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/
One. Describe the dystopia of the warehouse wage slave job.
A barrage of tests, invasive questions, and videos create the sense that the job applicant is a prisoner doing prison work. This sense of self-abasement is further reinforced by the dystopian inner city landscape of the interview office.
You’re ordered to do stretching exercises to counteract the abuse of overtime work shifts. There is an implicit message that the work you're doing is brutalizing your body, so stretch in order that we may exploit you all the more.
Inevitably, the repetitive work will do lifelong damage: arthritis, carpal tunnel, scoliosis, herniated disc, plantar fasciitis, shin splints, hernias, PTSD, etc.
One package distribution error (putting two of the same packages on the conveyor belt when the scanner says only one package) results in a disciplinary notice, which in short paints you like a criminal. "A package distribution error has rendered you a liability to the operation."
Your work is dehumanizing and defines you as a cog in a machine: You stand still at a conveyor line for a 10-hour shift while walking on concrete or metal stairs. Depression and madness are the natural results of this kind of work. In fact, to not go mad in this environment is to evidence another form of madness.
You want more?
Workers walk 12 miles a day on concrete.
You have to show up an hour early and wait for being sorted out and trained and this hour goes unpaid. Again, the implicit message is that you're worthless and we have you in our control.
The employees are warned “there is no room for inefficiencies” and directed toward Brian, a husband with children, who lost two weeks of pay because he screwed up on his job application. Brian is used as a warning and an example to the others. This sounds like a prisoner-of-war camp.
Bathroom breaks are discouraged because they diminish productivity.
There are penalties for “butt crack violations” when you're squatting or bending down, so you have to wear the appropriate belt and pants.
If you cry, you’re fired “because there’s sixteen people waiting for your job.” Crying is a sign of being critical and disrespectful toward your employers.
You feel like you’re an employee from an episode of Black Mirror. I can't show it to you because of its graphic nature, but it's very compelling.
This work hell is so bad that one abroad friend says on Skype, “Is this America?”
Essay Assignment Based on Prompt #6 from page 410.
McClelland not only chronicles the physical toll warehouse work can exact; she examines the psychological toll as well. How does her account of the psychological pressures she experienced on the job compare to the portrait of the unemployed Louis Uchitelle (342) presents? Do you find any similarities or parallels in the ways each essay explores this issue?
Sample Thesis
McClelland, Uchitelle, and Vice News show that the modern day business model has become more and more predatory toward the workers, exploiting them in new ways that result in new kinds of humanitarian crises that are morally bankrupt and contrary to the American Dream.
Mapping Components for Body Paragraph Topic Sentences
Triangular relationship between temp agency, employer and worker strips workers of their rights and conceals discrimination practices.
The New Economy has created desperation, a condition that the new employers are eager to take advantage of.
The labor and wage practices are analogous in many ways to a form of slavery.
The New Economy doesn’t give workers viable alternatives to these exploitive conditions and in fact traps them in a cycle not unlike that between an abusive boyfriend and his girlfriend.
Sample Thesis from Vice News Video
Intro: I would describe the acid that fell over a worker and how his employers did not dial 9/11.
Worksite conditions paint America as a dystopia evidenced by __________________________, _________________, ________________, _________________, and ____________________.
no accountability in a triangulated system among workers, temp agencies, and companies
human rights violations
de-investment labor model in face of globalization
stolen wages
enabling raiteros
abundance of desperate labor market in New Economy
Profits, sales, and stock value are up in these companies even as labor conditions decline.
A woman hits about 40 because she's worked during that time, she has a lot of financial resources, and she realizes she's too old to bear a child, so she seeks a younger, less financially endowed woman.
The dynamic of power is someone with money buying someone's body and that body belongs to a someone of modest financial means.
An aside: Just like the documentary we saw on temporary work, whenever we're short on financial resources we find ourselves vulnerable to sacrificing our bodies to survive.
I'd rather be a surrogate mother than work in a chicken farm.
The total cost is $80,000, and this includes psychological evaluations. However, in India, the total cost is $10,000.
Two. What are the typical steps at attempting pregnancy?
First, the husband and wife have a doctor implant their embryo in a surrogate's womb.
If step one doesn't work, step two is combining the husband's sperm with a surrogate's egg (a donor egg) and implanting into another surrogate's womb.
In the case of Dr. Patel, she increases the chances of success by implanting "about five embryos at at time, aborting fetuses if they numbered more than two."
Essay Prompt:
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that renting a womb or surrogate mother is unethical, exploitive, and anti-humanitarian.
Sample Thesis:
The payment of women to borrow their bodies during a pregnancy is morally bankrupt when we consider ______________, _______________, ________________, and ___________________.
Sample Refutation of the Above Thesis
While in an ideal world I would be opposed to the surrogate womb business, in the real world surrogate motherhood is the lesser of two evils for poor women because ____________, ___________, ______________, and _______________.
Possible Supports for the Above
Paternalistic do-gooders shouldn't be able to tell the poor what they can and can not do with their bodies.
Payment for a womb rental may help a woman feed her starving family.
Payment for a womb rental may help a woman get an education and break free from her cycle of poverty.
McMahon Grammar Exercises: Comma Splices and Run-Ons
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can
often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
Essay Option That Connects Tirado, Uchitelle, DePalma, and Vice News video:
In the context of Linda Tirado's essay, Louis Uchitelle's (342), DePalma's (353), and the Vice News video series (Vice News video, Part 1 and Part 6 are the most relevant to our purposes), develop a thesis that analyzes the way the tightening job market affects our emotional and professional connection to work. Your essay should be 1,000 words and have a Works Cited page with 3 minimum sources.
McMahon's Approach to the Above Prompt (Sample Thesis Attempts)
The essays in Chapter 5 evidence a fracturing of Americans' connection with work because the majority of America's economic growth is getting funneled to the 1% resulting in learned helplessness, a strictly business approach to education, a reinforced economic caste system, and lowered expectations for the American Dream.
Critique of the Above
Perhaps the writer is trying to cover too much. Perhaps the writer needs sharper focus:
The essays in Chapter 5 show that as the 1% gobble up most of America's economic gains, the average American is succumbing to learned helplessness evidenced by ___________________, ____________________, _______________, and __________________.
The essays in Chapter 5 show that the American Dream of upward social mobility is a myth evidenced by ___________________, ___________________, ____________________, and ______________________.
The essays in Chapter 5 show that now more than ever millennials must approach college strictly as a business decision based on cost-benefit analysis, demand for intended major, economic forecasts, and strict budgetary discipline.
“The Case for Working with Your Hands” by Matthew Crawford
Study Questions
One. Why do office workers hunger for “confrontations with material reality” that have become “exotically unfamiliar”?
Too often in a big workforce, we feel like a cog in a machine or a mouse on a treadmill.
"Cubicle life" eats you from the inside until you're a hollow cipher, a zero.
We feel so alienated in our offices, sensing no “tangible result” of our work, that we crave the kind of connection that comes from getting our hands dirty.
High school has becoming a training center for turning human beings into alienated cubicle workers who are powerless and disconnected from life.
Crawford observes that “It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.”
Sitting all the time, in fact, has proven bad for one’s health.
We are also envious of watching people who are useful in a way that is straightforward and direct such as painting a bedroom. The effect is immediate.
Because our worth is concrete, we prove our value at the workplace; in contrast, a cubicle job is often at the mercy of bureaucratic whim and arbitrary decisions by some confused manager who’s under pressure to downsize.
Two. Why does Crawford argue certain types of physical labor are growing in demand?
Because he points out, quoting Princeton economist Alan Blinder, that “the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site.”
Yet we shun physical labor, Crawford writes, because it makes us dirty and we conflate dirt with stupidity.
