Chapter 9: Maps

The places where Ohler makes the tire-hit-the-road for me were in describing Egan’s and Adam’s work.  I found Egan’s list of questions in Figure 9.6: The Story Form Model useful for teachers in planning lessons, particularly, “Why should it [the topic] matter to children?”  and “What powerful binary opposites best catch the importance of the topic?”  The notion that one can begin a story by using binary opposites to set up the tension was interesting.  The example of the stream generation in science was a good one—looking at heat as a positive force or as a negative force.  In math one could harness that to get students to recognize that something must be going on to explain both forces.  

Adams sentence starters seemed useful too.  Often times I have asked students to write word problems for a math problem, like 

 3 x 4 + 6        or     3 x (4 + 6)       or    3 + 4 x 6. 

It would be interesting to try Adams sentence starters in conjunction with that idea.  “Once upon a time there were 3 friends…” You get the idea.  I would ask them to write for each of the expressions, so they could compare the different aspects of the story necessary to make each expression correct.  Adams Spine could assist in the story telling aspect.

Ohler makes the point again about the story coming first, but this time he identifies the effectiveness of the map as a tool in supporting the students to actually identify the “power” in their stories before they get too many hours into the digital technology aspects.

I also thought the idea of work to be done at home, might include watching a favorite TV show in order to make a map of a story.  The point of this activity is to learn about the map as a tool and to be able to identify the components of the story.  This makes sense to me as a step in storytelling, as it is what we at the math project call a “backwards question”.  When you are working on establishing an idea, if you only ever ask students to deal with it from one angle or forwards, they don’t get as robust a view of that idea.  They have a one dimensional understanding and cannot see when to apply it in slightly different situations.  Mark Driscoll, in his book Fostering Algebraic Thinking, suggests that going backwards with identifying terms in sequences is a necessary step before being able to generalize algebraically.  (That last sentence was more for me and Jeremy.)  Anyhow, seems like a good idea to both create story maps, (a question going forwards) and identify map from existing stories (backwards question.)

Commercials too! I love that commercial with the guy in the suit sitting at the kindergarten table with the small kids, just talking and listening.  It would be interesting to map those.  (Don’t you just wish you got paid to just to ask kids kooky stuff and then listen?)  Commercials might be a good medium to use in class.

Chapter 10: Other Kinds of Stories

His point: as usual, we westerners have a tendency not to include others.  I appreciated Ohler’s introduction.  I think this might be the first time I really felt like I could hear his voice coming through as he spoke about not knowing what we don’t know, but that him making a poor attempt at describing stories told by indigenous stories was better than no attempt at all.  I also liked  considering that we are all untied in our not knowing—at least those of us who don’t know about such storytelling.

But then after that he goes on a long time about how we can’t really know anything and cannot really attribute what we think we know to any particular folks.

That all said, the only idea I took from his analysis of types of stories and authors that worked out of the literary box of their times, was that this works like other ways we should be connecting with our students.  If you are teaching storytelling, you should look for storytellers of all genres as authentic resources; get them to come work with the students.  Make sure to properly respect their work and culture, and teach your students that too.