The getting-to-know-you period at the beginning of each school year can be difficult to navigate. Figuring out how to do so without resorting to "ice breakers" can be tricky. I have found success with one method, a method I want to share today.
My AP students read Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor for summer reading. His voice is candid and clever and they honestly (usually) love it. What I love most about it is the "Interlude" entitled One Story in which Foster explains:
“Those
stories – myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature –
are always with us. Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to
them whenever we want. One of our great storytellers, country singer Willie
Nelson, was sitting around one day just noodling on the guitar, improvising
melodies he’d never written down, never heard in quite those forms. His
companion, a nonmusician whose name I forget, asked him how he could come up
with all those tunes. “They’re all around us,” old Willie said. “You just reach
up and pick them out of the air.” Stories are like that, too. That one story
that has been going on forever is all around us. We – as readers or writers,
tellers or listeners – understand each other, we share knowledge of the
structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we
have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air
and pluck a piece of it.”
So I ask my students to consider what they add to the One Story. . .though it may not be original, I want them to pluck out what makes them, well, them. They create a digital introduction to themselves & accompanying explanation. And the following is what I did to model:
My
grandfather died this summer. It wasn’t sudden. But that didn’t make the dying
any easier. As I wrote his eulogy, considered what truths to glean from 95
years of a man with whom I shared so few moments comparatively, I entered a
complex, recursive, regenerative process through which I realized that
implicitly he taught me an important lesson—we don’t own the spaces we fill.
Here’s a
quick explanation from a piece I wrote this summer:
Empty
spaces are not bought or sold but rented.
The American dream of ownership of land is charming with its false promise of
holding onto something tangible that’s truly ours. But it isn’t the spaces that
we own, it’s not the land or the house or the car or the antique pie safe—we’re
just leasing them. What we do with them, how we remember those spaces; that is
whatwe own.
I have learned to reconcile this proprietary
myth by placing value to what I rent with the currency of living in the moment
& in the reconstructing of memory.It’s an exchange worth more than merely
the commodifying of experiences—it frames who we are, how we understand
ourselves & the world, how we treat others; it carries a sense of fixed
value and variability, permanence and transience, wholeness and insufficiency.
What I bring
to the one story is that I rent—or at least try—every moment so I can own them
through memory.
I taste
pockets of grapefruits, feel each yogic breath. I giggle at vanity license plates.
I notice fabrics and lines. I record what I remember and what I create on
napkins and scratch paper and unfinished journals. I drive cars with a manual
transmission so I can be a part of shifting the gears, a part of the driving. I
sing. Loudly. I take moments to walk and not drive. I enjoy the parts of my
community that make it unique. I listen to music and talk radio. I give of
myself to my friends and family and my jobs, give almost too much. I smile. I appreciate
others’ quirks. I float in salt water for hours and make seaweed crowns and
collect mermaid’s toenails. I dream. I work. I love.
Through it
all, through all the moments, I am undoubtedly me. Whether you see me running on the streets or at snoozing at the
beach or snuggled up with a book in the park or teaching in the classroom, you’ll
see me embracing those spaces & moments I borrow. It is what I add to the
one story.
And it is
this passion for living that I bring to the classroom especially because beyond
the grammar and the essays and the literature, I hope to help others own their own moments, a montage of memories to
carry beyond the spaces we rent together.
Afterwords, I ask them to consider which characters & authors & stories are in them as they consider their own identity. Me? Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice in Wonderland, Billy Pilgrim, Siddhartha, Alice Walker, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Adah Price, Little Women, Piggy, Margaret Atwood, the BFG, Pablo Neruda, Montag and so many more. It's incredible to see how connected we are within the One Story, and they love it.
So, I guess the purpose of this blog entry, then is to 1) challenge anyone reading it to explore how you connect to the One Story--it is comforting and 2) be open with your students about who you are, the quirks the wonders the villains, the Bunburying, & your One Story connections because the importance of truly being earnest goes understated in our profession.