Three. What kind of jobs give us the gratification from seeing the direct result?
20. national security operative (however, no one gives you credit when you do things right. You only take blame when one thing goes wrong)
21. actor
22. matchmaker
23. doctor
24. nurse
25. health care worker
26. Center for Disease Control operative
27. journalist
28. special ops fighter
29. charity fund raiser operative
30. life coach (99% of life coaches are frauds and mountebanks but there should be a few good ones out there)
31. movie critic
32. book critic
Writing Option
In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that compares the way Louis Uchitelle (342) and Matthew Crawford (368) explore the emotional life of work and how work affects our happiness, contentment, and self-esteem. To what extent does Uchitelle's argument about the psychological damage wrought by unemployment recall or help reinforce Crawford's claims about the emotional satisfactions afforded by working with your hands?
You might look at these mapping points that are in common with Uchitelle's and Crawford's essay.
Consider the anxiety of being replaceable.
Consider how feeling powerless at work creates anxieties and a sense of disconnection and alienation at work.
Consider how there are jobs where you feed your sense of self-worth and other jobs that feed your sense of worthlessness.
Consider how there are jobs where you see your role in the overall product and overall jobs where you feel like a tiny cog in the machine.
Too many young people embark upon a career without a necessary grasp of how many jobs can, in spite of their healthy salary, become a threat to their mental health because of the jobs' tendency to _____________, ______________, ______________, and __________________.
“How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty” by Barbara Ehrenreich
Study Questions
One. How are the poor robbed?
They are exploited and robbed in thousands of tiny cuts that leave them eviscerated, bereft, and hopeless.
They pay more for cars.
They pay higher interest rates on loans, up to 600%, which is legal in some states.
They pay in terms of stolen wages (employers can program computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck).
They pay in terms of being preyed upon by police for civil forfeiture laws in which police can take money, cars, valuables of any kind, by saying it was money “seized in a drug deal” with no need for evidence, no need for arrest, and no need for any kind of trial.
They have to pay for family members’ incarceration or else be fined and subject to arrest and imprisonment themselves.
The sub-prime market preys upon the poor.
The poor can go to prison if they don’t show up to court to address a debt to a landlord or collections agency.
The government will confiscate the drivers’ licenses of the poor in the event they owe child support (which can’t be paid because they’re, well, poor) and now they can’t drive to work to earn their minimum wage.
If the poor cannot pay their overdue traffic fines in Las Cruces, New Mexico, they will be fined by having their water, gas, and sewage turned off.
Once the poor, who are more likely to get into trouble with the law, have a criminal record, they cannot find work for they now suffer a permanent stigma.
At this point, the poor are more likely to be homeless at which point they may “get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.” (I keep thinking of the metaphor “squeezing blood from a turnip.)
In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that compares the way DePalma (353) profiles immigrant workers with the way Ehrenreich (380) explores the working poor. Based on the argument she makes here, which specific aspects of DePalma's essay do you think Ehrenreich would find most persuasive? Why?
Sample Thesis
Ehrenreich and DePalma's essay refute the rhetoric that any person, no matter how poor, can lift herself out of poverty with strong character, determination, and hard work by showing that poverty is a self-reinforcing cycle evidenced by _______________, ______________, _______________, and _____________________.
Thesis That Disagrees with the Above
While Ehrenreich and DePalma do a good job of highlighting the risk factors for cycles of poverty, they do little to offer the poor strategies to free themselves from their impoverishment and as such their rigid liberal political agendas do more harm than good because their vision paints the poor as helpless victims who must rely on policy changes before they find relief from their interminable economic hell.
McMahon Grammar Exercise: Essential and Nonessential Clauses
Birthdays that land on a Monday are a bummer.
Birthdays, which can be costly, are overrated.
Circle the relative clause and indicate if it’s essential with a capital E or nonessential with a capital N. Then use commas where necessary.
One. I’m looking for a sugar substitute that doesn’t have dangerous side effects.
Two. Sugar substitutes which often contain additives can wreak havoc on the digestive and nervous system.
Three. The man who trains in the gym every day for five hours is setting himself up for a serious muscle injury.
Four. Cars that operate on small turbo engines don’t last as long as non-turbo automobiles.
Five. Tuna which contains high amounts of mercury should only be eaten once or twice a week.
Six. The store manager who took your order has been arrested for fraud.
Seven. The store manager Ron Cousins who is now seventy-five years old is contemplating retirement.
Eight. Magnus Mills’ Restraint of Beasts which is my favorite novel was runner up for the Booker Prize.
Nine. Parenthood which is a sort of priesthood for which there is no pay or appreciation raises stress and cortisol levels.
Ten. I need to find a college that specializes in my actuarial math major.
Eleven. UCLA which has a strong actuarial math program is my first choice.
Twelve. My first choice of car is the Lexus which was awarded top overall quality honors from Consumer Reports.
Thirteen. Mangoes which sometimes cause a rash on my lips and chin area are my favorite fruit.
Fourteen. A strange man whom I’ve never known came up to me and offered to give me his brand new Mercedes.
Fifteen. My girlfriend who was showing off her brand new red dress arrived two hours late to the birthday party.
Sixteen. Students who meticulously follow the MLA format rules have a greater chance at success.
Seventeen. The student who tormented himself with the thesis lesson for six hours found himself more confused than before he started.
Eighteen. There are several distinctions between an analytical and argumentative thesis which we need to familiarize ourselves with before we embark on the essay assignment.
Nineteen. The peach that has a worm burrowing through its rotted skin should probably be tossed in the garbage.
Twenty. Peaches, which I love to eat by the bucketful are on sale at the farmer’s market.
Twenty-one. Baseball which used to be America’s pastime is declining in popularity.
"Fifteen Years on the Bottom Rung" by Anthony DePalma
One. How is this essay about class divisions in America?
John Zannikos represents upward mobility: You come to America with hardly anything and you become a somebody. Zannikos is one of the three Greek owners. He came to America in an earlier generation when there was more "meat on the bone" for working class Americans. Now that "meat on the bone" is gone thanks to the Great Recession, Globalization, and the rise of temporary work as the fastest job sector in America.
Today Mexican immigrants who work in the back of the kitchen have a dead end job. Despite Zannikos' efforts to help them, "they risk becoming stuck in a permanent underclass of the poor, the unskilled, and the uneducated."
Some immigrants do make it, but the competition is staggering. Every year 400,000 immigrants arrive in the US to make a living.
Juan Manuel Peralta is one such man. He arrived in America 40 years after Zannikos, and opportunities are more difficult.
"But monumental changes in the economy and in attitudes toward immigrants have made it far less likely that Peralta and his children will experience the same upward mobility as Zannikos and his family."
The biggest obstacle is immigration status. The "illegal" designation shuts many doors to opportunities in jobs and education. Remember, Zannikos arrived in the US 40 years earlier with legal papers. He made it. Now the legal obstacles are higher.
Zannikos, however, is under the belief that today's immigrants have it easier because "today they give you credit cards in the mail."
But la pobreza, the poor, don't receive such mailings, Peralta reminds us. Zannikos is living in a bubble in which he does not see the reality Peralta and other modern workers face.
Today's poor are scared their illegal status will be discovered, so they don't organize their labor; they hide.
Today's poor with illegal status can be exploited by landlords and employers.
We learn that in many Latino cultures, family expects financial help from those who are working in the US. I've heard this first-hand at Puente's Noche de Consejos (Night of Consultation or Advice). "Everyone wants my money. The guilt if I don't give the money will kill me."
Two. Why is legal status so important?
We read that within a few years, incomes rise 20 percent and English speaking skills improve greatly (361).
