Wit: Play Summary

Our life lessons are taught at a young age, to be exact they start at birth. Mimicking others as they perform certain task in their daily rituals. The play Wit focuses on a college professor that learns she has been diagnosed with advanced metastatic ovarian cancer and is ironically attended by a former student of hers. This student has already completed medical school and has completed his residency, but is furthering his journey with cancer by completing a fellowship with a profound doctor in his field of study. Throughout the duration of the play, we witness many occurrences go wrong during this patients’ treatment many of which are done by this fellow. This behavior can be explained through the teachings of Banduras social learning theory.

In Banduras studies, he concluded that these components are attention, retention, reproduction and motivation. Attention is when you give your undivided train of thought to something; maybe you viewed it on TV or witnessed it in person you could see it once or many times and as long as nothing disrupts you during you should begin to understand its concept. The next component to the learning theory is retention. Once you are able to retain the information that you have observed you can cycle this in your thought process without any longer having to view the action. Once you have both paid attention and retained this action you can then attempt to reproduce it. The reproduction stage is when you continuously repeat this action until you feel you have each part of it exact. Lastly is motivation, motivation is drawing up the courage to reproduce this new skill you’ve just learned. Having gone through these phases you are more than likely to show off whatever it was that you just witnessed (Bandura, 1977). An example of this would be learning a joke and reproducing it to your friends. If they laugh, then you are more than likely to tell the joke again. If they don’t laugh, then you might not repeat the joke out of

In her teachings of seventh-century poetry, specializing in the holy sonnets of John Donne she taught her students the value of research and what it stood for. Being one of the toughest professors in the institution Jason learned from her that research is everything and that stuck with him especially after practicing under Dr. Kelekian. Classes that didn’t require any study or research didn’t quite keep his interest. Jason mentioned in the play about a course he took in med school about bedside manner. He talks about how it’s a required course and also a colossal waste of time for researchers (Edson, 1999). Jason has built this idea that nothing but the research matters. In Tuesday’s with Morrie he was a professor that taught a good lesson but also taught life values. He gave just as much as he gathered and taught about the beauty of things. Although it doesn’t seem like a class that Jason would attend but maybe if he did take this class he would’ve learned that research isn’t only thing that matters. “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it” (Alborn, 1997). Jason is oblivious, unmindful, and has his head in the clouds but how can he be to blame his mentors have only cared about research. Bandura had an experiment with a bobo doll where the parents were seen by their children fighting the bobo doll. Since