TRANSCRIPT
Shanxi: Hello, this is Shanxi Omoniyi, host of MPE’s “Homeschool Hints” podcast to encourage you wherever you may be on your homeschool journey.
Today we’re listening to Dr. Daniel Schwabauer, ThD, and longtime MPE homeschool conference vendor, author, and creator of the One Year Adventure Novel.
Dan teaches English at MidAmerica Nazarene University and writes award-winning fantasy and science fiction novels.
In this recent Facebook Live, Dan discusses the power of story to engage reluctant writers and inspire a love of learning!
Daniel: Hey everybody, I am Daniel Schwabauer with Clearwater Press, creator of the one-year adventure novel and of Byline and Cover Story. And I’m here to talk to you tonight about engaging reluctant writers and using story to instill a lifelong love of learning.
So in my opinion, this is one of the most important but under-emphasized aspects of education and our culture, in part because everybody has to go to school, but you don’t actually have to learn when you’re there.
And I’m a case in point, I used a lot of my time when I could have been learning algebra or other math things to daydream about stories, which has helped me as a writer, but it didn’t help me become better at math.
In most cases, the disconnect with students, I believe, is not the result of bad teachers or bad homeschooling. It’s actually just, we’ve been kind of talked into education looking a certain way, and it doesn’t always have to look the way it looked for us.
So I actually teach at MNU, Mid-America Nazarene University. I’m the head of the English department there, and I teach writing. I’ve been teaching writing, not just in a homeschooling context, for years. I’ve been teaching writing, teaching fiction writing, teaching composition.
Tonight, I really want to focus on how do we get students to want to write? And if they want to write, how do we capture their hearts in a way that they don’t just want to do the one thing, but they love to learn? Can we get our students to have a lifelong love of learning?
So I should point you to a book that I wrote a few years ago that’s free. There’s an e-book on our website, clearwaterpress.com/curiosity. If you go there, you can download the book, Curiosity Saved the Cat. In that book, I expand on some of the things I’ll talk about tonight.
Let me start by telling you a story, a story of something that happened to me in 1997. This story makes the case for everything that I’m going to tell you in this video.
And in part, I like using this story because the method for learning, one of the best methods you can use for learning, is actually storytelling in some way, right? So there’s different types of storytelling.
I just want to tell you a story about what happened to me when I took a job in 1997 as an insurance adjuster for a Fortune 500 company.
Taking this job meant that I had to spend six weeks out of town. At the time, I was 30 years old. I had a 2-year-old daughter, and I was the oldest person in this class of 15 recent college graduates that have been hired to go take the job of investigating insurance claims.
So I had to fly out of town, sleep in a strange bed, and during the day go into this corporate office where their 5th floor had the education department’s classrooms and library. And we learned – not what I thought I would learn.
What we learned was that being trained as an insurance adjuster means reading insurance policies all day long. So yeah, page 11, paragraph, you know, 6L, indemnification, “Mr. Schwabhauer, would you read paragraph ...”, right? That kind of thing. So day after day, hour after hour.
Brutally boring, right? I mean, it’s not, the way I described it makes it sound more interesting. It was not nearly as interesting as I just made it sound.
So about three days into this, the head of the education department – super nice guy, but he comes in with this wooden mallet. And this wooden mallet was one of his prized possessions. It had been signed by like 7 different famous athletes, Pete Rose and Michael Jordan, people like that. And he comes in whacking this wooden mallet into his hand. And he says, all right, everybody, when I come in here with the explainer, this is my explainer. And whenever I come in with my explainer, it means I’m going to explain something to you.
And so what he explained to us was that someone had parked in the wrong parking spot. And as trainees, we were not allowed to park in those parking spots and they needed to be moved immediately, right?
So it’s kind of funny, a little bit funny the first time, you know, because it was at least a break from the monotony of reading insurance policies. It’s also a little condescending. <laughs>
And I think he meant to be funny, but it came across as the gym coach who’s a little surly to the 8th grade student. That’s what it came across as.
