Y+The+Last+Man


 * Welcome to unit, "What if you were the last man/woman on earth?" Kind of a crazy idea, right? Being the last of your gender on the whole planet. This unit is going to get you thinking about concepts and ideas such as, survival, the importance of working with others, plagues and viruses, and some issues of gender politics.**

**What you're going to be reading for this unit is a graphic novel called, "Y: The Last Man" by Brian K. Vaughan.**



__**About Y: The Last Man**__ :

On July 17, 2002, something (referred to as a plague) simultaneously kills every living mammal possessing a Y chromosome — including embryos, fertilized eggs, and even sperm. The only exceptions appear to be New York residents Yorick Brown, a young amateur escape artist, and his male Capuchin monkey, Ampersand. Many females are killed from disasters caused by the men's deaths.

Society is plunged into chaos as infrastructures collapse, and the surviving women everywhere try to cope with the loss of the men, their survivor guilt, and the knowledge that - barring a rapid, major scientific breakthrough or other extraordinary happening - humanity is doomed to extinction.

Yorick leaves New York City for DC (view walking directions here) to reunite with his mother. In the process, he meets the new president of the United States, the former Secretary of Agriculture (since everyone above in the chain of command had died). The mysterious Agent 355 is commissioned by the president to help and protect Yorick and get him to Boston to meet with brilliant geneticist and cloning expert Dr. Allison Mann, despite Yorick's determination to find his girlfriend Beth who was in Australia when the plague struck. However, Congresswoman Brown's distrust for 355 and 355's agency leads her to reveal Yorick's existence to an Israeli commando nicknamed Alter. Alter, however, has different plans for Yorick, hoping to use his existence as leverage against any and all of Israel's enemies, which in the new state of the world seems to be every other country.

__**Unit Focus**__**:**

__Themes__:

This unit is designed to get you thinking about the importance of working with others to accomplish a goal. What happens when you are the last of your gender or race or kind on earth? How do you stay alive? What happens to all the systems that we depend on to live when half the people doing the job die off? How do we get what we need when we're alone?

The unit is also designed to think about: How does this relate to me and my life? Of course getting shot out into space has very little to do with any of our lives, but by focusing on the themes of the story and not only on the story details themselves, we can better connect our lives to those of the characters. Hopefully, maybe even learn a little something about ourselves along the way.

__Skills__:

This unit will focus on the following skills-
 * Background knowledge (activating schema)
 * Making connections (text to self, text to text, text to world)
 * Questioning (fat & skinny questions. What's the difference and how can we use them to go deeper?)
 * Making predictions and inferences (what do I think will happen next? What can I figure out the missing details based on clues given by the author?)
 * Understanding how an author uses story elements and lit. devices to tell a story (how can we identify them and use them ourselves?)
 * Summarizing a text (re-telling just the important details about a text)
 * Vocabulary (what is confusing? How do I find the definition to a word I don't know? How do I remember the definition?)
 * Paragraph and essay construction (how can I use a structure to clearly express my ideas about something?)

Click this link for your first assignment.