Breakthrough Writer

Good Research Link for Baby Genius Essay: An Interview

Here's a good link, an interview with author Alissa Quart.

1A Study Guide for “The Baby Genius Edutainment Complex” by Alissa Quart 450

 

 

One. (Quiz question): What is the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex?

 

It has two meanings. First, it is the intricate network of entrepreneurial innovations designed to bilk as much money as possible from well-intentioned albeit grossly insecure parents.

 

The second meaning refers to the psychological condition known as a “complex” in which one has an exaggerated notion of one’s perceived strengths and/or weaknesses. Parents are fearful that their children will be left behind so they over-compensate with extreme, obsessive, and neurotic behavior.

 

Two. Lexicon

 

1. Bilk
2. prodigy
3. social Darwinism (fear of not being gifted or up to par; the fear of not being able to compete)
4. fad
5. pejorative
6. 2 meanings of “complex”; see 451
7. America’s psychotic delusion: 451 bottom and 452 top
8. Precocity
9. Entrepreneurial innovation
10. Impetus
11. Mozart effect 453 top
12. Debunked (Mozart effect not reproduced in further studies)
13. Narcissistic parenting; parents who live through their children; they raise their children to bring glory to themselves. See 459.
14. Quackery; see 454 prenatal BabyPlus System
15. Correlation confused with causality; see page 469 top

 

 

Three. What are the causes behind the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex?

 

1. Perverted sense of love by which I mean that we live in a society where we don’t feel loved unless we perform in some spectacular way. We have to have the wow factor or we will be dismissed as nobodies.
2. Parental narcissism, that is the need for parents to feed their vanity by living vicariously through their children’s accomplishments. In effect, these narcissistic parents use their children as trophies.
3. Fear that one’s child will be behind.
4. Ruthless ambition rooted in social Darwinism, which tells us we must see life essentially as a competition with winners and losers. And of course we want to be on the winning end.
5. Embracing the idea of “giftedness” as seen on page 455
6. The clever marketing Mozart effect of the early 1990s and the gullible parents who believe in it as if it were some kind of religion.
7. The parents’ preference of direct play over free play; see 459

 

 

 

Weak Thesis:

 

Alissa Quart’s essay is about parents who suffocate their children with “genius products.”

 

True, but too obvious and too broad. And not really a thesis at all but a fact.

 

Better Thesis:

 

While certainly Quart identifies extreme and neurotic behavior, her alarmist essay fails to see that the baby genius complex can be a healthy alternative to the infantile, dumbed-down entertainments that too many American children embrace. Contrary to the portrayal of the “complex” that Quart so robustly demonizes, the genius industry ____________________, ______________________, ____________________, and _________________________.

 

Better Thesis:

 

Poor McMahon is a misguided soul whose rigorous defense of the baby genius industry evidences his blind eye to ______________________, ________________________, __________________________, and _______________________________.

 

 

 

1A New Option for Essay #2: The Selling of "Authenticity"

In "The Big Organic" Michael Pollan makes a convincing case that the organic food industry is wrought with contradictions and is somewhat fraudulently marketing "authenticity" to its consumers.

In the same way, Starbucks is selling "authenticity" and the idea of a "counter culture," in a prefabricated, contrived manner. Both of course want to be perceived as "green." See the green images above.

In a comparison essay, analyze the manner in which Whole Foods and Starbucks are meeting the emotional needs of their consumers by providing a "lifestyle of authenticity.'

