Making a story with the Invisibles is truly a team effort. So remind your students to be on the lookout for those little insight moments – those moments to milk – that, in a second, can improve the quality of the movie being made in the minds of your students via a catch phrase.
There are moments in which something, some sentence quality in some scene, is somehow remarkable and special. Someone says some cute line that grabs the attention of the class. The phrase is more interesting and somehow funnier than anything else in the story. It’s a catch phrase.
Catch phrases associated with certain characters can improve the quality of the story experience. Some catch phrases last all year and are associated with certain invisible characters.
Let’s say that Jimmy’s character has just fallen into the pool and needs to be rescued. He cries out, “I can’t swim!” (Jimmy of course is acting out the role of his character.) We alertly recognize the line “I can’t swim!” as a catch phrase line that clearly calls out and commands the undivided attention of the class.
In French, it’s not “I can’t swim!” but “I don’t know to swim!” Should I (a) teach that rule to the kids or (b) just say it a lot in different interesting ways using the Director’s Cues? I should probably do (b), since that is the one that aligns with the research.
Recognizing such charged phrases as this one, we then milk it for full dramatic effect. We slow it down; we shine a spotlight on it. We use the Director’s Cues to ask the character to say it romantically, angrily, with surprise, to the left, up into the air, as a secret, to a certain student in class, whispered, while laughing, while bowing. (Refer to the Director’s Cues in Appendix J on p. 344 of ANATS.)
I still remember one catch phrase from a few years ago. It was a character in a story who said, “I don’t want to leave my room!” I must have said it at least twenty or thirty times or maybe a lot more in one class that day in different ways. I would just make eye contact with a student, the student would roll their eyes in expectation, and we would all try to keep from laughing when I said it in various director’s cues ways. It was just silly fun. But the language went deep.
Most catch phrases happen in Questioning Levels 5 and 6, because those are the levels of most intense questioning sequence dialogue.