Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Themes

Themes

I have been thinking about having two types of objectives. One would be like a lecture where I elaborated on a teaching point to try and head off any questions and the other would be a practical exercise that would require the student to demonstrate that they understood one or more of the objectives that had been covered.

This is pretty old hat to teaching professionals who have been at this a long time , however this practicum type of objective is something that Karen wanted me to think about as we were kicking the can for the Workshop down the road.

So I have taken a different approach on this one because it is an area that gives students trouble and it involves shades of meaning, specifically, what is the difference between a Dramatic Premise and a Theme? These are not two words with same meaning. They are different. If the Dramatic Premise (DP) is the keel of the story then the Themes are the ribs. The difference is that there can only be one DP but there can be multiple themes. Themes are much like subtopics and the DP is the Main Topic.

Rather than try and explain this in a definitional sense, I decided to write a small story synopsis and ask the students to see if they could pick these components out. When I finished there were some other ones I also decided to check on and see if they could identify these as well.

See if you can identify the DP, (A positive and a negative one), Themes, Central Character, Supporting Characters, Life Changing Event and the Three Crisis in the story.

REMEMBER! Identify a DP, using the template, “____leads to ____.”

Woe is Me

Once upon a time there was an overweight young girl named Lucy, who ate too much of all the wrong stuff. In Wall Mart one day she bought a book called Eating Responsibly. Every night she read this book for inspiration. Unfortunately inspiration wasn’t enough. Later that week, she heard two of her friends joking about her weight problem. She burst into tears and was sent to the School Nurse‘s office.

The Nurse gave her a pamphlet entitled Nutrition. Every night she studied it along with her inspirational book. Still she couldn’t break the cycle and found herself eating between meals. Her personal life was a mess and eating eased her anxiety. On top of everything else, her boyfriend, Frank, dumped her after class one day saying she was too fat. This trauma caused her severe anguish and suicidal thoughts, until she resolved to turn her life around.

She began by deciding she would only eat three nutritious meals a day. Her newly acquired self- discipline paid dividends and kept her from gaining any more weight. Her test came when she went to McDonalds with her friends. She was very proud of herself, only ordering a glass of water. As time went on there was good news and bad news. While her weight wasn’t increasing, neither was she shedding any of those excess pounds. Another setback happened when she called her EX pleading to take her back. He rebuffed the poor girl, telling her he might reconsider if she lost fifty (50) lbs
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“Woe is me!” she lamented.

A friend told her about Weight Watchers. She signed up and the program offered classes on Monday and Wednesday night. The first was “Setting up a Diet.” The second was “Counting Calories”. For the next six months she religiously attended those classes, learned the teaching points and took them to heart. At the end of six months, after losing sixty (60) pounds, she ran into Frank.

“Wow! What a knockout,” he said, “How about the movies Saturday night?”

“Sorry, I have other plans,” she replied
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Write the DP, (A positive and negative one), Themes, Central Character, Supporting Characters, Life Changing Event and the Three Crisis in the story.