This story may actually support those that claim TV is bad for kids, but it nonetheless illustrates how good teachers worked with the often bizarre material that I brought into school when learning literacy.
In 2001, I was six, and my brother was ten. Being the older sibling (and being kind of a fart), my brother dominated our TV. He got to pick which shows we watched, and luckily, I liked most of them. I thought I was awesome because I got to watch the older kid shows, which included my favorite: Dragonball. My parents loathed this show because of its excessive amount of yelling and because my brother and I would run around the house screaming “KAMEHAMEHAAA” and essentially double fist punching each other. While it was a violent show, it wasn’t graphic, so my parents didn’t think much of it aside from it being annoying.
We wrote a lot of stories in first grade, and we could write about whatever we wanted. A lot of kids wrote about dogs and aliens and fish (Finding Nemo had just come out), along with whatever shows they were watching. My teacher, Mrs. Smith, was only concerned with the structure of the story and character building.
Come parent-teacher conferences, my mother was handed a short story that I wrote. No preface. No context. Just handed my paper. It was titled “The Master”. I don’t remember the specifics of the story (I hardly remember writing it), but I have heard the story of my mom reading it multiple times. Basically, “the Master” was this bizarre lizard ninja creature that had a legion of bad guys trying to take over the world. The Master was eventually stabbed to death by one of his companions. The End.
My mom is thinking at this point: Oh no. They are going to think something is happening at home. They are going to want her to see a therapist. That’s what this meeting is about.
Instead, Mrs. Smith smiles at my mom and exclaims, “She is so creative! And she really understands how to build a story with a beginning, middle, and end.”
My mom breathes a sigh of relief, and Mrs. Smith goes down in history as one of my mom’s favorite teachers that I had.
What Mrs. Smith could have done in this case was not approved of what material I brought into the classroom. This form of literacy, writing about violence and evil masterminds, could have been rejected, and I would have had to learn a different form. I did eventually learn the appropriate classroom literacy, a more academic one, since I don’t write about evil lizards being stabbed anymore. However, that may have been delayed had my teacher at that point decided to weed out my approach to literacy in the process of introducing the school’s, which took the form of her focusing on the structure and characters in this case.
