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| Illustration by Arthur Rackham |
All the rainbows were finished, with rows of crunched-up tissue paper glued in arcs on the paper plates we’d handed out. Our small team of volunteers had at least ten more minutes to spend with this class of third graders, and it seemed a shame to waste them. But with all but one of us unable to converse with the students and their teacher, it seemed we were out of options.
Of course that’s when having a story in your proverbial back pocket (and a bilingual companion), comes in handy.
“We can tell a story,” I said to Francis. “I’ll tell “Tortoise Flies” in English, and you tell it in Spanish.” I’d known Francis only since we’d met on our way to the airport three days earlier, but I’d immediately been taken with her energy and her background. Although she lives in Philly, not so far from me, her mother is from Puerto Rico and her Dad is a professional musician from Cuba. Spanish is her mother and father language, and English the language of her day-to-day life in the world.
“Tell a story! I can’t do that. I’ve never done that,” was her immediate reaction, but it didn’t take long to convince her to give it a try. As new friends and roommates on this service trip to Costa Rica, it seemed to me we were well equipped for the effort. After all, I’d told that version of the Aesop’s fable many times, and Francis, although she had no teaching experience, seemed to be enjoying our work with the children.
So we began: “One morning Tortoise woke up early. It was a beautiful sunny day, a good day for a walk.”
“Un dia, la Tortuga . . . .”
Tortoise was on her way to her beg a flying lesson from Eagle, and we were on our way as a telling team. By the time Tortoise was riding on Eagle’s back, Francis was flapping her arms and winging through the rows of seats. I can be a fairly animated teller, but Francis had me beat. She had become a storyteller, a lively one, in a magical blink of an eye. I’d never seen and heard the story told with as much verve.
At least that was true until last week when I was working in the Spanish-only room during a poetry residency with second graders. Two of the groups are in a dual-language program. The way it works in this school, kids in the program alternate day-by-day: one day in the English-only room with that teacher and then in the Spanish only, and so forth. Usually the benefactor (and once in a while the victim), of my tendency to say “Yes” to any teaching challenge, I’d agreed to do one session a day in Spanish. It was relatively easy to find enough catalyst poems and not too hard to muster my limited facility with the language. I knew the teacher would be a great help, and of course she was, providing vocabulary and helping me with verb tenses.
With second graders, I often introduce poetry-writing activities by telling a traditional story. I was doing so again, but only in the two other classrooms. I knew: no way I had enough Spanish to tell a story, so I let the idea go. That is, until Action Poem day when flying came up, and once more I drafted a translator partner so this group of children would not miss out on. Best of all, the teacher and I were a true team.
Once more, a story came to life in a way I alone could not accomplish.
Turtle flew, at least she thought she did, and the story flew across languages, from one teller through another, into the minds and hearts of the listeners.
