Uglies

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. Brainstorming a list of science fiction examples as a class could be a useful jumping off point; once students have come up with a decently sized list, they can begin looking for underlying commonalities.

• Science Fiction on SuperSummary: Definition and discussion of the science fiction genre, including its history and subgenres
• Dystopia on SuperSummary: Definition and discussion of dystopian literature that includes examples and comparison to utopian literature

Short Activity

Answer the following prompts with “Agree” or “Disagree.” When everyone has completed the activity, discuss your answers in small groups or with the whole class.

• Being beautiful is more important than being yourself.
• Beautiful people get more opportunities.
• The government has a right to tell people what to do.
• It is important to sacrifice things if it benefits the community.
• Technology can solve all our problems.

Teaching Suggestion: This activity gives students a chance to consider their preconceived notions about beauty, knowledge, and community before beginning the novel. Debating their answers with peers also provides them with the opportunity to make connections between their views and those of others.

Personal Connection Prompt

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

Respond to one of the two prompts:

Who is the person you have been friends with the longest? What do you do when you are together? Do you have any plans for the future?

Or:

Have you ever made an unexpected friend? Who was that person and where did you meet them? Are you still friends to this day?

Teaching Suggestion: Uglies often grapples with the difficulty of friendships, especially when old relationships are at odds with new ones; contextualizing Tally’s situation in terms of their own relationships can help students better empathize with her predicament. Since friends are part of one’s community, these prompts also give students the opportunity to think about the theme of Individuality Versus Community.