So we see a business incentive for employers wanting their employees to remain in illegal status: The employers can pay the workers less.
Three. How does poverty affect your long-term goals?
In short, you have no short-term goals. When you're beaten down by unemployment and poverty, you succumb to a provisional, short-term existence with no long-term vision for a happy, meaningful future.
There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of.
Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn't in the mix.
When I got pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel. I had a minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I had a stove, I couldn't have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up.
I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate high school. Most people on my level didn't. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you'll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they'll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That's not great, but it's true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle-class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.
The closest Planned Parenthood to me is three hours. That's a lot of money in gas. Lots of women can't afford that, and even if you live near one you probably don't want to be seen coming in and out in a lot of areas. We're aware that we are not "having kids," we're "breeding." We have kids for much the same reasons that I imagine rich people do. Urge to propagate and all. Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge abortion even harder.
Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act passed, it's hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell phone to the desk to hold as surety.
Nobody gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don't apply for jobs because we know we can't afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super legal secretary, but I've been turned down more than once because I "don't fit the image of the firm," which is a nice way of saying "gtfo, pov." I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but my boss won't make me a server because I don't "fit the corporate image." I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on B12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and that's how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn't much point trying.
Cooking attracts roaches. Nobody realizes that. I've spent a lot of hours impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick pikes to discourage others from entering. It doesn't work, but is amusing.
"Free" only exists for rich people. It's great that there's a bowl of condoms at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college campus. We don't belong there. There's a clinic? Great! There's still a copay. We're not going. Besides, all they'll tell you at the clinic is that you need to see a specialist, which seriously? Might as well be located on Mars for how accessible it is. "Low-cost" and "sliding scale" sounds like "money you have to spend" to me, and they can't actually help you anyway.
I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.
I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.
Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It's why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It's more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that's all you get. You're probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don't plan long-term because if we do we'll just get our hearts broken. It's best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.
I am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions. This is what our lives are like, and here are our defense mechanisms, and here is why we think differently. It's certainly self-defeating, but it's safer. That's all. I hope it helps make sense of it.
Additions have been made to the update below to reflect the responses received.
UPDATE: The response to this piece is overwhelming. I have had a lot of people ask to use my work. Please do. Share it with the world if you found value in it. Please link back if you can. If you are teaching, I am happy to discuss this with or clarify for you, and you can freely use this piece in your classes. Please do let me know where you teach. You can reach me on Twitter, @killermartinis. I set up an email at killermartinisbook@ gmail as well.
This piece has gone fully viral. People have been asking me to write, and how they can help. After enough people tried to send me paypal money, I set up a gofundme. Find it here. It promptly went insane. I have raised my typical yearly income as of this update. I have no idea what to say except thank you. I am going to speak with some money people who will make sure that I can't fuck this up, and I will use it to do good things with.
I've also set up a blog, which I hope you will find here.
Understand that I wrote this as an example of the thought process that we struggle with. Most of us are clinically depressed, and we do not get therapy and medication and support. We get told to get over it. And we find ways to cope. I am not saying that people live without hope entirely; that is not human nature. But these are the thoughts that are never too far away, that creep up on us every chance they get, that prey on our better judgement when we are tired and stressed and weakened. We maintain a constant vigil against these thoughts, because we are afraid that if we speak them aloud or even articulate them in our heads they will become unmanageably real.
Thank you for reading. I am glad people find value in it. Because I am getting tired of people not reading this and then commenting anyway, I am making a few things clear: not all of this piece is about me. That is why I said that they were observations. And this piece is not all of me: that is why I said that they were random observations rather than complete ones. If you really have to urge me to abort or keep my knees closed or wonder whether I can fax you my citizenship documents or if I really in fact have been poor because I know multisyllabic words, I would like to ask that you read the comments and see whether anyone has made your point in the particular fashion you intend to. It is not that I mind trolls so much, it's that they're getting repetitive and if you have to say nothing I hope you can at least do it in an entertaining fashion.
If, however, you simply are curious about something and actually want to have a conversation, I do not mind repeating myself because those conversations are valuable and not actually repetitive. They tend to be very specific to the asker, and I am happy to shed any light I can. I do not mind honest questions. They are why I wrote this piece.
Thank you all, so much. I don't know what life will look like next week, and for once that's a good thing. And I have you to thank.
Essay Option That Connects Tirado, Uchitelle, DePalma, and Vice News video:
In the context of Linda Tirado's essay, Louis Uchitelle's (342), DePalma's (353), and the Vice News video series (Vice News video, Part 1 and Part 6 are the most relevant to our purposes), develop a thesis that analyzes the way the tightening job market affects our emotional and professional connection to work. Your essay should be 1,000 words and have a Works Cited page with 3 minimum sources.
Proofreading your essay, while not a guaranteed cure for your grammar, punctuation, and format mistakes, can help to a significant degree.
Students may find that their essays improve in terms of content as the semester moves along. However, their grammar and punctuation errors remain stubborn and recalcitrant like a virulent rash that defies the most heavily medicated prescription skin ointment. A common reason behind these stubborn, acute grammar errors is that most students don’t proofread their essays.
Because we’re trying to improve writing content, grammar and punctuation, we must proofread our typed writing assignments.
To encourage more students to participate in their proofreading, I submit to you a Proofread Essay Contract. This contract is a ticket that must be attached to your typed essay in order for me to grade it. You cannot submit your essay without attaching this Proofread Essay Contract to your essay. Staple it to the top of your document. Everything else in your document remains unchanged.
Here’s the contract:
I, ____________________________________________________________, hereby affirm as a true statement of fact that either I alone or with the help of tutor proofread my essay to make sure I corrected common grammar, usage, punctuation, and format errors. My proofreading was robust, thorough, and meticulous, not the last minute skimming of a student with time management problems.
During my proofreading, I kept a sharp eye for the following:
Sentence fragments
Comma splices
Run-ons
Noun-pronoun agreement errors
Subject-verb agreement errors
Pronoun shifts
Mixed sentence structure errors
Diction (writing style and usage) errors
Comma errors
Parts of speech errors (confusing nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs)
Possessive apostrophe spelling errors
Spelling and word choice errors
Headers (putting page numbers in the upper right of document)
MLA Works Cited format
And any other common patterns of grammar, punctuation, and format errors that I see in my writing
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for successful marriage, glom on to the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that they as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break-up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and woman alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's passivity and his aversion to argument insure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a trouble maker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sports writer Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
One. Is it enough to say unemployment kills self-esteem?
No, it's not. That's an understatement. Unemployment kills the former self. We become a ghost of our former self. Stacy Brown missed her husband, the one who had a job. The new one was insufferable.
Erin suffers from learned helplessness, the sense that he is trapped in a cycle of futility that compels him to give up on getting a job, himself, his wife, and Life.
Studies show after three years without a job we become unemployable.
We read that for men especially, but women also, "incapacitating illness" takes over the mind and soul.
We further read about a close correlation between unemployment and suicide rates.
Even in the face of being a good person and a good worker, the unemployed take a "blow" that "erodes human capital" and eats away at them like a pernicious, ongoing disease.
You've heard the cliche: "I'll define you not how you fall off the horse, but what you do AFTER you fall off the horse."
But for the unemployed, falling off the horse is easy compared to the shame and self-loathing that follows. How do you get back on the horse again when you're hit with a "blow" to the guts?
Two. What happens to the stay-at-home dad?
Rather than connect with his family, a huge barrier separates him and his family as he withdraws into his world of shame and depression.
We read that men don't communicate their feelings of depression well, so they just suffer a slow rot in isolation.
The American Psychiatric Association has officially declared being laid-off has dangerous to your mental health.
The disease spreads from the laid-off parent to the children who too are overcome by shame, depression, and low self-esteem.
