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. Many stories convey messages about the meaning, value, or purpose of life. They tell you how to think and behave if you want to live a good and happy life. But some stories promote unusual ideas that not everyone agrees with. What advice about life do you think everyone can agree with? Write a list of three to five ideas about life’s meaning, purpose, or value that you think any reader would agree with.

Teaching Suggestion and Helpful Links: As students share their ideas, challenge their thinking by showing them that any idea about life’s Meaning, value, or purpose can be disagreed with by someone. Ask them whether “majority rules” is a good way to determine if an idea is true or false, or whether there are times when a single person might be more right about something than the majority. Introduce one of the key ideas of Existentialism: that meaning, value, and purpose are determined by the individual.

• Logically Fallacious’s entry on appeals to common belief explaining why arguments based on the popularity of an idea are logically flawed.