The Tale of the Sellotape Snail (& The Power of Story) by Tess Berry-Hart

It’s late summer.  I’m wandering around the garden – I call it a garden, but it’s really more of an enclosed yard, bounded with ancient hedges and whiskery hawthorn where the sun never reaches, and spiders, slugs and other animals lurk in the perennial dusk.  My three-year old son is crouched in a corner like a frog, knees almost level with his ears, talking and gesticulating excitedly to himself. As I pass him, a dull squidgy crunch echoes underfoot.

“NOOO MUMMY!” Benjy’s horrified voice erupts from behind me. “You’ve TRODDEN on the SNAIL!”

I lift my foot.  Underneath my shoe is a greeny-grey globule, peppered with shards of smashed black and brown shell, out of which a colourless ooze trickles dismally.

Benjy peers at it anxiously. “You’ve hurt him, Mummy.  You’ve hurt him really bad.”

Quickly I take a leaf and scrape the snail carcass onto the wall.  Benjy scrambles up to see. The smashed gastropod lies pitifully in the sunlight. Desperately I wish a passing bird would swoop down and carry it off, but no such luck.

“Mummy, you need to Sellotape him. He’s got a hurt on his shell.”

I turn and look at Benjy. Huge blue eyes look back at me trustingly. He’s on safe ground here. Mummy knows how to patch a book together with Sellotape, stitch buttons back on shirts and Velcro onto trainers. For him this is just another adventure but frankly, kid, this is beyond me, and even the most experienced surgeon.

“Mumm-MEE!”  Benjy sees the look on my face, and realises the situation’s serious.  He’s starting to escalate.  Then I see – joy of joys – another speckled shell nestling in the shadowy crevice of a brick wall.

“Sellotape! That’s a really good idea, sweetheart.  Why don’t you go into the house and get me a roll?”

Benjy turns and bolts into the house for the craft box – he knows where it’s kept – and quickly I flick Snail 1 into the bushes and switch it for its mightily surprised body-double Snail 2. Moments later Benjy arrives, waving the Sellotape roll, and I bite off a large piece and stick it ostentatiously onto the new snail.

“There we are, sweetie.”

Benjy peers at it suspiciously – the substituted snail is darker in colour and even to his three-year-old eyes the transformation from shattered road accident to gleaming new model is, frankly, excessive – but as two little horns start to emerge from its shell and wave around reprovingly, a smile lights up his face. “Well done, Mummy, he’s all better now!”

Later I’m putting him to bed when a little voice emerges from the shadows.

“Mummy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can you tell me the story of the Sellotape Snail?”

I can see the questions forming in his little brain. What had happened to the snail? Had he done the right thing? Would the snail be all right? If the snail was – or was not – all right, what were the implications for him as a little boy in a huge wide world filled with random and sometimes incomprehensible events? The idea of a story simply finishing – to a child who simply exists in the moment and has only the loosest understanding of time – is inconceivable.

The power of story to modify expectations of behaviour or help children through transition periods and outline for them what to expect has developed rapidly over the last twenty years since Carol Grey developed the concept of social stories. Social stories – simple written stories, illustrated with pictures or in comic strip form – are often written for children with autism or behavioural issues so that they can learn about events, reactions and the emotions of other people as well as themselves. According to primary school reading specialist Tiffany Jean-Baptiste: “As adults, it’s very easy for us to understand why things happen, but for children it’s not so clear. Social stories explain, in a very supportive way, what the situation is, why the situation is the way it is, what the child is expected to do, and how people will feel if they do the right thing or the wrong thing.” So for example, Lydia, who is having trouble sitting down in class, would read: “My name is Lydia. I have trouble sitting down in class. All my friends come to school to learn. If I don’t sit down then they can’t learn and they will get upset with me. If I sit down then they will be happy with me and I will be happy too.”

