Using Vocal in the classroom

For the record, I didn't use any of their ideas. For the record, I had already written the introduction to my actually submitted story, and I am desperately hoping some of them entered as well.

For the record, I didn't win.

I am a high school English teacher, and believe in modelling what I teach - I always tell my students I will never give them a task I am not prepared to do myself. I like writing, but I'm not a fabulous writer - it's do it for fun. I try to make it fun for the students too, and this is where Vocal comes in. This class is Year 9, aged around 14 - and during this year the students do a standardised test where they have to write from a prompt, with a 45 minute time limit. Easy for some, not for many. Now, I enjoy writing from a prompt - I like the framework - but many hate the restriction. In the same semester they were also studying a Narrative unit - double win! In fact, their stories are due today (spoiler: I've read the drafts and there is not a dragon to be seen...).

I told them, "I need help!" (I did need help, I'd reached a road block all of three sentences in). Looking at the picture of the whiteboard again I'm kind of regretting not using some of their ideas; in retrospect they were better than mine. I wrote the starter sentence on the board and we all had a crack. Let's break it down: "Valley" had a capital letter - the town in which we live and go to school in a Valley (proper noun), so that part was easy. Location established. "There weren't" means that there are now. OK, there are now dragons. And....go.

It was one of the most engaging and entertaining lessons I have taught. I was thrilled that there were students in small groups, paper between them, madly writing. Some were sitting on the tables shouting out suggestions, or coming up to the board and writing them themselves. We teased out ideas - what do dragons taste like? Could you use all the parts? What would you use them for? Not to step on Jasper Fford's toes but, why would you kill a dragon if you didn't have to? These are pragmatic country kids living in dairy country - threats to existence are real.

Part of it became existential - humans are at fault for pretty much every disaster, why not this one? It must have been genetic engineering or climate change, of course. My evential story did have quite common animals (lizards) turn into dragons, an idea I became quite attached to - Australia already has enormous lizards in goannas or lace monitors, not a million miles from dragons. If you can find it, check out Funnelweb by Richard Ryan, a horror story set in Sydney after an off-shore radiation leak has mutated our most poisonous spider, the funnelweb, into massive Godzilla-sized arachnids. It's several shades of awesome.

Almost all my stories have been about anthropomorphic Australian animals, mainly because I get a kick out it. Interestingly, my first story for Vocal was set in a future Sydney that has been largely consumed by rising seas - and in the year or so since then, the entire coast has endured record rains, with serial floods occuring somewhere in the state for most of the year. Prescient or common sense?

They're still waiting for me to win a challenge, and I'm still waiting for them to enter one. Sadly, the year became busy and writing fell away, becoming a luxury I didn't have time for. This article has been sitting in draft form for nearly six months. The year is coming to an end, all the assessments are done, and time for writing is back along with, finally, reading.

Time to find out what happened to the lizard dragons.