Recommended Research Links:

Selling a farm-fresh lifestyle in a box

Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex

The Starbucks LIfestyle

Preserving the Starbucks Counter Culture

1A Study Questions for “Big Organic” by Michael 174

1. How is food connected to meaning and identity? 174 P1; 175 P3
2. How does the marketing of food confuse shoppers? 175 P2
3. How did organic food become a marketing bonanza? 176 P2-4. It communicates a story or narrative that pulls our heartstrings as the narrative has all to do with the pastoral fantasy.
4. How is organic food a good guy vs. bad guy movie? 176 P3: The story of Supermarket Pastoral makes us feel more “authentic.” 177 top.
5. What contradiction must Whole Foods reconcile and how does it fail? 177 P2; 178 top; 178 P3 in which cows “never see a blade of grass.” And “free-range” is a fraud as well on 178 bottom. Also see 187 top paragraph in which organic method more and more resembles the industrial method.
6. What is “countercuisine”? 181 P3.
7. What does the organic food movement, especially the one connected with Whole Foods, have in common with Starbucks?
8. How was food radically compromised and degraded by the “scientific method”? 184 P2 and 3.
9. What is the opposite of “reductionist science”? 186 top. “Imitating whole natural systems.” See the evolution of organic farmer Gene Kahn whose business becomes more and more like the private model he once demonized: 187 P2-end of the page. And see what he says on bottom of 188.
10. Is there definitive proof that organic is superior to non-organic? See 188-190. Consider correlation over causality: People who seek healthy foods are living healthier lives in general. Produce may be healthier. See 192 bottom.
11. Is organic food better for the environment? See 193 and 194. It appears not much if at all.

 

1A McMahon Commentary on the Role of Shame in Eating Disorders

Both Francine Prose and Caroline Knapp address the connection between shame and eating disorders. 

Whether they are bingeing or purging, irrational eaters are in a most damnable condition--the state of having no self-control and being helpless and fearful in the face of overwhelming appetites. These inflamed irrational passions are so devastating that binge eaters must tiptoe through life fearing that at any moment they will fall into the abyss of their avarice. 

Most irrational eaters, especially the women described by Knapp, suffer shame for several reasons, including a sense of anxiety over the disparity of their new freedoms but limited power; their internalized "theme of vigilance and self-restraint" that often backfires and is counterbalanced by compulsive appetites that eradicate all the "gains" rendered from the meticulous adherence to eating rules; the state of hunger that "becomes divorced from the body" and becomes "loaded with alternative meanings" that have to do with unfulfilled emotional longings; and their knowledge that violating the slender female aesthetic will cause them to be held in tacit contempt by both men and women alike.  

This sense of shame and self-loathing becomes exacerbated when obesity is looked at through a religious prism which would have us condemn over-eaters as gluttons, sinners indulging their appetites, reprobates putting their desires before God, miscreants violating our space with their grotesque corpulence. 

Scapegoated by society for putting an undue strain on medical costs, despised for taking up our space, an unloved for not inciting the kind of desire that we associate with Kate-Moss slenderness, fat people represent the possibility of human failure and rejection that we fear in ourselves. Thus many of us, overreacting to our fears, develop a myriad of eating disorders so chronic that once ensnared in these irrational eating habits, it is nearly impossible for many of us to free ourselves from them and lead relatively normal lives. 

1A Lesson Plan for "Add Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem" (217)

One. Lexicon

1. Addiction to starvation 217 first paragraph

2. obsessive compulsive rituals second paragraph

3. anorexia 217 bottom and 218 top

4. silent protest 218 top

5. core cause of anorexia 218 middle and 221 second paragraph and 223 top paragraph and 225 middle paragraph

6. internalized caveats and rules 218 and 219 top 2 paragraphs and 221 middle paragraph

7. female math 220 top

8. dangerous form of hunger 222 top

9. cardinal violation of appetite 222 bottom

10. new female aesthetic 223 second and third paragraph; Marilyn Monroe trumped by Kate Moss

11. backlash against feminine strength 223 bottom and 224 top

12. visceral knee-jerk hostility to fat women and people in general 224 bottom and 225 top

13. buffet hostility 225 bottom and 226 top

14. buffet as metaphor or microcosm for Knapp's neurosis 230

1A Lesson Plan for "The Wages of Sin" (197) and "In Gorging, Truth" (204)