And I will tell you that by the 5th week, the explainer was no longer funny. It had become a source of great frustration and angst for everybody in the class. There’s nothing we can do about it, but he’s coming in with this, “I’m going to explain something to you,” way too often.
And so one week before class ended, after he came in and did this, the guy next to me, a guy named Tim, leaned over and he whispered in my ear, we need to steal the explainer.
So I thought about this because they’d flown me in with the promise of a company car and I had no way of getting home.
And I thought if they fire me, I know I don’t have any money. For one thing, I’d sold my construction business in order to take this job, and I hadn’t actually gotten paid for the construction business. So how do I go home? I mean, do I hitchhike? What do I do?
But on the other hand, I had to think this over because this was a pretty painful experience to go through with a ’splainer all the time. So on the one hand, I can be a responsible person and stay here. On the other hand, I could pull off a heist in the middle of a Fortune 500 company.
Oh, that is guarded by former FBI agents. Seriously. Insurance companies get more death threats than pretty much any other industry. And so they have serious security. And I don’t mean just serious like third party. I mean, they hire FBI agents to come work for them because they have all the money. Insurance companies have all the money.
So I do think about this. And then about 10 seconds later, I said, okay, I’m in. What are we going to do?
So we made a plan, and this is what we did.
We went down during the lunch break. Tim and I went down, and I acted as the patsy. I kept the Splainer guy’s secretary busy, asking her inane questions – I’m sure she thought I was a complete idiot – while Tim crab walked past her, because I had her looking in a different direction, went into his office.
Her desk was outside his office and he had a glass window, and fortunately the little blind things for the window were up so I could see what he was doing. I saw him stand up. The glass case that the Splainer was in was fortunately unlocked, and so he takes it out. He puts the Splainer down his pants. He crab walks back out while I’m continuing to ask crazy questions. We left.
He went down to his car – walking very awkwardly, because he had the splainer down his pants – went out to his car, hid it in his car, and while he was doing that, I went into the library and I started taking out magazines from the library’s shelves, and I made a ransom message out of the little letters. You know how they do in movies, you cut out the letters, right?
And then, so I had that, and I put it in the inner office mail system, which is very quick there at the time, so I could just put it in there and it would show up at the at the guy’s office there in about an hour. So I did that right away.
And then I took the cassette recorder that they’d given me to do interviews with people, which it had two speeds. So I recorded a message. My message was, if you ever want to see the Splainer again, let us have tomorrow off.
So I waited in the library until lunch was over and I knew that the Splainer guy would be back in his office. And then I called his office using the company telephone system. And when he answered, I pressed play, but I played it at a slower speed. So it sounded kind of like if you ever (merged) Darth Vader and Predator, maybe something like that. It was very witness protection sounding, you know, “If you ever want to see that ...” that kind of thing, right?
So, but I hung up and I went back into the classroom and I sat down as other people arrived. And Tim and I just kind of looked at each other. I was like, did you hide the thing? Yeah, I did. Did you send the message? Yeah, I did. So like, okay, cool. I wonder what will happen next. What’s going to happen next?
So this is the first time I’d asked that question in five weeks. I wonder what’s going to happen next, right? And I was thinking, you know, okay, so they actually have a robust security system around here. They didn’t have cameras anywhere. I mean, we had thought about that at that time. They didn’t have any cameras anywhere. That was 1997.
They did have a special investigations unit that was comprised of these former FBI agents that were hired to investigate fraudulent claims, right? And let me tell you how good they were. When I arrived the first day, having never met anybody there, I walked onto the campus and a guy stood there at the door that I’ve never seen before in my life. He opened the door and he said, good morning, Mr. Schwabauer. Welcome to this insurance company.
And I was like, how do you know me?
