StoriesLive® at Lynn Classical High School

By Owen Grey

The auditorium buzzed as the students turned to one another to share their sensory memories and then to share their stories. I walked around the auditorium a little during this exercise. The students were almost all talking about their memories and they were almost all telling their stories.

I noticed one girl sitting quietly. I went over to her. “What's your story?”

“Oh, I don't have one,” she said.

“You must. C'mon.”

She insisted that she didn't. I went through some of the StoriesLive® prompts and she still insisted that she didn't have a story.

“Oh, she's just a junior,” the boy sitting next to her said.

“You don't have to be a senior to have a story,” I said. “Fine. Help her get started. What's your story?”

He told his story. “So, how about you?” he asked me.

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Lynn Classical High School hosted StoriesLive®, a project of massmouth, from December 12th through December 16th with a school-wide Story Slam on Monday December 19th.

The program began with the StoriesLive® Assembly. English Department Head, Mr. Burke, introduced StoriesLive® and asked for the students attention. Storytellers Nicolette Heavey, Norah Dooley, Ben Cunningham, and Paula Junn took the stage to telling the story of StoriesLive® and telling their own stories.

Norah discussed the principles of storytelling and led the students through an exercise to explore their memories and dig up sensory details. This was the first exercise of a week of learning about storytelling and the oral tradition.

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What makes a good story? What makes a good performance? How does spoken word differ from the written word?

The challenge was to teach 11 sections of senior English classes how to answer these questions. StoriesLive® brought some interesting exercises to help students learn about oral tradition and spoken word performance.

In one class, Andrea Lovett taught storytelling by giving examples of her own stories from her life as examples as she talked about the StoriesLive® prompts. She had the students dig in their memories for sensory details again, as they had in the assembly but pushed them to go deeper.

In another class Norah Dooley had the students get up and walk in a big circle around the outside of the desks. She had the students walk and embody each of the 6 universal emotions and then stop and make a face representing that emotion to a classmate across the room. She tied that into performance about how a gesture or a facial expression can replace what would be a paragraph or a page of exposition in writing.

Tony Toledo had Paula Junn and me join him in front of the class to tell one story in three parts. I took the beginning, Tony took the middle, and Paula took the end. At the end we had the students try to guess whose story it was. The class was about equally split between whether the story was mine or Tony's. He asked the students to split of into groups of three and then do the exercise themselves. The students took the activity seriously and it was fun watching them get up there and act out their parts.

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These kids have powerful stories. While not everyone had the courage to speak, everyone seemed to love hearing their friends and classmates tell their stories. Not all of the stories were life changing but I could see that telling their stories and listening to their classmates stories was transformative.

One particular story I will carry with me. I watched A—'s story evolve from the in-class Story Slam to the school-wide Story Slam. I learned from his story. Here's the story I heard on Friday.

One day during the summer of 2010, A— and some friends went up to 40 Steps, a part of Nahant beach. People climb a cliff at 40 Steps and jump down into the ocean. As A— and his friends approached they noticed one kid standing apart from the crowd. When they got there, A— saw it was his friend S—.

“What's going on, S—? Why haven't you jumped in?”

“I can't swim.”

A— jumped into the ocean a few times. Climbing back up to the top of the cliff, he saw that S— was still standing apart and still dry.

“Listen, S—, I got you. We'll jump in together. I won't let you go.”

S— didn't jump the first time but he did the second time. A— and S— surfaced. S— pushed A— off him. A— tried to grab S— again but then S— began doggy-paddling.

A— told his classmates how inspired he was by S—'s courage to jump and to try swimming alone.

When A— sat down, I noticed he seemed a little choked up. I had at first thought it was because he was remembering how brave S— had been.

As A— was walking out, his teacher flagged him down. “Good job, A—,” she started, “but you know the real story is what happened the week after.” She pushed him to tell that part of the story. A— left for his next class.

She turned to Tony and me to explain that the week after S— had jumped from 40 Steps, S—, A—, and some other friends went swimming in the reservoir. S— was not a strong enough swimmer to swim the course they set. S— did not know how to back float when his arms got too tired. S— went under. His friends were not able to get to him in time. S— drowned.

Tony and I both tried to tell his teacher that A—'s story of being inspired by S—'s jump was a story itself. A— was honoring S—'s memory by telling that part of the story. Not telling about his drowning did not diminish what A— had told.

“I saw how choked up he got sitting at his seat after telling,” Tony said. “A— might not be ready to tell that story yet. It's too raw. A— may not be ready to talk about the drowning for five or ten years.”

On Monday at the school-wide Slam, A— got up. Telling in front of the entire senior class of some 300 is much different than telling in front of a class of some 30 people. A— had to stop in the middle of the story. Anyone could tell he was about to be overcome by his emotions.

The auditorium thundered with applause and calls for him to continue. The whole senior class supported A—.

A— stumbled over his emotions but was able to finish his story. He began to cry. After another round of applause he continued, his voice cracking, “Listen everyone, if you know you can't do something, don't do it. Just don't do it.” He talked about how S— drowned and how much he missed him.

The other student storytellers who were on deck for that round opened their arms to him.

* * *

Watching the program, I alternated between two different lenses: that of a storyteller and that of a graduate student in English Language Arts education. There was some reticence on the part of the students on Tuesday and some on Wednesday but by Friday, the day of the in-class Story Slams, the students had largely opened up and were participating in the slams.

There was still some reticence at the end but for the most part the students had overcome their fears. The in-class slams that I saw were all very supportive. All the students cheered for one another.

I did find one thing particularly troubling: many of the students said, “I don't have a story.” From the girl in auditorium to students on the day of the in-class Story Slam, there were students that insisted that they had no stories in them.

This still puzzled me during the meeting I had with Norah Dooley and Tony Toledo on Monday afternoon. We talked about reaching all the students. I talked a little about differentiated instruction. I drifted in and out of the conversation, thinking of the students who said they had no stories. We talked about how to make the program more effective for future years. I mentioned a discussion of the five paragraph essay I had had with another teacher.

“We spend all this time in schools telling students to conform to certain norms and formats to pass tests and ‘succeed,’” Norah said. “We crush their voices and crush their voices and we never ask them them for genuine expression.”

Driving home after the school-wide Story Slam and that meaning, I realized what the students had meant. Of course they had stories. Of course things had happened to them. What they were actually expressing was that they did not have any confidence that their stories mattered. These students had had their voices crushed out of them.

One week of work with professional storytellers is not enough to help these students undo the years and years of being told their opinions and stories don't matter unless those opinions match the officially sanctioned opinions.

But that one week is a start.

* * *

Rabb Auditorium, Boston Public Library.

The StoriesLive® Scholarship Slam for the 2011-2012 Season will be March 31, 2012 at Rabb Auditorium, Boston Public Library.

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Owen Grey has been telling stories his whole life. He has found his home with massmouth and the Greater Boston storytelling community.