Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Coming to WDC

Coming to WDC and New Horizon’s Academy (NHA)

A family of starlings built a nest on the eaves above our deck. There is a lot of traffic in birds swooping and darting this morning. Maybe the eggs hatched or the cats are walking about. We like the starlings despite the fact they are messy….they eat mosquitoes and the barnyard is amazingly free of them.

I came to WDC from a site called Fan Story. The management was a group that was not particularly fond of men and encouraged stories of bad guys getting their just deserts; particularly abusive or perverted ones. The climate just was not conducive to males, and I wonder now why I stayed as long as I did. I guess it was because you meet some pretty cool people regardless of where you go. I had a female friend who was outspoken and when she got booted I came to WDC. WDC is still heavily female dominated but it is more tolerant of males and man bashing is certainly not the norm. As a matter of fact there are activities here that would “freak out” the Fan Story community.

I have always enjoyed writing even though it has been a bit of a struggle over the years with my dyslexia issue. It is a problem I have always had but as I write more I feel more and more in control of my work. Practice makes perfect…but I am still a long way from that.

After about a year here, I saw a request for Writing Instructors from New Horizon’s Academy. In the Military I taught basic writing skills like writing memos and doing Staff Studies. What the heck I thought, maybe I can do some more of that. What I discovered is that they were looking for a Drama Instructor and asked if I would consider the job.

At the very bottom of my list of writing experiences I had listed Drama and “don’t you know…” that is the one they zeroed in on. I was surprised in a sense because WDC is not exactly a Mecca for stage and screen plays.

(Wow! I just hit a wrong key on my word processor and half this blog flashed in a highlight and vanished… thank goodness that on my word processor, under the edit function is the “Undo Typing Option. This happens to me frequently working in the WDC editor and in such instances there is no recovery. Thus I have learned to write everything on my Microsoft Word Processor and copy and paste it to applications on WDC.)

After retiring from the Military I belonged to the Playwrights center in Minneapolis (It was a long drive) and wrote some full length and one act plays. A couple of them were given readings and that was a good experience. (One of them, Andromache, is in my port.) However, it hardly qualified me to be an instructor… However the staff at NHA took exception and asked me to develop a course. I did and that’s how the One Act Play Course was born.

Last semester I got to test it and for a host of reasons (Personal problems), that appeared unrelated to the course, four of the students dropped out in the very beginning. Two, however, stuck it out and I was amazed at how these persistent students, with vastly different skill backgrounds, improved.

New Horizon’s Academy sets the bar pretty high in requirements for course development. There are course pages to write and lesson plans and in my case a mini library of reference aids. All this requires an understanding in ML Write and you get pretty familiar with this print utility at WDC that enhances the text and graphics of your work. All the effort paid off and the aids and handouts answered a lot of questions; particularly the examples that were provided for the student’s guidance. I can’t wait for this semester (quarter) to get started and see what this class comes up with.