Teaching Abstraction

One of the most useful metaphors I've encountered about helping students understand the difference between what happened and what happens--a distinction that James Moffett suggests reflects two different levels of abstraction--is the 1980s television program "The Wonder Years." This program, about an 8th grader named Kevin growing up in suburban California during the turbulent sixties, uses a narrative technique that is now fairly commonplace on TV: the superimposition of two stories, one that captures what happened to Kevin as he experienced it, and the other a narrator who is the voice of the adult Kevin, reflecting on what happened. Each of these represent the two modes of abstraction--what happened and what happens--and it's clear that without the latter, the program wouldn't be nearly as poignant. We hear the adult narrator--or the "now narrator"--throughout the program, not just at the end, reinforcing the idea that such reflection isn't reserved for some final eureka paragraph. To show a clip to your students go on YouTube. Then talk about how it models a good personal essay, and a method of thinking that applies to everything they write.