Joshua, as a teacher (of entrepreneurship & innovation) and storytelling I just LOVED this article. It reminded me in many ways the storytellers (often on religious and spiritual themes) that I grew up listening to India - incorporated explicit narration, interspersed with song, then the occasional audience call & reply loaded with much imagery and context—a true multimedia experience. The story of the Tennessee Stud and the sub-3min performance by Johnny Cash moved me enough to jot a small post on LinkedIn with a shout out to The Recovering Academic! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksrikrishna_johnny-cash-tennessee-stud-activity-7026896705723727874-6DGz
Thanks so much! Do you go by K or a different name? I really appreciate your LinkedIn post and your mention here of storytelling in India. Folk ballads derive from the bardic tradition in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, so you might say that the three songs mentioned here represent a trans-Atlantic oral tradition. This is a separate subject, and one that I don't have a lot of primary expertise in, but the model of education in America and Europe, and I suppose many places influenced by colonialism, really runs counter to the models that evolved within oral communities. Neuroscience, I think, is circling back to some of these ancient views by affirming that cognition is a full-body experience -- that the brain is the fullest expression of the body. So I think this is another rationale for incorporating elements of surprise into our teaching, especially if we are adding some immersive or experiential component to it. It was one thing to talk about sustainability in a classroom. It was quite another to explain to students how local food eliminates fossil fuel dependency when we were standing in a garden with cherry tomatoes close at hand for tasting.
I can't tell from my stats how popular this post was with readers, because there was a glitch (I'll explain in tomorrow's thread). But there is another assignment that I developed with some friends that incorporated music and writing, and that even gave students the chance to write and perform an original song for the class.
Joshua, I only have one name that's Sri(krishna) (like Madonna and Sting I like to tell my students). So most folks address me as Sri! Of course when I got a passport to come to this country tacked on my father's (one) name in front - but not wanting to be called Kuppuswamy (my dad's name) I just use the initial! A writing workshop I attended in Petaluma CA a lifetime ago featured an Irish storyteller who just with his acoustic guitar and caramel-like voice held us all spell bound (and the old country accent didn't hurt either!)
My own first memory of story/ballad is my great grandmother feeding a bunch of us kids dinner while we sat in a semi-circle around her - with hands out. Between each sentence she'd put a dollop of rice/curd in our hands and continue her story - song & narration with a good deal of tears thrown in the more poignant moments! Wrote about it here. https://designofbusiness.com/2008/01/25/storytelling-and-culture-in-companies/
I'd love to learn about the music & writing assignment as my wife teaches music appreciation and related interdisciplinary topics (How Music Shapes Cities; Bhakti & Music - Oral Traditions & Radical Change).
Sri, what a great article about storytelling! Thanks for sharing. If you have not seen the Mad Men scene "The Carousel," you might find that useful for your teaching. Don Draper uses not only storytelling, but also a powerful metaphor in that example -- at least more powerful than the metaphor the Kodak guys came up with. Metaphor is a separate topic, but there are many bad metaphors in business. Finding metaphors that evoke nostalgia, as Draper says, rather than merely crass association, can be a real difference maker. I'll share the link below.
Hi Joshua, thank you for mentioning my article. I found this very moving, and every song lyric brought a lump to my throat. I'd have loved to have been in your classroom listening to the discussions.
You've inspired me to repost a somewhat similar article about a musician called David Ackles. Obviously, I have cited this article in the uodate. Here it is, I hope you like it:
Thanks! Enjoyed reading your post, too. Maybe only a fellow teacher can truly appreciate posts like the ones we've shared about teaching experiments. I'm aware that much of the reality of teaching is non-narratable, or at least cannot be duplicated in dramatic form. Which is why when you see classroom scenes in a movie, it's just a few moments before or after the bell. I suppose being a teacher means sharing a great deal with David Ackles. Not that I'm professing any brilliance, but it seems that Ackles' talent was more meaningful in smaller contexts. Since teaching depends so much on relationship building, and since so much of that requires context-dependent insider knowledge, it is perhaps impossible to capture for a public audience.