Lexicon
Anhedonia: you reach a state of unhappiness from which there is no return. Once you wear this quality on your sleeve, you become unemployable.
What’s harder on a man, begging for love or work? Work. Humiliation results in anhedonia.
Inertia (resistance to change); paralysis that feeds on itself.
Male vs. female hardwiring and their different effects in the workplace: Women are more adaptable, take more risks, and seek change. In contrast, men like routine, comfort, and stability.
Unemployment is referred to as the “acuteness of the blow." One person in the essay is so traumatized he cannot face the anxieties, the rejection, and the sense of insignificance all over again, so he sabotages future prospects.
The double hit of unemployment: The feeling of being worthless coupled with self-blame. Let's add a third hit: You lose your medical coverage.
“Finessing layoffs”: The attempt to “finesse” a layoff is futile.
The layoff is followed by a breaking of emotional bonds with others; it has a rippling effect. The person withdraws into depression.
Despondence and apathy set in.
Ennui (the cycle: despondence, apathy and inertia, ennui, and then anhedonia)
Husband’s unemployment devastates the wife: She has to carry her soul, and his, up the mountain. She can't do it forever. Eventually, she gives up. Divorce is the common result.
“Going postal”
Unemployment spreads shame through the entire family. We read that the rippling effects spread in unforgiving fashion. Children lose confidence that they can achieve. They fear they will fail like their parents.
Shell-shocked: You become so traumatized that you build a defensive wall that is worse than the problem that made you shell-shocked in the first place. (describe the student with the scowl on her face)
Summary of Unemployment Effects
1. family withdraws from one another
2. children are "emotional sponges" and internalize and absorb their parents' emotional trauma.
3. alcoholism increases
4. divorce increases
5. suicide (murder-suicide in Wilmington)
6. long-term stigma
7. long-term low self-esteem and self-blame
8. long-term physical ailments including hypertension, ulcers, chronic fatigue, etc.
9. women reach out for social support more than men so women tend to fare better.
10. Vicious cycle of unemployment: You become depressed, which makes you less employable, which makes you more depressed, and so on and so on. "Layoffs deplete life."
Writing Prompt from Page 352
Some of the psychological or emotional effects of being laid off that Uchitelle lists are low self-esteem, nervousness, inability to form close bonds, and fear of trying new things. Do you think it is reasonable for employers to consider the emotional costs of layoffs in determining whether to let workers go? How might an employer address the criticisms that Uchitelle is making? Ultimately, is a company responsible for the emotional well-being of its employees? Why or why not?
McMahon's problem with the above prompt from the book is that while I agree it would be great if employers followed the prompt's recommendations, it's doubtful it would ever happen, so what's the point of writing the essay?
The above probably won't happen since we live in a corporatocracy.
Chapter 5: How We Work Typed Essay Options
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that compares the way Louis Uchitelle (342) and Matthew Crawford (368) explore the emotional life of work and how work affects our happiness, contentment, and self-esteem. To what extent does Uchitelle's argument about the psychological damage wrought by unemployment recall or help reinforce Crawford's claims about the emotional satisfactions afforded by working with your hands?
Sample Thesis
Reading Crawford and Uchitelle, we must face the terrifying fact that our sense of self is so inextricably linked to our job that failure to choose a job compatible with our personality can result in alienation, self-loathing, crippling depression, and even death.
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, write a review of DePalma's essay that you think Uchitelle might offer. To what extent would Uchitelle's review find parallels in the social and economic hardships profiled here and his argument regarding the emotional costs of unemployment?
Sample Thesis
Uchitelle's tragic view of unemployment would compel him to see DePalma's essay as a complement to his own as DePalma's essay reinforces the learned helplessness, depression, stagnation, and family dysfunction rendered by low-income work and unemployment.
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, write an assessment of how the messages in Catherine Rampell's essay (388) and Matthew Crawford's (368) compare with one another. Does Rampell's attempt to explode the myth of the "slacker generation" remind you in any way of Crawford's desire to rewrite the boundary between white-collar and manual labor? Do these writers challenge such stereotypes in order to say similar or different things about the meaning and value of work?
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that compares the way DePalma (353) profiles immigrant workers with the way Ehrenreich (380) explores the working poor. Based on the argument she makes here, which specific aspects of DePalma's essay do you think Ehrenreich would find most persuasive? Why?
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, show how McClelland's examination of the psychological pressures she experienced on the job (394) compare to the portrait of the unemployed Louis Uchitelle (342) presents? Do you find any similarities or parallels in the ways each essay explores this issue?
In a 5-page essay with 3 sources, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses whether it is appropriate, or not, to use the business model described in Hochschild's essay (418) as a way of making the "mutually beneficial transaction" between parents and a surrogate mother. Consider Barbara Ehrenreich's essay (380) about how the experience of being poor complicates this business model.
Transmitting radio signals by satellite is a way of overcoming the problem of scarce airwaves and limiting how they are used.
In the original sentence, they could refer to the signals or to the airwaves.
Reference implied but not stated
The company prohibited smoking, which many employees resented.
What does which refer to? The editing clarifies what employees resented.
A pronoun should refer clearly to the word or words it replaces (called the antecedent) elsewhere in the sentence or in a previous sentence. If more than one word could be the antecedent, or if no specific antecedent is present, edit to make the meaning clear.
Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
Incorrect pronoun case
Determine whether the pronoun is being used as a subject, or an object, or a possessive in the sentence, and select the pronoun form to match.
Incorrect:
Castro's communist principles inevitably led to an ideological conflict between he and President Kennedy.
Correct:
Castro's communist principles inevitably led to an ideological conflict between him and President Kennedy.
Incorrect:
Because strict constructionists recommend fidelity to the Constitution as written, no one objects more than them to judicial reinterpretation.
Correct:
Because strict constructionists recommend fidelity to the Constitution as written, no one objects more than they [do] to judicial reinterpretation.
Confusing subject with object
Please give the chocolate to Randy and (I, me).
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
Two. Who does Gatto blame?
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Writing Prompt from Page 279
At the heart of the problems around contemporary schooling, argues Gatto, is its compulsory nature. Think back on your experiences in school. How much of what typically defined your role was compulsory? What are some of the scripts (for how to act, talk, even think) that were required? Write an essay that argues in favor of or against the validity of implementing these particular requirements. What educational goals did they seem designed to accomplish, and were they worth it?
“Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” by Bell Hooks (287)
One. What did Hook’s mother teacher about desire in the mother’s attempt to quell the appetite for unaffordable things?
Hooks felt belittled and learned to distrust her desires and bury them. The implicit message is that since she is of the lower classes she has to know her place and have no sense of entitlement. She must remain modest. She must be happy in life with life's bare minimum. She must be apologetic about her existence.
To have desires for anything above one's station in life is considered impolite.
We can only imagine what this would do to her psyche.
That would drive me crazy to want something and to develop this reflex to immediately say I don’t actually want it.
Hooks’ save-money mentality followed her into college where money had to be first considered above all else.
During Hooks’ first year in college, she realizes a lot of her mother’s fears are rooted in class shame, the disgrace of not measuring up in the presence of “real classy people.” Sadly, we live in a society where the lower classes suffer an inferiority complex because they don't "measure up" to the higher classes.
Two. What happens to Bell Hooks in college?
She is isolated by the white girls who look at her in horror and disdain for being black and for being not rich. “Not only are you black; you’re not rich. Stay away from us, you pariah.” She becomes La Otra.
Like her childhood, Hooks was learning to be apologetic about her existence. "Sorry I don't fit in, rich girls. I'll try to stay out of the way."
