DreamScope Theatre

© 2025 Puja Goyal

The teacher doesn’t get noticed right away and neither does the student pay attention. Most teachers are wrapped up in completing their curriculum, and there is a target that needs to be achieved. like. I need to finish this topic today, and its a race against those 40 mins.

She’s standing in front of a blackboard smudged with yesterday’s chalk, arms moving with slow as she describes the revolt of a young queen who rode into battle with her infant son strapped to her back. She is writing the main points and reading from a text book. The class forgets the ceiling fan’s hum. I remember as a child thinking during these sessions, oh I can always read it, its in the textbook.

But you really won’t find it in a textbook. In a text book its only words.

But if you’ve been in a classroom — really been in one — you’ll know: in that suspended moment between fact and feeling, between a child’s drifting attention and the teacher’s invitation to listen — not just with ears, but with heart. Is the moment when you can create a story that will keep the children engaged or leave the child with facts and points to remember.

Here’s what we often forget: Teachers are storytellers. The best kind. The kind who do it with no stage, no microphone, no viral post. Just voice, gesture, chalk, and heart. They can make the lesson a landmark, or leave it in the pages.

They carry whole civilisations in their lunch-stained satchels. They perform time travel between bells. They summon empathy with a whisper. But because it doesn’t come with a blue tick or standing ovation, we overlook it.

We forget that storytelling isn’t a bonus skill. It is the very foundation of human connection.

It is how we pass on memory, lessons and subjects, how we make ideas stick, how we remind one another that facts have faces and numbers have names.

And here’s where the second tragedy lies: no one trains them to do this. Not really. Not in B.Ed classrooms or teacher workshops. Articulation — that fine, subtle power of choosing the right word, pausing at the right beat, wrapping a concept in context — is treated like decoration. Not what it really is: the architecture of learning.

Let me tell you about Mr. Fernandes, a quiet science teacher in Goa. He once taught his students about gravity by telling the story of an apple orchard in Himachal, where a child once tried to catch a falling fruit and broke her wrist. That story traveled. Years later, a student who barely passed high school remembered the orchard, the wrist, the fall — and went on to become a physiotherapist. “I wanted to help people who fall,” she said.

That’s the mark of a story well told. Not just remembered. Transformed.

So if you’re a teacher reading this — or a trainer, a communicator, a speaker — here’s your gentle nudge: Don’t bury your story beneath the syllabus.

And one day — perhaps when you’re long retired — someone will sit across from their own child and say, “You know, my teacher once told me a story…”

And that story will still be alive.

Coming Soon: The Storytelling Classroom—a professional development workshop by DreamScope Theatre, designed for educators, facilitators, and communicators seeking to elevate their teaching through the art of storytelling.

Because the future of education begins with how we speak, listen, and connect.