For my capstone, I designed a series of posters that aimed to educate kids about animals in a playful manner and put these posters up at Smith Memorial Playhouse and Playground. I collaborated with a mentor who works at Smith, and ultimately created ten posters, each one focused on an animal that can often be spotted at Smith. For every poster, I chose a fun fact relating to that animal’s behavior or anatomy, and included a brief description of this characteristic. Then I created a play prompt relating to the characteristic. This prompt allows the signs to be both informative and engaging for the visitors. Throughout my research for this project and the work I did on it, I learned about the importance of play-related education for young children and was able to combine my appreciation for Smith’s unique play space and my childhood fascination with animals.

While reading The Road, we noticed that the man and boy often perch themselves on top of hills and other high-up places, and look out at the vastness of their post-apocalyptic world. As we tracked these moments, we started noticing patterns that explained this behavior.

As they look out from their resting places, McCarthy often describes the boy and man’s view as being extremely desolate. At one point the man “sat in the leaves at the top of the hill and looked into the blackness. Nothing to see. No wind.” (188) The pair are often being consumed by darkness. One way we see them battle this darkness is with fire, both physically and metaphorically.

Fire is a symbol McCarthy uses to represent perseverance and hope, and this is emphasized whenever the boy and man look out from a hill, since most of the time they are looking for a light. In one scene when the man is looking out from a hill in the night, the narration describes how, “In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light. Dim and shapeless in the murk.” The man is trying to find a sliver of life in his new bleak and deserted reality. We found a connection between this moment and a flashback of the man’s: “A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned.” (187). In this moment, before the apocalypse, the man physically had fire with him, whereas in the book, he was always looking for it.

After noticing these patterns, we decided to make a map following the boy and man through their journey with a specific focus on highlighting the parts where they rest atop hills or look out from high ground.

Map Key:

1) p 187: “He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned.” 2) p 9: “they went up to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out to the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp.” 3) p 19: “They walked out and sat on a bench and looked out over the valley where the land rolled away into the gritty fog.” (looking at a dam) 4) p 43-44: “When the bridge came in sight below them there was a tractor-trailer jackknifed sideways across it and wedged into the buckled iron railings. It was raining again and they stood there with the rain pattering softly on the tarp. Peering out from under the blue gloom beneath the plastic.” 5) p 81: “At the top of the hill he turned and studied the town. Darkness coming fast. Darkness and cold.” 6) p 104: “The site they picked was simply the highest ground they came to and it gave views north along the road and overlooking their backtrack.” (hiding from bad guys) 7) p 160: “We can stop now./On the hill?/We can get the cart down to those rocks and cover it with limbs./Is this a good place to stop?/Well, people don’t like to stop on hills. And we don’t like for people to stop./So it’s a good place for us./I think so./Because we’re smart.” 8) p 188: “He sat in the leaves at the top of the hill and looked into the blackness. Nothing to see. No wind. In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light. Dim and shapeless in the murk. Across a river or deep in the blackened quadrants of a burned city. In the morning sometimes he’d return with binoculars and glass the country for any sign of smoke but never saw any.” 9) p 193: Trying to find people: “If we can get across the creek we could go up on the bluffs there and watch the road.” 10) p 206: “They stood looking out through the tall windows at the darkening land.” 11) p 221: “At the end of the strand their way was blocked by a headland and they left the beach and took an old path up through the dunes and through the dead sea oats until they came out upon a low promontory. Below them a hook of land shrouded in the dark scud blowing down the shore and beyond that lying half over and awash the shape of a sailboat’s hull.” … “Let’s just watch for a while./ I’m cold./ I know. Let’s move down a little ways. Out of the wind. He sat holding the boy in front of him. The dead grass thrashed softly. Out there a gray desolation. The endless sea crawl.” 12) p 267: “He stood looking out. A steel dock half collapsed and submerged in the bay. The wheelhouses of sunken fishingboats standing out of the gray chop. Nothing moving out there. Anything that could move had long been blown away.” 13) p 276: “He scuffled together a pile of the bonecolored wood that lay along the shore and got a fire going and they sat in the dunes with the tarp over them and watched the cold rain coming in from the north. It fell harder, dimpling the sand. The fire steamed and the smoke swung in slow coils and the boy curled up under the pattering tarp and soon he was asleep.”

This drawing depicts Offred from the Commander’s perspective. It takes place in the Commander’s study on the night they go to Jezebel’s, and shows Offred seated across from the Commander at his desk, just after he has given her makeup.