They study everybody’s faces so that everybody who should be there, they know before you arrive that you’re going to be there. And they know your name, your first name, your last name. They had a card, like everything. It was wild. They’re very, very competent at this, right? Way more competent than I realized, or I would probably have been too afraid to do this.
But I was thinking, maybe I’ll make it home before they figure this out, right?
Wrong. Fifteen minutes later, these two, actually there’s three special investigations unit guys (who) walk in and they’re not messing around, right? They normally wear suit coats. Their suit coats were off, revealing their shoulder holsters with the 9 millimeters weapons in there.
And they walk into our room and they say, okay, everybody, stop what you’re doing. Take out a sheet of paper and a pen. and write down the answer to this question and nothing else.
Why should we not suspect you of having stolen the ‘splainer?
That’s the question.
So I wrote my answer. Everybody wrote their answer.
They collected the pieces of paper. They went out, and I’m telling you, the guy who was in charge, stopped at the door and he turned and he looked back in and he had that look on his face.
I tell you, I’ve only ever seen this look before on lions when they’re chasing down a gazelle in one of those nature documentaries.
Seriously, I knew our plan had gone south and I did not know how, but I knew it had gone south because he looked our direction and he said, I’ll be back.
So I’m like, okay. Now what do we do, right? So I can’t really, give up at this point, right? We gotta just wait this out.
We didn’t wait long. It was another, I don’t know what it was, 15, 20 minutes.
He sticks his head back in and he goes, Dan Schwabauer, Tim Niticov, I’m gonna see you in the other room.
Tim said, no way. Like, there’s no way, right? How did they do this?
So we go into the other room and he says, okay, look, We know you two guys stole the explainer. Don’t deny it. Don’t lie. We know you stole the explainer.
I have one question for you and one question only. What are you planning to do with it?
Okay, now I was an English major, master’s degree in creative writing, right? So I’m thinking, what are you planning to do?
This is not subjunctive. This is not a statement contrary to fact. This is a question about what, as if I still have some agency, right? What do you, what I plan to do?
So I said, well, I mean, our plan was we were going to take it around the city and put it in places that seemed very threatening, like on railroad tracks. We were going to, you know, cover it in like bad food. as if we’re serving it somewhere. We’re going to take photos of it using the company cameras that they’d given us.
And we were going to send blackmail photos every single day and we’re going to make it worse and worse until he lets us have a day off.
And this guy looked right at both of us and he said, I hate that stupid splainer. We want in.
So I said, wait a minute. You’re not going to turn us in?
And he said, oh, I promised him that we would get to the bottom of it. I did not tell him we would give him the results. So now that we know who did it, we want in. We hate that explainer too.
Let’s see what we can do together to, can we cut it into little pieces and send it to him?
We weren’t going to be that mean. We were just, we were going to just try to get ...
So we actually did the rest of the week. We went around after we got out of class. We never did get the day off. We went around and we took pictures of it, and it was amazing when we told people the story. They let us into sports stadiums to take pictures of this thing.
People, even the president of the company, when he found out about this, and I went up to him and I said, hey, about the splainer? yeah. I said, I have it. Can we get a picture with you? So it looks really, and he was like, oh, that’s really mean. But you know, I don’t think this guy has had this much fun in 30 years. So it actually signaled to us that we were not ruining his life, right?
So what the company wisely did with this was they shifted gears. And for that last week, the special investigations unit came into our class – they’d never done this before – and they spent the entire week talking about how to catch people when they’re lying.
So they gave us a class on how did we know that it was Dan and Tim? And they used that to explain to us the telltale signs that you learn in the FBI and all that.
It’s fascinating, right? It was a really interesting week, way more interesting than reading insurance policies.
But here’s the thing. My experience that week was very different. Time flew by, and it flew by for a couple of reasons.
One, I had actually lived a story that last week that was a blast, in spite of still having to read insurance policies. Well, we didn’t really read during that week, but we, like, we had to go to the classroom and we had to do stuff. We had to fill out forms and things, but the learning was geared around lies, learning to spot lies. So it was a kind of adventure.