One. Lexicon

1. scapegoat

2. stigmatization; see 198

3. glutton's crime; see 199 top

4. gluttony as a "sin": 199

5. apotheosis

6. Ugly American: boldly ignorant, self-indulgent, infantile, pushy, presumptuous, self-centered, prone to excess

7. Voyeuristic

8. Exhibitionist

Two. Professional Eating Contests Are a Celebration of the American Dream

1. Mindless entertainment, the sign of a dumbed-down culture

2. The aesthetic that more is better; the More Factor; More for more's sake

3. Competition combined with entertainment

4. Domination fantasies evoking the Barbarian Within

5. Training and discipline combined with the excess of gluttony: 212

6. Voyeuristic Curiosity of the Carnival Act; 213 bottom

7. Narcissistic Exhibitionism

8. American optimism has vitality but it's a vitality forever tied to arrested adolescence; as a people, we never grow up; see 214 top

Three. Essay Options

In Prose’s stunning essay “The Wages of Sin” we see that obesity is looked at, even in our secular society, from a religious standpoint, complete with _______________, ________________________, _______________________, and __________________________.

See Writing #6 on page 203 in which you compare and contrast the ways Prose and Jason Fagone (204) address our cultural obsession with overeating. 5-page outline: Summarize Prose's essay in a page and do the same for Fagone. Then write a thesis: While Prose exposes our food obsession in terms of __________________, ____________________, and ___________________, Fagone takes an opposing angle by showing that our food obsession ________________________, _________________, and _________________. Your final 3 pages would flesh out these 6 mapping components.

What characteristics in the American culture that are described in Joseph Epstein's "The Perpetual Adolescent" explain the popularity of professional eating contests, chronicled in Fagone's "In Gorging, Truth."

1A Thesis Fill-In for Essay #2

In Prose’s stunning essay “The Wages of Sin” we see that obesity is looked at, even in our secular society, from a religious standpoint, complete with _______________, ________________________, _______________________, and __________________________.

Suggested Research Links:

When Eating Becomes Sin

Gluttony

Eating Disorders

1A Lesson Plan for “Return of the Madhouse” by Sasha Abramsky 419

One. Lexicon

1.    prison dilemma: extreme deprivation, designed to protect and punish, results in more craziness, which results in more danger: See page 420, top paragraph. And see 420, bottom paragraph
2.    Insane running asylum: See page 426, third paragraph.
3.    Prison paradox: prisoners are helpless and brutalized on one hand; on the other hand, powerful prisoners, heads of gangs, operate their crimes more efficiently in prison than they do outside of prison and often they boss around the prison guards.
4.    One-size-fits-all fallacy, procrustean: See page 421
5.    Economic waste: 422 top
6.    Counterargument structure: See 421, 422
7.    Chicken or the egg 423
8.    Recidivism:

Qualities of Successful Thesis:

1.    One sentence that establishes a demonstrable argument or purpose.
2.   Demonstrable means two things: writer has authentic emotional connection to material so he or she doesn’t run out of gas at the midway point. Secondly, it means writer can support the thesis with mapping statements.  Sample: The popularity of SUVs reveals a malignancy about American consumerism. First, SUV makers market their vehicles toward people who wish to dominate and bully on the road; second, SUV drivers feel entitled to cheap gas to quench their driving habits, at the expense of American dependency on oil from hostile countries; third, SUV drivers often recklessly multi-task as they live inside their little cockpit fantasy. Lipstick, DVD, Carl’s Jr. gluttony, cell phone, etc.
3.    A good thesis defies the obvious and possesses the So-What Factor: Sample: Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens are jerks. A better thesis: Society requires grotesque celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens, to be our punching bags. First, these vile celebrities refute the unhealthy notion that riches result in goodness; second, our communal hatred for them gives us a sense of shared values; third, our loathing for these miscreants gives us catharsis and we vent our class envy and middle class frustrations.
4.   A good thesis answers a compelling question. Why does no one care about Barry Bonds, even as he closes in on Hank Aaron’s record? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, how did the US government leave so many people to die in a country that is the richest and freest in the world? Why do women continue to outnumber men in college enrollment? Patience, fortitude, humility, pride, long-term vision. What is it?