Her existence becomes one of self-abnegation or self-erasure: “If I want things and if I feel overcome by loneliness, then too bad. I have to suffer. My existence is not worth these considerations. My needs mean nothing compared to these rich white girls.”
Bell Hooks sees the world as binary: The haves and the have-nots. Those who live in glorious gardens with grass and trees and those who live in the scorched weeds.
Bell Hooks connects with one white girl who like Hooks is financially challenged. She is a Czechoslovakian immigrant with modest means. The two of them together become Las Otras.
In 1978 when I was training at the gym, a 300-pound power lifter scrutinized me with piercing eyes and told me "there are only two kinds of people in the world, homeowners and renters." And then he spit behind his back before bench pressing 500 pounds like it was a feather.
Unlike Hooks, though, the Czech girl has contempt and envy for the rich white girls. She desires their riches and resents them for having what she lacks.
In contrast, Hooks’ religious upbringing taught her to be leery of excess, of pride, of loving riches for their own sake.
Three. What finally sets off Hooks’ rage toward the rich white girls?
When they perform their ritual of trashing someone’s room and it ends up being Hooks’ room, Hooks is enraged that these rich narcissists cannot consider that someone with modest finances cannot easily replace all the items that were ruined during the trashing.
The rich girls’ lack of empathy and their failure of imagination stirs Hooks’ deep loathing for them.
Adding to her contempt is Hooks’ refusal to want to be white like them and to aspire to behave like a vain privileged white girl.
Her contempt for these immature white girls compels Hooks to go to a real college, Stanford, which will test her parents’ class anxieties. Her parents will hide behind religion and say that Stanford, which is in California, is sinful.
Four. What does the essay teach us about education?
To succeed in education, we have to break the bonds with our class identity and this can be excruciating if our class identity is tied up with our parental identity.
Time and time again, we read of college students who don’t succeed until they break from their parents’ and communities’ class influences and this break is often seen as a betrayal and it results in guilt. But it is necessary.
Five. What cynical worldview does Hooks observe at Stanford?
Her white roommate, a poor girl from Orange County, believes in the religion of privilege: “Cheating was worth it. She believed the world the privileged had created was all unfair—all one big cheat; to get ahead, one had to play the game. To her, I was truly an innocent, a lamb being led to the slaughter.”
Hooks isn't prepared to play the game because playing the game means selling one's soul to the devil.
For Hooks' roommate however the only devil to worry about is being poor.
Six. What does Hooks conclude about the manner in which students must adapt to college?
Hooks writes: "Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality."
In other words to assimilate into the privileged, educated class, we have to embrace their language, attitude, demeanor, characteristics, body language; in other words, we have to die to our former self, disavow our past, and become a new person born in a world of privilege.
This new privilege becomes evident in the way we speak, write, and affect our body language. We develop a certain superciliousness and hauteur (uppity, proud, self-regarding expression that says, "I'm all that").
Hooks is tormented by the above fact not only because it's true, with all of its questionable moral implications, but because Hooks went through the process herself even as she questioned it. She became an "upper class intellectual."
At best when we transform from working class to privileged educated class, she writes, someone like her will suffer contradictions, having a remnant of her past identity and a new identity based on privilege.
Writing Prompt from Page 295
Race and class, hooks argues, are the unspoken norms that structure everyday college life, the invisible scripts that set the boundaries around what different types of students are encouraged or allowed to expect from school. Write an essay in which you analyze how hooks makes this argument. How does she present her own experience as a student as an example? What unspoken (or spoken) scripts about schooling, education, race, or class does hooks expose in her writing?
Breaking down the assignment:
What are the “unspoken norms” or “invisible scripts” of race and class that pervade college life?
The unspoken belief system, if you will, is that people of white privilege, evidenced by their high-earning power and emulation of an upper class code, enjoy a world of entitlement. On the other hand, it’s also scripted that people of the lower classes are loathsome and only deserving of contempt and society’s spoiled leftovers, not the fresh fruit enjoyed by the rich.
Write an essay in which you show how Hooks makes the argument that invisible scripts set boundaries for students.
Hooks shows that professors teach their students how to enjoy the upper-class club, to deny their lower-class family roots because those roots are contemptuous and shameful.
Hooks further explains how college education is not just a specialization in a certain field; it’s an indoctrination into the superiority of the educated, privileged class and how working class and more modest backgrounds are not even worthy of consideration; therefore, these modest backgrounds should be shunned; in other words, we should become dead to our poor past.
Hooks argues becoming dead to our past is immoral because we become indoctrinated into the worldview of the privileged vs. the non-privileged, the haves vs. the have-nots and such an indoctrination in Hook’s view is immoral and antithetical to the true humanitarian teachings that should be part of college life.
Hooks shows how students of modest means who don’t aspire to be uppity are disregarded and dismissed as invisible.
You need to drink the privileged class Kool-Aid if you want to succeed in college and in the work world, Hooks is arguing.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Essay Option
In a 1,500-word essay with a minimum of 5 sources, support, defend, or complicate the notion that Hooks, Kozol, Rose, and Gatto make a convincing case that education is class biased in a way that is harmful to the working class and reinforces class inequality. You might consult Dana Goldstein's YouTube presentation.
A thesis statement is one sentence that articulates the central idea of your essay.
A thesis statement is one sentence that tells readers your position or argument.
A thesis statement often outlines your essay’s body paragraphs with mapping components.
A thesis statement is born out of your assigned topic.
A thesis statement can never be merely a statement of your topic. Rather, it must be the point you are making about your topic.
Example
Topic
Standardized testing is part of the No Child Left Behind program.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes.
Standardized testing is a sham that we need to replace with more reliable measures of student learning outcomes because the evidence shows that _______________, ___________________, ________________, and _________________.
Topic
In high numbers, upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children from measles and other diseases.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
Many upper class educated Anglos are not vaccinating their children because their pride, paranoia, and pseudo-science have intoxicated them into embracing all the myths de jour of the anti-vaccine movement.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
There should be harsh penalties incurred against parents who don’t vaccinate their children because ________________, ________________, _______________, and _______________________.
Topic Is Not a Thesis
Unlike other first-world countries, the United States spends close to 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare while other countries spend closer to 10 percent.
Cause and Effect Thesis Statement
The United States is resigned to spending 18 percent of its GDP on healthcare because __________________, __________________, _________________, and _______________________.
Argumentative Thesis Statement
The United States needs to get its healthcare GDP down to about 10 percent because _______________, _______________, ______________, and ___________________.
Topic
The manner in which John Gatto would respond to teachers committing plagiarism in the classroom is a writing topic.
Definition Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we see that plagiarism is not all kinds of imitation, but imitation characterized by ____________, _____________, _____________, and _______________.
Cause and Effect Thesis
Reading "How We Learn," we can imagine John Gatto being outraged by the link between teaching hypocrisy and student boredom when we analyze ________________, __________________, ______________, and ___________________.
A strong case can be made that John Gatto, when faced with the hypocrisy mentioned in Toor's essay, would use this hypocrisy as ammunition to support his thesis evidenced by _______________, _______________, ________________, and ___________________.
As The Geography of Bliss teaches us however implicitly, it is imperative that we embrace strong moral cultural norms to create happiness evidenced by _________________, __________________, ________________, and ____________________.
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.
An essay with a clear thesis and organization has a stronger probability of succeeding.
Fragment
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests
Corrected
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests will inevitably discriminate against non-native speakers.
No main subject
Fragment
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students
Corrected
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students, No Child Left Behind remains a form of discrimination.
Fragment
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese
Correct
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese, they fell apart upon the first bite.
Fragment
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos
Correct
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos, your tacos will fall apart.
