Narratives

Today when I was in my school observing, I was able to see something that really got me thinking. We were working on narratives and my teacher decided to start the lesson by telling the class her own narrative. Her story was really emotional and powerful. I was actually really surprised that she shared the story of her rough childhood and alcoholic father, but I think I understand why she did. After the class was over, one of the students came up to my cooperating teacher and was crying. The story had really touched him because he said his parents are going through a divorce. My teacher asked him to come to her room during his lunch period to talk. Seeing this 16 year old boy cry in the classroom made me get teary myself.

This incident made me realize that I can prepare great lessons and use many awesome strategies, but I can't always anticipate what will happen with my students and how they will react. This incident really brought me back to my health and learning: strategies for teachers course that I took last year at Kent State. My instructor taught us about the different issues that students will have going on in their lives and how those personal issues can affect their performance in the classroom.

In chapter 11, Atwell discusses teaching narratives. She discusses how her students seemed to phase out narrative writing from their repertoires (372). She comments on how her students had trouble thinking about an experience to write that had meaning or why it was worth writing at all. Atwell shares a genre that she and her students found more fun and interesting: memoirs. She says, "Memoir is how writers look for the past and make sense of it" (372). I personally don't see much of a difference between a personal narrative and a memoir. Atwell says that memoirs allow writers to discover and tell their own truths (372).