The Need to Share Our Stories

My elementary school had a plan for molding correct behavior in its students. At the end of each school day, our teachers awarded us stars for being good. At my old school, though, those stars were affixed not to some chart hanging on the classroom wall, but to our foreheads. And, if we misbehaved in some way, one of the points of those five-point stars was torn off by the teachers, and the mutilated sticker was affixed right there for the whole world to see. Forget the unpleasantness of being reprimanded by the teacher, or the embarrassment when faced with the snickering of our classmates. Far worse was the interminable wait in the carpool line, knowing that when the door was opened, the customary cheerful greeting “What did you do today, honey?” would morph into an alarmed, “What on earth did you do today?”

I vividly remember an experience when I was in first grade. I must have been feeling especially cantankerous that day — or perhaps my teacher was feeling particularly irritable herself. At any rate, things went badly for me on that occasion, and when the stars were distributed I was awarded just one single point — my forehead now a billboard, announcing to the world that I hadn’t met classroom standards. Bad enough to have been stripped of four points, but there was also the disgrace that came when my teacher sighed that I’d been such a handful that day that I didn’t really deserve even one point but that she couldn’t in good conscience send me home with nothing. So I also had to bear the burden of the knowledge that I was sporting a “pity point.” That awareness was a heavy load.

In my role as the Upper School Director at a girls’ school in Baltimore, I shared this 45- year-old story with my students last spring. I used it as a way to illustrate the fact that schools and societies are reflections of one another. Schools do more than teach math facts and the skills required to write a first-rate analytical essay. They are also charged with teaching about democracy, civic participation, and leadership, about all the other values our culture holds dear. Using my star-on-the-forehead story as a starting point could lead to the conclusion that my old school and first grade teacher, and even (one could argue) American society in the early 1960s, might have responded to the prompt “This I believe” by intoning: I believe order is essential for a functioning society. Schools and parents will agree to work together to attain it, and there will be no talking out of turn!

I think a lot about values that we cherish and pass along to our children (both explicitly and implicitly), and about all the various messages we receive and send. I’m struck by the fact that, unlike institutions, people generally go blithely about their business, rarely articulating the foundational beliefs upon which their lives are built. The evidence of a person’s beliefs exists most often only in the form of his or her actions — material that becomes the stuff of stories, the scrapbooks or photo albums of our lives. As individuals, oddly and perhaps unfortunately, putting words to our beliefs sometimes means we have to work backwards: it’s sometimes easier to identify our most deeply held beliefs after the fact, by metaphorically “reading between the lines,” by taking stock of our stories, of “This I Do (or Have Done)” as a way of finally being able to complete the sentence “This I Believe.”

So, I believe in stories because they instruct our minds and provide nourishment for our hearts. I believe in telling stories to children and in listening to the stories they tell. I believe in reading books, watching movies, sitting around campfires, and in carefully observing the world around us as we struggle to make sense of all the stories so complex that no one’s yet constructed or told them. I believe in seeking out the stories in museums, memorials and in amusement parks. I believe in crafting our own stories as honestly as we’re able, whether we’re laughing at the lunch table, scribbling in a journal at the end of a long day, or putting together a yearbook page.

I believe in the implied hopefulness and intimacy when we share our stories with one another. “Here’s something you might enjoy, or something that might touch you, or something that you can learn.” I believe in teaching children to look backward and to look forward, to discover and tell their own stories and, then, I believe in marveling at their courage when they do so, and also in marveling at the generosity with which their peers listen to their thoughts. And lastly, I believe that our touching willingness and need to share our stories is an expression of our humanity and decency: the parts of us that make us all deserve five point stars on our foreheads.