Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What does it mean to be beautiful? What is the cost of beauty?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may have different beauty standards depending on their personal experiences, backgrounds, and the media they encounter; discussion of how widely these standards vary can help students tease out their arbitrariness. It may also be helpful to revisit the question of what beauty is after students have considered the lengths people will go to for “beauty”: Does that knowledge change how they understand beauty?

• “People’s Beautiful Issue: A look Back at the Covers”: This article showcases the covers of People magazine’s “The 50 Most Beautiful People In The World” issue, beginning with 1990 and ending in 2022.
• “This Is the Cost of Your Beauty Routine”: This New York Times article highlights one of the non-monetary “costs” of beauty standards: environmental damage.

2. What is science fiction? What is a utopia? What is a dystopia?

Teaching Suggestion: Students will likely have some familiarity with science fiction and perhaps with dystopian/utopian literature as well. However, they might not have considered what features actually define the genre.