This past week, our ninth grade spearheaded Take Back Your Imagination Week. In an effort to “unplug” and reclaim the joys of the three R’s: reading, writing and real (not virtual) relationships, they created and signed a contract: no iPods, no texting, no email, no Facebook, no computer games, no television, no DVDs, no visits to the movie theater. In other words, unplug cold turkey. And to lessen the pain, this innovative group planned game nights and international dance lessons, hosted a barbeque and attended a philosophy discussion. Most importantly they read.

As summer approaches, parents have an opportunity to provide healthy supplements to offset their children’s highly saturated media diet: great stories.

Why stories? Great stories appeal to the whole person. They meet St. Augustine’s criteria for good teaching and good preaching--they delight the appetite, they instruct the mind and they move the heart. For St. Augustine, it was the New Testament, for Alexander the Great it was Homer’s “Iliad’’ and ‘‘Odyssey.” Abraham Lincoln read and reread “Macbeth” to engrave upon his mind the dangers of unbridled ambition.

Stories invite us to discover the kind of person we ought to become and the kind of person we ought not to become. Good novelists are not only good storytellers, but also great psychological portrait painters. Their characters give readers access to the private, highly-personalized world of moral motivation. Fictional life struggles can awaken the moral imagination of young readers and help them to become more adept at ethical reflection.

Whenever I taught “The Great Gatsby,” I noticed the sway its characters held over my students. They were troubled by Jordan’s reputation for lying, Tom Buchanan’s arrogance, and Daisy’s total preoccupation with herself. They had mixed feelings toward Gatsby, trying to decide if he was naive and misguided or if he was dangerously obsessed and borderline insane. Perhaps the most striking evidence of this influence occurred at the end of one my classes. Two girls were packing their books and discussing weekend plans, when one of them blurted indignantly, “You are such a Daisy Buchanan.” Whether or not the details of the conversation warranted such a slight I’ll never know. What I do know is that the young woman accused felt the blow with full force. She was reduced to tears, and a bitter quarrel ensued. It was the first time I had witnessed the invocation of a literary character nearly give rise to a fist fight.

Good stories help us to re-examine our perspective. In the novel “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s fictional account of his own experiences in Vietnam, the narrator catalogs what soldiers carry with them: love letters and dog tags, C-Rations, ammunition, and even a dead man’s thumb. What they carry with them -- both externally and internally -- weighs on them and reflects in some way how they define themselves.