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
All Your Essay Options for Third Typed Essay Due 10-21-15
One. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, support, refute, or complicate Kristof's argument in "Prudence Or Cruelty?" that in spite of the food stamp abuses cited by opponents of the food stamp program, providing food stamps for the poor is moral and economic imperative over the long term. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section at the end of your essay.
Two. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, support, refute, or complicate the notion that eating meat is morally defensible in the context of evolution and biology and that ethical objections to meat eating are not born of eating meat but the abuses that result in the factory farming of animals. Be sure to have a counterargument-refutation section.
Three. Addressing Francine Prose's "The Wages of Sin," write a 4-page essay with 3 sources that supports, refutes, or complicates the notion that overeating is not an illness but a moral flaw and a vice.
Four. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that Francine Prose and Caroline Knapp are criticizing cultural norms about eating that in truth are not normal at all but pathological and that these norms create a toxic eating environment in our culture.
Five. Both McMillan and Kristof (172) use their examinations of public attitudes toward food as a platform to argue for specific changes in our official food policy. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that explains how these recommendations compare. Can you imagine Kristof citing points McMillan raises here as evidence or support for the argument he makes about food stamps? If so, how specifically?
Six. Both Dolnick and Francine Prose address the mythical narrative of obesity and overeating by deconstructing the myth. In a 4-page essay with 3 sources, develop a thesis that analyzes how Dolnick and Prose deconstruct the myth of fatness.
Seven. Write a personal essay in which you either support or refute Kohn’s argument about grading, using anecdotes from your experience as a student. Do you view grading in a negative or positive light? Why or why not? Make sure to structure your argument by addressing Kohn’s multiple points directly.
Break Down the Prompt into Its Parts
Convert the questions in the assignment into sentences.
Follow instructions
I agree (disagree) with Kohn because . . .
Eight. Kohn writes about the need to move a school “from a grade orientation to a learning orientation” (pp. 239, 243). What do you think he means? How, according to Kohn, does grading make it harder to focus on learning? Write an essay in which you discuss the characteristics of these two orientations. Do you think it’s possible to have an educational system that emphasizes both?
Break Down the Assignment into Your Own Words
We're asked in the prompt to explain, perhaps in one sentence, what Kohn means when he says we must move from a grade to a learning orientation. Clearly, a grading orientation for Kohn excludes learning. We have to explain why Kohn believes this and then explain whether or not we agree with him.
Nine. This essay asks you to think about the relationship between blue- and white-collar work. Write an essay in which you compare the particular rules, scripts, roles, and norms that teach us how to think about each of these two categories. How is each type of work typically defined? What tasks, skills, or abilities are we told each conventionally involves? And, perhaps most important, how are we taught to value these types of work differently? In your view, are these value distinctions fair? Accurate? How or how not?
Explanation Part in Your Intro
Write an essay in which you compare the particular rules, scripts, roles, and norms that teach us how to think about each of these two categories. How is each type of work typically defined? What tasks, skills, or abilities are we told each conventionally involves? And, perhaps most important, how are we taught to value these types of work differently?
Argument Part in Your Thesis
In your view, are these value distinctions fair? Accurate? How or how not?
Ten. According to Rizga, the primary factor responsible for designating a school as "failing" is our current reliance upon standardized tests. Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity or usefulness of using standardized tests to rank the performance of schools. Do such tests offer a fair, accurate, or helpful measure of a school's performance or not? How? If you were charged with revamping the system for evaluating school performance, what kind of standardized test (if any) would you utilize? Why?
Sample Thesis:
We need to get rid of standardized tests and replace them with a variety of assignments that measure Student Learning Outcomes because ______________, ___________, _____________, and ____________________.
While I concede that standardized testing has made some educational improvements in terms of bridging the gap between performing and non-performing schools, the current practice of standardized testing must be eliminated because _____________, _____________, ______________, and __________________.
Although standardized tests are imperfect and still need fine-tuning, they are a necessary tool for improving public school education evidenced by _____________, _____________, ____________, and _______________.
Eleven. At the heart of the problems around contemporary schooling, argues Gatto, is its compulsory nature. Think back on your experiences in school. How much of what typically defined your role was compulsory? What are some of the scripts (for how to act, talk, even think) that were required? Write an essay that argues in favor of or against the validity of implementing these particular requirements. What educational goals did they seem designed to accomplish, and were they worth it?
Twelve. From very different perspectives, Kozol and Mike Rose invite readers to take a closer look at the way cultural stereotypes about different jobs can influence how we define legitimate or valid intelligence. Write an essay in which you identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare. How does each understand the connection between work and learning? What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Key words and passages
Identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare.
How does each understand the connection between work and learning?
What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Sample Responses
Support of the Authors
Rose, Gatto and Kozol are allies in the battle against economic class warfare, which perpetuates the divisions between the lower and upper classes evidenced by _____________, ________________, ________________, and __________________.
Refutation of the Authors
Rose and Kozol are shrill liberals whose attempts to bridge the gap between the poorer working classes and the more affluent classes prove misguided when we consider that Rose is guilty of glorifying blue-collar work and making it attractive to those who should aspire to greater career goals; Kozol is guilty of dismissing vocational training in low-income schools that are giving students options that they otherwise would not have; both are guilty of intrusive and unrealistic social engineering and economic redistribution.
Thirteen. Race and class, hooks argues, are the unspoken norms that structure everyday college life, the invisible scripts that set the boundaries around what different types of students are encouraged or allowed to expect from school. Write an essay in which you analyze how hooks makes this argument. How does she present her own experience as a student as an example? What unspoken (or spoken) scripts about schooling, education, race, or class does hooks expose in her writing?
Breaking down the assignment:
What are the “unspoken norms” or “invisible scripts” of race and class that pervade college life?
The unspoken belief system, if you will, is that people of white privilege, evidenced by their high-earning power and emulation of an upper class code, enjoy a world of entitlement. On the other hand, it’s also scripted that people of the lower classes are loathsome and only deserving of contempt and society’s spoiled leftovers, not the fresh fruit enjoyed by the rich.
Write an essay in which you show how Hooks makes the argument that invisible scripts set boundaries for students.
Hooks shows that professors teach their students how to enjoy the upper-class club, to deny their lower-class family roots because those roots are contemptuous and shameful.
Hooks further explains how college education is not just a specialization in a certain field; it’s an indoctrination into the superiority of the educated, privileged class and how working class and more modest backgrounds are not even worthy of consideration; therefore, these modest backgrounds should be shunned; in other words, we should become dead to our poor past.
Hooks argues becoming dead to our past is immoral because we become indoctrinated into the worldview of the privileged vs. the non-privileged, the haves vs. the have-nots and such an indoctrination in Hook’s view is immoral and antithetical to the true humanitarian teachings that should be part of college life.
Hooks shows how students of modest means who don’t aspire to be uppity are disregarded and dismissed as invisible.
You need to drink the privileged class Kool-Aid if you want to succeed in college and in the work world, Hooks is arguing.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with Bell Hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with Bell Hooks
While I sympathize with Bell Hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. Bell Hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousand of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, Bell Hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our tribalistic past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as Bell Hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of Bell Hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that Bell Hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
Fourteen. In a 1,000-word essay with a minimum of 3 sources, support, defend, or complicate the notion that Hooks, Kozol, Rose, and Gatto make a convincing case that education is class biased in a way that is harmful to the working class and reinforces class inequality. You might consult Dana Goldstein's YouTube presentation.
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
“Everything You’ve Heard about Failing Schools Is Wrong” by Kristina Rizga (252)
One. How is Maria denigrated at school?
Classmates call her derogatory names and stigmatize her because of her lack of English skills.
I have a Turkish friend who complained that Americans thought he was stupid because of his accent, as if an accent, or not, is a sign of intelligence.
