Show, Don't Tell

The first few chapters of Teaching Literacy in the Digital Age seem to all be variations on a theme about video presentations of stories or ideas. It's amazing how many chapters all crystallized in my mind with one sentence on page 31: "Instructing our students to write short stories and then retell them through sound and images gave them a chance to actualize the 'show, don't tell' writer's mantra in an alternative format, thereby reinforcing the concept in their minds."

Ding. A light bulb snaps on, and the writer in me and the teacher in me get into a long, intensive
dialogue that probably wouldn't make any sense at all to anyone who didn't live inside my head, but it's perfectly clear to me:

The teacher in me says, "Brilliant! What a perfect way to explain what 'show, don't tell' means to students. You want to understand the movie without needing a voice-over the whole time!"

And the writer in me says, "HEY! Remember that time I was talking to one of my writing buddies and we said how we always pictured our Muppet fanfictions as movies when we wrote them? This is totally the same thing!"

To which the teacher in me says, "Yeah! It's a way to get students to exactly where we were as writers then--or, well, close to it, because every person/journey is different and so on--and do so several years earlier in life! Imagine how much more they'll be able to grow!"

That's about how the abridged, distilled, sensible version of the dialogue would have gone, anyway. The extended version includes more details from that conversation with my writing buddy, cryptic comments from a former creative writing professor, and general excitement about how to share all of that with elementary students, culminating in the general sensation of a conversation between thunder and lightning happening inside my brain. I suppose that sounds uncomfortable, but for me, it's a familiar and exhilarating sensation of potentially endless puzzle pieces clicking neatly into place.