Provide hands-on activities for practice and mastery. Check for understanding of concepts and skills by using relevant standard materials, i.e. worksheets, text problems, workbooks, teacher prepared exercises, etc.
Theme assignments.
Objective: To analyze how the disregard of usual play conventions and genre format helps convey the characterization and involve the audience to a greater extent.
Activity: 1. Students take each convention in the play, trace its use through the drama, and show how Bolt's manipulation of it did or did not work with a focus on his manipulation of character.
2. Traditional theme assignment to focus on structure and function, comparing these to the play Hamlet.
3. Students will write a theme based on an article in which Albert Speer asserts that the Nazis were just following orders. They must relate this stance to the play and the idea of individual choices. In addition, they will research one real-life incident in which someone took a stand or did not (e.g., Kitty Genovese case in NY or the mass rape of the woman in the New Bedford, Massachusetts bar).
