Monday or Tuesday (A/B)
- Recap: What have we read thus far in The Importance of Being Earnest? Students will provide a short summary of Act 1 before we continue performing the play.
- Perform and Discuss: The Importance of Being Earnest Act 2 (pg. 56-67)
- Small Groups: Students will get into groups of no more than four and respond to the following prompt in their notebooks. Select one of the following lines from Algernon that are supposedly his “words of wisdom.” What exactly is he saying here? Respond to what he is saying (agree, disagree or qualify) and support your position with at least one specific example from life, literature, or film. (10 minutes)
o “Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the slightest instinct about when to die.”
o “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”
o “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.”
o “It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.”
- Discuss: Small group work
- Perform and Discuss: The Importance of Being Earnest Act 2 (pg. 67-77)
- Answer: What is wordplay? (Oscar Wilde is even mentioned in the dictionary entry!)
- Watch: Abbott & Costello, Who's on first.
- Closing Activity: Discuss “Who’s on First” skit and why wordplay is effective.
Wednesday or Thursday (A/B)
- Watch and Take Notes: More Quack! Vol. 8, Part 2
- Perform and Discuss: The Importance of Being Earnest Act 2 (pg. 77-90)
- Note-taking: What is chiasmus? Students will take some brief notes on chiasmus in their notebooks. We will explore a few different examples from various authors, philosophers, and scholars throughout time.
- The Chiasmus Quiz Show!
- Watch and Compare: The Importance of Being Earnest (Miramax, 2002) Act 2
o Act 2 – Approx. 35 min.
o End part way through DVD Ch. 10 (1:05:00)
- Closing Activity: As a class, we will discuss the changes that the director decided to make to scenery, lines, and the order of particular scenes and the students’ opinions about the changes.
- Homework: Review Act 2 and our discussions of both wordplay and chiasmus. You will have a quiz next class. A link to the full text and an audio version are available at the top right-hand corner of the blog.
Friday (A)
- Quiz: Act 2 of The Importance of Being Earnest
- Recap: What have we read thus far in The Importance of Being Earnest? Students will provide a short summary of Act 2 before we continue performing the play.
- Perform and Discuss: The Importance of Being Earnest Act 3 (pg. 91-101)
- Note-taking: What is the difference between farce, lampoon, and a “comedy of manners”? We will discuss what each of these terms mean, how they can be applied to modern films and television, and how they apply to The Importance of Being Earnest.
- Watch Example of Farce: “Delta Farce Trailer”
- Watch Example of Comedy of Manners: “Borat at Lunch downright funny!!!”
- Watch Example of Lampoon: “Yankees Building New Vacation Stadium In The Hamptons”
- Small Groups: Students will form groups of no more than four and come up with three examples of how The Importance of Being Earnest can fit into the categories of “farce,” “lampoon,” and “comedy of manners.” They will be required to refer to specific scenes to support their responses and be prepared to share with the class. We will briefly examine literary critic Richard Foster’s analysis (see below) as a class before students break into their groups.
- Discuss: We will discuss the small-group work on examples of farce, comedy of manners, and lampoon in The Importance of Being Earnest.
- Closing Activity: Review Quack! Volume 8, Part 2 by viewing the words a second time.
- Homework: Quack! Quiz next class. Be sure to study your words!
