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LYNN CHIPLEY, Broker/Owner Cell 306.421.0100
1339 Fourth St., Estevan, SK S4A 0X1 Office 306.634.1020 Fax 306.634.0088 lynn.chipley@c21.ca www.century21.ca/lynn.chipley Each office is independently owned and operated.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Local students present speeches to South East Cornerstone board
Corey Atkinson New Material Only
Haven’t I seen this plot before? One website that I always get way too much enjoyment out of researching examines the ideas behind some of the most popular works of fiction and takes them apart. The site tvtropes.org is a wormhole you can get easily sucked into. Hitting the ‘Random Trope’ button is a sure way to kill an afternoon. “Cursed with Awesome” is a good place to start. If your work of fiction has a character with special powers saying any variation of the phrase “I just want to be normal”, you’ll need to get that character in line. Everyone with special powers, from Spider-Man to Arrow to Supergirl to the Big Bang Theory’s Leonard to Buffy the Vampire Slayer all has long story arcs about them just wanting to be normal. You want to yell through your television that “You guys wouldn’t have a show if you were normal because normal people like us don’t sell DVDs and action figures!” And Batman? Please. I consider myself a fan of Batman but my goodness for an ultra rich guy with his own assortment of vehicles and toys, he sure does complain about wanting revenge a lot. It’s the same in any movie. And the Clark Kent character on Smallville is worse. My goodness, dude, you’re Superman. Stop whining about it. TV Tropes presents the idea that everything you’ve seen on television, theatre, films, comic books and other fiction has already been presented before, to the point where just about every idea you’ve thought of as a brilliant and original thing is suddenly reduced to a plot used countless times in other forms of entertainment. Sometimes it’s a mildly depressing look at our entertainment but it’s also important to realize that maybe that brilliant idea isn’t so brilliant after all. Once you recognize tropes, you can’t unsee them. If you see someone coughing blood into a handkerchief and telling you they’re alright, you can be sure that they’ll be dead in less than 10 minutes of show time. If you see a villain making a “Brand New Era” type of speech broadcast over all public forms of communication, you know things are very soon going to go horribly wrong by the end. Cat people, for example, are all over science fiction, from Babylon 5, to the many different kinds of cat people on Doctor Who, Grimm and Red Dwarf. It’s rare to have an overweight person in animated television or live action TV and movies who isn’t portrayed as a blundering idiot. From Fred Flintstone of yesteryear to Hurley from Lost, Chumlee from (the partly fictional) Pawn Stars, Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies, Homer Simpson, Cleveland Jr. and Peter Griffin from Family Guy and Cartman on South Park, being overweight and a complete blundering fool is an easy and all-too common way for comic relief. Have a racist grandparent in your work of fiction? Sadly it’s been done before. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall had one, Randall’s grandmother in Clerk’s II, an unknown woman in Blazing Saddles, there are a couple of them each in Parks and Recreation and Community (I always got those shows confused and thought for years they were the same show), and of course, Sophia Petrillo in the Golden Girls (sometimes). Finally, one of my favourite frequently used plotlines is having a smart person play chess, sometimes a few games at the same time, to show the audience exactly how smart they are. Professor X and Magneto from the X-Men film series play chess, R2D2 and Chewbacca play a Star Wars-y version of it and Spock plays a three dimensional version of it on Star Trek IV: A Voyage Home and a few episodes of the original TV series. That 3D chess is also used in Star Trek: The Next Generation and 3D Go is used in Andromeda. The chess has even crossed over into other fictional universes. Sheldon and Leonard in The Big Bang Theory played it, for goodness sake. The Avengers play the regular version of chess in their 1998 movie, it’s in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, it’s in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, one of Alan Turing’s team on The Imitation Game is a chess champion and HAL plays it in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically, if your ultragenius character doesn’t have a solid background in chess it’s apparently like a big red flag that they might not be that smart. Before unleashing your work of creative fiction on the world, it might be worth going through these commonly used plots or characters to see exactly how you can make it better, or, at least different.
The board members for the South East Cornerstone Public School Division were provided with a one-hour presentation of facts and examples of student achievement successes when they met in the school division’s conference room in Weyburn on Oct. 10. Lynn Little, director of education for the division, provided the first portion of the presentation that also included the facts and figures. Rocanville School educators Nathan Bromm and Michael Gowan then took over, but only after a trio of students provided proof of the high level outputs by reading samples of their personal narrative essays they had composed last school year as Grade 6 and 7 students. The student presentations came from two Westview School students, Kiarra Biette and Alex Spencer, and Grace Pederson from Lyndale School in Oungre. Pederson is now attending the Weyburn Comprehensive School. Their stories dealt with a pet dog (Alex), a memorable letter (Kiarra) and distant memories (Grace). It was pointed out that when the division embraced the Turning Points program that centres on character awareness, resilience and literacy among students through written expression, the results were positive. The program kicks in at the Grade 6 level and continues through to Grade 12.It empowers students to reflect upon their values, and the opportunity to expand literary skills, Little said.
