How Can We Stop Students Writing About Bob, Steve and Bill?

Narrative writing 101 today involved some teaching of planning (story mountains aplenty) and some modelling of how to turn said plan into an actual narrative worthy of an AQA GCSE examiner.

Then I unleashed my class of budding writers on the world, or at least on the task.

Or at least, I asked them politely if they’d mind having a go at a bit of narrative writing of their own, despite their unwilling and irregardless of the crazy gale force winds seeking to distract them.

Either way, they began to write.

 

Approaching a student on the front row, I asked him what his story was about. An innocent enough question.

“Some humans,” was his answer.

“Don’t you need to know who your characters are and how many of them there are?” I asked, somewhat panicked that I’d managed to teach a class of thirty nothing over the last two weeks of narrative writing.

“I guess,” he replied, shrugging nonchalantly. “We could have Steve, Bill and Bob.”

I raised my eyes to the class, scanning the room.

Fifty percent of the students were female. Only five percent of the room were white.

“Why’ve you chosen those names?” I asked, again concerned but for a very different reason.

“Dunno.”

Another shrug.

“Look around the room! Where are we in your story? Where are the women? I want to be represented in your writing. Where are your representations of people that you actually know? Where are the Asian characters, the black characters…” I tailed off, the rest of the class listening in.

“Who should the characters be???”

A student at the back shouted out, “I want a Shaniqua! She’s a feisty black woman…”

“Who has an excellent back handed slap,” a second student finished.

“Mohammed,” two students called simultaneously (though neither of them claimed “JINX” as I would have done when at school).

The class laughed.

“How about a Jeremy or a Rupert?” A small voice from the corner unwilling to give up on the power of traditional British stories to shape our current students’ narratives.

“Nah,” a chorus echoed.

“Why do we use these characters and these names in our stories?”

One student grimaced thoughtfully before putting her hand up and saying, “But Miss, all the stories we read have these names in them.”

More a thought for the day than an answer to the question, I’m left wondering why our students still feel like this. When my classes have more Jaspreets than Jeremies, more Mohammeds than Marks, and more Aishas than Anns, why do my classes’ stories contain Bob, Steve and Bill?

 

Leave a Reply