When Offred is with the Commander, she often seems conscious of her face and facial expressions. During their first secret meeting, when he asks her to play Scrabble with him, she narrates, “I hold myself absolutely rigid. I keep my face unmoving” (p. 138). The night they go to Jezebel’s, when Offred is going into the Commander’s study, she says, “I knock on his door, hear his voice, adjust my face, go in” (p. 229). To Offred, facial expressions seem like a point of vulnerability, where her true emotions can be seen. She frequently adjusts her expressions, as if putting on a mask in an attempt to hide these feelings. This action is seen most often with the Commander, likely because of the extreme imbalance in their power dynamic. In my illustration, I depicted Offred’s face as completely blank, because it sometimes feels as though this blankness is what she aims to achieve. With a blank face, the Commander would not be able to discern any of her thoughts or feelings.

I also noticed the idea of faces as a point of vulnerability and intimacy during the first Ceremony after Offred and the Commander start meeting in secret. During this scene, Offred recounts, “He reached his hand up as if to touch my face; I moved my head to the side, to warn him away, hoping Serena Joy hadn’t noticed, and he withdrew his hand again, withdrew into himself and his single-minded journey” (p. 162). Here, the Commander’s movement to touch Offred’s face displays the shift in the pair’s relationship, the new connection that had previously been absent. But Offred pulls away. To her, their relationship is not one of intimacy. She has to be conscious of what this action could give away to Serena Joy, as she is more likely to be punished for it. In pulling away, she is again pulling back and hiding her face from the Commander.

In my illustration, on the Commander’s desk is the makeup that the Commander gives to Offred the night they go to Jezebel’s. This moment felt significant because we see that despite all of the hiding that Offred does around the Commander, he doesn’t really care about seeing her real face, or her real emotions. He only cares about her face looking the way he wants it, and that night, he wanted her in makeup. Although the makeup ended up helping Offred fit in at Jezebel’s, initially, it felt like the Commander was picking out Offred’s face for her that night, deciding on his own how he wanted her to look. This is one of many examples in The Handmaid’s Tale of Offred having other people decide what she should do, what she should think, and how she should act.

“It isn’t a story I’m telling.

It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along” (p. 39).

Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred frequently reminds us that this story is a “reconstruction”, that she is telling us what happened, and that that is all we get to know. This idea first comes up on page 39, when Offred is spiraling, saying she wishes she was telling a story and she wants someone to tell her story too. At this point in the text, I was so overwhelmed by this new society that the book takes place in, all of the characters, and the lack of backstory that I glossed over this section, not recognizing that Offred was essentially admitting to being an unreliable narrator.

The first time her narration really made me stop to question the story’s reliability was when she described Moira’s escape. In this section, Offred recounts events that she heard from Janine, who heard them from Aunt Lydia, who heard them from Aunt Elizabeth. This roundabout source is questionable to begin with, but Offred takes it one step further and adds details that she thinks probably happened: “I could kill you, you know, said Moira, when Aunt Elizabeth was safely stowed out of sight behind the furnace…Just remember I didn’t, if it ever comes to that. Aunt Lydia didn’t repeat any of this part to Janine, but I expect Moira said something like it” (p. 132). Offred has no source for this line of dialogue, only her familiarity with Moira and knowledge of events leading up to and following the alleged conversation. This made me wonder if Offred might have made up any other aspects of the story. We know that not everything she hears may be reliable, like the news, but could she have added in or taken out other important information from the narrative?

Just as the chapter on Moira’s escape casts doubt on the narration’s reliability, the very next chapter begins with the lines “This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction” (p. 134). Offred even tells us that “It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances…” (p. 134). Here, she is fully admitting that her words are not always reliable and true. She doesn’t seem to have ill intentions behind her questionable narration, but she does appear resigned to the fact that she will never achieve full honesty in her retellings. So we’re left with the knowledge that Offred’s memory poses a threat to her narration and creates this idea of the story being a “reconstruction”.

This frustrated me. I understood that Offred might not be able to recount details perfectly, especially when so much of the story takes place in the past, but it felt like she wasn’t even trying to be accurate. When describing her first time meeting up with the Commander in secret, Offred says, “I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands. In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have thought about that, at the time, but I didn’t. As I said, this is a reconstruction” (p. 140). This section particularly irritated me. Why would she mislead us in the first place, telling us false information, just to end with a “Sike! That was a lie”? But in looking for someone to blame, I felt like I had to focus on Atwood, not Offred. Why had Atwood made this narrative choice? The story is already fiction, so she could write it however she wanted. Why not just give us reliable scenes? Particularly in the first third of the book, it was so hard keeping up with this new and disturbing society that having to question everything Offred says on top of it all just felt insulting.

