Oh, Drama

Well. This was even better than fingerpainting.

Today was a sort of mystery roleplay exercise thing. I'll skip the lead up stuff and jump right in. We were given a fragment:

On June 27th, the body of Tessie Hutchinson was found by the road that runs from the village to Moose Creek, as it passes the farm of Mr. Summers and is on the route Mr. Graves, the postman, takes daily. Tessie was the wife of Bill and mother of Nancy and Davy. No one spoke of her death. No gravestone marks her burial place.

The first thing he does is trick us into a close reading by asking what we notice about the story. What are the facts, what can be inferred, ect. Then we're given some time to come up with questions we would like to ask. 15 of them are written on the board. We spent a lot of time on questions this session and learning how to craft some good ones, but we haven't gotten to the fun part yet. The fun part comes soon after; we've broken into groups, and we need to identify what character can tell us the most about what happened. We can pull them from the story, or make some up (within reason).

In addition to the ones from the story, we also add in Tessie's best friend Jon-Clement (who is apparently female), the sheriff, and the local drunk and founder of Wendy's, Dave Thomas (I'm not sure how they got this one o_O). As a class, we pick out the five characters that we think will be key in unraveling the mystery. These characters will be roleplayed. So we get;

The husband, Bill
Mr. Summers, whose property the body was found near (and who I would roleplay)
The best friend
The sheriff
The local drunk/ fast food tycoon

So basically we all end up in a very loose courtroom drama. Each of us that volunteered to roleplay had an interregation session, showed where we were in relation to the body on the night of the 27th, where we were at the funeral and so forth. The story had no official ending, so we were really free to make up whatever the hell we wanted and have fun with our Q&A sessions. The guy playing the husband was hilarious:

Guy 1: How long were you and your wife married before she died?
Husband: I dunno - a few months?
Guy 1: Do you argue a lot?
Husband: Not anymore.

Guy 2: Did you take out any life insurance policies before your wife died?
Husband: Yes.
Guy 2: How much?
Husband: A lot.

The guy playing the town drunk got some good lines as well, though my favorite came when everyone did a roleplay as a townsperson showing where they were during the funeral. Minnick had us all freeze in place and had everyone say a line about what they were thinking/ doing/ what question they had as the body was lowered into the ground. A few people apparently decided to go to Wendy's:

Dave Thomas: Would you like fries with that?

And after all that brouhaha, everyone got back into groups and wrote an ending to the story based on what we found out.

Where were these lessons when I was in school? D= This was fun. I could see this sort of thing being stretched out into a day long lesson plan. Even though it was on the fly, it felt so much more natural than writing and performing a skit for class. My ribs were aching by the time we were out of there it was so much fun. I've still got a bit of a stitch in my side.

I'm starting to think Minnick and his classes need their own tag here as often as I talk about them.