In the traditional sense of stories then, children also learn empathy towards others and details about experiences that they have never had; it’s a safe way of rehearsing events in case a similar situation should ever happen. Deep inside us we all have a psychological need for story – for our own narratives and sense of meaning in life; the literary devices of sympathetic hero, the challenge, the struggle and resolution/ return are all part of our deep innate need to empathise and learn.  According to Peter Guber, writer and producer (The Kids Are All Right, Bernie, Rain Man, The Color Purple), "stories are not just a form of entertainment, they’re the highest form of consciousness." Stories are the reason that we have survived as a species, because they make us understand ourselves in a way that pure information and logic cannot. Stories are easier to remember than facts, and give us the framework to understand our world. Stories aren’t an accessory to real life, they ARE real life. The power of story is “unlocked by our [brain’s] ability to form mental representations of our experiences. Mental representations allow us to simulate events, to enjoy the experiences of others, and to learn from them, without having to endure all experiences ourselves.”

Amazingly, according to Guber’s informative article, it appears that storytelling is not even simply a social or a literary device, it’s actually the way our brains function. In general, the brain is packed with small localised processors – governing motor control, different emotions, cognitive representation, vision, etc – but with no “central command post”. Instead, events are experienced at the neural level as discrete segmented pieces of information. A processor in the left hemisphere of the brain interprets all these millions of pieces of sensory data and is our “built-in-storyteller”, forming rationalisations on external events based on interpreting the information and synthesising it into a story. It generates explanations using actions, perceptions and memories, resulting in the sense of psychological unity and a subjective sense of oneself as a person. We create ourselves through stories – we literally become our own stories using our brain’s own narrative.

So, with sufficient prompting from Benjy, a tale emerges.

“AJ the snail – (yes, I know) – was on his way to visit his three cousins behind the Terrible Trees. He was very tired and he sat down for a rest. Then one of the Big People came, whose name was Mummy The Snail Smasher, and trod on him.  AJ’s shell was broken and he was very sad and cried because it hurt. But Benjy the little boy had seen his accident and wanted to help him get better. So Benjy ran all the way to get some Sellotape and put it on AJ’s shell to mend it. AJ was very happy because he could go and visit his cousins, and Benjy was very happy too because he had made a new friend.”

So it is that the Tale of the Sellotape Snail, along with The Day I Got Lost At The Supermarket For Five Minutes and My Little Brother Daniel (Breaks My Jigsaws) are still favourite bedtime stories for Benjy, just as much as The Gruffalo and The Way Back Home.

And the next time someone asks me why I make up stories for a living, I shall tell them that making up stories is in fact the highest form of consciousness!

Have you ever used the power of story with your little ones? (or indeed, your not-so-little-ones?) Let me know how!

Fighting for fiction - Nicola Morgan

A couple of days ago the Daily Telegraph told us that "Schools in America are to drop classic books such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye from their curriculum in favour of 'informational texts'." The article went on to say that "American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014."

OMG, clearly.

Well, that was the desired reaction and it was the reaction I duly gave. However, it appears, judging by the early comments below the piece - which I hadn't read at the time because comments beneath online newspaper items generally give me appalling indigestion - that the article was wildly misleading. The third comment, by Deborah Brancheau, seems particularly informed and suggests that we needn't worry too much.

Anyway, I am not here to say who may have exaggerated what and why, or not checked which facts. I am here to shut the stable-door before the horse bolts, just in case anyone from our Government could possibly be so stupid as to consider trying to undermine the importance of reading fiction. Hard to imagine, but still.

I have done many different talks about literacy and the reading brain over the years, as it's one of my hobby-horses. I will also admit that I used to recommend non-fiction as equal in value to fiction, particularly as I used to teach reluctant readers and am a dyslexia specialist, and keen never to undermine anyone's reading choice.

However, while it's certainly true that readers should be allowed to come to a love of reading by whichever types of book they wish, I can't get away from the increasing research that suggests compellingly that reading/listening to fiction is necessary to developing empathy and an expanded Theory of Mind, which are in turn necessary for tolerance, wisdom and the strong foundations of human society.