The real issue isn't intelligence. An accent presses the buttons of the close-minded tribalist who's afraid of Los Otros.
Therefore, a lack of English speaking and writing makes student in the essay an outsider, La Otra. She's not a member of the tribe. The tribalists (people who only accept their "own kind") won't accept her because her lack of English skills suggest she's not a member of the privileged club.
Her math teacher addresses Maria and the other students as dummies.
Nothing like having a teacher who has contempt for her students. This creates a stigma or a permanent dark cloud over the person.
We could argue it is criminal for a math teacher to stigmatize Maria and others because lowered expectations have harmful (deleterious) effects on students.
Patronization
In the administrative office a middle-aged woman who thinks she’s being sympathetic tells Maria that she shouldn’t worry about struggling in high school since “Latinas usually don’t finish high school. . . . They go to work or raise kids.”
Nothing like having a counselor or an administrative official rely on stereotypes for an "analysis" of the student.
We have lowered expectations and racism ushering a girl into the lower economic and social classes, and this degradation is reinforced by standardized tests that cater to the upper classes.
Two. What is the source of Maria’s academic frustration?
She begins to do well in high school; however, her state exams for going to college are too low. These are standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB was based on good intentions: to raise expectations for all students, especially disadvantaged ones, but it actually punishes them.
Each state spends over a billion dollars on standardized testing, which comes to about $65 a student. This is a huge money grab for companies who want to be part of the test.
NCLB was supposed to be the savior, offering concrete metrics to measure student performance in the face of wishy-washy bureaucrats, and it was championed in a movie Waiting for Superman. Many have dismissed this film as propaganda for charter schools as we read in The Washington Post.
Three. What is Rizga’s thesis?
Rizga’s thesis or purpose is to criticize NCLB by showing the many ways it has changed instruction for the worse.
Students might know bullet points for NCLB but be ignorant of everything else; in other words, NCLB is too narrow in its instruction objectives.
The overemphasis on test performance has resulted in cheating.
There is class bias in the standardized tests so that the tests are more understood by middle and upper classes than lower classes.
There is a tendency to make the standardized test the be all and end all of education. We’ve turned it into a panacea or a cure-all when in fact its godfather Robert Glaser warns that it’s incomplete and imperfect (260).
In a school where English is the second language, NCLB scores will be lower and this will give an inaccurate metric of the school’s quality.
According to Rizga, the primary factor responsible for designating a school as "failing" is our current reliance upon standardized tests. Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity or usefulness of using standardized tests to rank the performance of schools. Do such tests offer a fair, accurate, or helpful measure of a school's performance or not? How? If you were charged with revamping the system for evaluating school performance, what kind of standardized test (if any) would you utilize? Why?
Sample Thesis:
We need to get rid of standardized tests and replace them with a variety of assignments that measure Student Learning Outcomes because ______________, ___________, _____________, and ____________________.
While I concede that standardized testing has made some educational improvements in terms of bridging the gap between performing and non-performing schools, the current practice of standardized testing must be eliminated because _____________, _____________, ______________, and __________________.
Although standardized tests are imperfect and still need fine-tuning, they are a necessary tool for improving public school education evidenced by _____________, _____________, ____________, and _______________.
One. In the essay’s opening, we see that boredom is synonym for all sorts of horrible things. Give a list of things boredom stands for.
Learned helplessness
Resentment or mutual loathing (everyone blames everyone else for the problems at school)
Recurring cycles of futility, which brings up Einstein’s definition of insanity
Monotony
Lethargy, the fatigue and enervation from being mired in a problem with no apparent solution for so long
Lowered expectations
Dysfunction, settling into the idea that “this is how it is” and “nothing can be done,” so I’ll just “ride this out.”
Two. Who does Gatto blame?
All of us. We are all responsible, according to Gatto’s grandfather, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We have all been responsible for the apathy and tolerance to brain-dead mediocrity.
Three. For Gatto, what is the difference between education and forced schooling?
He argues that “mass compulsory schooling” is not associated with success if we look at history.
The goals of “mass compulsory schooling” were defined, we read during 1905 and 1915 and they focused on the following:
One. To make good people.
Two. To make good citizens.
Three. To make each person his or her personal best.
For Gatto and H.L. Mencken who Gatto quotes, education is a form of indoctrination in which we brainwash students to fit with the system, be mediocre, and conform into the same type of safe person. This conformity is to the model of the mindless consumer who is obedient to marketing and advertising in order to insure a robust economy.
We further read that schools base their operations on indoctrination, not critical thinking.
Obedience to authority, conformity to norms, learning the “correct” social role, labeling the students according to perceived rank (tag the “unfit”; promote the desirables), pass on elite power to younger generation of the elite and to hell with the rest of them (276).
In contrast, a teacher serves his students well if he gives them critical thinking skills:
Learn how to think for yourself by establishing informed or considered opinions, not habitual or peer-driven ones.
Learn how to read critically.
Learn the difference between causation and correlation.
Identify logical fallacies.
Grow and flourish as you become an adult and independent thinker.
Writing Prompt from Page 279
At the heart of the problems around contemporary schooling, argues Gatto, is its compulsory nature. Think back on your experiences in school. How much of what typically defined your role was compulsory? What are some of the scripts (for how to act, talk, even think) that were required? Write an essay that argues in favor of or against the validity of implementing these particular requirements. What educational goals did they seem designed to accomplish, and were they worth it?
Your Essay Must Have a Thesis Statement That Is the Engine of Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
A thesis statement is an assertion that can be demonstrated with logic, reasoning, and examples.
We read in US & World News Report that, "Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only, a new study finds."
The above is not a thesis; it is a fact. We could use such a fact or study to support a thesis.
A thesis from the above would look like this:
While college costs are punitive and oppressive, especially to those with modest financial means, going to college for most people is worth its steep investment when we consider gains in lifetime income, networking with diverse populations, developing literacy, and creating a legacy of higher income for future generations.
Thesis statements or claims go under four different categories:
One. Claims about solutions or policies: The claim argues for a certain solution or policy change:
America's War on Drugs should be abolished and replaced with drug rehab.
Two. Claims of cause and effect: These claims argue that a person, thing, policy or event caused another event or thing to occur.
Social media has turned our generation into a bunch of narcissistic solipsists with limited attention spans, an inflated sense of self-importance, and a shrinking degree of empathy.
Three. Claims of value: These claims argue how important something is on the Importance Scale and determine its proportion to other things.
Global warming poses a far greater threat to our safety than does terrorism.
Four. Claims of definition. These claims argue that we must re-define a common and inaccurate assumption.
In America the notion of "self-esteem," so commonly taught in schools, is in reality a cult of narcissism. While real self-esteem teaches self-confidence, discipline, and accountability, the fake American brand of self-esteem is about celebrating the low expectations of mediocrity, and this results in narcissism, vanity, and sloth.
Sample Thesis
John Taylor Gatto accurately diagnoses the corruption of school by pointing out that it is not designed to educate us to be our better selves; rather, public education is about indoctrinating us to be malleable slaves to mediocrity and conformity evidenced by _____________, _____________, _____________, and ______________.
Paul Fussell’s Class Anxieties Lesson 4: Language, Speech, and “The X Way Out”
Four Writing Options
One. In a 4-page typed essay, support or refute the argument that your matriculation through college, and the major you have chosen (or not), is inextricably entwined with the class status anxieties analyzed in Paul Fussell’s Class. In other words, argue for or against the idea that fear of falling short of America’s status system—a code system that is much more complicated than income level alone—is a significant driving force in your college studies. What evidence is there, or not, that you are beholden to class status codes? What evidence is there, or not, that you have rejected America’s class status script and have carved your own path, so that you love learning for its own sake? Are you an aspiring bourgeois consumer? Are you an “X person”? Explain. Successful essays will show a clear and accurate reading comprehension of Paul Fussell's Class by integrating the book's major principles into your essay. You must have a Works Cited page referring to Class, and two other sources.
