Story tellers

I must confess that I’m not the kind of person that knows how to keep focus. Just one phrase or someone walking around works as a trigger in my brain and so a lot of thoughts starts to get chained in my head. Can you imagine a guy like me in the classroom? It was easy to forget the teacher and just think about a lot of more interesting things. Maybe the problem was with me because it was me losing the focus, right? What the hell is problem with this kid?

Or maybe the problem isn’t with me.

I can remember two or three teachers that know how to naturally keep my attention. What they do was very simple to understand, but also very complicated to do in a natural way: they tell stories instead of throw information on me. They know that writers don’t write the books to students, but to readers. They know that important people take decisions to change things, not to force students learn dates and places by heart. And those story tellers know that scientists, genius like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein do what they do because of curiosity about understand how the Universe works. Not to force me to sit in a classroom and learn some formulas.

When you think like this, you starts to contemplate the stories, the context, the reasons and motivations behind the things you are trying to learn. Why this writer is so obsessed about “not to perfume the flower”? Why is he so obsessed about his strict meter and assonant rhymes? Try to know his history and you will see that he used to be an engineer (plus he comes from a family of artists). What about the calculus controversy between Newton and Leibniz? How cool is to listen someone tell theses histories. I guess that this is the reason why we are so glad to share beers with friends while we tell and listen stories. Even more important, we share the stories we listen with others, that share with others and so on. Very powerful way to share knowledge.

For sure it was much more interesting to me hear all the stories both inside and outside the books. And that is what I try to do every time I teach something, I try to tell stories.