Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Learning

After a family hike on a daytrip, write and then read each other’s stories about the trip
February 8, 2006

On a visit to the Sibley Nature Center, fifth grade students were asked to write a narrative of their hike along the trail to pond. Storytelling is a necessary human skill. We need to know how to tell of an event in a logical manner. Sometimes it is a matter for the law, when we witness an accident or crime. Other times we need the skill to tell of our day to our spouse, or to better explain ourselves. Storytelling helps people become better teachers, better public speakers, and to fit into a conversation with ease. It was a very eye-opening experience for me – I was very surprised by many of the papers that I received – for now I believe we need to spend more time teaching the skill!

Several of the children noticed a beer bottle near a dead cotton rat whose head had been eaten. Both rat and bottle were given equal attention and received an equal amount of "Oh, gross!” in their writings. Another child noticed a soft drink can and imagined it flying away like a bird leaving the electric lines. Did all the objects this child saw have the potential for animation? What an incredible worldview -- that anything and everything might just go away, disappear, or fly off. This child's essay about his visit to Sibley had a unique structure. He repeated the line, "We went to the nature center" between every other sentence. Why did he have to remind himself constantly of the focus of the writing assignment?

After the dead rat, another girl noticed a dead bittern, a large marsh bird. Instantly, she imagined the predator that killed it. "We thought a snake would come and get it." To see two dead animals in a hundred feet stirred fear within her. She worried that something would attack us on the hike. (A scuzzball punk had shot the bittern with a BB gun, while a stray cat had killed the rat.)

A few more feet down the trail, a cottontail rabbit took a few hops and then settled down. At first, all the fourth graders had wanted to catch it. "The rabbit was so cute and soft and gray," wrote the girl who had worried about being attacked. She had written that the little fish in the pond were nasty, and that the rat's guts were "Yuck", but she ended her essay with "We had lots of fun." Seeing all of the natural world's processes had stimulated her in a positive way. Or was it just the stimulation itself that she remembered positively?

Another child had heard the girl say a snake would eat the dead bird, and he wrote that the class saw a snake come and eat it. Competition among children to invent reality can be fascinating. So often the one-upmanship quickly becomes logically ludicrous, but of all the children adamantly insist upon the validity of their words. In one child's story the half-eaten rat became a half-eaten bobcat. The snake story grew -- that it was huge, and one girl wrote that the class saw a rattlesnake going into its hole. This was the second to last sentence in her essay. The last -- "Then we saw poop." (Coyote, fox, skunk, and rabbit droppings had been pointed out on the hike.)

One child used the first person singular case for her essay. Most used third person plural. In our supposedly individualistic society this was quite surprising. The child that wrote in first person said that she and her teacher experienced the walk together. Her descriptions of the dead cotton rat were the most vivid: "Its insides were green and a piece of the heart was sticking out." She reported that both she and her teacher almost barfed upon smelling the gasses of natural decay at the pond. Her memory of the lecture part of the visit was somewhat skewed. "Mr. Williams talked about dinosaurs." I had talked about the buffalo prairie of only a hundred and fifty years ago.

Only one child was able to construct a narrative for his essay, instead of a collection of disjointed impressions of the visit. He wrote as if he was talking to me, not the teacher or another audience. Part of this child's narrative was cinematic in style. "We watched the hawk coming into land in a dead tree, which caused us to see a bat house, but the bat house was empty." Video storytelling relies on visual cues to focus the observer's attention, revealing a mood, an idea, or an understanding that carries the story along.

Oral storytelling is the way that humans have organized our world for most of our shared history. The best storytellers are often the best organizers. Modern children only hear and see recorded video narratives – pre-packaged stories which are very different from their own. Video stories are designed to be heard once, while in the oral tradition a story was retold dozens of times. The listener participated in its development, too.

A number of the children wrote non-stop "sentences" that were stream-of-consciousness lists of objects they saw. Most of the children attempted to report on all of the happenings of the visit to the center. Only one child focused on a single object. He wrote about a turtle shell, contemplating the cause for its demise. "Its shell was all scratched up. Maybe a bird ate that turtle. An animal ate that turtle." He made no other mention of anything that occurred.

Several children repeated themselves in their essays without even changing the words a little. One started making his letters bigger and bigger, to fill up the page, and yet another wrote about being told to write an essay about visiting the Sibley Nature Center. Two wrote about a child throwing trash on the ground and getting in trouble. Many of the children saw the assignment as something to have finished as soon as possible.

Instead of idly commenting on the "cuteness" of a child's words, I believe we should spend some time trying to perceive the world through their eyes. We should help them learn how to tell us about what they see and do. I believe it would be a fun exercise for a family to go on a daytrip to any trail that offers a chance to walk among trees and bushes and see animals and birds and flowers. Afterwards everybody could write about what they saw, and then everybody in the family could read their story to each other. Come to the Sibley Nature Center trail, or go on a walk at the Comanche Trails Park in Odessa (just west of the junction of I-20 and the Crane Highway). Or the family could go to Big Spring and walk along either the trail in the State Park on Scenic Mountain, or the long paved trail near the old “Big Spring” in the City Park.