First of all, my story can be found here
I’ll be honest, this wasn’t the greatest story ever told. I could definitely think of more inspiring, educational and meaningful stories than the one that I chose. I decided on this one because it is the kind of ‘normal story’ that I tell in my classes on a daily basis. A normal story to me is far more representative of the kind of story that I am likely to tell, and such stories are an integral part of my teaching.
To me, this story is worth telling and pedagogically justified for several reasons: there is a moral to it, it is a ‘personalizing’ story, it is a good anchor point for teaching concepts and (to me at least) it’s funny. The moral of the story was to think about what you are doing, which is an important moral for grade 11 students to hear (especially before allowing them to use potentially dangerous chemicals). I have seen some of the most incredibly unsafe things done in the lab because some students simply don’t think before doing. This story simply illustrates that were are all guilty of doing this from time to time, and that it takes some effort to make sure you think things through ahead of time. The story has a personal touch, which to me has educational merit. Students like to see that you are a fallible human being… it makes them feel more normal. It also shows that I do more than teach and mark and think of ways of torturing them. Many of my students won’t remember what stoichiometry is, but many will remember the exploding pumpkin story. I do use this story to help teach concepts. For example, I use it as an example of an exothermic reaction and a combustion reaction. Finally, it’s a funny story and one that I remember fondly. Funny stories can help break up a lesson and let students breathe a bit (me too!).
Bitstrips was a good tool to use to tell this story. I do a unit on comics with my French 9 students and I was looking for some time for a way to make the unit more fun… I believe that I have found that way. It’s a free program and despite being fairly simple, it allows the user to do a whole bunch of stuff. I kept finding new ways of doing things as I went along. The functionality of the program allowed me to recreate this story in a different medium without losing too much of the detail of it. To me, a good story is a story that is told well. Some people have a real gift for storytelling, a gift that I am envious of. With this story, the way that it is told makes it funny. Any program that I wanted to use for this assignment had to allow me to be able to tell the story well. Using a text-based medium, I couldn’t use the intonation of my voice to help the story along. What I gained was the ability to use facial expressions, which would be difficult to incorporate into the story when told verbally. A difficulty with comics is that I really had to pare down the dialogue because only a little bit could fit in each vignette.
The strengths of a story are that they can teach without teaching. Kids learn from stories starting very early in their lives, and spend their time regaling their friends with their own stories. Stories can provide context and relevance to a subject, and students really need this to understand why they are learning what you are teaching them. Stories can be limiting in that they are typically more time-consuming that simply getting to the point. In a curriculum-heavy course, stories can be seen as a waste of time.
I had fun with this assignment but, like many assignments, I really found that this one isn’t complete. There are innumerable ways to continually tweak and tinker with an assignment like this one.