The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

In the essays in this collection, Green’s tone shifts several times. How many distinct tones can you identify in these essays? What would you call these tones? How do these tones and the shifting among them support the larger meaning of the collection?

Teaching Suggestion: If your students are less familiar with the concept of tone, you might read a brief passage together and then talk about how to identify its tone. Then, you can model how you would think through the issue of how that tone supports meaning. As an intermediate step in the gradual release of responsibility, you might next offer time for students to discuss an essay with a partner or small group to reason through possible tone labels and tone’s relationship to meaning. You can reduce the amount of time required for this assignment by asking students to focus on a smaller number of essays or by allowing them to work on the entire prompt with a partner or small group.

Differentiation Suggestion: Answering this question requires mastery of a large amount of text; English learners and students with dyslexia or attentional or executive function issues may struggle to sift through enough text to answer effectively.