If you are interested in this research, here are some resources:

Four fascinating books:

Proust and the Squid – Story & Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf
Such Stuff as Dreams – The Psychology of Fiction, by Keith Oatley
Grooming, Gossip & the Evolution of Language, by Robin Dunbar
iBrain – Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, by Gary Small

And one online article: “Effects of reading on knowledge, social abilities, and selfhood”, by Marr, Djikic and Oatley. Keith Oatley is the author of Such Stuff as Dreams, mentioned above, and this article is an academic but shorter introduction to that message. He and his colleagues find numerous links between degree of empathy and reading fiction and their work seeks to find explanations for such links, in psychology and neuroscience. I find their findings compelling and fascinating and I urge you to read the article and to try some of the books above if you're interested in pursuing this.   

In the article, they ask: "Is fiction just a pastime, an entertainment, or does it have psychological effects that can be distinguished from those of reading non-fiction? Does reading the works of great artists have effects that can be distinguished from reading the same information but without artistic form?" And the work in Such Stuff as Dreams and on their blog, Onfiction, suggests that the answer is Yes, and provides possible explanations and greater detail.

Let me offer one quote from the article, describing one study which goes to the crux of the argument: "Students read either a chapter of a novel about the difficult life of an Algerian woman or an essay on the general problem of women’s rights in Algeria. As compared with those who read the essay, those who read the fictional piece said they would be less likely to accept current Algerian norms for relationships between men and women. In another study Hakemulder (2000) found this same decreased tolerance for current norms in students who read the fiction piece under instructions to mentally project themselves into the situation, as compared with those asked to mark the structure of the text with a pencil instead." The latter finding, they suggest, shows "that it is our imaginative projection of the self into the described situations that is key."

Narrative transportation - that "imagined projection of the self" - it's what humans can do, and what fiction facilitates. And it's this, they (and I) believe, that generates empathy, the human understanding that what is in my head is/may not be what is in your head, at the same time allowing the difficult skill of guessing what might be in your head, based on a combination of what is in my head and a generalisation of what I have experienced from the other heads I've been able to enter - in fiction.

So, if a government were to introduce any circumstances that would make fiction rarer, harder to access, available only to those wealthy enough to buy lots of novels and stories - supposing, for example, libraries and librarians were threatened - they would be threatening empathy, wisdom, tolerance and society. 

And that would never happen, would it?

[If you'd like me to speak about any aspect of literacy acquisition, Reading for Pleasure, and/or the reading brain, whether for parents or educational professionals, do email n@nicolamorgan.co.uk. I've done a number of conference keynote speeches this year and a series of talks to parents for Education Scotland.  I've got dates lined up for trips to London and elsewhere (Kuala Lumpur and Prague!) throughout 2013 and I'm happy to add talks onto those visits, thus saving you some costs. Have brain, will travel!]

Yes, we are all individuals - Nicola Morgan

This week is Dyslexia Awareness Week. Dyslexia and I have some history. Several bits.

When I was an English teacher, I found myself in a school with an exceptionally high proportion of pupils with various reasons for finding reading and writing difficult. In a sense they were all dyslexic, though only some of them had Dyslexia. Later, I did an RSA Diploma in teaching children and adults with "specific learning difficulties" (SpLD), which was the then phrase for Dyslexia in all its forms. I then spent the next 16 years teaching such children and adults.

While doing that Diploma, I discovered that I am, on many assessment criteria, dyslexic. Quite patently, I'm not dyslexic, as my spelling, reading, writing, comprehension etc are far from problematic. However, I measure as dyslexic (and somewhat dyspraxic) because: I am inexorably hopeless at left/right tasks; I am strongly crossed-lateral (right-handed but left-eyed); I cannot remember or perform sequences of various sorts; absolutely cannot recite my times tables beyond 5x; my coordination is poor - I am very bad coming down stairs, my typing is riddled with reversals, I cannot learn the simplest dance routines, and my attempts to learn musical instruments have been dismally hampered by my inability to become automatic and coordinated. I also recognise that my hilarious (to others) inability to talk while doing anything with my hands, such as make a cup of coffee, is a function of how my brain works (or doesn't work).