Yes, I think you're right. I can't imagine Ackles filling a huge arena somehow, although I suppose Leonard Cohen did. I've noticed the 'just before the bell' thing too. What's always struck me is how rude the students are: they just get up and leave. My students didn't leave until I told them they could!
It is fascinating how teachers are both celebrated and scorned in American life. I remember thinking about this in graduate school one morning as NPR played a clip of "Surfin' USA," the hit Beach Boys song. That of course includes the line "Tell the teacher we're surfin', surfin' USA." As if the teacher has no inkling of serving himself.
This is not original to me, but I'm learning as part of my research for my current longform essay on academic librarians, that much of the cultural prejudice against librarians and against teachers is simple misogyny. The preponderance of women in both professions, as they were burgeoning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when highly educated women did not have equal access to higher-paying professions like medicine, law, and business, led to a feminizing of the profession and a conflation of sexist expectations: the librarian as "hostess", the teacher as mother, both different variations on the Angel of the Hearth. Men are not always seen in that way, but when sweeping generalizations about the profession are made, I think men are also implicated in those schoolmarm tropes.
Interesting! I've just published an article about teachers being treated with respect: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/teachers-setting-a-good-example In the UK people -- quite often the same person -- will say to a teacher, "I don't know how you do it, managing 30+ kids and trying to get them to learn stuff", and also, "It must be great having all those holidays". Yesterday teachers in England went on strike. As far as I could tell, most people were concerned about their child-minding arrangements; plus the usual narrative about kids' life chances being ruined -- because of missing, in effect, one lesson in each subject!
I'm sure your comment about mysogeny is correct, because that's at the root of a lot of things. I don't know what it's like in the USA, but here primary (elementary) schools have mainly female teachers, while secondary schools have mainly male teachers. School librarians seem to be exclusively female, though I daresay there are a few exceptions.
Joshua, as a teacher (of entrepreneurship & innovation) and storytelling I just LOVED this article. It reminded me in many ways the storytellers (often on religious and spiritual themes) that I grew up listening to India - incorporated explicit narration, interspersed with song, then the occasional audience call & reply loaded with much imagery and context—a true multimedia experience. The story of the Tennessee Stud and the sub-3min performance by Johnny Cash moved me enough to jot a small post on LinkedIn with a shout out to The Recovering Academic! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksrikrishna_johnny-cash-tennessee-stud-activity-7026896705723727874-6DGz
Thank you - keep on teaching brother!
Thanks so much! Do you go by K or a different name? I really appreciate your LinkedIn post and your mention here of storytelling in India. Folk ballads derive from the bardic tradition in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, so you might say that the three songs mentioned here represent a trans-Atlantic oral tradition. This is a separate subject, and one that I don't have a lot of primary expertise in, but the model of education in America and Europe, and I suppose many places influenced by colonialism, really runs counter to the models that evolved within oral communities. Neuroscience, I think, is circling back to some of these ancient views by affirming that cognition is a full-body experience -- that the brain is the fullest expression of the body. So I think this is another rationale for incorporating elements of surprise into our teaching, especially if we are adding some immersive or experiential component to it. It was one thing to talk about sustainability in a classroom. It was quite another to explain to students how local food eliminates fossil fuel dependency when we were standing in a garden with cherry tomatoes close at hand for tasting.
I can't tell from my stats how popular this post was with readers, because there was a glitch (I'll explain in tomorrow's thread). But there is another assignment that I developed with some friends that incorporated music and writing, and that even gave students the chance to write and perform an original song for the class.
Joshua, I only have one name that's Sri(krishna) (like Madonna and Sting I like to tell my students). So most folks address me as Sri! Of course when I got a passport to come to this country tacked on my father's (one) name in front - but not wanting to be called Kuppuswamy (my dad's name) I just use the initial! A writing workshop I attended in Petaluma CA a lifetime ago featured an Irish storyteller who just with his acoustic guitar and caramel-like voice held us all spell bound (and the old country accent didn't hurt either!)
