The Lottery

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 do you know about the horror genre? Make a list of horror stories that you have read or heard. Explain what makes these stories scary.

Teaching Suggestion: While “The Lottery” might not be a traditional horror story as students may think of them, the thematic motifs of The Cruelty of Friends and Family and Small Towns and Small Minds are certainly horrifying. This question helps students consider what makes a story scary so they are ready to identify similar elements in “The Lottery.” Alternatively, students can list horror movies. Try to push students beyond “jump scares” and have them consider how tension builds in a horror film.

• “The Psychology Behind Why We Love (or Hate) Horror” by Haiyang Yang and Kuangjie Zhang of the Harvard Business Review provides insights into what happens to the audience in a horror story. 
• “Cormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature” by Joe Fassler not only discusses a terrifying scene from The Road by Cormac McCarthy but also describes what makes it so horrifying. He interviews horror author Benjamin Percy about this scene and how he approached writing a horror novel.

2. What, if anything, do you know about the author Shirley Jackson? Are you familiar with any of her short stories or novels? Have you seen any movies based on her work?

Teaching Suggestion: This question offers an opportunity to discuss Shirley Jackson’s background with students. You can also extend the question by asking what other authors of horror fiction students are familiar with, and what movies they’ve seen based on their works (e.g., Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe).

• “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson” by Zoë Heller in The New Yorker connects the author’s personal life to her work.

Differentiation suggestion: Audio-visual learners may benefit from viewing this video from PeopleTV, which gives a 2-minute biography of Shirley Jackson.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the story.

What traditions do you have in your family, community, culture, or country? Do you like these traditions or not? What do you know about the origin of these traditions? How have they changed? If you can’t think of any traditions, make up a new tradition for a community you belong to and explain why you created it.

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt can help prepare students to question the blind adherence to traditions like the one in “The Lottery.”

• “Why do humans embrace rituals? Disease and danger may be at the root of the behaviors” by Tim Vernimmen of National Geographic explores various rituals while delving into why humans follow these traditions.

Differentiation Suggestion: To support various learning styles, the personal connection prompt can be completed as a piece of writing, a discussion, a drawing, or a skit.