Earlier this month, my 11th grade students hosted a storytelling showcase in conjunction with Story District, a local non-profit that "turns good stories into great performances." As we molded our personal stories into shape and rehearsed them in front of each other for the umpteenth time, my students started noticing something disturbing.
Many of the stories my students chose to tell about themselves were about misbehavior...and the subsequent consequences which invariably involved physical punishment. So many of the stories involved physical punishment, in fact, students started to become self-conscious about the issue. A few of them changed their stories before the showcase, others changed their focus away from violence when they spotted the trend. The showcase was great and our stories really did become great performances. But the idea of the prevalence of corporal punishment in many of my students' lives was out in the open, a topic ready to be discussed.
[For more of this story go to http://blogs.edweek.org/teache...s_month_my_11th.html]
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