Even Adults Like a Good Story > James Fleming

During one of my live seminars a couple of months ago, a student made a surprising request: “Professor, do you have any stories today?” This student’s question was followed by desperate pleas from the rest of the class for me to tell them all a story. Over the previous weeks, I had punctuated my lessons at various points with anecdotes and stories drawn from my own life to illustrate both directly and implicitly some element of the lesson at hand. I did so in order to recapture the attention of my class, which had waned over the previous half hour of detailed discussion of the finer points of argument and persuasion. I quickly switched gears and told an anecdote about me and my wife arguing over where to have dinner. I made my story humorous and sharp and explained the different ways that my wife, who is an attorney, and I approach and engage in argument. The story was a hit and I wound it up by asking my students what the main idea behind the story was. This story served the purpose of having my students think critically about the narrative I had shared and to step back from the anecdote itself and segue back into the realm of academic discourse and the discussion topic at hand. From there, the seminar took a sharp turn and my students seemed more engaged and active during the remaining half of the seminar.

I think the positive response to my story was owed to a couple of different factors. First, the story served to break up the monotony of the discussion and allowed my students the opportunity to leave the position of academic discourse, and step, if even for a moment, into the position of personal discourse. This allowed the students to break from their active roles as students in the class and, also, allowed them the opportunity to view me as not simply their instructor but also as a human being. While my anecdote was simple and revealed very little about my life, it allowed me to connect to my students on a human level. For the moments in which I was telling the story, I stopped being an instructor and, instead, became a human being who faces the same conflicts and experiences as my students do. Second, the story provided entertainment. The importance of entertainment—by which I mean drama and humor—in the classroom cannot be overstated, though it is often given little attention as a form of worthwhile pedagogy. While our main imperative as instructors is to educate and enlighten our students, entertainment is one of the ways by which we can go about engaging our students  in the lessons at hand and maintaining their interest.

Given the success of this experiment, I decided to develop at least two illustrative stories for every seminar I teach. I try to open every seminar discussion with a story that illustrates some of the main ideas we’ll be working with. I try, also, to include a story somewhere around the midpoint of the seminar, usually in order to help explicate or illustrate a complicated idea or process. I structure these stories carefully, and often against my own artistic instincts. As a prose writer, I tend to write fiction that is experimental, fragmented, chaotic, and disordered. But the stories I tell my classes, however, are clear and direct and have readily recognizable points and morals behind them. A classroom story will only prove successful if it balances entertainment with illumination and the tale itself has a kernel, at very least, of insight and wisdom stuck within it.

Did you know…

That when James Fleming was seven, he was in a deli in Hyannis, MA, and next to him stood John F. Kennedy Jr.? The story continues that while people were snapping pictures and pointing, John leaned down and asked James what he should order. James recommended corned beef. John shook his hand and said that that was a good idea because it was his father's favorite sandwich.  James is a Composition Professor at Kaplan University.

[This article was originally published in our September, 2009 issue.]