BRINGING RHETORIC INTO THE SHADOWS

     A couple of days ago, I was teaching from Thank You for Arguing, my favorite rhetoric book.  I was extolling the power of telling stories as a way of changing an audience’s mood. This particular class had been taking quite a bit of notes, so I felt it was time to engage the students in a group activity that might reinforce these words about persuasion and narrative. I decided to play Shadows  by Zak Arnston. It’s a storytelling game that I knew I could quickly teach a whole class, and I was so pleased with the results that I have since used it in a test prep elective that I teach and recommend it for any sort of character education course.
     Shadows is a game in which the players play and narrate themselves and their “Shadows” through the world. This Shadow is some invisible being or monster that is pleased with nothing more than getting its respective player in trouble.  Take a look at how easy the rules are in this game:

• The players find themselves awakened by something startling.
• The players tell the game master what they want their character to do given the situation.
• The players roll one die which represents themselves and one that represents their Shadow.
• If the “good” die wins, the players’ desired outcome happens.
• If the Shadow die wins, the players must narrate how their Shadows gets them in trouble.

    There is a little more to it, but that is the game in a nutshell.   My emphasis in the rhetoric class was about providing intriguing detail in one’s story, but it is fairly obvious how such a game could be used for kids to reflect on right and wrong and issues of character.  There is a lot of possibility packed into this free, little game.

DADA WITH DADDY: PLAYING HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBOT!

Last night, I played Daniel Solis’s Happy Birthday Robot! with my two young children–ages six and eight. This little story game had my two kids in stitches and had me wondering if I am raising a couple dadaists. Or maybe they are surrealists. One way or the other, I learned that the game is awesome and that my kids are wonderfully weird…and a little violent when it comes to stories. Please indulge me and read a quick story that sprang from the game. I am going to present the tale without correction.  I was probably as loose with the rules as I was with grammar.  After the story, I will mention what my next step would be if I were to play this game in the classroom.

Here goes:

Happy Birthday Robot!
I challenge you to hippopotamus and dance.
Whale will fight you, you robot.
Robot, fight Goku super Saiyan with spirit bomb and the dancer, hippopotamus.
Robot!
There’s a hippopotamus.
Robot, you land on the whale and fly up with water.
A trampoline bounces.

End of story.

Wait a minute! That ending!  Maybe I am fathering a couple haikuists.

After we finished this first story, my kids wanted to write another one.  Let’s just say that this is where my babies got a little more violent and a lot weirder…bananas, goats, beards, electrocution (“Dad, that’s one word.”), and brains.  It was also insanely ungrammatical.

THE IMPORTANT THING IS THAT AT TV PRIME-TIME WE WERE TELLING STORIES AND LAUGHING SHOULDER TO SHOULDER.

As a teacher, my next step would be to begin talking about sentence structure, how a sentence begins and ends, how to punctuate it.  With a little stealth and patience, this could be done without much notice on the pupils’ part.  I would just be enforcing game rules, not teaching English, right?  I am not so sure they would care if they did catch on that they were being taught.  The game is just that fun.