So as some of you may now, I am really into story-telling. By which I don’t just mean that I like to tell stories. My junior year, I led a seminar on folklore and story-telling; I wrote about it for my English thesis. (My psychology thesis wasn’t about it at all. I think narrative identity theories are interesting, but they’re not where my research interests lie — yea?)

So the other day my friend Rebecca mentioned that she’d been doing story-telling things with her students (here in Madrid), and she talked about it a bit more in an email to me. Now, her students are a lot more advanced than mine, and she’s doubtless a better teacher than I am, but I nonetheless decided that bringing stories into classes was probably something I could do.

Last week, I did basic (fake) mad libs with them. It was actually hard — not because they couldn’t understand the story, but because they didn’t get the task. I think I’ll give it another try in a bit, and see how it goes. (By “didn’t get it,” I mean that they picked easy words, instead of fun/funny words — mad libs don’t work with “table,” “walk,” and “tall” nearly so well as they work with “space ship,” “punch,” and “flabbergasted.” Obviously the vocabulary of these kids is a limiting factor, but still.)

This week, however, I had some of my kids write stories. I did a super-basic brainstorming activity — they picked ten or so “interesting” words and then had to write a story using three of them. In one class, for example, this was their word-list: lightning, alien, wolf, bear, beer, bus, bowling alley, skating, orange, jupiter, glove. Now, this was fifth-graders, mostly. And these kids don’t have a very high level of English. I can’t really place any of these kids at a level — sometimes they seem to understand perfectly, and sometimes not at all — but I think they’re probably around where I was in fifth grade, with Spanish. Which is to say: pretty bad. A lot of their problems stemmed not even from language, though, but from just being lazy — most of the stories they wrote didn’t make any sense because they just tried to cram the words together instead of telling a story.

Here’s one of the best stories, by a kid named Guillermo. I’ve corrected his grammatical and spelling mistakes.

The Magic Bowling Alley.

I am in the bowling alley and I see a magic bowling pin. I am amazed. This is a magic pin! I run to there. Oh no! It is very fast. And soon it disappears. I try to follow it. But I lose track of it. One day, I will catch the magic pin.

Even here, the story is ridiculous and nonsensical. But it’s creative and kind of fun. Here’s one of the ones that makes almost no sense:

The alien is orange. It comes to the city, rides the bus, sees a bear, and drinks a beer in its space ship. It arrives at Jupiter.

Even that is better than this (again, as before, I’ve corrected mistakes where I can):

Suddenly I. Between lightning. Suddenly aliens and I ride a bus. Suddenly orange aliens appear, and burst (?) to everyone and travel to Jupiter.

(I think this kid wasn’t listening when I explained what “suddenly” meant.)

I also did this exercise with some of my older students, who are between 14 and 17, I’d say. They had less fun with it, maybe, but they seemed to enjoy it somewhat nonetheless, and some of them wrote stories that, while still short, were kind of fun. (Their word list also began with lightning — that was my word — and was almost entirely made up of words I gave them, because they don’t like to talk.) Here’s one I thought was funny (by Victor):

One day, wild lightning attacked a house. Inside there was a young man, smoking and drinking vodka. He wasn’t paying attention and he burned himself. He tried to escape the lightning to ask for help, but no one saw him, so he died. The end.

I’m interested by how writing tasks some of these students a lot more than others — for some of them, they write a few words in English and it takes forever. For others, they can write a lot — not necessarily well — and just keep on doing so. None of them really had a good story, or even the start to one. Maybe we’ll work on this.

Anyway, I had fun with these. I think I’ll do it again. I have lots of writing exercises sitting somewhere in my head.