Another compelling question: Why do Americans spend more and more money on diets and workout programs and personal trainers as they continue to getter fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter?: Americans grow obscenely fatter in the face of their diet obsessions because none of their “programs” address the root of their fatness. To the contrary, their dieting exacerbates their real problem, which is that they are blind, incorrigible consumers. The diet is just another consumer commodity that promises a “magic bullet.” The diet is, like their overeating, a form of obsessive neurosis and orality. Finally, the diet becomes a form of shared communal experience that gives them a feeble sense of belonging and assuages their loneliness. Their laziness compels them to seek magic bullets rather than change behavior and get educated. Their diet obsession intensifies their food obsession. Their diet becomes a feeble way to stave off their loneliness.

Weak thesis is too broad and obvious:

Katy Vine’s essay shows that addiction is growing in the Internet Age.

Katy Vine’s essay is about a bunch of computer nerds who get more stupid when they hang out together.

Improved thesis is more specific, demonstrable, and analytical

Katy Vine’s essay shows us the devious nature of addiction in the Internet Age, which renders addicts helpless because technology creeps up on us incrementally, it is ubiquitous and easy to access, it is associated with intelligence and success, and it creates a world that buffers us from “reality checks.” (Cause and effect essay)

Weak thesis statements for option 2:

“AWOL in America” is about how the military takes advantage of young, naïve people.

“AWOL in America is about how we should be more lenient with deserters.

Weak thesis statements for option 3

“Return of the Madhouse” is about the abuses in prison.
“Return of the Madhouse” makes us question the harsh conditions of the supermax.

A thesis that rejects Abramsky:

While Abramsky makes a solid and noble case for removing prison abuses, her lack of “real life” experience contributes to a rather naïve argument for a more humanitarian prison approach, which ignores the near impossibility of ferreting real psychos from fakers, compromises guard safety for prisoner freedoms, blue-printing an improved prison model for which there is an egregious lack of funds.

A thesis that supports Abramsky:

While Abramsky’s refutation of the supermax system reveals some serious flaws, her argument for reform must be embraced with great urgency for failure to do so will only endanger prison guards, exacerbate criminal behavior, set the stage for gross prison abuses and mismanagement, and in the long-term pose a greater threat to the security of our society.    

1A Lesson Plan for “AWOL in America: When Desertion Is the Only Option” by Kathy

   

One: Sample Thesis for Option 1

Take a bunch of socially dysfunctional computer nerds in desperate search of belonging, stick them in a yuppie techno-apartment flexing its steroidal broadband muscles and you’ve got Walden, a microcosm of the types of addictions Americans will face in the near future. These addictions will include a sick attachment to trumped-up, often noxious alter egos, the need to vent without boundaries, the preference of virtual worlds to the real world and all the chemicals the body requires to stay up in a ghoul-like existence where sleep is little more than an afterthought.

Two. Lexicon

1.    coercion
2.    naiveté
3.    conscientious objector : is an individual who, on religious, moral or ethical grounds, refuses to participate as a combatant in war
4.    AWOL
5.    Marginalized people: people with no education, resources, or support system who are apathetic, feeling no hope to improve their lives; consequently all their decisions are based on physical survival, nothing else.
6.    Army’s manpower crisis (360) demand exceeds supply
7.    Stop-loss orders (360) A commander must retain at least 85% of soldiers or he will have hell to pay.
8.    Principle of Scarcity: Whenever there is a short supply of something, we lower our standards, food, mates, military, etc.
9.    Docility, docile
10.    Acquiescence, acquiesce, acquiescent 
11.    Metamorphosis, drastic transformation for which there is often no return

Three. What 10 life lessons do we learn from this essay?