But as my understanding of Offred’s world and her character expanded, I realized that the unique narration is as important as the setting and the characters. We learn about Offred through the way she tells her story, and end up with a better understanding of her role and how she views herself. When Offred says that she wishes this was a story she was telling, we recognize her desperation and the hardships she’s been put through. And because she’s recounting events from the past, she’s already had time to analyze and draw messages from her experiences. For example, describing a lesson from Aunt Lydia, Offred says “[Men] only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good…Aunt Lydia did not actually say this, but it was implicit in everything she did say” (p. 144). In a way, Offred makes some things easier for the reader by delivering information directly, even if the exact facts are a bit off. So while her inaccuracies can be jarring at times, I think the unique narration style adds a layer of depth to the story that it might not have otherwise.

In my first post on animal cruelty in factory farms, I had learned about many issues of inhumane treatment in the factory farming industry. Majority of the animals raised for us to eat live painful and unnatural lives, packed together in uncomfortable spaces, stripped of natural behaviors and forced to grow extremely fast so that they can be slaughtered quicker. The livestock raised in this industry are not treated like the sentient beings that they are.

While many are unaware of the mistreatment that goes on in factory farms, there are still people and organizations working to battle this issue. Take Temple Grandin, for example; Grandin is known for her work towards the humane treatment of livestock, particularly cattle, and is one of the most respected experts on animal behavior. Organizations like Animal Equality launch corporate campaigns, educational programs, and undercover investigations to help document and end animal abuse in places like factory farms and slaughterhouses. There are also groups working to spread awareness about factory farming and similar issues, like the Organic Consumers Association. I would say that any and all work being done to advocate and act against animal cruelty in the industrial farming industry is beneficial to this issue.

It took me a while to decide on what to do for my agent of change. During my research, the ideal solution to change industrial farming that kept coming up was to influence it at a systematic level. There are lots of organizations working towards this goal, so I thought that maybe I could somehow donate to them. But the more I talked to family, friends, and peers about the issues in the factory farming industry, the more I realized how little people really know about it. So I changed my approach for the agent of change portion of this project. I wanted to educate members of my community about both the inhumane conditions that industrial livestock lives in, as well as what people can do about it. This second part was very important to me; a lot of times, after learning about an issue or injustice in our world, I’m left wondering what to do to actually create a change. And when it comes to factory farming, there are many ways to create a positive impact without giving up meat completely, like many people assume. I plan on putting my project in the advisory memo next week, as well as spreading it through other communities I am a part of.

Overall, I feel pretty good about my project. I think it is informative, and includes a lot of information on this topic. My presentation also encourages people to make changes when it comes to the animal products they eat in whatever ways they are able to. I just hope it is able to reach as many people as possible. If I could do this project again, I would want to add an extra part where I raised money to donate to one of the organizations I researched, like Animal Equality. Unfortunately, my time management skills this quarter were subpar, but think that I was still able to create a meaningful project.

When I first started my research on the issue of factory farming, I was flooded with information on how animals are mistreated, abused, and killed in this industry. On the surface, all I saw was the bad. But as I dove farther into this topic, I realized that there are a lot of people and organizations working towards a positive change. I think that bringing awareness to the atrocity that is the industrial farming system is a crucial step forward at this point. Whether that is through the media or even just through conversations, more people need to learn about where the food they eat comes from.

Annotated Bibliography

When you go out to dinner and order a hamburger, have you ever thought about the cow whose life was taken so that you could eat that meal? According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, approximately 9 billion animals are killed in factory farms every year, and the Sentience Institute estimates that 99% of animal products in the US come from factory farms. Many of those creatures live their entire lives in tiny crates, receiving little to no care and as much food as their bodies can hold. When their time is up, they’re sent to the slaughterhouse. Factory farms are essentially giant warehouses designed to produce and kill the maximum number of livestock they can, under controlled conditions and using intensive methods. Factory farming began in the mid 20th Century, to keep up with the increasing demand of meat. However, in the process of making that meat cheaper and more easily accessible, we have lost sight of the fact that animals are sentient beings — they want to avoid harm and stay alive. The factory farming industry is a cruel and inhumane place for animals.

The above image displays young chickens cramped into a large warehouse.

This project is all about educating myself and others on a topic I’m passionate about, and I chose to work with factory farms.