The second thing is that I really was curious – how did they catch us? Because I would not have believed that we were that, I don’t know, stupid or something in the way we did it. We planned it really well.
It convinced me I’d be a terrible criminal because of the things that were sort of funny, you know, about, oh, okay, so our body language gave us away. They said we knew walking in, who it was because of the way you guys shifted your body language. We knew the rest of it was just, it was just collecting evidence that we could use if you tried to deny it, right?
So those two things were really, really important. And I think that’s part of making, giving kids the opportunity to learn to love learning. So if you can make everything to some extent, a story that’s unfolding for them, they will be far more engaged.
And this doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be as complicated as teaching them, you know, FBI techniques of learning to spot when people are lying. It can be changing where your classroom is. It can be changing the makeup of the classroom. It can be doing things out of order.
Now, to some extent, some students can be better off with order. But when everything is always predictable, we always know what to expect. We kind of fall into a sort of, I don’t know if trance is the right word, but we don’t live in an engaged mindset.
And so I’m not, this talk tonight is not meant to be an advertisement for our programs. I’m happy to talk about them. I just want you to know that I’m mentioning these things because I’m giving you an example of something that we tried to do with making writing essays interesting instead of ...
So the byline program that we have tries to turn students into time-traveling journalists working for a 1930s era newspaper called the Metropolitan World, where I’m the editor and I’ve asked students to go back in time and write these essays on things.
So it requires that they do research. I don’t call them essays until the last lesson of the school year. I call them reviews or hard news stories or op-eds or whatever. But really they’re disguised types of essays, descriptive essays or narrative essays or expository essays. So my goal was to get students to live an adventure during that school year.
So that’s one of the main things is inviting the students into a story process where they feel like they are living the story.
The second thing is if you can make the subject matter to them, which means making your starting point something the student loves. And all four of the programs, the year-long programs that we have, this was like the basic premise of creating these programs was, I want them to be able to write about something they care about.
And that’s such a simple thing, but how do you make them care about something? We don’t make them care about anything. You design the assignment to be flexible enough that they get to pick something that they love.
Cover Story, which is the middle grade writing program, I teach the short form content that would go into a magazine, but students pick the theme of the magazine. So if they want to do Minecraft, if they want to do horses, if they want to do ballet, they pick the theme and that allows them to structure their short story, their reviews, their, you know, anything that you would put in a magazine, it all is around something they love.
And the reason that works is that it’s way easier to grasp or use the interest the student already has than to try to force them to be interested in something.
So it’s a really simple principle. You just gear the learning around something they already love.
And then the last thing, the provocation of curiosity. We make a big mistake when we’re teaching, when we begin with the assumption and the idea that students need to learn something, therefore they recognize their need to learn something.
Most of the time we begin – this may, if you went to a public school, some public-school systems are great. I’m not, I’m not disrespecting public schools or whatever. But this can even be true with homeschooling.
You start the school year with a stack of books and you say, essentially, symbolically, you’re telling the student, “Here’s all the things you ought to know. And by the end of the school year, you’re going to know all these things.”
It’s way more effective to provoke a question and just make them want to know the answer to something. If you make them want to know the answer to something, they will be invested in learning it.
This is actually the way Jesus teaches in the parables. right? We don’t notice this very much. It doesn’t get taught this way very much, but it is the principle that he uses. It’s abductive storytelling. It’s telling a story that carries a second layer and often a third and fourth layer of meaning along with it that you have to work at in order to understand.
So, the story itself provokes a sense of, wait a minute, what’s going on with that? This is one of the functions of stories. They make us see reality differently.
Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist, said all art exists to make the stone stony again. And that’s really what storytelling does. That’s what it does for, you might say, education. It’s what it does for students. It’s inviting. It gets them to live an adventure.