From left, Alex Spencer and Kiarra Biette from Westview School and Grace Pederson from Lyndale School in Oungre presented to the South East Cornerstone Public School Division’s board on Wednesday. Photo by Greg Nikkel of the Weyburn Review The two Rocanville educators explained how the lessons were delivered and essays allocated. Bromm and Gowan noted how the judging was carried out and how the program is expanding within the division. They said the 270 students at the school had answered the challenge and 18 teachers got very involved in the process in its first year. Little spoke of how Cornerstone weighed in above average on 18 of 20 marked provincial programs in various subjects, not only in writing and for classrooms, but also on drama, debate and music stages and on athletic fields. She revealed the above average success rate of Cornerstone students in the Grade 1-3 read-
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Members of the Estevan Fire Rescue Service dealt with a train collision and a garage fire last week. The fire department, as well as members of the Estevan Police Service and the Estevan Emergency Medical Services, were called to a collision between a train and a semi-trailer unit at the Kensington Avenue south train crossing on Oct. 10. A southbound semi-trailer unit had been struck by the train as it was passing through the crossing. Part of the load of fiberglass pipe from the trailer fell and struck a northbound pickup that was stopped for the train, causing some damage to the pickup truck. “Thank goodness, to everybody’s surprise, it was actually a heck of a lot better than what the initial reports were, as there were no injuries sustained as a result of the collision,” said
Fire Chief Dale Feser. As they were wrapping up the call, firefighters were alerted to another collision on Viewfield Road northwest of Hitchcock, between a semitrailer unit and a sports utility vehicle (SUV). The SUV sustained substantial damage, but there were only very minor injuries. The scene was eventually turned over to the RCMP for investigation. Firefighters were called to a local restaurant in the early morning of Oct. 12. Crews arrived to find no visible smoke or flame from the exterior of the building, but there was a smell coming from the manager’s office. Feser suspects the cause might have been faulty computer or electrical equipment. Three calls came in on Oct. 13. The first was a fire in a detached garage in Benson.
When firefighters arrived, the garage was fully engulfed and the fire was threatening the nearby home. “Crews did arrive on scene and established exposure protection control so that there would be no extension of fire to the home itself, which we were successful in, and then contained and supressed the fire in the garage,” said Feser. The garage was a total loss. The fire department was assisted by the Stoughton Fire Department for water supply in this particular incident. The cause is still under investigation, but Feser said it’s not believed to be suspicious. As firefighters were returning to the city, they were called to a report of a power pole arcing and causing a fire adjacent to the truck bypass east of the city. After a search of the area, including the sub-
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station, they could not detect a fire. Later in the afternoon, they were dispatched to a restaurant in southeast Estevan for a fire caused by a rooftop heating and air conditioning unit. The unit sustained an electric fire, so crews went in, isolated the power, suppressed the fire and ensured no other issues were going to occur. The scene was turned back over to the property managers so they could contact an electrician and fix the electrical issue that was the cause. The fire department also participated in activities during Fire Prevention Week, including its smoke alarm program and the Emergency Services Night at the Power Dodge Estevan Bruins game on Oct. 10. This week’s edition of Southeast Lifestyles will have more on Fire Prevention Week.
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provided examples of student achievement at high school levels, taken from their own school’s registered students and how both students and teachers responded to various challenges by creating a positive environment for all that allowed the student to ultimately reach their targeted goals. The duo, along with Little, fielded a number of questions from the trustees following the presentation. The questions generally dealt with attendances, communications and program offerings. The Rocanville team as well as the student presenters were thanked by vice-chairwoman Carol Flynn who was chairing the meeting. Chairwoman Audrey Trombley was absent due to family reasons.
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ing levels, and a repeat of those success rates from Grades 4-8. Writing skills of Cornerstone students at the Grade 9 level, as an example, were measured independently at over 73 per cent, compared with the provincial average of just under 68 per cent. She also pointed out the success rate of the early years’ evaluation program that helps ensure more success once a student enters kindergarten. She noted the marked improvements from the fall to spring assessments, indicating how well the program works with Cornerstone’s professional teams of educators, consultants, speech pathologists and English as Another Language instructors, among others. Bromm and Gowan
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