Tell me a story

Last week, I went to a TPRS conference in Cincinnati with my supervising teacher. TPRS stands for "Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling." My supervising teacher told me a little bit about it, but she wanted me to have some more exposure to it and I'm so glad she orchestrated it.

After picking me up at 4:50am, we took off toward Ohio. I wanted to curl up into the fetal position and go back to sleep, but I wasn't sure if my supervising teacher would have approved. The car ride was fun and we made good time. We walked into the Comfort Inn off of the interstate and I felt a little out of place, but nothing more than a student teacher would feel at a conference full of seasoned teachers. There were other French teachers there, which was as encouraging as it was intimidating.

I won't bore you with the details of the conference, although it was not at all boring. We'll settle for the fact that I was inspired to do a little storytelling myself when I returned to my classroom the next day.

I plopped onto the couch and went through paper after paper, trying to outline a story that would interest middle schoolers and include level-appropriate vocabulary. After killing a tree, I thought I had a winner. I was excited and a little full of myself as I went to school the next morning.

It was not as easy as I thought it would be. As fun as it was, it was exhausting and I felt like I was botching everything. Naturally, I am a beginner with this method, so of course I wouldn't do it perfectly. I did discover that, after a few practice runs, I love telling stories to my students. The students love hearing them and participating. They come into class now asking me if there could be another story. They are also soaking up the French. I speak more French in my French 1 classes than in the upper level classes, which is crazy.

One of the stories went like this: There was a boy named Ed. He had a friend. It was Stuart Little. They both wanted hamburgers, but there was a problem and Stuart Little had to go to the hospital...because he didn't have a mouth. Ed then goes on a search all over the world to find a mouth for his friend and purchase 400 hamburgers. He bought a mouth from Dr. Frankensteina and then went to Russia to buy some hamburgers. The cashier became angry with Ed, so she threw 400 hamburgers on him, so now he had to transport all of these across the world, back to Stuart Little in Madagascar. He gave Stuart Little the mouth and then Stuart Little ate all the hamburgers.

Through TPRS, I have discovered another side of how I want to teach. I love being a little more crazy in front of the students and making them laugh. Their interest in the class has grown exponentially since I started telling stories. I have found a way to tell stories AND make people laugh at the same time! Hallelujah! Telling silly and crazy stories has made me so much more comfortable in the classroom and I love that feeling. It might also be the fact that I just completed my 8th week of student teaching, but I think I'm going to chalk it up to storytelling. It sounds better... which is what it's all about. Give the students something to laugh at, something to remember, something they can be a part of. I feel myself growing and looking eagerly at the future, even though I have no idea what is really going on outside of my lesson plans.