40 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret AtwoodA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
For this activity, students will write a utopian counter to Atwood’s dystopia.
Contemplate an alternative future to the dystopia Atwood invents in her text. Whereas Atwood’s narrative is pessimistic, you will be solution-oriented for this writing assignment. Remember that Atwood wrote her poem in 2009, and even though the issues she raises continue, more people are now conscious of the threats posed by climate change.
The goal is to tell the story of how humans came together to reject the future Atwood envisions. Try to use some of the devices Atwood uses, including allusion, repetition, parallelism, imagery, and personification.
Differentiation Suggestion: One way to differentiate this writing assignment is to provide scaffolded sections for the text you expect students to write. A graphic organizer like the one below might aid in this endeavor. In this graphic organizer, the teacher provides the overarching theme for the objects—in this case, energy. The teacher provides the first two objects so that students understand the progression, but they must provide images that identify how the object evolves in the future. Each object should correspond to the value in the third column. The student must decide what values people held that led them to value the object in each age.
The goal is to get students to identify the needed value and object in the third age to eventually arrive at the fourth age, which would be global cooperation, equity, and environmental justice.
Teachers may want to use the fourth column to differentiate the assignment for individual students by choosing one literary device that will be a good focus for each student. In the example below, the student is asked to write a personified description of the object.
Once students have completed the graphic organizer, it might be beneficial if they write a summary that explains the progression they have created. The summary’s length could be individualized for each student.
Age - The First Age
Object
Value - Human beings, intoxicated by the benefits of fossil fuel energy, almost destroyed the Earth with greenhouse gases. They did this because they valued greed and convenience.
Personification - The smog from the power plants was always hungry and never stopped eating the air.
Age - The Second Age
Object
Value - Wealthy countries, having realized the dangers of climate change, began to shift to renewable energies, but the shift was slow and inequitable. This happened because people began to value ______?_____.
Personification - ?
Age - The Third Age
Object - ?
Value - ?
Personification - ?
Age - The Fourth Age
Object - ?
Value - ?
Personification - ?
By Margaret Atwood
Allegories of Modern Life
View Collection
Canadian Literature
View Collection
Challenging Authority
View Collection
Climate Change Reads
View Collection
Earth Day
View Collection
Fantasy & Science Fiction Books (High...
View Collection
Fantasy & Science Fiction Books...
View Collection
Nature Versus Nurture
View Collection
Power
View Collection
Required Reading Lists
View Collection
Science Fiction & Dystopian Fiction
View Collection
Science & Nature
View Collection
The Future
View Collection