It’s one thing to tally all the elements needed for a well-told tale, but as 6th graders at Batavia Middle School learned recently, they’re much more tantalizing to encounter.
Dozens of the school’s pupils sat almost motionless, listening as professional storyteller Jim May recently retold an old Scottish heroic tale of a young girl forced to hang out all night with an evil corpse. As the tale unfolds, the girl’s bravery, compassion and guile save three young boys from the corpse’s deathly deed while in turn enriching her family with gold.
As part of its social studies curriculum, the school invited May to spend two days sharing his stories and conducting workshops with teachers and 6th graders on how to create their own heroic tales. Ten pupils were chosen to present their stories to an assembly of parents, peers and teachers on Tuesday evening.
“We teach various countries and all the countries have their own myths,” said 6th grade teacher Shirley Hardersen. “We want the children to be able to write a myth, because the values of a culture are carried through its myths.”
“He painted a picture,” said pupil Cody Renwick of May. “He didn’t just sit down and say it, he made it more suspenseful by painting a picture–he told instead of showed.”
Through May’s tale, the pupils could visualize those major things–an unsuspecting hero, a crisis, a bad guy, a journey, the solution and a story–ending moral. And while all of those are important parts to a good heroic tale, May told the pupils, the most vital is a test of character.
“How does the hero respond under a test? With nobility, with love, bravery? If nothing is happening to the hero, then it doesn’t build personal character. Stories need to show us that the heroes have these qualities because that’s what makes people a hero–that it is something other than just shooting some bad guy,” May said.