Dancer in the Dark - the end + New text = Death Row

Hey,

today we first talked about Timothy Adams in a bit more details. You will need to find even more information about the prisoner to whom you are going to send a letter. Here is what we said:

Facts about Timothy Adams :

He has killed / murdered / shot his 19-month-old son with two bullets in the chest during a domestic dispute with his wife; that’s why he is on death row now. It’s an atrocious crime.

Then we finished talking about Dancer in the Dark and we corrected the worksheet that you had complete for last time. Here are the correct answers:

 Selma has decided* to pay the doctor in the afternoon, that’s why she can’t wait until the end of the month to get her money back.
She has recently been* fired from her job, that’s why she can’t save up more money.
She is blind and it would take her too much time, that’s why she decides not to count the money.

(* GRAMMAR: present perfect pour exprimer la conséquence dans le present)

At the beginning of the scene, what does Selma think about Bill’s intentions?
According to her, Bill doesn’t intend to shoot her because he is a good friend.

- Why does Bill shout?
Bill shouts so as to scare Selma and to alert his wife.

- Why is Bill lying about Selma to his wife?
Bill is lying in order not to give the money back and so as to pass for the victim.

At last, we found in the characters’ speech which is at the end of the worksheet some words or expressions proving that the tables are turned in that scene. Bill wants to appear as the victim. Here is what we found:

“Show me some mercy, please, and just…kill me?”
“If you want the money…you’re gonna have to kill me”
“Shoot me! Just shoot me! Shoot me…”
“Just stand up and pull the goddamn trigger!”

Finally we began to speak about our new text entitled "Death Row". Here is the information we have gathered so far about the place, the time, and the characters:

 
The scene takes place in 1990, in Mississippi. It deals with two characters, Sam and Adam.

Sam, who is seventy, is Adam’s grand-father but he doesn’t know it. He is on death row and he is desperate = he doesn’t care about living anymore.

Adam is twenty-six and he is a lawyer. He was born in Michigan (A death penalty free State). Because of his education, Adam may be against the capital punishment; he doesn’t support the death sentence.
We may suppose that as he is a lawyer he wanted to meet his grand-father and try to defend his case to save him from the death sentence.

Additional vocabulary:

pull the goddamn*** trigger
mercy
fired
atrocious
bullets
chest

HW: don't forget the letter you need to write + the vocabulary you need to learn + take advantage of the holidays to classify your copybooks properly -> I will check them when we go back to school in January (lesson, vocabulary lists, grammar points, phonetics, cultural aspects, ...).

More information about Texas death row inmates (Mickael Hall, Timothy Adams, Humerto Leal) here.