
in some area, now kids began finding support and courage in others' progress.
Near the beginning of the following year, Sam would tell a frustrated, angry
newcomer: "That's right, you can learn to read here. Remember back
at the center, I couldn't do it at all? Look at what I'm reading now!"
AFTERWORD-- June, 1996
The events described in this article took place about 1975. I co-ran that
school for four years, after which (a) I'd had enough-- I was the only person,
child or adult, who was still there from when I'd begun-- and (b) in order
for the school to get state funding, the group home had to replace me with
somebody who had a degree in special education. So I became a full time
storyteller, which has suited me very well for almost twenty years.
About half the kids in the group home seem to have gone on to have reasonably
good lives; the rest are either in or in-and-out-of jail. I bump into them
from time to time-- they seem to remember me and the group home fondly,
for the most part.
I have taken this opportunity to very slightly rewrite the article-- only
slightly, because I could go on forever. By and large, I've left it alone.
There are many other ways to use storytelling in a school setting. As an
artist in residence, I've taught many classes of children to tell folktales
to each other and to younger children, for instance. Sometimes I find myself
working with groups not unlike the one described here-- once such a group
included "Clara's" son-- but that, as they say, is another story.
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