The Best Medicine

A psychic in Bangor, Maine loses her car keys in a lightening storm. A park ranger wears a fedora at Venice Beach during a cold snap. A couple on vacation in the South Pacific sips from a tea kettle, witnesses a tsunami, and relocates their home from Tallahassee, Florida to Des Moines, Iowa.

These are some of the silly stories my ESOL class came up with in our continuing theme of storytelling. I devised a kind of card game to spark their imagination based on a method of prompts one of my college writing professors used to use. I wrote occupations, cities, objects, and weather conditions on individual index cards, then had the students select one of each from face-down piles. Their task was to incorporate all four selections into an oral story. Our task as the audience was to guess what their selections were. The main object of the game is to incorporate the odd items as smoothly as possible, so guessing them would be difficult. I had hoped this would force my students to stretch their vocabulary, as well as their speaking skills.

Van probably did the best by including lots of random objects, like sunglasses and tennis shoes, as well as several cities and occupations, thereby masking her selections in the accumulation of oddities. 

Santos didn’t quite understand the guessing part; he literally showed us his cards each time he mentioned one of the items in his story. At least his tale about the tsunami was creative.

In the first writing course I took at the university, Bob Pope started off giving us prompts off the top of his head at the end of each class. After a while, he passed around scraps of paper with occupations, objects, and weather elements on them that we each chose at random. I specifically included a spelunker and weather elements in my card deck as a tribute to him. 

Whether or not this game increased my students’ vocabulary and speaking skills could be debated, but one thing is clear: the game generated a lot of laughter. 

That’s what I think I love most about running this class: the laughter. There is almost always a moment where I find tears of laughter streaming down my cheeks. Even if I’m not teaching my students much in the way of grammar, even if I can’t explain the difference between ‘lightening’ as a weather phenomenon and ‘lighten up’ as a verb, even if I don’t have structured lesson plans with educational goals and tangible outcomes, at least I can facilitate a little levity. 

Luz Alba reads and translates harrowing testimonies of refugees seeking asylum all day; Santos studies hypnotherapy and cancer treatments all day; Van teaches higher math to sulky college students all day. The one thing these students of mine need more than anything is a good laugh to relieve the stress and clear their heads.

I am only too happy to provide that through silly storytelling.