Despite being a so-called SpLD specialist, I failed to realise that my younger daughter had a specific difficulty until she took herself to the learning support teacher in her final year of school. (The guilt!) She turned out to have a "dyslexic-type" deficit, though she has different manifestations from me - for a start she is a brilliant musician and very well-coordinated. Her problem was essentially an information processing one, which had few outward symptoms, and which she disguised brilliantly and now has strategies for. She had been going around thinking she was "thick", despite the fact that I told her over and over again that she very obviously wasn't, pointing out that there were clever things she could do far better than other people.

During my training, one of the things I started to investigate was the human brain, the ways in which our brains are the same and the ways in which they are different, how weaknesses are often mirrored by strengths. I ended up writing two books on the brain, both for young people and families. The better known one is Blame My Brain - the Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed. But it's the other one that's relevant here: Know Your Brain. It seeks to show young people that there are many types of intelligence, that the ones most valued at school (literacy and numeracy) are not necessarily the best and are not necessarily the ones that determine your later success.

And that is what informs my thinking on this subject and why, although I'm proud to be one of Sir Jackie Stewart's Ambassadors for Dyslexia Scotland, I want people to understand that Dyslexia is only one set of conditions. There are many other people struggling to succeed on specific tasks and being laughed at or disrespected for their inability to do whatever it is.

Dyslexia is a useful word. Even if you don't know the definition, you kind of know sufficiently what it denotes. Going through school with undiagnosed or unmediated dyslexia is horrendous - and I've had many pupils whose self-esteem I've somehow had to try to rebuild. It's a scandal that there's no compulsory part of the teacher training curriculum in Scotland (I don't know about England and Wales) to make sure new teachers know how to identify and deal with the pupils they will inevitably come across.

There isn't a word for the things I (and many others) can't do, and the fact that on assessment criteria I'm dyslexic is irrelevant because I can't go around saying I am, as it would be ridiculous and unfair to those genuinely afflicted. What I have just feels like clumsiness; it feels like a brain failure; it sometimes makes me feel thick.

It also makes me fascinated by the human brain. One thing I believe is that it can't be brilliant at everything. The maths genius will lack something, perhaps artistic talent or leadership qualities; or the musical prodigy will lack something else, perhaps sporting skill or the ability to understand people and work well in a team; the lateral thinker may lack logic and the logician be too rigid to be creative. Even an apparent polymath will have some area of weakness. Show me someone who is genuinely brilliant at every one of the many intelligences.

Many dyslexic people have great creative or other skills - but many don't, and we should not assume that one thing produces the other. The differences between human brains are enormous and to be marvelled at, investigated and, most of all, celebrated. I wrote Know Your Brain because I wanted children and young people to understand their own strengths and to value them equally, artistic, creative, logical, literary, musical, spatial, courageous, whatever. I wanted children (and adults) to value different areas of cleverness properly and not set highest store by coming top in school tests and "academic" exams.

So, I can't walk down stairs smoothly, or make you coffee while talking; I am likely to give you the wrong directions (or, in fact, no directions) for getting to my house; I can't tell you a story in the right order; and you really wouldn't like to listen to me play the oboe. But I can write passably well and I can understand something about people's brains.

I'll cope with that.

I want all dyslexic people to value their own talents in Dyslexia Awareness Week. Actually, I want everyone to understand what their brains find difficult and what they find easier. Please share!

Important info: If your child's teacher would like a free, online, simple assessment for dyslexia, please send them towards Dyslexia Scotland's fabulous Addressing Dyslexia Toolkit. Available for all teachers everywhere, not just Scotland! FREEEEEEEEE!