Teaching the young through stories is an old concept. In pre-literate societies, rhymes, songs, and jingles served to help people remember things that they needed for daily survival. From the fables of Aesop to the mythology and symbolism of the constellations, stories that teach, admonish, and illuminate our cultural beliefs are as old as spoken language.
Astronomy is perhaps the oldest science and the stars scattered across the dome of the night sky became the first calendar of mankind. The observation of the stars, knowing their seasons of rising and setting, gave primitive people the power to predict the future turnings of the cycles of the seasons and to harness the power inherent in a seed of grain to feed more people than hunting and gathering alone could provide for. Research indicates that the names and symbols of the zodiacal constellations may be as much as 15,000 years old, stretching back to the dawn of agricultural civilization. To better observe the stars, observatory temples were built, and stories told that the knowledge would not be lost and the children of the tribe would not starve in the winter's cold and bleak landscape.
The power of the story to teach is as old as language, far older than writing itself. A well told tale resonates with something primitive inside us, stimulates a part of the brain that evolved when fur-wrapped savages huddled around the miracle of fire for warmth and protection from the dangers of the night. We still use the story and the song to teach the very young, but formal education moves away from story and song at an early age and a more 'scientific' and directed instruction takes its place. Even so, the power of the story is undeniable, and the bogeyman will get you if you don't watch out!
In education, as in most other endeavors, people self-select into groups. Those that can remember and still resonate with their early youth teach the very young with songs and stories, teach the colors, the shapes, the sounds that the letters make in our silent minds. Some educators are of a more technical bent, they love the rigor and precision of mathematics, the elegant argument of scientific discovery, or the tangled skein of history; many of these self-select to teach older children, young adults gathering the last of the harvest of formal knowledge and skills they will need in adulthood.
Other teachers favor neither the pre-literate energy of the very young, nor the rebellious challenge of the nearly adult secondary student. These few favor teaching those we call middle schoolers. From necessity rather than choice, I spent a year teaching 6th grade science and math. As a trained research scientist and a secondary school educator of 15 years experience, I walked in with excited confidence. I would be Mr. Wizard! A teacher who knew his subject both intellectually and experientially, a teacher I myself would have dreamed of having when I was young. I painfully relearned the fact that I had not been like most other children when I was young, that the rituals of story and song had been lost to me at an early age and that the draughts of knowledge and discovery I so favored were bitter to many.
I survived that year and transformed myself as a teacher. I became more organized and less spontaneous. My lessons became more precise and left less to the imagination and almost nothing to the initiative of the individual student. I was deeply loved by a very few and deeply hated by many more. I would not settle, would not compromise, would not feign ignorance nor the acceptance of ignorance. Everyone grew that year and the growing pains were very real. My colleagues found me no more palatable and no less a mystery than my students and their parents did. What was I trying to accomplish? What did I think I was doing pushing the students that way? How could I stay the course with so many parents and students set against the way that I was doing things?
I did stay the course and finished the year, but I became convinced that I had chosen to go through the mountain instead of merely around or over it. How could the average middle school teacher whose experience of science and mathematics was not as intimate or experiential as mine convey the very technical and exacting concepts needed and demanded by California state science standards?
I had been using a device in high school astronomy and physics classes for years that had worked well. Students would be asked to imagine how their favorite sport would be changed if it were played upon a different planet. A baseball would fly farther in the low Lunar gravity, but the aluminum bat would melt if the players were on Venus with its hellish temperatures and liquid-thick atmosphere. What would be different? How would you compensate? How would things be different if you were on another planet? Could this be a useful tool in teaching younger students?
A couple of years later, I took a correspondence course in writing children's stories. One assignment called for a story that "taught a lesson or informed the reader." I came back to this idea of sports on other planets and wrote a short story called Jump Like an Earthman about a boy who lived on the Moon and wanted to make the high jump squad on his school's track team. How could he train to make the required 24 foot high jump that was the minimum height for the team? I was moonlighting at the time, selling telescopes to supplement my income. I named my character Maurice after my boss, Dr. Maurice Sweiss, an irascible man with dark hair and flashing eyes; a fast talking character who always had a new idea and seemed able to talk both employees and customers into almost anything. Maurice on the Moon was born.
The story sat idle for some years; untouched even though I had joined a club for writers of children's literature. Maurice didn't seem to be anything that had commercial possibilities; it was just a 4-page story languishing on a hard drive, never emerging into daylight through the buzz and shush of the printer. I returned to Claremont to pursue my graduate education, refused to give up my writer's club, and kept teaching science to high school children. The whirling vortex of my busy life brought these disparate elements together when I took Jump Like an Earthman in to the writer's club one evening. I was cheating, you see, I hadn't had time to do the assigned short story for the club that month, so I dug the story about the boy who lives on the Moon out and read it for my friends at the club.
After reading it, one of the women at the club shook her head emphatically, saying, "It isn't a story - it's a chapter." Everyone in the club agreed; everyone but me, that is.
"I haven't time to write a book, I'm in grad school!"
"If it's a book, it'll come out that way anyhow," someone commented.
"I don't know where to go from there," I whined.
"That isn't the beginning anyway. And you know it."
"What is the kid trying to do? Is this just a fancy sports story about a kid who makes the track team?"
"No. Maurice wants to get to Earth," I said confidently.
My good friend Ellen Garcia who loved pirate stories nodded, "Have him stow away on a space ship. That will get you started!"
"I haven't the time to write a book and do my school work at the same time!"
Linda Quinn, the leader of the club, rapped the table with a knuckle, "See if you can do it as part of your program, then. It's certainly educational enough."
The rest, as they say, is history. The writers in the club vetted the chapters as they were written and made many invaluable corrections and suggestions. The many years of teaching astronomy and physics lent the story its sound technical grounding, and the joy of writing carried me along in its irresistible current. The story is multicultural, interplanetary, and interdisciplinary. I have foisted it upon youngsters, oldsters, and teachers who have all been captivated by Maurice and his struggle to get to Earth. The boy who journeys far from home to claim his own culture and find a sense of belonging in the home he couldn't wait to escape isn't a new idea by any means. But Maurice and I have taken the concept to new heights and new frontiers. It is my hope that Maurice on the Moon will put the joy back into science and math for a new generation of children and their teachers.
As for me - I'll see you on the Moon!