Performances include stories, songs, and poems from simple and playful nursery rhymes and songs for the vary young to longer and more in-depth and thought provoking material for older and more mature audiences, listeners, and readers.
Workshops include academic and creative writing, performance skills in the spoken word arts, and songwriting.
Education
- Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Theatre, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond Virginia
- Creative Writing under W. O. Mitchell, Banff School of Fine Arts, Alberta
- Tesol Diploma for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Vancouver Community College
Experience
- Five years as an actor in children's theatre.
- Close to 30 years delighting children and families with my own stories, songs and poems.
- Close to 700 hours as a workshop leader presenting creative writing and performance programs for children, teachers, and librarians since 1986.
- Seven international tours and six successful CDs to my credit.
- Honourable mention for seven songs and stories in national and international competitions.
For more information visit Max Tell at: www.maxtell.ca.
Disclaimer: I have a great deal of respect for teachers, lesson plans, and the ever changing approach to education that focusses more and more on keeping up with technological growth. Education must be keep up with the times. However, any system of teaching, no matter how progressive, can never help everyone. There will always be those who will slip between the cracks. My approach suggests that there are solutions beyond the system that can help students individually.
Too often children from less fortunate households financially and those with learning disabilities are disenfranchised by a system that blames struggling learners for their inability to keep up.
As difficult as it may seem, a two teared system is needed within the classroom, where one hour each day is set aside for non conventional styles of learning:
- where slow learners, for whatever reason, are not blamed for their difficulties in school.
- where these children are allowed and encouraged to grow at their own natural pace.
- where, in a buddy system, children of more advanced abilities are encouraged to share their knowledge and skills with those less fortunate.
- where everyone is treated as an equal member of the educational family.
- where reading is not taught but a love for reading is inspired.
I repeat, as difficult as it may be, room must be made for those who do not fit into a square or round hole, room for untraditional forms of education that are not based on a system, but rather on the individual needs of particular children.
Personal Experience: In addition to my artistic career, I have had the pleasure of tutoring second language students in English for over twelve years. In that time, I have worked with many young learners who started out with very poor reading and writing skills.
For the strugglers, many of them high school students, I start from their current level of reading a writing skills and worked up from there.
Natural Evolution: Children are born totally unskilled, but natural learners. They soon begin to flex their fingers, arms, and legs. They roll over. They learn to crawl, stand, then walk. Over time, they begin to run and jump. Some progress to become athletes, and still others champions.
We would not expect a toddler to run a marathon or even around the block. Each stage of growth is important in its own way. One stage must be fully completed before moving on to the next. To skip a stage for an athlete would lead to disaster and failure.
So why do we expect struggling learners to learn above their current level? By setting goals and expectations that are too high for a child at their level of development causes that child to freeze up, to fear learning and to hate school.
As mentioned above, when faced with young learners who lack the skills to read or write at the level of their peers, I have had to set aside higher expectations, especially in the eyes of the children themselves.
However, I do talk to them about setting their own goals, pointing out that goals are essential to growth, comparing my young learners with Olympic hopefuls. I encourage them to set a new goal each week, to add one line, ten words to both their reading and writing. Goals that are completely achievable.
As things improve, they may add two lines or perhaps even ten, but only if they feel that the goal is achievable. Eventually, the child even begins to set his or her own goals, making them their own.
In these cases, it has usually taken about three years to bring struggling learners up to a level of their peers, in some cases from a grade three level of reading and writing all the way up to a grade ten level. Yes, in three years.
If you have a child who is only crawling, please do not ask that child to run. Every child, every single child, has an innate ability and desire to learn. It is our responsibility as adults, parents, and teachers to help coax struggling learners and to encourage their natural instincts to learn by setting goals that are reachable.
Once one goal is completed, a child can easily move on to the next, and the next, one step at a time. And though all children may not learn to love reading and writing, many will have learned how to be proud of their own achievements and will have built a foundation for much further progress.
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A note to teachers interested in my workshops:
You will find that my workshops for teachers are not conventional.
They are not based on, and for the most part, do not include lesson plans.
My intention is to help teachers to put themselves in the shoes of struggling learners for at least one hour each day; to focus not on goals created by a system, but goals based on individual needs; goals directed toward inspiring reading and writing in the hearts of those who otherwise may be lost to an educational system whose expectations are far above an individual child's current abilities.
I have asked this question many times before: Do children love the rules of hockey, or do they learn the rules because they love the game?
Encourage children to love reading through stories, songs, and poems, shared in a warm and intimate atmosphere; and your task as teachers and even parents will be far easier.
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To Book Max: Please include in your email your goals and objectives in terms of the type of programming you wish, including the needs of your students and their grade level. robert@maxtell.ca
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