When you allow the story to be around something they’re interested in, it allows them to have some agency in the sort of adventure that they’re involved in. This is why children can learn video games very quickly. It’s because they’re having fun. It’s okay to make their learning fun. It’s actually a benefit. They will learn faster if they’re having fun doing it.
And then the third thing is just provoking that curiosity. Learning to find ways that get them to go, hey, what? What? Why is that, right? Rely on that as a natural consequence of childhood, and you’ll probably have more success with it. So I’m scrolling through, looking to see if there’s any questions here I need to answer.
So there’s, Marlon asked about students signing up for the One Year Adventure Novel. They get access to peer review from other online students. So the One Year Adventure Novel, we do have a student forum. where they are encouraged to post and get feedback on their work from other students. We kind of have an unwritten rule. It’s not exactly a rule, it’s a guideline that if you post one thing for feedback, you should give feedback to two other students.
Like I said, it’s not a rule, but it’s generally the case that as a writer, you will learn more from your critiques of other people than you will from the critiques they give you. We’re usually more invested in the critiques we get, but the better learning takes place with work that we’re not as invested in. So that’s a principle we use in the one-year invention novel. It’s a principle we use in the summer workshops that we put on as well.
So Genevieve comments on bond. Thank you, Genevieve. I don’t know if there’s other questions you guys want to put in here. I have a quick quote from Arnold Edinborough I was going to end with. You said curiosity is the very basis of education. And if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. Yeah.
So, Genevieve: what are some steps your students have taken after completing your course? Did any of them continue on in writing careers?
Yes, I actually have students who have gone on to publish books, books, both traditional publishers. I have students working in professional writing films and TV programs. They’ve won awards. I don’t have a list of them right now. And I should mention this as the head of the English department at MNU. It’s a small English department, so I’m actually, I say I’m the head and on the tail as well. It’s me and three adjuncts that do the English courses there.
But this fall, I’ve spent two years planning and launching a narrative studies BA program. It’s the only Christian narrative studies program in the country right now. It’s at Mid-America Nazarene University right here in Kansas City.
So, if you have students who are interested in studying narrative, it is narrative that we go very deep into how stories work. We also do it from a biblical standpoint. So it’s not limited to a biblical standpoint, but it is something that we are launching. We have students already enrolled in it. And I’d invite you, if you have students that are interested in this kind of thing, it’s worth checking out. Even though I’m not here to plug MNU, it is where I teach full-time.
And I am so invested in doing this because I genuinely believe that our world needs storytellers who can shape the culture through better stories.
And then I will answer this last question, I think, because I think I’m basically running out of time.
How do you make stories out of less riveting subjects, math, physics, so-called hard sciences?
That is a great question, and it’s a matter of using your imagination to tell a story around the thing. I have a student who just passed an algebra course at MNU working with. She’s a narrative studies student who’s working with a different former student of mine. That former student worked with her to turn equations into stories.
So she imaginatively took the parentheses, those are the castle. You got to get the princess out of the castle, et cetera.
I have a friend who taught math for years. He retired, but he would do linear man events, linear man being the man of lines.
It’s not as easy working with some things that don’t feel like they’re a story, but basically we are wired for stories, and just about any subject can be turned into a simple story that will have much more power to fire a student’s imagination than just the concepts.
This is really deep. I don’t have time to go into the depth of it, but the way your brain works, if it’s a concept, it’s something you’re not imagining, and if it’s something you can imagine, it’s probably not a concept.
Your brain will turn images into concepts easily, but not vice versa. So students need help from teachers to give them storified concepts that will help them to learn and absorb the material on a deeper level than just the quadratic formula in its conceptual state.
Shanxi: Thanks so much for listening. We hope you are encouraged in your homeschool journey.
Please continue the conversation with us on our website, midwesthomeschoolers.org, or email us at podcast@midwestparenteducators.org. We’re also active on social media if you’d like to connect with us there. Thanks to Kevin McLeod of incompetech.com for providing this royalty-free song Wholesome, which is licensed under creativecommons.org.
