Storytelling: The Key to All Education

Thomasina: I think it is an excellent discovery. Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?

Septimus: We do.

Thomasina: Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?

Septimus: I do not know.

Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.

Septimus: He has mastery of equations which lead into infinites where we cannot follow.

Thomasina: What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten.

Those lines (in combination with the entirety of Tom Stoppard’s genius work ARCADIA,) did more for my understanding and appreciation of math than anything I encountered in all of my education. Not only did I finally understand both the purpose and execution of iterated algorithms, but for the first time, it MATTERED. I wanted to understand it. I knew why it was important.

Storytelling is not something that should be relegated to “people who want to have fun in the arts.” It’s a vital part of how we learn EVERYTHING as human beings.

I remember being so frustrated in classes where I was told to memorize facts, numbers, and formulas by rote, “just because.” I have a feeling many of you experienced the same thing. Can you tell me what year Napoleon lost at Waterloo? Neither can I. Then again, I can’t tell you off the top of my head what year I started middle school. Can you? Not being great at isolated facts doesn’t mean someone’s “bad at school.” It’s something we all encounter on a daily bases. And if we have trouble remembering dates in our own life – when we were there! How can we remember them if we’re just memorizing them out of a book to get a good grade on a test?

What changes things is when those abstract numbers, formulas, and facts are linked to a story. You may not be able to easily tell me the year you started middle school, but I bet you could tell me about what middle school was like…some of your teachers, important experiences, maybe even what you were wearing on your first day. I can tell you the entire history of western Europe in the 1800s…not because I memorized a bunch of facts for my SAT II, but because I have a passion for the origin and history of fairy tales and children’s literature – and most of what we consider the classics were transcribed or written between the early 1800s and 1900s. These were stories that meant something to me, and because of that, I wanted to know the stories of their genesis. It just so happens that those stories connect with those of economics in Victorian England, American feminism at the turn of the century, and the creation of the first German dictionary.

Many people are not familiar with the multi-modality approach to learning. What it basically boils down to is that different people learn best in different ways – most frequently those are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. If you’ve ever had to learn lines for a show, you’ve probably encountered this. Some people learn best by reading the script and looking at the lines over and over again (visual.) Some people like to record the lines being read and listen to them (auditory,) and some do best when they’re on their feet and can pair their lines with physical action (kinesthetic.) Truthfully, we’re all a combination of many modalities, but some work better for us than others.

Traditional means of storytelling integrate all these types into one experience. If you ever did some sort of historical play in school ( a Thanksgiving pageant, the story of Hannukah…) you probably intrinsically remember the story. If you learned a song in kindergarten, you probably remember it – along with the gestures that went along with it.

So why when we get older and more “serious” in our studies does that devolve into sitting at our desk memorizing things? I’m not advocating group projects over solo work (I am an introvert,) but I am advocating incorporating storytelling into ALL aspects of our education. I’m someone who can’t learn things unless there’s a story attached – seriously. Take giving directions. I’m from L.A. and to this day I can’t tell you what freeways to take to get from y to z. I can tell you to take the freeway I used to go down to go to high school, then when you get to that great teriyaki place we all used to go to between shows take a left, etc. I know I’m an outlier, but I’m sure we’ve all had some version of this experience. I remember asking my math teachers WHY a particular theorem worked. How did someone discover it? How was it tested.? My teachers never knew, and often just responded with “It doesn’t matter, just memorize it!”

Now there are times when you do just need to memorize something (verb conjugations for one…) but how much easier is that memorization when it’s placed in context? I remember as a child wanting to act out my favorite stories so they’d be “in my body” and I’d remember them. To this day when I have to do any sort of algebra (yes, it does come up in real life) I think about Thomasina and Septimus.

Storytelling is also our prime method of understanding empathy. One of the best ways to “walk around in someone else’s shoes for a while.” But what happens when we start taking storytelling out of education? In every form? What happens when statistics, not empathy, are the sole focus of most educational courses. You can memorize what happened during the Napoleonic wars…but it’s only when you connect it to a story that you feel empathy for the people involved – and think about how their story connects to your own. For too long we’ve stopped at “Who, What, When, and Where” and forgotten the “Why” and “How.”

One of the reasons, perhaps, that there’s not the overall respect for the arts we feel there should be is because storytelling, the essence of human culture and communication since time immemorial, is no longer being valued by our society. Long gone are the days of sitting around a campfire and singing songs of great legends, or telling stories, now we frequently aren’t even watching the same shows as a family to talk about them later.

To alter a quote from “Mr. Holland’s Opus”: “You can cut the arts, and storytelling as much as you want…Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.”

There was an article in the Harvard Business Review called “Why China Can’t Innovate.” Whether you agree with that or not, there has recently been a push in Asian countries to try to get their students to think more creatively. While their kids are at the absolute top in terms of education and test scores, they’ve found that students can follow directions extremely well, but can’t always come up with something “outside the box.” One of the things they did to try and counteract that is to introduce Sci-Fi into young readership. Stories about science…not just facts. But it’s not just Asian countries. It’s EVERYWHERE. We, by and large, are no longer storytelling cultures. And that needs to change. There’s a lot that the arts can teach math, science, history and English. And we need to start listening.