Resources

by Nicole Callihan

Nicole Callihan’s poems have been published in the New York Quarterly, Lingo, Washington Square Review, the Windmill, the Young Zionist Newsletter, and EarthQuakes. Hefner is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and she was awarded the Washington Square Poetry Prize in 1998.

Okay, Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

Teaching very young students often sends me grappling for something new. It was, I believe, on a very long train ride to teach learning-disabled kids in the Bronx or Jamaica, Queens, or students participating in an after-school program in Jackson Heights, Queens, called “Project Read” that I concocted a new game I call “OK, Tell me Something I Don’t Know.” Much to my delight all populations responded well. The following lesson incorporates this game. It works best with students through the 6th grade, although modifications can be made for older students.

The Preparation

Since I usually use this lesson on the third or fourth day of a residency, I make a point of visually exploring the classroom each time I’m there. I look for vocabulary words, multiplication tables, drawings of Uncle Sam, anything that the students are currently studying. I ask the teacher about what books students are reading and any special programs they may be involved with. Are they learning sign language or dance? Drum beating? Basket weaving? I try as much as possible to get a feel for what goes on when I’m not around.

The Review

We begin each day by talking about the brain and the heart. What can we do? We can think, and we can feel. I draw a large circle on a piece of chart paper. “Now, because we can think and feel,” I tell the students, “what on earth is this?” The responses pour in. The obvious responses include “a circle,” but then the circle becomes a swimming pool, a rotten egg, Saturn’s sixth ring, a wedding band, a head, an o, a capital O, an open mouth, a jelly bean, a belly button. “Well, pupils,” I say, “for today, it’s a head.”

The Setup/The Game

“Okay,” I say to the students, “tell me something I don’t know.” “Whaddya mean?” they ask. I explain to the students that every day I try to learn something new, that I can’t go to bed without a brand spanking new morsel in my head. “Just today,” I say, “I learned that termites—y’know what a termite is?” Someone almost always does, and if not I explain. “Just today,” I say again, “I learned that in order to communicate with each other, in order to talk, termites beat their heads against the wood. Beat their heads against wood.” I usually bang my fist (not my head!) on my desk a couple of times for drama, then they ask me if it’s true. Almost always someone points out that people sometimes do the same thing.

“Okay,” I tell them, “now you tell me something I don’t know.” I begin my spiel on how grownups don’t know everything and how sometimes we know things but we forget them. I fish from my mind the discoveries I made during my preparation, and say, for example, “I can’t for the life of me remember what 9 times 9 equals.” Hands shoot up like fire. Whoever gives me the correct response gets to draw a single feature on our friend the circle (the one I drew on the blackboard). This is the main “rule” for the game.

“Now,” I tell them, “somebody else tell me something I don’t know—about science maybe or Indonesian rap music, anything.” I try to jump around from subject to subject and even allow a good joke here and there. “Did you know,” they begin, and I am flooded with information on tadpoles, saying hello in Japanese, kissing frogs to make princes, chickens crossing roads, dinosaurs dying out. This continues until the face—and often a stumpy body attached to the circle by an intrepid student—is completed.

The next step is naming the character and giving her traits. Does she have a boyfriend? Does she bite her toenails? Did her fish just die? We figure out all her likes and dislikes. We flesh her out, maybe draw a moon or a tree or jail bars, give her a locale.

“But we’ve forgotten the most important thing,” I tell the students, “we’ve forgotten her secret power.” I explain to the students that everybody has a secret power. Some people can be invisible. They can sit all day in a room, and nobody ever even notices them. Some people can be in a really bad situation, and their minds can fly away to Tahiti. I tell them of the thousands of tiny invisible shields that I sport daily, and how sometimes they’re uncomfortable but it’s better than getting hurt. The little ones sometimes ask if it’s true. I smile, suppressing a shriek.

Next, we give our character her power, and I tell the students to start thinking hard about their own powers. “Can I have more than one secret power?” You can have a jillion.

The Assignment

Write about your secret power. Where does it take you? Don’t just tell me you can fly, tell me where you can fly to. With students who are either too young or too disabled to write, I solicit the help of the teacher and his or her assistants, and we take dictation. Some secret powers are as simple as love. Some are more complicated.

I would like to note that this exercise is rarely the best thing students writes while I am with them. This lesson is more about the game. It is about letting the students know that I care about what they think, that I can learn from them as much as they can learn from me. Trust, as we all know, is essential. In the sessions that follow this lesson I am rewarded with the trust that was developed in the course of the game. Every week I have students running up to tell me something new that they learned—the uses for a peanut, what a wishbone is—and every week, the writing comes easier and easier, gets better and better.

Below are some of the responses to “My Secret Power.”

My secret power is to fly to God
because I wish to fly.
I fall down on the ground
because I think about it.
I sleep at the sun
because I want to do it.
I fall down at the moon
because I was just thinking.

—Crystal Chen, Grade 1

My secret power is
I can turn into a bird.
I can turn into two apples.
I can turn into a bee.
I can turn into a horse.
I can turn into a pig.
I can turn into a mom.

—Kelly Sinclair, Grade 2

My secret power is
water coming out of my ears
in the night.

—Eric Jackson, Grade 1

My secret power is love.
Just love. Nothing else.

—Jalissa Torres, Grade 1