The Future – Senior English

Essential Questions:

--What shapes our (personal & societal) views of the future?

--What kind of place will the future be?

--Do we have any control over the future?

Standards:

Students will be critical readers, listeners, and viewers of a variety of sources and texts, including fiction and nonfiction books, print and nonprint media, and live speakers.

Students will read a wide variety of literature from many periods and genres to build an understanding of the dimensions of human experience.
Students will employ a wide variety of strategies as they write and speak, to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
Students will conduct research by generating ideas and questions and posing problems. They will gather, evaluate, synthesize, communicate, and reference information and data from a variety of sources.
Students will consistently participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative and critical members of literacy communities.

Objectives:

Students will independently and critically read a novel about the future.
Students will understand and critique various views of the future.
Students will integrate these views (see #1 and #2 above) in the form of a creative project to effectively communicate their own views of the future.

Activities:

Read a novel based in the future and complete an online Wiki page as well as an online journal on the reading.
Participate in the Long Bets Challenge by collaborating with a classmate and posting a ‘long bet” on the online message board set up for that purpose.
Plan, create, revise, produce, and present a creative project which presents the student’s view of the future
Write a critique of the view of the future presented in the project (above), including a comparison to other published views of the future.

Materials:

Sets of novels, including Anthem, 1984, Brave New World, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Robot, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451.
Online resources including www.longnow.org and longbets.org
List of formats for creative projects (handouts)

Assessment: