The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
Other Website: http://herculodge.typepad.com/
More Essay Strategies for Deleting Social Media Accounts Essay Due March 30, 2020
Writing Question: Using Your Homework to Support Your Essay's Thesis
Can I as a student use my homework assignments for my introduction and/or body paragraphs of my essay?
The answer is yes.
Writing Strategy:
Introduction Paragraph 1:
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Argue that Jaron Lanier has made a persuasive case that the existence of "BUMMER" in social media compels us to at the very least delete our social media use by 90% or outright eliminate it.
Paragraph 3:
Paragraph 3 based on your first Lanier homework assignment: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
Paragraph 4:
Paragraph 4 based on your second homework assignment: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves. Lanier is referring to the "A Factor."
Paragraph 5: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 6: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Three Sample Thesis Statements That Address the Argument That We Must Delete Our Social Media Accounts
Overview of the Essay Topic
Essay Assignment
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) claim that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
Sample Thesis #1
Jaron Lanier makes the persuasive case that social media must be deleted because it is a portable crack machine that enslaves us to addiction, compromises our individuality by turning us into tribalistic conformists, makes us “race to the bottom” for attention, and encourages us to surrender our private data to Big Business.
Supports
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
Sample Thesis #2
Jaron Lanier makes a compelling case that we must delete our social media accounts because immersing ourselves in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon through selfish addiction, wolf pack behavior (joining Outrage Machine and Cancel Culture), and attention-getting fakery, which becomes “a race to the bottom.”
Supports
One. How does Lanier compare the A*** Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates A***
Simple syllogism: A*** get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates A***.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important than any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period oftime close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood.Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Delete your social media.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
Thesis #3 (Disagreeing with Lanier)
As someone with an addictive personality, I can say that I agree with Jaron Lanier that living in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon; however, my personal experience as shown that I can calibrate (moderate, adjust, control) my social media behavior in a way that I can avoid most of the self-destructive behaviors he describes, and I find benefit from social media in that I can communicate helpful information for others, share collective anxieties about our cultural and political discontent, the nature of social media for conciseness (brevity) has forced me to be a more efficient writer, saying more with less, and social media lets me “check in” with friends whom I otherwise have no time to visit in the physical world.
Three Sample Thesis Statements That Address the Argument That We Must Delete Our Social Media Accounts
Overview of the Essay Topic
Essay Assignment
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) claim that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
Sample Thesis #1
Jaron Lanier makes the persuasive case that social media must be deleted because it is a portable crack machine that enslaves us to addiction, compromises our individuality by turning us into tribalistic conformists, makes us “race to the bottom” for attention, and encourages us to surrender our private data to Big Business.
Supports
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
Sample Thesis #2
Jaron Lanier makes a compelling case that we must delete our social media accounts because immersing ourselves in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon through selfish addiction, wolf pack behavior (joining Outrage Machine and Cancel Culture), and attention-getting fakery, which becomes “a race to the bottom.”
Supports
One. How does Lanier compare the A*** Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates A***
Simple syllogism: A*** get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates A***.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important than any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period oftime close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood.Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Delete your social media.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
Thesis #3 (Disagreeing with Lanier)
As someone with an addictive personality, I can say that I agree with Jaron Lanier that living in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon; however, my personal experience as shown that I can calibrate (moderate, adjust, control) my social media behavior in a way that I can avoid most of the self-destructive behaviors he describes, and I find benefit from social media in that I can communicate helpful information for others, share collective anxieties about our cultural and political discontent, the nature of social media for conciseness (brevity) has forced me to be a more efficient writer, saying more with less, and social media lets me “check in” with friends whom I otherwise have no time to visit in the physical world.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
McMahon’s Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
Number #1 Way to Improve Your Writing:
Signal Phrases
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from credible sources of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Addiction is not a bug; it's the feature.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, inclined to find belonging in groups, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.
Why does the nastiness happen? In brief: ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main – or often the only – reward that’s available is attention.
With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.
Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices – especially, for now, smartphones – that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.
Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.
C is for Cramming content down your throat
Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.
Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn’t Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.
Bummer platforms have proudly reported on experimenting with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of Bummer. The digital network approach to behaviour modification flattens all these examples, all these different slices of life, into one slice. From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimise.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.
If someone isn’t paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.
F is for Fake mobs and faker society
This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn’t part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.
Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.
It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.
Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.
The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.
If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
Loss of Free Will: How Technology Owns Us
Cats integrate with society but essentially remain independent and free. Humans on the other hand will find that their brains get hijacked in the manner Tristan Harris explains.
What’s scary about getting our brains hijacked is that we don’t know they’re getting hijacked. The process is so gradual it feels natural. We become enslaved to the devil because we deny his existence. He ruins us by helping us in our denial. Such is the devil that lurks behind social media. We don’t know our lives we’re ruined with addiction until we’re deep in the muck of it.
Addiction sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.
We’re more like dogs and Facebook or some other social media site has become our Master.
Portability of the Machine destroys our free will.
Lanier observes that the smartphone is a “cage we carry around with us everywhere we go.” Many of us bring our smartphones to bed. Many of my students are so tethered to their smartphones they have a pathological need to attend to it during class. They think this is normal, but this is not normal. This is addiction.
Addiction and Data Mining
We’re being tracked, receiving engineered feedback, and being mined for our data.
We are being molded into specimens for advertising manipulation.
We are being siloed into our political tribe’s bubble.
The Machine causes behavior modification.
We are living in a world beyond advertising.
We are now living in a bubble of “continuous behavior modification.” I refer you to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible.
Lanier writes that we are test subjects in an experiment, and we are not even aware of this.
We should be alarmed, but most of us are not. We are asleep at the wheel, so to speak.
Social media empires are “behavior modification empires,” so writes Lanier.
We become trapped in a short-term dopamine feedback loop.
We get hit with dopamine when we receive likes, followers, and positive feedback. This dopamine becomes a short-term substitute for real self-esteem, real self-confidence, and a real sense of an adult self, but of course this dopamine, like any drug, fails and our tattered self remains the tattered rag that it is.
Jason Lanier is arguing that by becoming addicted to these “short-term dopamine feedback loops” on social media we have lost our free will.
Social media addiction is connected to the growing divisiveness and polarization of society.
Lanier argues that the underlying force of both social media addiction and polarization is behavior modification that leads to helpless addiction. This helpless addiction makes us “crazy.” We’re crazy for more and more dopamine fueled by outrage and short-term self-esteem as we lose sight of real cognitive skills to be full realized adults.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy” (10).
The Tech Lords who make us addicted to social media know it’s bad for us.
These very same Tech Lords who design social media don’t allow their children to use social media or gadgets. They send their children to expensive Waldorf schools where technology isn’t allowed.
“Don’t get high on your own supply.”
These Tech Lords know they’re dealing with dangerous addiction because they hire consultants who work with gambling sites to maximize addiction (14).
Social pressure becomes an unhealthy force in the world of social media.
“People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.”
When we receive negative feedback on social media: being ignored, being scorned, being insulted, or being rejected, we experience hurt. We experience physical and emotional pain.
This hurt is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. We feel compelled to curate an existence to others that they would approve of. Social media pours gasoline on the fire of our desire for others’ validation and approval.
Social Anxiety
The resulting social anxiety from social media is probably enough reason to delete our social media accounts.
When we feel rejected, our social anxiety turns into depression, dejection, and despondency.
For those of us who are already vulnerable to this type of social anxiety and depression, social media is a nightmare scenario.
Rewards and punishments as the primary tools for controlling our behavior is called behaviorism.
Counterarguments that need to be addressed:
One. Social media is free so people of all economic classes can participate in it.
Two. Everyone can participate in the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to be a professional journalist to have a blog or a vlog. Therefore, social media helps spread democracy.
Three. Social media gives us access to information that we've never had before.
Four. Social media helps us connect to people all over the world in ways that were once impossible.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Addiction is not a bug; it's the feature.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, inclined to find belonging in groups, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.
Why does the nastiness happen? In brief: ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main – or often the only – reward that’s available is attention.
With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.
Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices – especially, for now, smartphones – that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.
Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.
C is for Cramming content down your throat
Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.
Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn’t Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.
Bummer platforms have proudly reported on experimenting with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of Bummer. The digital network approach to behaviour modification flattens all these examples, all these different slices of life, into one slice. From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimise.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.
If someone isn’t paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.
F is for Fake mobs and faker society
This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn’t part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.
Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.
It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.
Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.
The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.
If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
Loss of Free Will: How Technology Owns Us
Cats integrate with society but essentially remain independent and free. Humans on the other hand will find that their brains get hijacked in the manner Tristan Harris explains.
What’s scary about getting our brains hijacked is that we don’t know they’re getting hijacked. The process is so gradual it feels natural. We become enslaved to the devil because we deny his existence. He ruins us by helping us in our denial. Such is the devil that lurks behind social media. We don’t know our lives we’re ruined with addiction until we’re deep in the muck of it.
Addiction sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.
We’re more like dogs and Facebook or some other social media site has become our Master.
Portability of the Machine destroys our free will.
Lanier observes that the smartphone is a “cage we carry around with us everywhere we go.” Many of us bring our smartphones to bed. Many of my students are so tethered to their smartphones they have a pathological need to attend to it during class. They think this is normal, but this is not normal. This is addiction.
Addiction and Data Mining
We’re being tracked, receiving engineered feedback, and being mined for our data.
We are being molded into specimens for advertising manipulation.
We are being siloed into our political tribe’s bubble.
The Machine causes behavior modification.
We are living in a world beyond advertising.
We are now living in a bubble of “continuous behavior modification.” I refer you to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible.
Lanier writes that we are test subjects in an experiment, and we are not even aware of this.
We should be alarmed, but most of us are not. We are asleep at the wheel, so to speak.
Social media empires are “behavior modification empires,” so writes Lanier.
We become trapped in a short-term dopamine feedback loop.
We get hit with dopamine when we receive likes, followers, and positive feedback. This dopamine becomes a short-term substitute for real self-esteem, real self-confidence, and a real sense of an adult self, but of course this dopamine, like any drug, fails and our tattered self remains the tattered rag that it is.
Jason Lanier is arguing that by becoming addicted to these “short-term dopamine feedback loops” on social media we have lost our free will.
Social media addiction is connected to the growing divisiveness and polarization of society.
Lanier argues that the underlying force of both social media addiction and polarization is behavior modification that leads to helpless addiction. This helpless addiction makes us “crazy.” We’re crazy for more and more dopamine fueled by outrage and short-term self-esteem as we lose sight of real cognitive skills to be full realized adults.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy” (10).
The Tech Lords who make us addicted to social media know it’s bad for us.
These very same Tech Lords who design social media don’t allow their children to use social media or gadgets. They send their children to expensive Waldorf schools where technology isn’t allowed.
“Don’t get high on your own supply.”
These Tech Lords know they’re dealing with dangerous addiction because they hire consultants who work with gambling sites to maximize addiction (14).
Social pressure becomes an unhealthy force in the world of social media.
“People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.”
When we receive negative feedback on social media: being ignored, being scorned, being insulted, or being rejected, we experience hurt. We experience physical and emotional pain.
This hurt is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. We feel compelled to curate an existence to others that they would approve of. Social media pours gasoline on the fire of our desire for others’ validation and approval.
Social Anxiety
The resulting social anxiety from social media is probably enough reason to delete our social media accounts.
When we feel rejected, our social anxiety turns into depression, dejection, and despondency.
For those of us who are already vulnerable to this type of social anxiety and depression, social media is a nightmare scenario.
Rewards and punishments as the primary tools for controlling our behavior is called behaviorism.
Counterarguments that need to be addressed:
One. Social media is free so people of all economic classes can participate in it.
Two. Everyone can participate in the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to be a professional journalist to have a blog or a vlog. Therefore, social media helps spread democracy.
Three. Social media gives us access to information that we've never had before.
Four. Social media helps us connect to people all over the world in ways that were once impossible.
Social Media & Polarization:
Signal Phrase Guidelines:
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from credible sources of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 3 paragraphs explain how social media destroys free will.
Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism
One. How do so many of us become exhausted and broken by our internet habits?
The internet becomes our boss by making constant demands on our attention. We work so hard to please all the internet forces beckoning us 24/7.
We don’t even know we’re a slave. It happens gradually.
We lose uninterrupted time to focus on creating our better selves. We lose focus.
Internet companies’ success is based on making us addicted. That is their job.
The internet fosters anger and outrage because attention gets traffic, so the internet makes us an angrier, more outraged, more obnoxious version of ourselves, according to techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier.
Over time, Newport observes we lose our autonomy. We become addicts and slaves to the Internet Attention Merchants.
Two. What is the challenge of digital minimalism?
We can’t go back in time. Technology is here to stay. We must learn to reap the benefits while minimizing its liabilities.
Another challenge is to see the futility of “taking a break” or taking a “digital Sabbath” or a “digital cleanse.” Like junk food, Internet use can’t be purged from time to time. Rather, we need to change our overall habits.
Newport writes: What you need is a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”
Such a philosophy seeks to find the sweet spot between the Neo-Luddites, who reject all technology as evil, and the Quantified Self Enthusiasts, who want to embrace technology in every micro task of their existence.
Three. What is the value of focus?
Focus excludes chaos and distraction and makes us concentrate on what makes us achieve excellence and become happy. Internet and social media are about distraction. But we need focus.
Newport quotes Marcus Aurelius: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”
The more we can be digital minimalists, Newport argues, the more we can focus on what makes life satisfying and reverent.
To achieve focus, we must engage in “aggressive action” to combat the pitfalls of social media: mental and spiritual disintegration. Our “hyper-connected world” or “humming matrix of chatter and distraction” is leaving us hyper-disconnected.
Technology became a Frankenstein monster that overtook us and killed our focus. When Steve Jobs first conceived the iPhone, he saw it as an iPod that would keep a phone number directory to make phone calls and play music, not a “general purpose computer” that we carry in our pockets and take to bed with us.
What’s crazy is that the radical influence of Facebook and smartphones on our lives was “unplanned and unexpected.” We have not had time to process this sucker punch to the face.
Four. What are the unforeseen effects of smartphones and social media?
Newport concedes that you can find tech people who use their smartphones and social media to increase their productivity and self-promotion, but this is just a “thin slice” of what is happening.
On a much broader scale, the average social media user has been rapidly losing self-control.
“It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.”
This loss of autonomy was unplanned, but once the tech lords realized they could control the masses and make money from this, they capitalized on it.
The “nerd gods” are “selling addictive product to children,” to quote Bill Maher.
As Tristan Harris says on Anderson Cooper and his many videos, the smartphone is a slot machine.
Silicon Valley is not programming apps; they’re are programming people.
Five. Is it true that technology is neutral; what makes technology good or bad is how we use it?
The answer is no. Technology is not neutral. It is designed to be addicting, polarizing, and mentally disintegrating. Bill Maher: “Big Tobacco wants your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
Six. What specifically is the crack cocaine that gets us hooked on social media?
Here it is: “Intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.”
By intermittent, we are saying the positive reinforcement is unpredictable and erratic in its dishing out rewards; this becomes more addicting than predictable rewards.
Regarding social approval: Since Paleolithic times, we have been hardwired to gain social approval from the tribe in order to increase our survival and status in the group. We are hardwired to want approval.
The converse is a true: A lack of feedback causes anxiety and distress. What is wrong with us? We then do jumping jacks on social media and get lost down social media rabbit holes trying to win approval, the very thing the Tech Lords want for their profits.
When you tag or like someone on social media, they feel obliged to reciprocate; this in effect creates a social-validation feedback loop.
The Tech Lords are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” the very thing a hacker does, so says Sean Parker.
What’s the net sum of this? We have lost control of our digital lives.
Newport cites Adam Alter, author if a book I taught two years ago: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology.
Compulsive social media use “is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.”
Seven. What is Newport’s central argument throughout the book?
Newport is not arguing whether or not social media and Internet devices are useful or not. He is arguing about how we’ve lost our autonomy.
Eight. What is the book’s most powerful metaphor about gaining our self-control and overcoming addiction?
He cites Plato’s Chariot with Two Horses Metaphor.
We are the driver of the chariot. We have two horses pulling the chariot, our good horse and our crappy horse. When we surrender to digital world, we energize and strengthen the crappy horse, which takes control of our chariot, resulting in our loss of control and direction.
The takeaway is to see how every situation we’re in is an opportunity to strengthen our good or bad horse.
Newport’s “concrete plan” is to show how digital minimalism is a way of strengthening our good horse and weakening our bad one.
In a 1,200-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that compares the dehumanization in Andrew Sullivan's essay "I Used to be a Human Being" to the dehumanization articulated in Jason Lanier's notion of BUMMER, which is explored in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Be sure to have 3 sources for your Works Cited. One of the sources will be Lanier's book.
Study Questions
One. Why does Andrew Sullivan give up his smartphone and enter Internet Addiction Rehab?
His life as a curator of web news had taken over his life, had hijacked his brain, and had attacked his immune system. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually. More and more, he became immersed in Internet activity, and his body and mind could not keep up with it.
What’s crazy is that he was driven to tread water even though he was dying.
He was losing his life. He was dying.
A spark of metacognition (self-awareness) kicked him in the pants and told him to go to rehab before it was too late.
His blogging was killing him while making him rich and famous:
“If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”
But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”
Sullivan described a certain anxiety I’ve read about in other Internet addicts, and I’ve seen it in myself during my worst times:
I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.
Two. How does Sullivan suggest that the new technology is different from technologies of the past?
The new technology is infinite in its data, and it can penetrate our brains, hijack our brains, and manipulate our behavior through algorithms.
As he writes:
“We absorb this “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) no longer primarily by buying a magazine or paper, by bookmarking our favorite website, or by actively choosing to read or watch. We are instead guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists andtheir ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.
And the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.”
Three. What is so scary for an Internet Addict who enters rehab?
In a word, silence. In silence, our demons that we’ve been tamping down with distractions come out of the woodwork, and we have to face them.
Another fear is boredom, or the boredom of the abyss. We’re conditioned to be repelled by boredom, as if it were a bad thing when boredom can be very productive and helpful.
Only in silence does our deepest psychic and soulful pain emerge, and we are overtaken by it, a terrifying but necessary event. In Sullivan’s words:
“And then, unexpectedly, on the third day, as I was walking through the forest, I became overwhelmed. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my best guess is that the shady, quiet woodlands, with brooks trickling their way down hillsides and birds flitting through the moist air, summoned memories of my childhood. I was a lonely boy who spent many hours outside in the copses and woodlands of my native Sussex, in England. I had explored this landscape with friends, but also alone — playing imaginary scenarios in my head, creating little nooks where I could hang and sometimes read, learning every little pathway through the woods and marking each flower or weed or fungus that I stumbled on. But I was also escaping a home where my mother had collapsed with bipolar disorder after the birth of my younger brother and had never really recovered. She was in and out of hospitals for much of my youth and adolescence, and her condition made it hard for her to hide her pain and suffering from her sensitive oldest son.
I absorbed a lot of her agony, I came to realize later, hearing her screams of frustration and misery in constant, terrifying fights with my father, and never knowing how to stop it or to help. I remember watching her dissolve in tears in the car picking me up from elementary school at the thought of returning to a home she clearly dreaded, or holding her as she poured her heart out to me, through sobs and whispers, about her dead-end life in a small town where she was utterly dependent on a spouse. She was taken away from me several times in my childhood, starting when I was 4, and even now I can recall the corridors and rooms of the institutions she was treated in when we went to visit.
I knew the scar tissue from this formative trauma was still in my soul. I had spent two decades in therapy, untangling and exploring it, learning how it had made intimacy with others so frightening, how it had made my own spasms of adolescent depression even more acute, how living with that kind of pain from the most powerful source of love in my life had made me the profoundly broken vessel I am. But I had never felt it so vividly since the very years it had first engulfed and defined me. It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.”
Four. What are some of the dehumanizing effects of always being online?
We suffer the aforementioned nervous energy.
We find that being online has become, without us being aware of it, a full-time job that becomes more important than real relationships.
We don’t share space with loved ones because our attention becomes fragmented. Likewise, our personalities become just as fragmented.
In Sullivan’s words:
“But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.”
Another type of dehumanization: losing satisfaction of doing focused work. As Sullivan writes:
“Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.”
We also suffer the breakdown of community. As Sullivan observes:
So are the bonds we used to form in our everyday interactions — the nods and pleasantries of neighbors, the daily facial recognition in the mall or the street. Here too the allure of virtual interaction has helped decimate the space for actual community. When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”
Another form of dehumanization is dopamine addiction. Sullivan writes:
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.
In addition to dopamine addiction, your brain enters a zombie limbo state, where you don’t feel full emotions:
“He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”
Yet another form of dehumanization in Sullivan’s view is the elevation of consumerism into a religion, which has replaced legitimate faith. Sullivan writes:
In his survey of how the modern Westlost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.
Five. Why are we hostile toward silence and embrace the noise and chatter of the internet?
For one, as social creatures we are hardwired to love gossip. Gossip is part of the moral glue that keeps societies together.
For two, noise is confused with the sound of being busy, which makes us feel like we’re adhering to a work ethic. But in fact we’re not. We’re merely scatterbrained.
As Sullivan explains:
“Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives — are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.
And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.
Counterarguments for Your Essay:
Digital Literacy or Digital Minimalism
Is deletion of social media too extreme? Isn't digital literacy a better solution? See the following:
Whether or not you go off social media, you have to achieve a savvy digital literacy that allows you to perform "Deep Work." What is Deep Work?
Study Questions
One. What is Deep Work and why is it important?
Definition
Deep Work is distraction-free concentration on professional activities “that push your cognitive abilities to your limit.”
To give us a clear grasp of the focus required for deep work, Newport quotes Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges:
“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
Deep Work’s 3 Important Results
Deep Work has 3 important results: It creates new value, improves your skill, and creates unique work that is hard to replicate.
Science Supports Claims About Deep Work
Only through deep work can we maximize our intellectual capacity and see how far we can go with what skills and talents we have.
Neurological and psychological studies support the claim that pushing yourself in non-distracted focus and enduring mental discomfort in pursuit of your goals is the only way to improve your skills.
What Should be Obvious and Commonplace No Longer Is in the Social Media Age
It should be obvious that you need prolonged focus attention to maximize the quality of your work, and it should be commonplace that people follow such a principle.
However, in the age of social media, emails, messaging, and texting, we live in an age of Attention Fragmentation.
Shallow Work
The activities done in a state of multi-tasking and attention fragmentation amount to what Newport calls shallow work.
Shallow work has become the norm, the commonplace. We think it’s natural because everyone else does it.
But shallow work results in mediocrity at best, and more often than not shallow work results in us becoming “bottom feeders” in the competitive economy.
If we want to be on the top of the food chain, we have to engage in Deep Work, which means committing ourselves to losing our distractions.
It’s difficult to commit to deep work because we live in a culture that encourages shallow work. We work in multi-tasking work environments in which were required to instantly respond to email, text messages, not to mention people who are playing games and uploading images on social media sites.
Most people are in a fragmented state and are performing shallow work. What they do is easily replicated.
Shallow work also makes us unfocused, unhappy, depressed, and hollowed-out versions of ourselves.
Recent studies even show that huge declines in teen drug and alcohol use might be explained by drugs and alcohol being substituted with smartphone and social media addiction.
Two. What is the difference between influential people and most people who are employed in the “knowledge work” industry?
Influential people have one thing in common: They make deep work a priority. In contrast, most knowledge workers or white-collar workers do shallow work.
Three. What is shallow work and why is it so dangerous?
Shallow work is non-demanding busy “logistical” work that anyone can do. Shallow work is done in a state of distraction and multi-tasking.
In other words, shallow work is meaningless work, and we can safely conclude that meaningless work, while easy, will bore and depress us.
The vicious cycle of shallow work is the more we’re bored and depressed by our shallow work the more we crave distractions like social media sharing, so that we become trapped in a cycle of shallow work and depression.
When we get jobs that require shallow work, we reduce ourselves to “human routers,” and as such we are very replaceable by new software and new machines. Does anyone want a job that reduces them to a “human router?”
What adds to this tragedy is that as teens we become acclimated to being addicted to our smartphones, social media sharing, and multi-tasking so that at a very young age we are conditioning ourselves for shallow work and depression.
Another tragedy is that shallow work can cripple us so that we may never be able to deep work. As Newport writes: “Spend your time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
Four. What practical career matter does Cal Newport want to address in his book?
Newport is observing that as fewer and fewer people are engaging in deep work, deep work is becoming more and more prized so that to be able to perform deep work in this new environment makes one more sought after for the most desirable jobs.
In other words, committing yourself to deep work gives you a huge competitive advantage over shallow workers.
Newport presents this idea in his “Deep Work Hypothesis”:
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Newport uses the example of Jason Benn who was a replaceable worker doing spreadsheets. He did shallow work and found himself addicted to distraction like checking his emails all the time. When he got replaced by a computer program, he forced himself to learn computer programming, a task that only deep workers can do.
He had to re-condition himself, unplug himself from his “drug”: smartphone distractions, and go into deep work. Only after becoming a deep worker did he surpass others in his field of computer science.
Your friends who think they’re cool, hip, and sexy being plugged in to their smartphones all day and night are conditioning themselves to be bottom-feeders, depressed members of the Shallow Work Society. Do you want to join their ranks or be a Deep Worker? It’s up to you.
Five. Why is deep work more important than ever?
Newport observes that we entering the Intellectual Machine Age, also called The Great Restructuring, in which robots and high-tech are replacing a significant amount of jobs. This job loss if very scary to the workforce.
However, there are 3 fields that will provide “lucrative” income to the American workforce and all 3 fields require deep work.
Being a superstar and a venture capitalist are 2 fields, but those fields are not realistic for most of us. However, Newport points to a third field that should interest us: Being able to work with Intelligent Machines.
The types of majors that allow us to work well with Intelligent Machines are computer science, math, and statistics.
All 3 of these majors require deep work. You’re not getting anywhere if you’re on your smartphone all day and night.
Six. What is deliberate practice and why is it important to deep work?
To do deep work, one must engage in deliberate practice, which requires two things:
One, is prolonged focus and this strains the mind. However, the longer you do prolonged focus the more you develop the myelin plasma shafts in your brain, which become thicker like bigger broadband. They are fatty tissue that allow brain circuits to fire in your brain. The stronger these brain circuits become the more they can fire effortlessly and effectively.
Later Newport explains that oligodenrocytes wrap layers of myelin around the neurons “cementing the skill.” Only intense focus achieves this.
Shallow work, in contrast, weakens the myelin brain circuits. Transforming yourself from a shallow to deep worker requires a re-hardwiring of your brain circuits.
Two, deliberate practice requires that you receive feedback so that you can correct and improve your approach.
Deliberate practice produces higher quality work. As Newport writes:
High-Quality Work Produced= (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
(The above formulation applies to students’ essays as well)
Seven. What is the relationship between multitasking and “attention residue”?
When we switch back and forth between Task A and Task B (and maybe Task D and C?), we suffer from attention residue in which the previous task is soaking our brain with residue that we’re not focused on the task at hand.
The result is loss of focus intensity, and this leads to mediocrity. We’re drifting into becoming “human routers” and bottom-feeders.
Oversimplification
Is Lanier committing an oversimplification by being one-sided? See the following:
Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.
One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings and all-night tantrums.
Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do, they have giant mood swings, and they have all-night tantrums.
Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.
You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony, they feature fatty, over-salted foods, and the lard everything with sugar.
Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.
I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absent gym music, and the improved concentration.
Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.
To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and write an intellectually rigorous thesis.
Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.
The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the rules are hard to follow, and the MLA in-text citations are difficult to master.
Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems and their brain-dumbing effects.
You should avoid watching "reality shows" because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism, they distract you from your own problems, and they dumb you down.
Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.
I'm still fat even though I've tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and the fasting diet.
Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.
To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and a thesis that elevates the reader's consciousness to a higher level.
Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and maintaining a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.
My children never react to my calm commands or my lugubrious supplications.
Paragraph 1: Write a cautionary tale of someone who followed the Passion Hypothesis or simply define the Passion Hypothesis.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim or argument in defense or refutation of Newport's thesis that the Passion Hypothesis is an impediment to success.
Thesis Example for Paragraph 2:
"Cal Newport's argument that we should shun the Passion Hypothesis and replace it with a craftsman's mindset is convincing (is not convincing) because ______________, ______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Paragraphs 3-6: Develop body paragraphs that support your claim.
Paragraph 7: Write a counterargument and rebuttal to show reader you've considered opposing views.
Paragraph 8: Write a conclusion that restates your claim or thesis with emotional power.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.
Essay Option B:
Suggested Essay Structure:
Paragraph 1: Explain the homework dilemma facing America for your introduction.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that agrees or disagrees with Greenfeld's contention that his daughter is assigned too much homework and this overload points to a broader problem about homework in American society.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph in which you anticipate how your opponents will oppose your thesis and your rebuttal to their counterargument.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion: Dramatic reiteration of your thesis.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.
Essay 1 Options for Essay 1 Due on March 9 and needs 2 sources for Works Cited
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. For a second source, you can use “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
February24 Go over Newport online chapters 1-3. Homework #2 for February 26: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend "A Teacher's Defense of Homework" and in 200-word paragraph, explain the dilemma parents face when struggling with their children’s homework.
February 26 Go over the homework debate. Homework #3 for next class: Read S-2 Sentence Fragments in your electronic Little Seagull Handbook and report on the following: What is a fragment? What are the types of fragments? Do the 3 Practice Quizzes, report your score, and explain how confident you are about avoiding fragments for your essays.
March 2 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Do Homework Check 3 for S-2 Sentence Fragments. Our goal is to write an introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, and one or two supporting paragraphs. Homework #4 for next class: Read S-3 Comma Splices, Fused Sentences and explain how to identify and edit comma splices and fused sentences. Take the 4 Practice quizzes, report your scores, and explain how confident you are about avoiding these errors in future essays.
March 4 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write two supporting paragraphs, a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, a conclusion, and a Works Cited page. Go over Homework #4, Comma Splices and Fused Sentences.
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin.
Suggested Essay Structure:
Paragraph 1: Explain the homework dilemma facing America for your introduction.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that agrees or disagrees with Greenfeld's contention that his daughter is assigned too much homework and this overload points to a broader problem about homework in American society.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph in which you anticipate how your opponents will oppose your thesis and your rebuttal to their counterargument.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion: Dramatic reiteration of your thesis.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.
Sample Introduction and Thesis
Karl Taro Greenfeld writes a sympathetic account of the struggles that he and his daughter must suffer to keep up with his daughter's homework. They feel there is a gun pointed at their heads 24/7, they are sleep deprived, they feel constantly behind in the homework, and the father's complaints to his daughter's teacher are met with the standard "I'm merely following the core standards and if you wish me to demote your daughter to the remedial class, I can make that happen." Not willing to compromise his daughter's educational standing, he backs down, but he wishes to make the case that the American education system is so caught up in teaching core standards that it is unleashing a torrent of homework on children to their detriment.
While I agree with a lot of Greenfeld's observations, I sadly and reluctantly must argue against him. Our teachers have no choice but to continue to push lots of homework on our children in the cause of teaching core standards, in the cause of getting us caught up in STEM, in the cause of acknowledging that career competition is far more ruthless than when Greenfeld was a child, and in the cause of holding teachers accountable for exercising high classroom standards.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-word essay
8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Sample Response from Parent's Point of View
Teachers, I get it. You need to teach the core standards. You’ve got administration breathing down your neck and giving you ulcers because they want to make sure your students pass all the tests so you can keep your job and maybe even get a raise. So let’s make a deal. Let’s do the core standards in class, not at home. That’s right. Let’s cut the homework. Why? Because you know math, right? I mean, you are a teacher, yes? So let’s do the math. Most parents work, just like you. We don’t have the luxury of being a stay-at-home parent to curate our kids’ homework. Why? Because we’ve got bills to pay. By the time we get the kids home, make them dinner, have them shower, brush their teeth, and get some much needed physical exercise after being cooped up in a cage all day (you cut PE classes, remember?), we don’t have diddly squat time for homework.
But you’ve got time. You’ve got our kids from 9 to 3. That’s six hours you get to spend working on core standards. That’s more time than we’ve got.
Teachers, time isn’t the only issue. It’s the quality of the homework itself. Too often you give our kids busy work. This amounts to photocopied worksheets from a 15-year-old workbook you bought on Amazon that got an average one-star rating. You’re being lazy by larding on a bunch of busy work on our kids. Stop it. You’re not the solution, teacher. You’re part of the problem.
Teachers, we want our children to be more than overworked mediocrities jumping through your hoops. We want our kids to have time to do exceptional work whether it be joining student government, joining the chess club, or leisurely reading. Your busy work, on the other hand, is turning them into brain-dead, sleep-deprived zombies.
Teachers, you’re part of a broken, dysfunctional system, and my family is paying the price.
We need to start fixing the system, and we can begin by cutting out the unnecessary homework.
Should We Give Homework to Children?
One. What are Karl Taro Greenfeld’s concerns about his daughter Esmee’s homework?
One, memory over logic: Esmee chants the mantra, “Memorization, not rationalization,” suggesting it is better to saturation the brain the mindless memory rather than learn logic and the process of higher thinking.
So there is a concern for the type of homework.
Two, unreasonable volume of homework: But secondly, there is a concern for the sheer volume of homework. Esmee is doing three to four hours of homework to pass standardized tests based on core learning requirements that the school is legally bound to perform. In addition to the rigors of 3-4 hours of homework, Esmee, who is 13, is only getting 6.5 hours sleep a night.
Thirdly, Esmee’s pressure to do well in her homework is causing her to fake sleep, get up, and do more homework behind her parents’ backs.
Fourth, when Esmee tries to do his daughter’s homework, he finds it a daunting task. One night is 79 pages of a memoir, a Life Science assignment, and Algebra.
Fifth, the textbooks, such as the one in Life Science, are written in overwrought, crappy academic style that makes them unreadable for anyone, let alone a 13-year-old child.
Sixth, without doing any research, American schools are trying to play catch-up with other countries that are crushing us, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), but our solution may be worse than the problem.
Seven, When a parent such as Greenfeld, approaches a teacher with concern about his daughter’s lack of sleep and overall burnout, the teacher threatens to demote child to remedial class.
Eight, Greenfeld compares parent-teacher conferences to speed dating.
Nine, at times Greenfeld wonders if they have brainwashed his daughter into accepting overwork as natural work since she feels assured she is battle-tested for high school. In a broader problem, we seem to be a culture acclimated to a term coined by Derek Thompson, “Workism,” as he expounds in an essay.
Thompson writes:
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
Is America Making Burnout the New Normal?
My students are burned out.
Here are 7 takeaways from my college students:
One. Most of my students are decent people trying to play by society’s rules so they can climb the economic ladder.
Two. Most of my students show up to class with a chronic sleep deficit.
Three. Most of my students don’t have big chunks of time to study and contemplate the joys of education for its own sake. Rather, my students grit their teeth and squeeze in college with the rest of their frantic schedule.
Four. Most of my students live in a state of constant financial insecurity.
Five. Most of my students are playing academic catch-up to make up for wasted time in high school.
Six. The cumulative effect of the above pressure points makes most of my students feel constantly stressed and exhausted, a condition they face with a mix of stoicism and depression.
Seven. The state of affairs described above has gotten progressively worse since I started teaching college in the 1980s.
In Contrast:
My wife’s school district where she teaches sixth grade give limits based on grade: 10 minutes per grade level.
For example, a third-grader gets 30 minutes, a sixth grader gets 60 minutes, and so on.
Also, anything more than 2 hours is considered counterproductive, according to major Stanford Study. In addition, Psychology Today draws from several studies to recommend only one hour of homework a night.
McMahon's Thesis
While some of the homework given in the service of core standards looks like it is fulfilling its mission of helping my daughters achieve high standards in reading, writing, and math, I find that there is inconsistency in the quality of the homework depending on the teacher. One of my twin daughters has reasonable, high-quality homework; however, the other twin has a teacher who gives busy work, makes the students do long handouts that come from old workbooks purchased on Amazon with low customer ratings, has homework that is given without any lesson or context to give the homework meaning or explanation, and who lards long homework assignments as if the volume were a sign of the teacher's high quality when in fact the opposite is true. Perhaps, then, the problem isn't the homework; it's the teacher.
Townsend writes that she is obliged to prepare her students for college. She writes:
I teach biology at the Charles School, a five-year early-college high school in Columbus, Ohio. I believe that my job is to prepare my students for college. In order to do that, I teach a wide variety of topics including cells, genetics, evolution, and ecology, using the National Science Standards. I teach each topic in depth so that the students understand and appreciate the information. I teach them about the scientific method, lab procedures, and scientific writing, all skills they will need in college. It’s a lot to fit into one short year, and my class requires a lot of effort from my students.
Townsend wish she could have students do more in-class work to reduce homework load, but the students aren’t efficient with their time. As she writes:
Unfortunately, many kids choose to socialize when I give them time to work on their own. The students always say, “I’ll just do this for homework” and neglect to get much, if any, of the assignment done in class. Then, they come home with a pile of homework, which many parents assume the teachers assigned at the end of class.
Townsend goes on to say that homework may be difficult, but it trains kids for adulthood:
A few times a year, I require students to write a scientific paper. We spend a significant amount of time on these assignments at school, but effort outside of class is required as well. And I think that’s great. Schoolwork prepares students for work-related tasks, financial planning, and any project that ends with the feeling of a job well done. Long-term planning, projects, and deadlines are a key part of adulthood.
Townsend also argues that homework is necessary to compete on the world stage:
Nevertheless, some parents think their kids are getting too much work. One argument, which Greenfeld uses, is to compare American students with those in other countries. In his article, Greenfeld cites the fact that students in many overseas countries are scoring higher than American children, while being assigned less homework. He uses Japan as an example. In 2011, Japan was ranked fourth in science scores in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. But according to a study cited in Greenfeld’s article, Japanese students are actually assigned less homework by their teachers. Why, then, do they achieve more? The answer comes when you look at the differences in our cultures and our views on education. Japanese teachers may not be assigning much homework, but it turns out that Japanese kids are doing plenty of homework anyway.
I spoke with Chris Spackman, who is the English as a Second Language coordinator at my school. Chris taught for 13 years in Japan, and served on the Board of Education in the city of Kanazawa. I asked him why Japanese kids are scoring so high on achievement tests despite having relatively little homework. “Because Japanese kids go to juku,” he answered. He went on to explain that juku is a common after-school program that prepares Japanese kids for achievement testing. In Japan, senior high school is not required or guaranteed. Instead, students compete for spots at prestigious high schools by scoring high on achievement tests. “Some schools are for art, or college prep,” says Chris. “You have to study hard in junior high to get into the high school that you want.” In high school, Japanese kids continue to go to juku so that they can get into the college they want as well. So, Japanese kids do academic work outside of school, just not necessarily work assigned by their classroom teacher.
Townsend finishes her essay by arguing that a compromise should be made and for parents to realize that teachers are fighting for their kids’ best interests:
There is room for compromise on the homework debate. In their book Reforming Homework, Richard Walker and Mike Horsley state that while homework isn’t very beneficial for younger kids, it’s still beneficial for older students. I agree. I’ve learned, while preparing my students to start college early, that study skills become much more important than they were in primary school. It’s also important for teachers to assign work that’s high in quality, instead of quantity. The vast majority of teachers I know are careful to only assign work that’s important for student success. Remember, teachers have to grade all of these assignments – we wouldn’t want to spend extra time grading papers that have no value.
In the comments on Greenfeld’s article, some readers assume that teachers don’t have our students’ best interests at heart. But usually, teachers who aren’t incredibly devoted to their students don’t last in the profession. The teachers who do stay are committed to giving the best education to their students. We wouldn’t be assigning that homework, giving that test, or reading that book if we didn’t truly believe it was worthwhile. All we ask is that you trust us, just a little.
Signal Phrases Used for In-Text Citations
About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.
We use signal phrases to let reader know we are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing.
Adapted from A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines 7th ed. by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers
How can I use them?
Below are some guidelines and tips for using signal phrases.
Signal phrases usually include the author’s name but can also include the author’s job title or background (“reporter for Washington Post,” “researcher,” “senator,” “scholar,” and so on) and/or the title of the source.
Signal phrases usually come at the beginning of a sentence before the source material, but they can also occur in the middle of a source or at the end.
To avoid monotony and repetition, try to vary both the language and placement of your signal phrases.
According to Maxwell and Hanson,…
As the 2017 IRS report indicates, …
Smith and Johnson state that …
Some scholars have shown…
Legal scholar Terrence Roberts offered a persuasive argument: “….”
Choose a verb that is appropriate to the way you are using your source. Below is a list of verbs that can be used in signal phrases:
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase.
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
“Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition” by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic)
In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.
“Welfare for Those Unwilling to Work? It’s Not as Crazy as You Think” by Christine Emba (Washington Post)
As journalist Annie Lowrey, whose book “Give People Money” surveyed basic income programs around the world, points out, the United States is distinguished both by its exaltation of self-sufficiency and its unique racial divide. As it turns out, racism makes it hard to improve the safety net: Research shows that whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit, even if they themselves are receiving social support. In fact, this was a flaw in the original New Deal: Agricultural and domestic laborers, most of whom were black, were purposefully excluded from many of the New Deal’s most important provisions.
“70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages” by Michael Saler (The Nation)
Through the ubiquity of such tools, scholars and laypeople alike are slowly being acclimatized to thinking in the long term, an outlook encouraged by Jo Guldi and David Armitage in The History Manifesto (2014). They argue that an emphasis on what the historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée back in 1958 is now the approach best suited to a world awash in data of extended times and climes. Critics of The History Manifesto reasonably point out that while Big and Deep may be appealing, even seductive, size matters: Extra-large will not fit all, and specific historical questions will always determine the scope and method of investigation. Yet the existence of the debate itself (quite lively on Twitter, of all places) is testimony to the reincarnation of Braudel’s project.
“Can You Believe YouTube Caused the Rise in Flat-Earthers?” by Madison Malone Kircher
When YouTube said earlier this year that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways,” people praised the decision. A certain ex-engineer called it a “historic victory” on Twitter and applauded the company for making such a move, possibly at a great expense to its business model. Which … ha. Among the types of videos YouTube said it would cut back on recommending was flat-Earth content. As in, videos peddling the idea that the Earth is not, as science has repeatedly proven, round. And while I’m all for quashing the spread of truly wrongheaded and potentially dangerous ideas, in the case of flat-Earth indoctrination, the damage has long since been done.
Researchers from Texas Tech University believe they’ve isolated YouTube videos as ground zero for the spread of flat-earth theories, TheGuardianreports. Speaking with attendees at the biggest annual gathering of flat-Earthers both in 2017 and 2018, the research team found that people who fell into the world of the flat Earth were often those who were already spending time on YouTube watching other conspiracy videos (about 9/11, for example). This feedback loop — where watching conspiracy videos leads to being shown more conspiracy videos, which in turn motivates creators to make more conspiracy content — was also cited by the above-mentioned ex-YouTube engineer. It’s that circle that has enabled flat-Earth content to thrive. Researchers said one of the most popular videos is a nearly two-hour-long piece that details myriad reasons why, if you’re smart enough to think beyond what has been crammed into your brain by society for your whole life, the Earth is so obviously flat.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
Washington, D.C. may soon be littered with the political bodies of people who believed they could spin their way out of the impact of the new Bob Woodward book, Fear. I’ve been to the Washington rodeo enough times to know that Woodward’s methodical, grinding style of investigation doesn’t lend itself to escaping unscathed, especially for bad actors and loose cannons. Hell, as a young Department of Defense aide in 1990, I saw it up close when his book, The Commanders, led to the firing of USAF Chief of Staff Mike Dugan. He had tapes then, as he does now.
This week, it’s Donald Trump’s turn under Woodward’s political electron microscope, and the President’s hissy-fit reaction tells us how close Woodward’s work has struck. Trump knows his White House staff, up to and including his daughter, thinks he’s off the rails, a danger to himself and the country, and unable to execute the duties of a Waffle House manager much less the President of the United States.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise. But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Healthcare
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Civil War in America
In the South, it is still common to hear white people speak of the Civil War by denying its connection to the evils of slavery and treason. Rather, it is commonly spouted by white people in the south that the Civil War was the result of "Northern aggression" and "state rights," but these explanations are odious poppycock and are part of America's shameful history of fake news, which afflicts our country like an ugly, festering cancer sore to this very day.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?'
Paragraph 1: For your introduction, summarize Karl Taro's Greenfeld's description of burnout as he and his daughter attempt to do what appears to be an onslaught of homework and the teacher's response when the father presents his complaint.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim that argues for or against the kind of rigorous homework discussed in the two essays above.
Paragraphs 3-6: Develop body paragraphs that support your claim.
Paragraph 7: Write a counterargument and rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Write a conclusion that restates your thesis with emotional power
Signal Phrases
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation.
After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Signal Phrases Used for In-Text Citations
About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.
We use signal phrases to let reader know we are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing.
Adapted from A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines 7th ed. by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers
How can I use them?
Below are some guidelines and tips for using signal phrases.
Signal phrases usually include the author’s name but can also include the author’s job title or background (“reporter for Washington Post,” “researcher,” “senator,” “scholar,” and so on) and/or the title of the source.
Signal phrases usually come at the beginning of a sentence before the source material, but they can also occur in the middle of a source or at the end.
To avoid monotony and repetition, try to vary both the language and placement of your signal phrases.
According to Maxwell and Hanson,…
As the 2017 IRS report indicates, …
Smith and Johnson state that …
Some scholars have shown…
Legal scholar Terrence Roberts offered a persuasive argument: “….”
Choose a verb that is appropriate to the way you are using your source. Below is a list of verbs that can be used in signal phrases:
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase.
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
“Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition” by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic)
In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.
“Welfare for Those Unwilling to Work? It’s Not as Crazy as You Think” by Christine Emba (Washington Post)
As journalist Annie Lowrey, whose book “Give People Money” surveyed basic income programs around the world, points out, the United States is distinguished both by its exaltation of self-sufficiency and its unique racial divide. As it turns out, racism makes it hard to improve the safety net: Research shows that whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit, even if they themselves are receiving social support. In fact, this was a flaw in the original New Deal: Agricultural and domestic laborers, most of whom were black, were purposefully excluded from many of the New Deal’s most important provisions.
“70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages” by Michael Saler (The Nation)
Through the ubiquity of such tools, scholars and laypeople alike are slowly being acclimatized to thinking in the long term, an outlook encouraged by Jo Guldi and David Armitage in The History Manifesto (2014). They argue that an emphasis on what the historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée back in 1958 is now the approach best suited to a world awash in data of extended times and climes. Critics of The History Manifesto reasonably point out that while Big and Deep may be appealing, even seductive, size matters: Extra-large will not fit all, and specific historical questions will always determine the scope and method of investigation. Yet the existence of the debate itself (quite lively on Twitter, of all places) is testimony to the reincarnation of Braudel’s project.
“Can You Believe YouTube Caused the Rise in Flat-Earthers?” by Madison Malone Kircher
When YouTube said earlier this year that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways,” people praised the decision. A certain ex-engineer called it a “historic victory” on Twitter and applauded the company for making such a move, possibly at a great expense to its business model. Which … ha. Among the types of videos YouTube said it would cut back on recommending was flat-Earth content. As in, videos peddling the idea that the Earth is not, as science has repeatedly proven, round. And while I’m all for quashing the spread of truly wrongheaded and potentially dangerous ideas, in the case of flat-Earth indoctrination, the damage has long since been done.
Researchers from Texas Tech University believe they’ve isolated YouTube videos as ground zero for the spread of flat-earth theories, TheGuardianreports. Speaking with attendees at the biggest annual gathering of flat-Earthers both in 2017 and 2018, the research team found that people who fell into the world of the flat Earth were often those who were already spending time on YouTube watching other conspiracy videos (about 9/11, for example). This feedback loop — where watching conspiracy videos leads to being shown more conspiracy videos, which in turn motivates creators to make more conspiracy content — was also cited by the above-mentioned ex-YouTube engineer. It’s that circle that has enabled flat-Earth content to thrive. Researchers said one of the most popular videos is a nearly two-hour-long piece that details myriad reasons why, if you’re smart enough to think beyond what has been crammed into your brain by society for your whole life, the Earth is so obviously flat.
Essay 1 Options for Essay 1 Due on March 9 and needs 2 sources for Works Cited
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. For a second source, you can use “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
February24 Go over Newport online chapters 1-3. Homework #2 for February 26: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend "A Teacher's Defense of Homework" and in 200-word paragraph, explain the dilemma parents face when struggling with their children’s homework.
February 26 Go over the homework debate. Homework #3 for next class: Read S-2 Sentence Fragments in your electronic Little Seagull Handbook and report on the following: What is a fragment? What are the types of fragments? Do the 3 Practice Quizzes, report your scored, and explain how confident you are about avoiding fragments for your essays.
March 2 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Do Homework Check 3 for S-2 Sentence Fragments. Our goal is to write an introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, and one or two supporting paragraphs. Homework #4 for next class: Read S-3 Comma Splices, Fused Sentences and explain how to identify and edit comma splices and fused sentences. Take the 4 Practice quizzes, report your scores, and explain how confident you are about avoiding these errors in future essays.
March 4 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write two supporting paragraphs, a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, a conclusion, and a Works Cited page. Go over Homework #4, Comma Splices and Fused Sentences.
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin.
Study Questions
One. What revelation does Thomas, the Buddhist Monk, make as he finds how to crack the koan codes (word puzzles) and become an enlightened Buddhist practitioner?
Too your passion is a canard, a dead-end, a chimera, and an illusion for the following reasons:
One. Sometimes you think you know your passion, but you don't.
Two. Sometimes your passion fills you on a caprice, a whim, an impulse and is therefore short-lived.
Three. Following your passions could blind you from their impracticality and make you homeless.
Four. Knowing your passions requires experience. You don't just know your passions without first delving into various interests and comparing them.
Five. Your passions may not be marketable and therefore more suited as a hobby.
Six. Too often we overrate our talent and ability and think that the combination of our talent, passion, and ambition is sufficient to make a decent living when in fact they are not.
Seven. Even sincere passions can be short-lived, misleading, or self-destructive. Following a passion can be a fool's errand.
Eight. You don't need passion to be happy. I know a jury clerk for East Los Angeles courthouse. She is a single mother with 5 sons. She makes 85K a year with no college degree taking jury attendance at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. and she shows a 20-minute video. Her job "pays the bills." She's very happy.
There's also a Non-Passion Trap:
One. Treating work like a soulless mercenary simply to make money and acquire materialism to impress others.
Two. Doing something you leaves you feeling bored, empty, soulless, and miserable won't bring good fruit, just bitterness and depression.
So what's the answer?
One. Explore a few passions that you might be able to market and develop a skill set that will make you valuable for a job.
Two. Learn to do "deep work," scheduling long blocks of focused work (no distractions on social media, texting, music, background TV, etc.) to build your skill level so that you eventually achieve 10,000 hours and master your craft. Developing a Deep Work Ethic is more important than passion.
Three. Possibly major in a passion and minor in a practical subject in order to have a contingency plan. Always have a Plan B in the event Plan A pulls the rug under your feet.
Four. Remember, passion is good, but passion doesn't come first. Mastery and expertise come first. Passion is the natural side effect of mastery and expertise.
McMahon's passions:
radio announcer
writer
pianist
comedian
public intellectual
Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
Steve Jobs, as we know him, is a myth.
Not only is Steve Jobs a myth, he perpetuated a myth: “The only way to be great at your work is to love what you do. Don’t settle. Keep searching until you find your passion.”
“Follow your passion. Life is for the living.”
“Passion is the engine to living a life.”
Steve Jobs’ words are a disingenuous, empty clichés; they are false; they are dangerous; and he didn’t even apply those words to his life, his real life, not the mythical one people have been led to believe about him.
Steve Jobs is a perpetrator of the Passion Hypothesis, which says the following: The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then to find a job that matches this passion.
Three. What is the real Steve Jobs story?
He never followed his passion to create Apple computer. Before Apple, he was living as a hippy on a commune and doing work with Atari. He traveled as a sort of nomad or vagabond, dabbling in Zen Buddhism, but really he lived the life of a dilettante, doing casual work here and there.
But then he needed money, and he Steve Wozinak who helped Steve Jobs sell model-kit computers at $500 a piece. Steve Jobs had no passion and no vision for some giant company that would take over the world. He wanted quick cash. That was it.
Once he saw an opportunity to make even bigger money, Steve Jobs busted his butt doing deep work to make himself competitive against the other people trying to make money in the same computer space.
Had Steve Jobs followed his passion, to be a lazy Buddhist monk living in Zen communes and travelling here and there, he would have never been able to compete against the burgeoning computer engineers.
He would have floundered.
He would have been a nobody.
He would have been a professional bum.
He would have been an annoying quasi-spiritual Zen-cliché-larded mountebank.
Steve Jobs Became Successful Because He Didn’t Follow His Passion
Steve Jobs didn’t follow his passion. He followed an opportunity and delivered by developing in himself a unique ability that made him valuable to others.
Following your passion is a lie.
Following your passion is canard.
Following your passion is the kiss of death.
Following your passion is an empty cliché spewed by sanctimonious, brain-dead mediocrities.
Cal Newport points out that Steve Jobs became passionate AFTER he mastered his craft, AFTER he honed his talent, AFTER he developed unique skills that allowed him to navigate a world-dominating computer company.
Complex Career Origin Principle
Cal Newport writes: “Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the single idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.”
Real Passion Principle: Time and Mastery
“Passion takes time.” You have to cultivate it with deep work, undistracted focus on your craft.
To support the above, Yale researcher Amy Wizesniwski wanted to look at job happiness.
She divided jobs in 3 ways:
One. A job is a way to pay the bills.
Two. A career is a path toward increasingly better work.
Three. A calling is work that is an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.
Dream Job Fallacy
Mastery is greater than passion as a factor for happiness.
Having a “dream job” wasn’t the key to happiness, AW found. She found that it was time spent on the job and mastery of the job.
Her findings contradict the lame Passion Hypothesis, that childish, infantile myth that all you have to do is find your passion and as soon as you get the job you are instantly happy. “You followed your bliss! Oh happy you!”
Complexity to Consider: You don't have a passion and build a master for it; quite the contrary, you may have to build a mastery or at the very least a baseline of competence in order to have enough knowledge to have an authentic passion.
“Passion is a side effect of mastery.”
Develop your mastery first. Then the passion comes as a natural result.
This reminds me of something Viktor Frankl writes: Don’t aim to be happy. Aim for a life of purpose and meaning and then happiness will be an unintentional byproduct.
“Passion is a side effect of mastery.”
Develop your mastery first. Then the passion comes as a natural result.
This reminds me of something Viktor Frankl writes: Don’t aim to be happy. Aim for a life of purpose and meaning and then happiness will be an unintentional byproduct.
Newport's Career Manifesto
A CAREER MANIFESTO: Be a Craftsman or a Craftsperson
Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.
The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.
The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.
The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.
The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.
The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.
The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfilling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.
The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.
The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).
The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.
The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.
The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.
“Drivel” of the Passion Mindset
Or if you reject the craftsman mindset, you can have the passion mindset, which asks how much value your job is offering you.
Newport argues it is only by producing the craftsman mindset that you can create work that you love.
In terms of maturity, the craftsman mindset is the approach of a mature, fully realized human being.
In contrast, a passion mindset is the approach of a naive, immature, lazy narcissist.
What is career capital?
One, great work, which is rare and valuable.
Two, great workers, who have rare and valuable skills.
Three, craftsman mindset, which is determined to be so great they can’t ignore you.
Always Know How Much Career Capital You Have Before Making Career Change
On Cal Newport’s blog, he elaborates on the life of Lisa Feuer, who is featured in his book:
The Courage Fallacy
In 2005, Lisa Feuer quit her marketing job. She had held this same position throughout her 30s before deciding, at the age of 38, that it was time for something different.
As the New York Times reported in an article from last summer, she wanted the same independence and flexibility that her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, enjoyed. Bolstered by this new resolve, Lisa invested in a $4000 yoga instruction course and started Karma Kids Yoga — a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women.
Lisa’s story provides a pristine example of what I call the choice-centric approach to building an interesting life. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of choosing better work. Having the courage to leave your boring but dangerously comfortable job — to borrow a phrase from Tim Ferriss — and instead follow your “passion,” has become the treasure map guiding this philosophy’s adherents.
But there’s a problem: the endings are not always so happy…
What is the 10,000-Hour Rule?
Excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum of hours to accomplish. We’re not just talking any hours. We’re talking deep work hours, that is undistracted focus entailing a lot of mental discomfort.
Being willing to do 10,000 hours of deep work is a trait we see in people who labeled as geniuses like Mozart and Bill Gates.
Genius does not exist without deep work.
Talent without deep work is a flop, a dud, and a waste.
Is hard work enough to reach a level of mastery?
No. Deep work leads to deliberate practice, which requires feedback. Without deliberate practice and feedback, even a talented hard-working person will hit a plateau.
What are the Five Habits of a Craftsman?
1: Decide what capital market you are in. There are 2 kinds of markets –
Winner-take-all: One killer skills with a few winners all over the world (e.g. Hollywood script writer)
Auction: Diverse collection of skills. Here, there are many different types of career capital and each person might generate their own unique collection (e.g. CEO of a Fortune 500 company)
2: Identify your capital type. Ignore this if you are in a winner-take-all market as there’s only one type of capital. (i.e. be among the top 10 script writers in the world to make it in Hollywood)
For an auction market, however, seek open gates i.e. opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. Open gates get us farther faster. Skill acquisition is like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. (e.g. keep moving upwards in an organization and then laterally instead of trying to move laterally and start from scratch)
3: Define “good.” Set clear goals. For a script writer, the definition of “good” is clear – his scripts being taken seriously.
4: Stretch and destroy.Deliberate practice – that uncomfortable sensation in our heads that feels like physical strain, as if neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations.
5: Be patient. Look years into the future for the payoff. It’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you.
Six. What is the power of control and how does control result in job happiness?
Giving people more control at work increases their happiness, fulfillment, and engagement.
But you cannot earn safe control without career capital. Think of the lady who quit her job to run yoga studios. She had to go on food stamps.
The Economics of Remarkable Lives
As the recession hit, Lisa’s business struggled. One of the gyms where she taught closed. Two classes offered at a local public high school were dropped due to under-enrollment. The demand for private lessons diminished.
In 2009, she’s on track to make on $15,000 — not nearly enough to cover her expenses.
This, of course, is the problem with the choice-centric approach to life: it assumes that a much better job is out there waiting for you. The reality, however, is often more Darwinian: much better jobs are out there, but they’re only available to people with much better skills than most of their peers.
As I’ve argued before, the traits that make a remarkable life remarkable — flexibility, engagement, recognition, and reward — are highly desirable. Therefore, to land a job (or start a business) that returns these rewards, you must have a skill to offer that’s both rare and valuable.
It’s simple economics.
Lisa didn’t have a skill that was rare or valuable. She did receive professional Yoga training, but the barrier to entry for this training was the ability to write a tuition check and take a few weeks worth of classes. This skill wasn’t rare or valuable enough to guarantee her the traits she admired in the lives of successful entrepreneurs, and as soon as the economy hiccuped she experienced this reality.
Her courage to follow her “passion” was not enough, in isolation, to improve her life.
The Value of Nerves
This brings me back to the (perhaps) controversial title of this post. If you’re in a job that’s boring but tolerable, and you feel nervous about quitting, you might consider trusting this instinct. Your mind might be honing in on the economic truth that you don’t have a skill rare and valuable enough to earn you a substantially better deal somewhere else. Because of this, your mind understandably reacts to your career day dreams with jitters.
On the other hand, those who have built up highly desirable skills rarely feel much nervousness about the prospect of switching jobs. They’ve probably had other job offers, or can name a half-a-dozen clients that would pay handsomely for their consulting services.
For example…
Tens of thousands of bored cubicle dwellers fantasize about building their own companies. (Writers have built lucrative careers around pitching this message.) Most of these workers, however, are nervous about this idea due to the very real possibility that their business ventures will fold, leaving them, like Lisa, broke, without health insurance, and worse off than before.
By contrast, earlier this year I received a call from a head hunter trying to recruit me to work at a Manhattan-based start-up incubator that would, in essence, pay me to think up and try out business ideas. (Jeff Bezos was in a similar position at D.E. Shaw when he came up with the idea for Amazon.com.)
My point is that if I wanted to start my own company (which I don’t), I wouldn’t feel nervous. The reason is clear: By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment. The market has made this value clear to me; ergo, no nerves.
The Hard Focus-Centric Approach
Though I’m not nervous about the idea of starting my own company, I am, at this point in my career, nervous about the path that most interests me: becoming a professor at a quality research university.
Instead of paralyzing me, however, these nerves provide wonderful clarity. My goal during my postdoc years now centers on eliminating this nervousness. To do so, I need to make myself unambiguously one of the top candidates in the computer science academic job market. This, in turn, requires incredibly high-quality research that promises to push my research sub-fields forward. This specific goal has trickled down into concrete changes in my day to day work habits. Most notably, I’ve recently rebuilt my schedule around hard focus, and I spend much more time reading the research literature and thinking about the long-term direction of my short-term work.
In other words, nervousness can provide more than just sober-minded warning. It can also help guide you in your efforts to build a remarkable life. Instead of grappling with vague worry — “Am I stupid for wanting to try this new career path?” — you can focus your energy toward a clear metric: building up a valuable skill until you’ve eliminated this nervousness.
Jobs to Avoid
One, the job offers you few opportunities to distinguish yourself with rare and valuable work.
Two, the job makes you focus on useless or morally wrong activities.
Three, the job forces you to work with people you don’t like.
Essay 1 Options with Suggested Outlines for Essay 1
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. Your second source will be “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
Suggested Outline with Sample Thesis:
Paragraph 1: Write a cautionary tale of someone who followed the Passion Hypothesis or simply define the Passion Hypothesis.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim or argument in defense or refutation of Newport's thesis that the Passion Hypothesis is an impediment to success.
Thesis Example for Paragraph 2:
"Cal Newport's argument that we should shun the Passion Hypothesis and replace it with a craftsman's mindset is convincing (is not convincing) because ______________, ______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Paragraphs 3-6: Develop body paragraphs that support your claim.
Paragraph 7: Write a counterargument and rebuttal to show reader you've considered opposing views.
Paragraph 8: Write a conclusion that restates your claim or thesis with emotional power.
Introduction Paragraph
You could start your essay with an introduction about someone you know who followed his or passion with or without the desired result.
Sample Introduction and Thesis
Stanley was a big proponent of "follow your dreams." After he graduated from high school in 1977 and took some acting classes at a local community college, he dropped out to move to Los Angeles where he spent the 1980s working as a waiter and trying to make a break into Hollywood. He spent his money on coaches, mentors, acting gurus, body language masters, voice instructors, New Age positive thinking experts, all in an attempt to step up his game. He landed a few small parts here and there, just enough work to make him feel he was on the verge of making it. His optimism grew in the 1990s when he met some film directors who gave him some small roles and hinted at getting him larger roles when the opportunity came. Feeding on these dreams while living in a squalid apartment in the 1990s, Stanley continued to live a life of abject obscurity and futility with the hope that he just had to follow his dream and be persistent and that these two qualities would guarantee his success. He remained inside this delusional bubble for nearly two more decades while he lived in a roach-infested apartment in downtown L.A. where he supplemented his income by delivering plasma and working as a masseuse, a job he had to give up when his hands become afflicted with arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome. At the age of 60, around 2018, Stanley got strep throat and couldn't afford antibiotics since none of his part-time gigs offered health insurance. Curled into the fetal position on his apartment's bare mattress with roaches crawling over him, he wept as he felt betrayed by the fact that he had done what the American Dream told him to do: He sacrificed everything to follow his passion and remained tenacious over four decades to bring his dreams to fruition, but he knew in that moment that he was a pathetic, miserable failure, and that his dreams had soured and curdled into rotten milk.
This curdling of our dreams and the false promise of following those dreams is explored in Cal Newport's important book So Good They Can't Ignore You and his accompanying YouTube video "'Follow Your Passion' Is Bad Advice" in which Newport makes a persuasive case for replacing the Passion Hypothesis with the craftsman mindset. His claim rests on four compelling observations. Passion without spending time mastering a craft is worthless. Passion is not some low-hanging fruit that we pick from a tree, but an asset we develop over 10,000 hours of sustained hard work and tedium. Only 2% of the human race work at a "dream job." Most of us must find happiness because we are a "dream employer" who is valued based on the mastery of our craft. And finally, courage to pursue your dream without an honest of assessment of your capital is dangerous and self-destructive.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-word essay
8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation.
After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Signal Phrases Used for In-Text Citations
About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.
We use signal phrases to let reader know we are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing.
Adapted from A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines 7th ed. by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers
How can I use them?
Below are some guidelines and tips for using signal phrases.
Signal phrases usually include the author’s name but can also include the author’s job title or background (“reporter for Washington Post,” “researcher,” “senator,” “scholar,” and so on) and/or the title of the source.
Signal phrases usually come at the beginning of a sentence before the source material, but they can also occur in the middle of a source or at the end.
To avoid monotony and repetition, try to vary both the language and placement of your signal phrases.
According to Maxwell and Hanson,…
As the 2017 IRS report indicates, …
Smith and Johnson state that …
Some scholars have shown…
Legal scholar Terrence Roberts offered a persuasive argument: “….”
Choose a verb that is appropriate to the way you are using your source. Below is a list of verbs that can be used in signal phrases:
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase.
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
“Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition” by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic)
In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.
“Welfare for Those Unwilling to Work? It’s Not as Crazy as You Think” by Christine Emba (Washington Post)
As journalist Annie Lowrey, whose book “Give People Money” surveyed basic income programs around the world, points out, the United States is distinguished both by its exaltation of self-sufficiency and its unique racial divide. As it turns out, racism makes it hard to improve the safety net: Research shows that whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit, even if they themselves are receiving social support. In fact, this was a flaw in the original New Deal: Agricultural and domestic laborers, most of whom were black, were purposefully excluded from many of the New Deal’s most important provisions.
“70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages” by Michael Saler (The Nation)
Through the ubiquity of such tools, scholars and laypeople alike are slowly being acclimatized to thinking in the long term, an outlook encouraged by Jo Guldi and David Armitage in The History Manifesto (2014). They argue that an emphasis on what the historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée back in 1958 is now the approach best suited to a world awash in data of extended times and climes. Critics of The History Manifesto reasonably point out that while Big and Deep may be appealing, even seductive, size matters: Extra-large will not fit all, and specific historical questions will always determine the scope and method of investigation. Yet the existence of the debate itself (quite lively on Twitter, of all places) is testimony to the reincarnation of Braudel’s project.
“Can You Believe YouTube Caused the Rise in Flat-Earthers?” by Madison Malone Kircher
When YouTube said earlier this year that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways,” people praised the decision. A certain ex-engineer called it a “historic victory” on Twitter and applauded the company for making such a move, possibly at a great expense to its business model. Which … ha. Among the types of videos YouTube said it would cut back on recommending was flat-Earth content. As in, videos peddling the idea that the Earth is not, as science has repeatedly proven, round. And while I’m all for quashing the spread of truly wrongheaded and potentially dangerous ideas, in the case of flat-Earth indoctrination, the damage has long since been done.
Researchers from Texas Tech University believe they’ve isolated YouTube videos as ground zero for the spread of flat-earth theories, TheGuardianreports. Speaking with attendees at the biggest annual gathering of flat-Earthers both in 2017 and 2018, the research team found that people who fell into the world of the flat Earth were often those who were already spending time on YouTube watching other conspiracy videos (about 9/11, for example). This feedback loop — where watching conspiracy videos leads to being shown more conspiracy videos, which in turn motivates creators to make more conspiracy content — was also cited by the above-mentioned ex-YouTube engineer. It’s that circle that has enabled flat-Earth content to thrive. Researchers said one of the most popular videos is a nearly two-hour-long piece that details myriad reasons why, if you’re smart enough to think beyond what has been crammed into your brain by society for your whole life, the Earth is so obviously flat.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
Washington, D.C. may soon be littered with the political bodies of people who believed they could spin their way out of the impact of the new Bob Woodward book, Fear. I’ve been to the Washington rodeo enough times to know that Woodward’s methodical, grinding style of investigation doesn’t lend itself to escaping unscathed, especially for bad actors and loose cannons. Hell, as a young Department of Defense aide in 1990, I saw it up close when his book, The Commanders, led to the firing of USAF Chief of Staff Mike Dugan. He had tapes then, as he does now.
This week, it’s Donald Trump’s turn under Woodward’s political electron microscope, and the President’s hissy-fit reaction tells us how close Woodward’s work has struck. Trump knows his White House staff, up to and including his daughter, thinks he’s off the rails, a danger to himself and the country, and unable to execute the duties of a Waffle House manager much less the President of the United States.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise. But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Healthcare
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Civil War in America
In the South, it is still common to hear white people speak of the Civil War by denying its connection to the evils of slavery and treason. Rather, it is commonly spouted by white people in the south that the Civil War was the result of "Northern aggression" and "state rights," but these explanations are odious poppycock and are part of America's shameful history of fake news, which afflicts our country like an ugly, festering cancer sore to this very day.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?'
Paragraph 1: For your introduction, summarize Karl Taro's Greenfeld's description of burnout as he and his daughter attempt to do what appears to be an onslaught of homework and the teacher's response when the father presents his complaint.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim that argues for or against the kind of rigorous homework discussed in the two essays above.
Paragraphs 3-6: Develop body paragraphs that support your claim.
Paragraph 7: Write a counterargument and rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Write a conclusion that restates your thesis with emotional power
Three. Pocketed, flat folder for your Homework Portfolio
Work You Must Do in This Class
One: Five Typed Essays
You will write 5 typed essays in MLA format. The first 4 essays will be 1,000 words. The fifth essay, your capstone essay, will be 1,200 words and will need 5 sources for your Works Cited. The first 4 essays are worth 150 points. The final fifth essay is worth 250 points. These essays will be uploaded on turnitin.
Your five essays total 5,200 words.
Your 14 reading responses at 200 words each total 2,800 words.
Your word total is 8,000.
Late Essays
Late essays are accepted for a week after the deadline and are marked down a full grade.
Two: Keep Reading Responses in Your Portfolio
You must generate a writing response to every reading. Instead of getting quizzed on the readings, you will write 200-word reading-response to the readings. You will keep these essays in a flat, pocketed folder, which I will grade during Finals Week. Unless you have a doctor’s note, you cannot make-up missing mini essays. You should be motivated to show up to every class. Your portfolio is worth 150 points. I grade it two halves at 75 points per half.
Grading Based on 1,000 Points
First 4 essays: 150 for 600
Final 5th essay: 250
Portfolio, Part 1 and Part 2, 75 each for 150
Grading Point Scheme
Total Points: 1,000 (A is 900-100; B is 800-899; C is 700-799; D is 600 to 699)
Essay 1 Options for Essay 1 Due on March 9 and needs 2 sources for Works Cited
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. For a second source, you can use “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
Read Rachel Monroe’s essay “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and develop an argumentative claim that supports or refutes Monroe’s claim that the appeal of GoFundMe is based on an over simplistic narrative that conceals unsavory contradictions and complexities.
Essay Assignment 4 due May 18. Be sure to have at least 2 sources and an MLA Works Cited page.
Option A
See Monica Lewinsky Ted Talk video “The Price of Shame” and John Oliver video on “Public Shaming” and develop an argumentative thesis about what type of shaming is good for society and what kind of shaming cannot be defended. Consult Conor Friedersdorf essay “John Oliver’s Weak Case for Callout Culture.”
Option B
Read Kajsa Elas Ekman’s essay “All surrogacy is exploitation” and write an argumentative thesis that supports or refutes her claim.
Option C
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us.” ConsultVice video about social media and tribalism; also consultBrian Klaas video on how tribalism in social media is undermining democracy. Also consult the role ofBackfire Effect and tribalism.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-word essay
8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Essay #5 Due June 10.
You need 5 credible sources for the MLA Works Cited page in your final capstone essay.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,200-word essay
9 Paragraphs, 135 words per paragraph, approx. 1,200 words (1,215 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-6: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 7 & 8: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Final Essay #5 for 1,200 words
Option A
In context of Alfie Kohn’s “From Degrading to De-Grading,” support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon. In other words, will students benefit from an accountability-free education? Why? Explain.
February 19 Introduction and Cal Newport video. Homework #1 for February 24: Read Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset and in a 200-word paragraph explain how he arrives at his claim.
February24 Go over Newport online chapters 1-3. Homework #2 for February 26: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend "A Teacher's Defense of Homework" and in 200-word paragraph, explain the dilemma parents face when struggling with their children’s homework.
February 26 Go over the homework debate. Homework #3 for next class: Read S-2 Sentence Fragments in your electronic Little Seagull Handbook and report on the following: What is a fragment? What are the types of fragments? Do the 3 Practice Quizzes, report your scored, and explain how confident you are about avoiding fragments for your essays.
March 2 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Do Homework Check 3 for S-2 Sentence Fragments. Our goal is to write an introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, and one or two supporting paragraphs. Homework #4 for next class: Read S-3 Comma Splices, Fused Sentences and explain how to identify and edit comma splices and fused sentences. Take the 4 Practice quizzes, report your scores, and explain how confident you are about avoiding these errors in future essays.
March 4 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write two supporting paragraphs, a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, a conclusion, and a Works Cited page. Go over Homework #4, Comma Splices and Fused Sentences.
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
April 6: We will go over bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” and “Keeping Close to Home” and develop an argumentative thesis about hooks’ contention that social class can be an impediment to climbing the educational ladder. Homework #12 is to read Rachel Monroe’s “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and explain why this fund-raising campaign has a dark side.
April 8: We will go over Rachel Monroe’s “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly.” We will grade Portfolio Part #1, which should include 12 typed homework assignments. Homework #13: Read P1 Commas and take the 10 tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
April 20 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Homework #13 is due next class.
April 22 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Homework #13 on commas is due.
April 27 Essay #3 due on turnitin. See Monica Lewinsky Ted Talk video “The Price of Shame” and John Oliver video on “Public Shaming” and develop an argumentative thesis about what type of shaming is good for society and what kind of shaming cannot be defended.Homework #14: Read Kajsa Elas Ekman’s essay “All surrogacy is exploitation” and in 200 words explain why surrogacy should be banned.
April 29 Will will go over surrogacy debate. Homework #15: Read David Brooks’ Atlantic essay “People Like Us” and explain why we gravitate people who share our values.
May 6 Go over free community college debate.Your homework #17 for next class is to read Harlan Coben’s argument from “The Undercover Parent” and in 200 words argue if spyware is a reasonable and compelling safety measure that parents may need to use for their children’s computers. Homework #18 is to read P-2 Semicolons and take the practice tests. Explain your confidence in using semicolons.
May 11 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write first half of your essay. Go over Homework #18. Your Homework #19: Read P-5 Quotation Marks, take the 5 Practice Tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
May 13 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write second half of your essay. Go over Homework #19.
June 1 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write first third of your essay.
June 3 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write second third of your essay. We will go over Homework #22.
June 8 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write final third of your essay.
June 10 Essay 5 Due on turnitin and turn in Portfolio Part 2 (13-22)
Each essay must be submitted to www.turnitin.com where it will be checked for illegal copying/plagiarism. I cannot give credit for an essay that is not submitted to this site by the deadline.
The process is very simple; if you need help, detailed instructions are available at http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/student-quickstart-guide
You will need two pieces of information to use the site:
Class ID and Enrollment Password, which I will give you first week of class
Classroom Decorum: No smart phones can be used in class. If you’re on your smartphone and I see you, you get a warning the first time. Second time, you must leave the class and take an absence
Tardies: Two tardies equals one absence.
Course Catalog Description:
This course is designed to strengthen the students’ ability to read with understanding and discernment, to discuss assigned readings intelligently, and to write clearly. Emphasis will be on writing essays in which each paragraph relates to a controlling idea, has an introduction and a conclusion, and contains primary and secondary support. College-level reading material will be assigned to provide the stimulus for class discussion and writing assignments, including a required research paper.
Course Objectives:
One. Recognize and revise sentence-level grammar and usage errors.
Two. Read and apply critical-thinking skills to numerous published articles and to college-level, book-length works for the purpose of writing and discussion.
Three. Apply appropriate strategies in the writing process including prewriting, composing, revising, and editing techniques.
Four. Compose multi-paragraph, thesis-driven essays with logical and appropriate supporting ideas, and with unity and coherence.
Five. Demonstrate ability to locate and utilize a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites.
Six. Utilize MLA guidelines to format essays, cite sources in the texts of essays, and compile Works Cited lists.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, students will:
Complete a research-based essay that has been written out of class and undergone revision. It should demonstrate the student’s ability to thoughtfully support a single thesis using analysis and synthesis.
Integrate multiple sources, including a book-length work and a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites. Citations must be in MLA format and include a Works Cited page.
Demonstrate logical paragraph composition and sentence structure. The essay should have correct grammar, spelling, and word use.
Students with Disabilities:
It is the policy of the El Camino Community College District to encourage full inclusion of people with disabilities in all programs and services. Students with disabilities who believe they may need accommodations in this class should contact the campus Special Resource Center (310) 660-3295, as soon as possible. This will ensure that students are able to fully participate.
Academic Honesty and Plagiarism:
El Camino College places a high value on the integrity of its student scholars. When an instructor determines that there is evidence of dishonesty in any academic work (including, but not limited to cheating, plagiarism, or theft of exam materials), disciplinary action appropriate to the misconduct as defined in BP 5500 may be taken. A failing grade on an assignment in which academic dishonesty has occurred and suspension from class are among the disciplinary actions for academic dishonesty (AP 5520). Students with any questions about the Academic Honesty or discipline policies are encouraged to speak with their instructor in advance.
Attendance and Class Participation
You can’t miss more than 4 classes. A tardy counts as one half an absence. These rules are designed so that we will be compliant with Title 5 Contact Hour Laws prescribed by the State of California.
Student Resources:
Reading Success Center (East Library Basement E-36)
Software and tutors are available for vocabulary development & reading comprehension.
Library Media Technology Center - LMTC (East Library Basement)
Computers are available for free use. Bring your student ID # & flash drive. There’s a charge for printing.
Writing Center (H122)
Computers are available for free use. Free tutoring is available for writing assignments, grammar, and vocabulary. Bring your student ID & flash drive to save work. Printing is NOT available.
Learning Resource Center - LRC (West Wing of the Library, 2nd floor)
The LRC Tutorial Program offers free drop-in tutoring. For the tutoring schedule, go to elcamino.edu/library/lrc/tutoring .The LRC also offers individualized computer adaptive programs to help build your reading comprehension skills.
Student Health Center (Next to the Pool)
The Health Center offers free medical and psychological services as well as free workshops on topics like “test anxiety.” Low cost medical testing is also available.
Special Resource Center – SRC (Southwest Wing of Student Services Building)
The SRC provides free disability services, including interpreters, testing accommodations, counseling, and adaptive computer technology.
Cal Newport Essay Topic
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. For a second source, you can use “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
Richard Bolles contributes to the Passion Trap in the early 1970s.
The premise of Bolles’ guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear: “[figure] out what you like to do…and then find a place that needs people like you.” But in 1970, this concept was a radical notion.
The Passion Trap is about going on the hunt for your passion as the key ingredient to success. This is the first time in history the focus went away from skills to passion. The idea of passion if examined closely is ridiculous for several reasons.
For one, an eighteen-year-old in college usually doesn't know his or her passion. This is natural. We go to high school where belong to cliques, being popular, posting on social media, and living day to day comprise our existence. We haven't arrived at the place where what we contribute to society determines our value and validation.
Most of us are blank slates when we arrive at college.
There are some exceptions. Some of us know we want to be painters, graphic artists, computer designers, game designers, cyber security specialists, comedians, and writers by the age of eighteen. But this is less than 5% of us.
What gives The Passion Trap its power?
Most of us get jobs just to survive. We barely like them. We tolerate them.
The Passion Trap
Let’s summarize Bolles’ insight as follows: the key to a fulfilling career is to first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match. For simplicity, I’ll call this the passion hypothesis. We can think of the past forty years — the post-Parachutes era — as a vast experiment testing the validity of this hypothesis.
The results of this experiment, unfortunately, are not pretty.
The latest Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction, released earlier this year, found only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61% recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey.
As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center, notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”
Though many factors can account for workplace unhappiness, a major cause identified by the survey is that “fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.”
We've grown up believing we deserve a fulfilling career, but the Passion Trap blinds us to what makes a job, or anything in life for that matter fulfilling.
Professor Jordan Peterson observes that only 2% of the world population enjoy jobs that are a life calling that summons our sense of higher purpose. Most of us get jobs to pay the bills.
The Passion Trap makes us believe that unless our life passion is expressed in our full-time job, we will be miserable failures.
The Passion Trap creates unrealistic expectations and sets us up for disappointment and misery.
Put another way, as we’ve placed more importance on the passion hypothesis, we’ve become less interested, and therefore more unhappy, with the work we have. I call this effect the passion trap, which I define as follows:
The Passion Trap The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.
I argue that the passion trap is an important contributing factor to our steadily decreasing workplace satisfaction. So far, however, my evidence for this claim is circumstantial at best. We need to dig deeper.
The Young and the Anxious
If the passion trap is real, recent college graduates should be the most affected. At this young age, before the demands and stability of family, their careers are more likely to define their identity. It’s also the period where they feel the most control over their path, and therefore also feel the most anxiety about their decisions.
This predicts, therefore, that the passion trap would make young workers the most unhappy. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what the Conference Board survey finds. Roughly 64% of workers under 25 say that they are unhappy in their jobs, the highest levels of dissatisfaction measured for any age group over the twenty-two year history of the survey.
To better understand why young people are so unhappy, let’s turn to Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 ode to youth disaffection: Quarterlife Crisis. This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy twentysomethings, and as the passion trap predicts, most of the stories revolve around uncertainty regarding the search for the “right” job.
Consider, for example, the tale of Scott, a 27-year-old from Washington D.C.:
“My professional situation now couldn’t be more perfect,” Scott reports. “[I] chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics.”
Scott succeeded in this pursuit. Though he had to start at the bottom, as a volunteer campaign aide, within two short years after college graduation he had the “Capital Hill job I dreamed of.”
Rationally, he should be happy with his work: “I love my office, my friends…even my boss.” Yet he’s not. “It’s not fulfilling,” he despairs. He has since restarted his search for his “life’s work.”
“I’ve committed myself to exploring other options that interest me,” Scott says. “But I’m having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.”
The passion hypothesis was so ingrained into Scott’s psyche that even his dream job, once obtained, couldn’t live up to the fantasy. Unhappiness followed.
Story after story in Quarterlife Crisis follow this same script:
“I graduated college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me,” says Jill. Not surprisingly, she hasn’t found it.
“I’m so lost about I want to do,” despairs 24-year old Elaine, “that I don’t even realize what I’m sacrificing or compromising.”
And so on. The passion trap strikes again and again in these pages.
This all points towards a troubling conclusion: not only is the passion hypothesis wrong, it’s also potentially dangerous, leading us into a passion trap that increases our feelings of unhappiness and uncertainty.
***
We end up believing there is a Job Holy Grail waiting for us. We believe in a Job Uber Alles (above all else, ultimate).
Telling college students there is a Job Holy Grail waiting for them is irresponsible, it's a lie, and it's not grounded in reality.
So what then do we tell students as they struggle to find a career?
Happiness Beyond Passion
These initial articles in my Rethinking Passion series have been negative. My goal was to tear down our assumptions about workplace happiness, because as long we cling to the passion hypothesis, other factors will remain obscured in its high-wattage glare. Soon, however, I’ll be taking on the positive task of figuring out what does matter. I’ve written at length about the importance of ability and craftsmanship in developing passion for your work (see here and here and here), but I also want to explore equally important (and equally nuanced) factors, such as:
authenticity (why are we attracted to the stories of people living simply in beautiful surroundings?),
autonomy (what’s the importance of having control over when and how you work?), and
mission (how vital is a cause for transforming work into something meaningful?).
***
Cal Newport argues that the emphasis for finding a meaningful career should not be based on something as simple as "finding your passion."
You have to gravitate toward your interests and passions, of course, but the emphasis for Newport is on developing mastery of your skill, becoming so good at what you do that you are irreplaceable, and developing a "craftsman mindset."
Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.
The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.
The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.
The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.
The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.
The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.
The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfulling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.
The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.
The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).
The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.
The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.
The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.
Homework #1 for February 24: Read Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset and in a 200-word paragraph explain how he arrives at his claim.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
Washington, D.C. may soon be littered with the political bodies of people who believed they could spin their way out of the impact of the new Bob Woodward book, Fear. I’ve been to the Washington rodeo enough times to know that Woodward’s methodical, grinding style of investigation doesn’t lend itself to escaping unscathed, especially for bad actors and loose cannons. Hell, as a young Department of Defense aide in 1990, I saw it up close when his book, The Commanders, led to the firing of USAF Chief of Staff Mike Dugan. He had tapes then, as he does now.
This week, it’s Donald Trump’s turn under Woodward’s political electron microscope, and the President’s hissy-fit reaction tells us how close Woodward’s work has struck. Trump knows his White House staff, up to and including his daughter, thinks he’s off the rails, a danger to himself and the country, and unable to execute the duties of a Waffle House manager much less the President of the United States.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise. But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Healthcare
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Civil War in America
In the South, it is still common to hear white people speak of the Civil War by denying its connection to the evils of slavery and treason. Rather, it is commonly spouted by white people in the south that the Civil War was the result of "Northern aggression" and "state rights," but these explanations are odious poppycock and are part of America's shameful history of fake news, which afflicts our country like an ugly, festering cancer sore to this very day.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?'
Three. Pocketed, flat folder for your Homework Portfolio
Work You Must Do in This Class
One: Five Typed Essays
You will write 5 typed essays in MLA format. The first 4 essays will be 1,000 words. The fifth essay, your capstone essay, will be 1,200 words and will need 5 sources for your Works Cited. The first 4 essays are worth 150 points. The final fifth essay is worth 250 points. These essays will be uploaded on turnitin.
Your five essays total 5,200 words.
Your 14 reading responses at 200 words each total 2,800 words.
Your word total is 8,000.
Late Essays
Late essays are accepted for a week after the deadline and are marked down a full grade.
Two: Keep Reading Responses in Your Portfolio
You must generate a writing response to every reading. Instead of getting quizzed on the readings, you will write 200-word reading-response to the readings. You will keep these essays in a flat, pocketed folder, which I will grade during Finals Week. Unless you have a doctor’s note, you cannot make-up missing mini essays. You should be motivated to show up to every class. Your portfolio is worth 150 points. I grade it two halves at 75 points per half.
Grading Based on 1,000 Points
First 4 essays: 150 for 600
Final 5th essay: 250
Portfolio, Part 1 and Part 2, 75 each for 150
Grading Point Scheme
Total Points: 1,000 (A is 900-100; B is 800-899; C is 700-799; D is 600 to 699)
Essay 1 Options for Essay 1 Due on March 2 and needs 2 sources for Works Cited
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. For a second source, you can use “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
Read Rachel Monroe’s essay “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and develop an argumentative claim that supports or refutes Monroe’s claim that the appeal of GoFundMe is based on an over simplistic narrative that conceals unsavory contradictions and complexities.
Essay Assignment 4 due May 18. Be sure to have at least 2 sources and an MLA Works Cited page.
Option A
See Monica Lewinsky Ted Talk video “The Price of Shame” and John Oliver video on “Public Shaming” and develop an argumentative thesis about what type of shaming is good for society and what kind of shaming cannot be defended. Consult Conor Friedersdorf essay “John Oliver’s Weak Case for Callout Culture.”
Option B
Read Kajsa Elas Ekman’s essay “All surrogacy is exploitation” and write an argumentative thesis that supports or refutes her claim.
Option C
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us.” ConsultVice video about social media and tribalism; also consultBrian Klaas video on how tribalism in social media is undermining democracy. Also consult the role ofBackfire Effect and tribalism.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-word essay
8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Essay #5 Due June 10.
You need 5 credible sources for the MLA Works Cited page in your final capstone essay.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,200-word essay
9 Paragraphs, 135 words per paragraph, approx. 1,200 words (1,215 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-6: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 7 & 8: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Final Essay #5 for 1,200 words
Option A
In context of Alfie Kohn’s “From Degrading to De-Grading,” support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon. In other words, will students benefit from an accountability-free education? Why? Explain.
February 19 Introduction and Cal Newport video. Homework #1 for February 24: Read Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset and in a 200-word paragraph explain how he arrives at his claim.
February24 Go over Newport online chapters 1-3. Homework #2 for February 26: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend "A Teacher's Defense of Homework" and in 200-word paragraph, explain the dilemma parents face when struggling with their children’s homework.
February 26 Go over the homework debate. Homework #3 for next class: Read S-2 Sentence Fragments in your electronic Little Seagull Handbook and report on the following: What is a fragment? What are the types of fragments? Do the 3 Practice Quizzes, report your scored, and explain how confident you are about avoiding fragments for your essays.
March 2 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Do Homework Check 3 for S-2 Sentence Fragments. Our goal is to write an introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, and one or two supporting paragraphs. Homework #4 for next class: Read S-3 Comma Splices, Fused Sentences and explain how to identify and edit comma splices and fused sentences. Take the 4 Practice quizzes, report your scores, and explain how confident you are about avoiding these errors in future essays.
March 4 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write two supporting paragraphs, a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, a conclusion, and a Works Cited page. Go over Homework #4, Comma Splices and Fused Sentences.
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,”, Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
April 6: We will go over bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” and “Keeping Close to Home” and develop an argumentative thesis about hooks’ contention that social class can be an impediment to climbing the educational ladder. Homework #12 is to read Rachel Monroe’s “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and explain why this fund-raising campaign has a dark side.
April 8: We will go over Rachel Monroe’s “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly.” We will grade Portfolio Part #1, which should include 12 typed homework assignments. Homework #13: Read P1 Commas and take the 10 tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
April 20 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Homework #13 is due next class.
April 22 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Homework #13 on commas is due.
April 27 Essay #3 due on turnitin. See Monica Lewinsky Ted Talk video “The Price of Shame” and John Oliver video on “Public Shaming” and develop an argumentative thesis about what type of shaming is good for society and what kind of shaming cannot be defended.Homework #14: Read Kajsa Elas Ekman’s essay “All surrogacy is exploitation” and in 200 words explain why surrogacy should be banned.
April 29 Will will go over surrogacy debate. Homework #15: Read David Brooks’ Atlantic essay “People Like Us” and explain why we gravitate people who share our values.
May 6 Go over free community college debate.Your homework #17 for next class is to read Harlan Coben’s argument from “The Undercover Parent” and in 200 words argue if spyware is a reasonable and compelling safety measure that parents may need to use for their children’s computers. Homework #18 is to read P-2 Semicolons and take the practice tests. Explain your confidence in using semicolons.
May 11 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write first half of your essay. Go over Homework #18. Your Homework #19: Read P-5 Quotation Marks, take the 5 Practice Tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
May 13 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write second half of your essay. Go over Homework #19.
June 1 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write first third of your essay.
June 3 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write second third of your essay. We will go over Homework #22.
June 8 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write final third of your essay.
June 10 Essay 5 Due on turnitin and turn in Portfolio Part 2 (13-22)
Each essay must be submitted to www.turnitin.com where it will be checked for illegal copying/plagiarism. I cannot give credit for an essay that is not submitted to this site by the deadline.
The process is very simple; if you need help, detailed instructions are available at http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/student-quickstart-guide
You will need two pieces of information to use the site:
Class ID and Enrollment Password, which I will give you first week of class
Classroom Decorum: No smart phones can be used in class. If you’re on your smartphone and I see you, you get a warning the first time. Second time, you must leave the class and take an absence
Tardies: Two tardies equals one absence.
Course Catalog Description:
This course is designed to strengthen the students’ ability to read with understanding and discernment, to discuss assigned readings intelligently, and to write clearly. Emphasis will be on writing essays in which each paragraph relates to a controlling idea, has an introduction and a conclusion, and contains primary and secondary support. College-level reading material will be assigned to provide the stimulus for class discussion and writing assignments, including a required research paper.
Course Objectives:
One. Recognize and revise sentence-level grammar and usage errors.
Two. Read and apply critical-thinking skills to numerous published articles and to college-level, book-length works for the purpose of writing and discussion.
Three. Apply appropriate strategies in the writing process including prewriting, composing, revising, and editing techniques.
Four. Compose multi-paragraph, thesis-driven essays with logical and appropriate supporting ideas, and with unity and coherence.
Five. Demonstrate ability to locate and utilize a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites.
Six. Utilize MLA guidelines to format essays, cite sources in the texts of essays, and compile Works Cited lists.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, students will:
Complete a research-based essay that has been written out of class and undergone revision. It should demonstrate the student’s ability to thoughtfully support a single thesis using analysis and synthesis.
Integrate multiple sources, including a book-length work and a variety of academic databases, peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly websites. Citations must be in MLA format and include a Works Cited page.
Demonstrate logical paragraph composition and sentence structure. The essay should have correct grammar, spelling, and word use.
Students with Disabilities:
It is the policy of the El Camino Community College District to encourage full inclusion of people with disabilities in all programs and services. Students with disabilities who believe they may need accommodations in this class should contact the campus Special Resource Center (310) 660-3295, as soon as possible. This will ensure that students are able to fully participate.
Academic Honesty and Plagiarism:
El Camino College places a high value on the integrity of its student scholars. When an instructor determines that there is evidence of dishonesty in any academic work (including, but not limited to cheating, plagiarism, or theft of exam materials), disciplinary action appropriate to the misconduct as defined in BP 5500 may be taken. A failing grade on an assignment in which academic dishonesty has occurred and suspension from class are among the disciplinary actions for academic dishonesty (AP 5520). Students with any questions about the Academic Honesty or discipline policies are encouraged to speak with their instructor in advance.
Attendance and Class Participation
You can’t miss more than 4 classes. A tardy counts as one half an absence. These rules are designed so that we will be compliant with Title 5 Contact Hour Laws prescribed by the State of California.
Student Resources:
Reading Success Center (East Library Basement E-36)
Software and tutors are available for vocabulary development & reading comprehension.
Library Media Technology Center - LMTC (East Library Basement)
Computers are available for free use. Bring your student ID # & flash drive. There’s a charge for printing.
Writing Center (H122)
Computers are available for free use. Free tutoring is available for writing assignments, grammar, and vocabulary. Bring your student ID & flash drive to save work. Printing is NOT available.
Learning Resource Center - LRC (West Wing of the Library, 2nd floor)
The LRC Tutorial Program offers free drop-in tutoring. For the tutoring schedule, go to elcamino.edu/library/lrc/tutoring .The LRC also offers individualized computer adaptive programs to help build your reading comprehension skills.
Student Health Center (Next to the Pool)
The Health Center offers free medical and psychological services as well as free workshops on topics like “test anxiety.” Low cost medical testing is also available.
Special Resource Center – SRC (Southwest Wing of Student Services Building)
The SRC provides free disability services, including interpreters, testing accommodations, counseling, and adaptive computer technology.