My own first memory of story/ballad is my great grandmother feeding a bunch of us kids dinner while we sat in a semi-circle around her - with hands out. Between each sentence she'd put a dollop of rice/curd in our hands and continue her story - song & narration with a good deal of tears thrown in the more poignant moments! Wrote about it here. https://designofbusiness.com/2008/01/25/storytelling-and-culture-in-companies/
I'd love to learn about the music & writing assignment as my wife teaches music appreciation and related interdisciplinary topics (How Music Shapes Cities; Bhakti & Music - Oral Traditions & Radical Change).
Sri, what a great article about storytelling! Thanks for sharing. If you have not seen the Mad Men scene "The Carousel," you might find that useful for your teaching. Don Draper uses not only storytelling, but also a powerful metaphor in that example -- at least more powerful than the metaphor the Kodak guys came up with. Metaphor is a separate topic, but there are many bad metaphors in business. Finding metaphors that evoke nostalgia, as Draper says, rather than merely crass association, can be a real difference maker. I'll share the link below.
https://vimeo.com/20736616
Hi Joshua, thank you for mentioning my article. I found this very moving, and every song lyric brought a lump to my throat. I'd have loved to have been in your classroom listening to the discussions.
You've inspired me to repost a somewhat similar article about a musician called David Ackles. Obviously, I have cited this article in the uodate. Here it is, I hope you like it:
https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/updated-in-praise-of-david-ackles?sd=pf
Thanks! Enjoyed reading your post, too. Maybe only a fellow teacher can truly appreciate posts like the ones we've shared about teaching experiments. I'm aware that much of the reality of teaching is non-narratable, or at least cannot be duplicated in dramatic form. Which is why when you see classroom scenes in a movie, it's just a few moments before or after the bell. I suppose being a teacher means sharing a great deal with David Ackles. Not that I'm professing any brilliance, but it seems that Ackles' talent was more meaningful in smaller contexts. Since teaching depends so much on relationship building, and since so much of that requires context-dependent insider knowledge, it is perhaps impossible to capture for a public audience.
Yes, I think you're right. I can't imagine Ackles filling a huge arena somehow, although I suppose Leonard Cohen did. I've noticed the 'just before the bell' thing too. What's always struck me is how rude the students are: they just get up and leave. My students didn't leave until I told them they could!
It is fascinating how teachers are both celebrated and scorned in American life. I remember thinking about this in graduate school one morning as NPR played a clip of "Surfin' USA," the hit Beach Boys song. That of course includes the line "Tell the teacher we're surfin', surfin' USA." As if the teacher has no inkling of serving himself.
This is not original to me, but I'm learning as part of my research for my current longform essay on academic librarians, that much of the cultural prejudice against librarians and against teachers is simple misogyny. The preponderance of women in both professions, as they were burgeoning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when highly educated women did not have equal access to higher-paying professions like medicine, law, and business, led to a feminizing of the profession and a conflation of sexist expectations: the librarian as "hostess", the teacher as mother, both different variations on the Angel of the Hearth. Men are not always seen in that way, but when sweeping generalizations about the profession are made, I think men are also implicated in those schoolmarm tropes.
Interesting! I've just published an article about teachers being treated with respect: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/teachers-setting-a-good-example In the UK people -- quite often the same person -- will say to a teacher, "I don't know how you do it, managing 30+ kids and trying to get them to learn stuff", and also, "It must be great having all those holidays". Yesterday teachers in England went on strike. As far as I could tell, most people were concerned about their child-minding arrangements; plus the usual narrative about kids' life chances being ruined -- because of missing, in effect, one lesson in each subject!
I'm sure your comment about mysogeny is correct, because that's at the root of a lot of things. I don't know what it's like in the USA, but here primary (elementary) schools have mainly female teachers, while secondary schools have mainly male teachers. School librarians seem to be exclusively female, though I daresay there are a few exceptions.