Writing to Unpack

 "Excuse me," said one of my students this morning. "I can't do this assignment."

"Why not?" I asked about the checklist of key features for a successful narrative. We had just listened to an audio version of a short story as the students had read along, and now they were supposed to work with their table groups to analyze the story with the same checklist we had used on two other mentor texts, all in preparation to write their own personal narrative.

"It's too sad," he sniffed.

I was a bit surprised. The story, which involved a boy hunting a blue heron with his dad, even though he didn't like killing birds, and then subsequently rescuing a chick, hiding it in the hayloft, and then jumping in front of his dad's shotgun to save the bird, had been very popular with the other sixth grade readers.

"I know it's a little sad in the beginning and scary at the climax, but everything turns out alright in the end, right?" I pointed out.

Tears were dripping down his cheeks. "It's just too sad," he insisted. "I can't even think about it anymore."

I took a deep breath and nodded. "Could you do the checklist without adding evidence from the text?" I suggested.

He grabbed a tissue and blew his nose loudly. "I guess so," he agreed, returning to his seat and making quick work of checking 'Yes' for every category. He had found it a successful narrative, for sure.

"We're going to talk about the story some more," I told him quietly a little later. "Is that going to bother you?"

"No," he answered, and in fact he participated quite a bit in our discussion, naming the author's purpose and even answering a question about when the main character showed courage.

"I think it took courage to take care of that baby bird," he said, "even knowing that if something went wrong it might die, and then he would be really sad. I'm not that brave," he finished, shaking his head vehemently.

It was not a typical sixth grade exchange, but his parents had warned us that he 'emotes freely', which was clearly the case today.