Crucial Thought

I’ve been thinking a lot about story telling. Since creating the Life Round Here project I’ve been wondering how the end results would turn out. As it turns out, as kids were going through the process of writing and then storyboarding, they ran into some serious roadblocks. Walking down Story Road turned out to be a more arduous journey than they expected…

I’ve been also wondering why they found this project to be so darn hard. You see, the kids were so looking forward to doing this project, in part based on the hype of competing against so many other schools, and in part because it is so technological. Some of them maintained that motivation throughout the duration of the project and others seemed to lose it. Once the novelty wore off and the story was still waiting inside the heart, kids found it difficult to coerce it out. Here are my reasons why I think this project was easier for some than others:

On a side note, please remember my students are young, typically 11 and 12 years old.

1. For some kids, it’s really tough to see what’s in their heart. Be it that they are young and perhaps they have not developed the schema to look inside the heart and articulate the emotions swirling around. Maybe it is because they are subject to such an onslaught of folks telling them how they feel that they do not understand how they actually feel or whether the feeling is genuine. For some, it may be that feeling and emotions are simply too painful and are simply avoided.

2. For some, it may be that circumstances are just so difficult that they are not willing to articulate them. I respect this. Quite simply, I have learned through talking kids through this project that there are some of them dealing with very adult issues and some of them are not handling it very well. Some are forced into maturity by the sheer gravity of the circumstance. This can make a project like mine even harder, because they ride the fine line of deciding whether to tell the whole story about what life is really like, or continue to hide it, sit down and remain quiet like we like so much.

3. Some kids are so wrapped up in a search for identity and are finding it in subculture. It’s interesting to watch kids from the beginning of the year to the end and how they can tend to change. The year they spend in our school (which is an amazing school, by the way) can be a defining one that has the tendency to catapault a kid on a certain course in terms of identity. The way they dress can radically change in a matter of weeks depending on the group of friends in close proximity. I would posit this not to be unique to our school, and is possibly a universal truth. I imagine the search for identity and the finding of identity in the context of subculture doesn’t stop when they leave us, either. This unawareness of self, however, can be detrimental to a personal project such as this because we can become clouded by the thoughts and emotions of others and unaware to analyze our own hearts through a clean lens. It is possible that we become unable to determine what is true and what is good because we are so impacted by those around us and what we allow to enter our ears and eyes. We identify ourselves in the context of something desirable, and if inauthentic,  we are unable to see our true selves. If the self is hidden, any story created out of the center of the being will be nothing more than off center.

4. The technology can be frustrating. Despite the novelty effect of using this type of equipment, the kids do tend to get frustrated. Since we’ve taught them so well that any time they get frustrated they are to raise a hand and holler out our names, they do so frequently. Needless to say, this got irritating. Some kids have a seeming inability or unwillingness to work through a problem or logically consider a solution. These kids are totally teacher-dependant. It is possible that we have created this monster, but I’m unwilling to categorically state that. This is partly why I tend to disagree with radical constructivist learning and can tend to lean much more towards guided discovery. Kids need hand-holding, and that’s a natural part of the learning process. Often, they just needed me to prod them to seek first a solution themselves applying basic logic, and at times they needed a guiding word or two. More often than not, with just a smidge of help, they conquered their own problems through the process, and that makes the learning sweeter. I suppose I could have just gone over and done it for them, but…

These are just a few of my thoughts having watched kids create over one hundred stories over the past few weeks.

The winners from my school will be announced towards the end of this week, and the announcement will happen here. Stay tuned!

1. Story Rd. picture from umjanedoan’s flickr stream.

2. Heart picture from geishaboy500′s flickr stream.