A New Sort of Storytelling

It actually had not occurred to me at the time to until now, but students can make great storytellers.

The seed was planted at the MACUL Conference, at the "Fill My Senses" seminar. We played a really interesting game during which we were to tell a collaborative story based on the images we were shown. Some of them were of cars on freeways, people overlooking bluffs, beautiful sunsets, butterflies, etc. In our group, we invented a story that was not only cohesive, but interesting. It started with Jack Kerouac and ended with our "selling our souls" for a ride back from some exotic destination. The activity was fun, but I thought no more about it until recently.

A little background: I am weird. Sometimes I refer to my brain as the Ben Goldberg wacky association matrix. Words, in addition to their semantic content, get lost in a sort of web of personally connotative associations my mind produces. Some associations, like that of school bus to grilled cheese sandwiches (white bread and Kraft American Cheese Singles) and the word "words" to Lima beans have been in my head since I was a child. Some came later.

Okay, so one day my mentor teacher and I were very bored and decided against my better judgment to try to explain the workings of the association matrix to her. I've done this only a handful of times before to people that I didn't consider very close to me--the invariable result is bewilderment or mild fear. To my surprise, my mentor teacher got it. Not only did she get it, she had one of her own (the only other person I've met with associations as tangential and bizarre as my own)! As we rattled off the word associations, we noticed that many of them had a culinary theme. So we started to play a game (this was one of those days during which all but 2 or 3 students tend to not show up).

The game was simple: one person imagines a meal, and the next creates the story of that meal. At first, just my mentor and I played, but soon we included the one of the students present that didn't think we were absolutely insane. As it turned out, she had some great storytelling abilities. By the end, we had all told stories we didn't know we could invent. I thought then of the MACUL conference. I have a new activity for my repertoire.