![]() ![]() "You miss a lot if you read narrative that way, particularly one that is deceptively simple. "They'd been taught that all the detail is not so much what's important, but rather can you distill something out of it that you can sort of summarize," he explains. His college students, however, were looking for abstractions, searching for the basic point or meaning of the story. "It was an appropriation of the story as a resource for them in their young years to discern right from wrong and to come to some conclusions and judgments about Pinocchio's own behavior, and to draw some comparisons with their own lives." The reason the fourth graders could recall the story in such detail "was not a process of memorization in the formal sense," Guroian says. The youngsters, on the other hand, had it down cold, remembering exact details of Pinocchio's movements and interactions in the story. The problem was that the college students had but faint memories of the intricacies of the plot. ![]() Paul's School in Brooklandville, where they read "Pinocchio" with a group of fourth graders (including his daughter, Victoria).Īfter they read the story, the college students and the fourth-graders broke into groups, where they made posters and performed skits based on the plot. This process was clearly demonstrated, he says, when he took a group of his Loyola students several years ago to St. Guroian argues that these stories are essential tools in helping children - or even adults - to learn to discern right from wrong, good from evil, and to inculcate virtues like courage and honesty. About 1915, when she was a 12-year-old girl growing up in historic Armenia, at that time under Ottoman rule and a part of Turkey, "She used to take supplies to the resistance fighters in the hills," Guroian says. Just like many of the classic fairy tales, his grandmother's stories were not always light and sweet, but sometimes had the hard edge of the reality of a cruel world. ![]()
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