← The Green

The Stretched Page · ages 9-14

My Own Stretch

The idea: the first stretch was Danya's own, a story about a friend told a little better than it happened.

Read it

Who is in this book

Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.

The Honest Page

Which parts are true, stretched or made up — and what does nobody know?

True

  • In 1932 the psychologist Frederic Bartlett, at the University of Cambridge, published a book called Remembering. When people retold a story from memory, the parts that did not fit what they expected were left out or changed into more familiar things. Source
  • In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed 150 students a short film of a car crash. A week later, 16 of the 50 who had been asked how fast the cars were going when they 'smashed' said they had seen broken glass. Only 7 of the 50 asked about cars that 'hit' said so. There was no broken glass in the film. Source
  • Bartlett was born in 1886, so he was forty-six when Remembering came out. Loftus and Palmer published forty-two years after him.

Stretched

  • Beto dived into the deep end of the duck pond and swam Tí to the bank. What we simplified: In the story, Tí sat down in the shallow end and Beto waded in to his knees and picked him up. Danya changed waded to dived when he inked the page over.

Made up

  • The Green, the duck pond, the Friday Paper, its box and card, Danya's first story, the drying room and Claim, Trace and Weigh as people in it are made up. Bartlett, Loftus, Palmer and their studies are real.

Nobody knows

  • How much any of us has changed a story we have told many times. Nobody can check their own memory from the inside. That is why the pencil page is worth keeping.

Tell it back

Tell the story in your own words: who was there, what went wrong, and what they found out. Then the eighth page of Danya's two-column notebook, the one about himself goes on your belt.

Ring the hammer for someone

Pick this book for someone younger. The link carries only the book, and it will wait for them on the Green.

Across the Table → For the grown-up: the story in three lines, one question to ask, and one thing to do together.