verb tenses

I really liked the way verb tenses were handled in the workshop over the last two days. When we asked a story, it was in the past tense. Today, when we read the stories, they were in the present tense. But, Von Ray, who was teaching, very adeptly circled the two verb tenses in the parallel stories we created. Who is her boyfriend? Who was her boyfriend? Is he her boyfriend now? No... he was her boyfriend, etc. It was perfectly coherent, comprehensible, and everything was still in context. We didn't have to learn any complex rules, and we didn't have to struggle through which was which.