Telling Stories in School

"Tell us a story."

That is a great interview question, and it's a great impromptu speech topic for high school students as well. Storytelling is the essence of what we do as English teachers, and the qualities of a good story, as well as the ability to deliver it, should be a primary focus of the classroom. For this reason, the personal narrative is one genre that I always incorporate into my classes, from middle school to AP Language to Senior Composition. And with the Common Core as well as our new Colorado Academic Standards emphasizing narrative as one of the three primary modes of writing instruction, it's important to teach the art form.

When I first began teaching AP Language and Composition, one of the first things I learned from a colleague, office mate, and good friend was the important role that personal narratives play in the rhetoric and composition classroom. Many AP Lang style analysis prompts over the years have been personal narratives. Some memorable ones: Meena Alexander on her Fractured Identity; Gary Soto on The Stolen Pie; Jamaica Kincaid On Seeing England; Nancy Mairs On Being a Cripple; and Richard Rodriguez Family Christmas.

I've always enjoyed teaching personal narratives, and on my colleague's advice, I begin with a class long analysis of Audre Lorde's Fourth of July. Lorde's work is so rich with rhetorical devices that it serves as the perfect example of how the personal narrative works. We also read a great piece by Michael Koenigs called Getting Off the Hammock, about his first summer job. It is a beautiful piece that he wrote at the age of seventeen, and it's a great example of how full of opportunities for writing our students' lives are. Ultimately, my students will write their own personal narrative, which is basically recounting a life event which progresses towards epiphany.

They can be insightful  and inspired or sarcastic and silly, but they should be meaningful. And year after year, they are.