Project Hail Mary

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 qualities, traits, or instincts are most helpful in ensuring a successful outcome in a crisis? Consider emergencies, conflicts, natural disasters, and other situations in which one’s well-being or survival is threatened. Provide a rationale for each quality, trait, or instinct you list.

Teaching Suggestion: Protagonist Ryland Grace offers readers a valuable chance to analyze depth and complexity in character development through direct and indirect methods. Discussion in the pre-reading stage of traits and qualities necessary in survival situations will benefit students as they evaluate Grace’s decisions throughout the novel and will help them in analyzing his character arc. To determine what qualities, traits, and instincts are consistent with people who survive in crisis scenarios, students may pull ideas from books news coverage, or other media. After listing their ideas independently, students might form small groups to determine the 3-5 most crucial traits or qualities and provide justification for the choices.

It might be helpful to specify the difference between survival skills like the ones in the linked article and the kinds of personal qualities intended in this response.