Stories Spark
I feel saddened by the fact that kids growing up nowadays are missing out on all the wonderful stories that I grew up on. The fairytales, folktales, even some of the books we read are no longer shared with kids.
I’m a storyteller. So when I talk to children about certain fairytales and folktales, I get blank stares at times as if I’m talking in a foreign tongue. Even reading to children in some households has changed. I was explaining to an elementary class the other day that I used to read to my son up until he was in Middle School. That statement surprised the class. One student even said his parents stopped reading to him when he was about 2 years old because he was able to read to himself.
Stories are powerful tools. They help enhance your imagination and creativity. Research has even shown that they improve memory and learning. I can attest to that, things that kids tell me they remember from my tellings years after I shared that folktale or personal memory.
Nowadays children are given formulaic ways to write and think. I was in a class a few years
ago where a consultant from Teachers College was doing a demo writing lesson for teachers in the class I was working in. He started the lesson by saying, “Boys and Girls, today we are going to do some freewriting; here’s how I want you to write.”
Between television, graphic novels, and the like, words take a back seat to the creating of your own images. The pictures in your mind are the ones you see on the page in the book or on the screen, not the ones you create. What a shame.
We need to bring back the spoken word. Bring back some of the stories and experiences of our youth. Share our own stories so that our legacy gets passed on.
It’s been said, “Those that do not learn from history, are destined to repeat it.”If we don’t share our stories, then there is little hope for us to learn from them.
I totally agree with your observations about writing. I taught high school English and by the time kids made it to grade 11 or 12, they were saturated with all sorts of “patterns”for writing. Really, they had been taught to write for a grade or to a test. The most challenging thing for them to do was free write because they had never relied on their own thinking, formats, or whimsy. Writing is such a human act, but somehow, the powers that be want to make it an exercise in automation.