"It's Baltimore, 1999. Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school senior, disappears after school one day. Six weeks later detectives arrest her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder. He says he's innocent - though he can't exactly remember what he was doing on that January afternoon. But someone can. A classmate at Woodlawn High School says she knows where Adnan was. The trouble is, she’s nowhere to be found."
Listen to the episode here. There are also interesting artifacts to explore there. The episode runs 52 minutes.
It is important to understand the difference between denotation and connotation of words, Look up the definition before you answer the following questions.
What does it mean when someone is “loosey-goosey” with details (8:09)? How is the denotation and connotation different from “lying” or “committing perjury”?
How is a “teeny weeny bag of marijuana” (6:58) different than a “small amount of drugs?”
What does the narrator mean when she says Adnan and his friends were “healthy American teenagers who were going to do what teenagers do, so long as they didn’t get caught” (10:00)?
The state portrays Adnan as “duplicitous.” Sarah and Saad phrase it differently: “We all grew up with that dual personality” that comes with being a “normal kid with immigrant parents” (10:00). What’s the difference in denotation? What’s the difference in connotation? Does this difference show up in your own life?
The narrator describes Adnan as having “big brown eyes, like a dairy cow” (19:45). What is the connotative meaning of this?
Look at your answers to the previous questions. What is the impact of the narrator’s choice of words? In other words, can you detect a bias in her description or a way that she wants the listener to react?
Here are some of the recurring words from this episode:
know (68) remember (49) think (30) talk (17) kill (16) probably (11) alibi (10) Try to make sentences using these important words picked out. Based on these words, can you predict a possible theme? Example: “Innocent people can’t tell people what they know when there’s nothing special to remember.”