'The Play's the Thing': A Study of Modern Drama (9th-12th grade)
"'The Play's the Thing': A Study of Modern Drama" is a high school literature class taught online. I am piloting the class with a small group of students this fall and will be introducing the class in Spring 2020. A tentative course description is below.
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This class takes its name from the scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet is planning on using a play, of all things, to expose murder and political skulduggery. In truth, the theater has been a noteworthy venue for social and political commentary since at least Sophocles. In this class, though, we will be focusing on modern theater – no Shakespeare, no Greek drama.
Students will read a play a week, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (staged in 1895) and concluding with Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (staged in 2012).
This is an asynchronous online class: students can submit assignments and discuss the week's readings at any time of day or night, allowing them to better meld classwork with their own academic and extracurricular schedules across time zones. This class is not self-paced, though: there are weekly deadlines with different assigned readings each week. Our "classroom" is a private Google Group.
In addition to reading a play each week, students are expected to engage in timely, thoughtful online discussion. Although this class does not involve any papers, each week students are expected to respond to short-answer questions related to the readings and to each other's ideas, giving students ample opportunity to put their thoughts into writing.
Because of the pace and content, this high school literature class is for avid readers ages 14 and up.
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This class takes its name from the scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet is planning on using a play, of all things, to expose murder and political skulduggery. In truth, the theater has been a noteworthy venue for social and political commentary since at least Sophocles. In this class, though, we will be focusing on modern theater – no Shakespeare, no Greek drama.
Students will read a play a week, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (staged in 1895) and concluding with Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (staged in 2012).
This is an asynchronous online class: students can submit assignments and discuss the week's readings at any time of day or night, allowing them to better meld classwork with their own academic and extracurricular schedules across time zones. This class is not self-paced, though: there are weekly deadlines with different assigned readings each week. Our "classroom" is a private Google Group.
In addition to reading a play each week, students are expected to engage in timely, thoughtful online discussion. Although this class does not involve any papers, each week students are expected to respond to short-answer questions related to the readings and to each other's ideas, giving students ample opportunity to put their thoughts into writing.
Because of the pace and content, this high school literature class is for avid readers ages 14 and up.