Morality in Rock-it Science Stories

by Estelle Gow, Rock-it Science Webmaster

Yesterday Mr. Mac told me about an article he had just read about how the Inuit people use storytelling to teach their children to control their anger. When a child misbehaves or gets angry, the parents don’t shout or scold. Instead, they teach children how to behave properly by telling them stories. You can read the article here.

That got me thinking about how Mr. Mac uses storytelling as an integral part of Rock-it Science lessons. In each lesson, we tell the students a crazy “fractured fairytale” type story about two friends named Jack and Jill and their nemesis, the Evil Mister Fred and his minions. (Yes, we’ve been telling stories about minions for many years, long before the movie came out!)

The purpose of the story is to get the students into a creative frame of mind and to spark their imagination. We tell the story only up to the point of a cliffhanger, where Evil Mister Fred appears to have the upper hand, and Jack and Jill and their friends are in jeopardy. Then we ask the students, “If you were Jack and Jill, what would you do?” We also ask the students to imagine that there is an “Acme Store of Everything” where they can order whatever they need, whether it’s a coil of rope, a flying caterpillar, a thunderstorm, or even a volcano. This frees the students’ imaginations and gets them into thinking about out-of-the-box solutions. Then they do the hands-on experiment while they’re in this creative frame of mind. We don’t tell them how the experiment is supposed to turn out, so the kids are observing everything and making their own discoveries. After the experiment, we finish the story, which always ends with Jack and Jill being successful and Evil Mister Fred’s plans being foiled.

But there’s another aspect of Mr. Mac’s stories that may not always be apparent, and that’s the morality of them.

A few years ago, I decided to take a crack at writing a Rock-it Science story, and I gave the draft to Mr. Mac to read. In the story, Evil Mister Fred and his minions were placing gun powder in tunnels under the town of Goodville in order to blow it up. I had written an ending in which Jack and Jill discover the plot and send the gunpowder back to Evil Mister Fred to blow him up instead. Mr. Mac really liked the story, but when it came to the ending he said, “Jack and Jill would never do that. They never do evil things. You need a different ending.” So I came up with a way for Evil Mister Fred’s plan to backfire through the incompetence of his own minions rather than from direct aggression from Jack and Jill.

Prior to writing this story, I had never really thought about that basic moral principle that Mr. Mac carries in all of his stories. Simply put, Jack and Jill are always doing good. They offer their problem-solving services to those who need it for free. When they acquire riches, they give them to the poor.

Jack and Jill never do evil things, not even when they’re confronting Evil Mister Fred and his minions. No matter how evil his behavior, Jack and Jill would never just pull out a gun and shoot him. Evil Mister Fred is always defeated by having his own evil plans somehow backfire on him.

This morality is never pointed out and the stories are never preachy. As far as the students are concerned, Jack and Jill are just enthusiastic, adventurous kids who have exciting lives. They also happen to be great role models.