1.    Morons and madmen reign in high places. Whenever you join an institution—any institution—don’t expect smart, competent, morally savory people to be on top. Expect the contrary to be true. Here you have a military system so desperate for recruits that is it yanking clueless people off the streets to fight a war that by all accounts is a catastrophic failure doomed to drain our country of all its resources and yet nearly impossible for us to leave. The Administration doesn’t even provide proper helmets, properly working gas masks, Hum-Vees and armor and parents are sending safety equipment to their children, paying out of their pockets.

2.    Whenever there is a crisis, it is the clueless, helpless margins of society who get manipulated into be exploited for the uses of the higher-ups. Here we have the worse foreign policy decision every made in US history and smart people know not to get involved with it. So who gets into Iraq, mostly clueless people who don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re getting into. See page 361, top paragraph. See 361 bottom and 362 top.

3.    When privileged and powerful people exploit you for their purposes, not only do the powerful not appreciate you for saving their butts, they insult you by not giving you any compensation. See page 361. Hordes of soldiers are calling hotlines for untreated injuries, mental illness, PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, violence, suicide, etc. 60 Minutes had a story about a VA hospital with sewage leaking everywhere, rats, roaches.

4.    Whenever there’s a screw up, the people on top always defer the pain and punishment to the helpless underlings who don’t have a clue of what’s going on. Rather than admit their mistakes and pull out, the Administration saves face by continuing a war that results in the deaths of thousands of people, soldiers from working class America and innocent Iraqis whose casualties number in the hundreds of thousands.

5.    Bureaucrats do whatever they have to do to save their butts, usually at the expense of doing the right thing. See page 360, bottom paragraph

6.    Don’t ever make a decision based on powerful emotional longing because more often than not your decision will be irrational, misguided, and work against your best interests. Jeremiah was raised by a single mother and hungered for a father figure and a positive role model of healthy masculinity. This hunger was so powerful that it compelled him to join the military even though his personality is at odds with military culture and he’s miserable. See 363 and 364 top.

7.    Related to number 6, don’t ever make a decision without doing the extensive research first because if you screw up, no one is going to bail out. You need to rely on yourself to take care of your own self-interests and you had better protect your interests ferociously and thoroughly or a heavy price will be paid. People get married without knowing what the hell marriage entails other than some sentimental image they got from watching a Hugh Grant movie or listening to some crappy love song on the radio.

8.    Do be an effective killing machine in the military, you have to put on a warrior’s mask that doesn’t come off easily—if ever at all—when you rejoin civilian life. See page 364 in which the sergeant says he joined the Army because he enjoyed killing and being an effective killing machine. Also see 366. We see that being an effective soldier is all about tapping into that vein of violence that exists in all of us. It’s necessary for war, to be sure, but how do you turn it off?

9.    When you’re young, there is no shortage of people who are eager and willing to take advantage of your innocence and naiveté. See 362.

10.    There is usually a complete disconnect between an institution taking appropriate action and maintaining its official policy. See page 365 in which Jeremiah is clearly having a nervous breakdown and is not useless to the military but presents a danger to others and himself, but the bureaucracy must maintain policy; doing the right thing in this circumstance is irrelevant.

Option 2: See Writing #5 on page 367 in which you refute or defend Dobie’s harsh criticisms of the military’s policies. 5-page outline: In 1 page, summarize Dobie's essay. Then write a thesis: Dobie's argument is misguided because ________________, ___________________, __________________, and _____________________. In about 4 pages, flesh out your mapping components.
Study Questions

Sample Thesis (in defense of Dobie):

While historically desertion is an act of cowardice, the military’s current “stop-loss-order” policy is an act of even greater cowardice mired in moral bankruptcy and corruption, which includes ___________________, _____________________, _________________________, and ________________________________.