I have been a vegetarian for years. I chose to stop eating meat because of the inhumane cruelty that goes on in the meat production industry, as well as the climate and environmental issues. While the safety of the environment is very important to me, for this project I chose to focus more on the wellbeing of the animals.

My family has friends who own a small farm. Growing up, we visited a lot, and I saw firsthand what humane farming looked like. The thought that an animal could be raised any other way, especially in the harsh conditions of factory farms, was distressing. This issue became very important to me.

Warning: The following video contains graphic content which some people may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.

The cruel methods used in factory farms are like no other. In many of them, animals live in too-tight cages and too-packed pens. They receive minimal medical care if any, and according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s statistical service, roughly 10 percent of the livestock die even before reaching the slaughterhouse. No matter the animal, chances are that in most large factory farms, they will be mistreated. For example, chickens raised for meat are forced to grow so large that oftentimes, their legs can’t support them. To force them to eat and fatten faster, bright lights shine almost 24/7 so that they stay awake. The end of egg-laying hens’ beaks are cut or burned off to prevent them from pecking each other. Pigs are stuffed into crates so small that they can’t turn around. Because they are highly intelligent creatures, their stark surroundings can cause abnormal behaviors like chewing on their tails. This can lead to infection, so workers sometimes cut off the tail, or even a pig’s teeth, usually without painkillers. Sows are moved between their gestation stalls and farrowing crates to give birth, both of which are small and restricting. Cows raised for beef usually live in sparse pastures with many other cattle, typically without shelter. Practices like branding and castration often cause them pain and discomfort. Dairy cows have unnaturally high milk production rates, and they usually have most of their tail and horns removed without painkillers. These cows are artificially inseminated once a year so they keep producing milk, and once they give birth their calves are taken away from them, which causes extreme stress for both creatures. The female calves are the next dairy cows, and the male calves are used for veal. When dairy cows have passed prime, they are slaughtered for beef. Turkeys are forced to grow so big so fast that it can cause pain and other physical illnesses. Because of their disproportionate bodies, turkeys cannot physically mate anymore. They face year-round artificial insemination, even though turkeys are only meant to reproduce once a year. Many fish meant for food are raised in overcrowded farms. There are very few regulations on fish farming, because fish are often not seen as sentient beings even though they are. Because of this, fish usually aren’t stunned before they are killed. Some of the processes used to kill fish are bleeding them out, blunt force, suffocating them or freezing them.

This image shows pigs, each confined to a crate so small that they can’t turn around.

Going forward, I’d like to research more about the steps people and organizations are taking to end this inhumane treatment in the food industry. So far, my research has made me more and more determined to spread awareness and take action against factory farming. Learning about the harsh conditions and treatment these animals have to face has been hard, but it is an important issue that I think everyone should learn about. No animal deserves to live in a cramped cage their whole life, rarely going outside, and being forced to eat the most food they can contain. Moreover, while it may cost more money and take more work, every animal deserves the right to lead a happy and healthy life. If factory farms continue functioning the way they are currently, almost every animal product you eat will come from an animal that led a painful, harrowing, and traumatic life, right up until the end.

Here is my annotated bibliography.

School has always included a lot of social activity. Rock climbing, on the other hand, is more of a solo sport because, while I work with teammates, I only rely on myself when I’m on the wall.

When COVID hit, school transitioned to online, and I lost touch with a lot of my classmates. As an eighth grader in a K-8 school, my last real school day with the classmates I’d been with for nine years came and went without any of us realizing. Our big eighth grade trip to Costa Rica, which we’d all been looking forward to since kindergarten, got cancelled. While normally I would have celebrated graduation next to all of my classmates following meaningful traditions, I instead spent the day squished into my living room couch in front of a screen with only my family.

Climbing was almost the complete opposite. An activity I’d always done for myself became one of my only ways to see people face-to-face. Though my climbing gym shut down, I was able to spend time rock climbing outdoors safely with friends.

During the summer, I played digital games with my friends, went to zoom calls with my family, participated in remote camps, and even had an online summer institute for my new school. But through all of this, climbing was a constant, and a way to see people in-person.

I created my project on Adobe Spark. This layout makes it easy to weave pictures and text together. It controls the photos people look at so they see one at a time and it is clear what text goes with which photo. I used images I took during the pandemic, but I wrote this piece specifically for this submission.

Recently, it’s been easy to focus on only the bad. Yes, I missed out on the last three months I’d ever have at my school, my entire summer was upended, and I had to venture into a new high school remotely. But I was still able to do the sport I love and use that activity to see my friends. Through these hectic and overwhelming times, climbing has truly been my rock - no pun intended.