STORIES AND HOW TO USE THEM
BY RICHARD THOMAS WYCHE
PRESIDENT, NATIONAL STORY TELLERS’ LEAGUE

ARTICLE NUMBER ONE

Once upon a time the writer undertook to teach a little school in a far-off seacoast town in the South. The little village was on a sandy bluff overlooking the sound and the sea. Cut off from the main land by an impossible swamp in the rear, yet shut out from the great Atlantic by an ever-shifting sand bar that lay for leagues along the sea coast, it gave the little town an ideal harbor of shallow water, the home of fishermen and oystermen whose cottages were scattered for miles along the sea coast.

Being isolated the inhabitants were compelled to rely upon themselves and in doing this had developed a solidarity of community life and a manhood and womanhood of purity and simplicity that was as refreshing as the breezes that ever swept its shores.

Amid such surroundings I began to teach, and it was my first experience. Not having libraries or lectures to help me, I too must depend on self.

I had never studied pedagogy and knew nothing of teaching except that which I had seen in the university lecture rooms. The teacher who preceded me “heard” lessons and the children “said” lessons. That seemed an easy proposition, for the questions were in the book and the children could memorize and say the answers.

But I soon discovered that the children found no interest in the fact that one word was a verb and another a noun. They memorized the rules and repeated the lessons, but they were not at all interested in the subject. They were bored by this mechanical process, and so was the teacher. Something must be done. One day I told the class the story of “Hiawatha’s Fishing.” Every child listened with rapt attention. I had found something that they were interested in. I requested the children to write the story out for their lessons the next day. The majority of them did so, and read the story as they had understood and written it down. One little fellow said, “I ain’t got no pencil,”—which meant that he didn’t write it. “Tell it then,” I said. He told it in such a vivid and realistic way that the class applauded. I had found something that the child liked. The second day I told the story of “Hiawatha’s Fasting,” then “Hiawatha’s Friends,” and so on, two stories a week, until we had told the whole story of Hiawatha.

But you ask “What did that have to do with grammar?” From the story we got the nouns and verbs we studied and the sentences that the advanced classes analyzed and studied. (The whole school heard the story, it being an ungraded school with classes ranging from primary to high school.)

What else did we do with the story? Let us see. When the children told the story orally or on paper it was creative work, and better for expression than memorizing “Mary had a little lamb.” The child received a mental picture. He heard the story, and retelling it in his own words he created afresh the picture, thereby becoming a creator and an artist himself. In reciting “Mary had a little lamb” he was dealing with words. In telling the story he was dealing with mental images.

One day I saw the children playing out on the campus, and on making inquiries they said, “We are playing Hiawatha and Mondamin and Old Nokomis.” They were dramatizing the story. It was taking effect. Had I been a trained teacher I would have let them do it in class as a part of their work. Twice a week we got the words for our spelling lesson from the story. The children were so much interested in Hiawatha that they wanted to make pictures of Hiawatha. Then I let them illustrate the story, writing in their composition books the story, and illustrating it. As we studied geography, the upper Mississippi Valley and the Lake Regions all took on new meaning because Hiawatha had once lived, toiled, and suffered there.