Alternative Option:
Two. In a 4-page essay, defend, refute, or complicate Fussell’s assertion that class is not as mobile as the American Dream purports it to be; rather, social class is more fixed like a caste system. Successful essays will show a clear and accurate reading comprehension of Paul Fussell's Class by integrating the book's major principles into your essay. You must have a Works Cited page referring to Class, and two other sources.
Alternative Option:
Three. Using bell hooks' essay "Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" (Acting Out Culture, pages 287-295), develop a cause and effect analysis thesis that supports Fussell's contention that ascending the class ladder results in colossal psychological upheaval and speaks to the hyper-competition that defines the American Dream.
Alternative Option:
Four. Develop an analytical thesis about the way class is perceived in the African American community or another ethnic group. How do race, culture, and history contribute to the unique attitudes minorities attach to the codes of social class?
Class Definition Summarized
Where you live, what degree of education you have, what kind of job you have, how you dress, and entertain yourself, and how you speak all are part of the class code by which our fellow Americans judge and rank us according to the hierarchy system.
Let us be clear: Your class can even determine your happiness and life expectancy, as we read in "All Hollowed Out," an article that would make a good resource.
One. What social class is most guilty, according to Fussell, of using pretentious, self-regarding language?
The middle class is fond of advertising how “educated” and “classy” they are by using elevated terms when a more plain term will do quite nicely.
They’ll use the following:
Cocktails instead of drinks
Individuals instead of people
Position instead of job
Albeit instead of although
Roadway instead of road
Purchase instead of buy
Affluent instead of rich
Subsequently instead of later
Proceed instead of go
At the local level instead of locally
Academia instead of college
Matriculating through college instead of going through college
Predicated on instead of based on
Utilize instead of use
Terminate instead of end
Tres chic instead of very chic or very cool
Mindful instead of thoughtful
My journey instead of my life
Élan or moxie instead of energy or spunk
Vis-a-vi instead of regarding
Montage instead of mix
Voila! instead of wow!
Gauche instead of tacky
Entrée instead of dinner or main dish
Fin de siècle instead of end of century
Sobriquet instead of nickname or pet name
Coquettish instead of flirtatious
C’est la vie instead of “it is what is is.”
Joie de vivre instead of lust for life
Denouement instead of conclusion
Chanteuse instead of singer
Circumferentially challenged instead of fat
I work as a garbologist instead of I work as a garbage man.
Two. Fussell is clearly disgusted with the vanity and pretentiousness of the middle class. He says the way out of this nonsense is to become an X person. What are the X person’s distinguishing characteristics?
You belong more to a category than a class because you do not identify with a class. A class is a label that society tries to impose on you. It is a label that insecure people aspire to embrace because they lack the core identity to define themselves in ways that are beyond class status.
You are born into a class, but you earn X status through hard work, curiosity, and rejection of society’s consumer scripts and clichés.
Entering category X often results in ostracism from family, friends, and the “tribe” that dictates your class because your rejection of their “lifestyle” and values is implicit condemnation of them.
Entering the creative class—through the pursuit of art, music, and writing—often makes one a member of category X.
Being a member of category X requires artistic talent and originality.
X people are independent and have arch disregard for the status yearned for by the middle class. In fact X people have contempt for middle-class aspirations. As a result, they are sometimes referred to as bohemians.
X people avoid brand clothing because they prefer to dress comfortably and to “dress down.”
A lot of X people clothing choices are explained in David Brooks’ masterpiece Bobos in Paradise. X people wear “earth shoes” and earth colors and coats made from the fur of alpaca and llamas. X People dress according to form and function more than to show.
X people are drawn to Subaru cars, which evidence oneness with nature.
X people’s priority for living location is based on proximity to delicious, cheap restaurants than social status or living in “the right place.”
X people are not dependent on their job, job title, career choice, or income level for their self-identity.
X people live in the present rather than waiting for some future where their lives will be “full of grand moments and riches.”
They prefer old house to new tract home. And they never manicure their lawns. During drought, they are the first to let all the grass and shrubbery die.
They keep their cars for over 15 years and rarely wash them. Nor do they touch up dents and scratches as these imperfections give their cars “character.”
X people never eat turkey on Thanksgiving, but prefer more off-the-track dishes such as Thai Curry, Vindaloo, Spanish paella, Russian borscht, Ethiopian Doro Wat and Injera, and Nigerian fufu.
X people avoid all chain restaurants like Appleybee’s, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, and Cheesecake Factory as these restaurants are condemned as soulless and corporate owned, designed to make food based on focus groups and “market research.”
X people are good cooks and can make delicious meals with a few good ingredients.
X people are voracious readers.
X people are masters of geography and can look at a blank globe and point to the city of Karachi, Nairobi, or Vallejo with great ease.
X people are critical thinkers, and they never “drink the Kool-Aid” of one camp of thought as they prefer to balance one type of thinking with its counterpoints in order to have a better informed opinion.
X people avoid euphemisms and other forms of phony, pretentious language.
X people avoid ostentation at all times.
X people never advertise that they are X people. Content with their identity, they feel no need to be evangelists for the X Way of Life.
Unlike the rest of America, X people do not suffer from class anxieties.
Perhaps most importantly, X People value critical thinking, the craft of developing informed opinions, more than consumerism. If we had to boil down the difference between X People and the rest of Americans it would be this: A life of ideas or a life of buying things.
Applying Paul Fussell's Chapter "The X Way Out" to Essay Prompt #1
In a 4-page typed essay, support or refute the argument that your matriculation through college, and the major you have chosen (or not), is inextricably entwined with the class status anxieties analyzed in Paul Fussell’s Class. In other words, argue for or against the idea that fear of falling short of America’s status system—a code system that is much more complicated than income level alone—is a significant driving force in your college studies. What evidence is there, or not, that you are beholden to class status codes? What evidence is there, or not, that you have rejected America’s class status script and have carved your own path, so that you love learning for its own sake? Are you an aspiring bourgeois consumer? Are you an “X person”? Explain. Successful essays will show a clear and accurate reading comprehension of Paul Fussell's Class by integrating the book's major principles into your essay. You must have a Works Cited page referring to Class, and two other sources.
Sample Thesis Response
Paul Fussell convincingly shows that the idea of social class in America is a mental disease, either a lowly condition of learned helplessness in the lower classes, a neurotic and fearful need to conform in the middle or a lofty position of obnoxious pride in the upper. Our "only way out" is, to follow Fussell's pointing to the Exit Sign is to be a X Person. An X Person rejects the learned helplessness of the lower classes, the pathetic groveling of the middle classes, and the disgusting smugness of the uppers. The X Person is characterized by having a sense of irony, a sense of the cosmopolitan world traveler, a love for knowledge for its own sake, a curiosity for all things, a disdain for class status, a love of critical thinking that makes her reject society's soulless scripts for living, and an appreciation for culture and the arts. While I am too young to have fully fleshed out my X Person aspirations, my Aunt Ciara is a bona fide X Person, as defined by Fussell, evidenced by __________________, __________________, ____________________, and _____________________.
Another Response
McMahon's championing of Paul Fussell's X Person Archetype is bogus. A close examination of the X Person reveals a vain human being, not all free from social status, but just as imprisoned by image as his upper- and middle-class counterparts. The X Person's imprisonment is evidenced by _________________, ________________, __________________, and ___________________.
Another Response
While I will concede that X People can be vain, I am not claiming that X People are perfect. What's compelling in Fussell's book is that Americans tend to be enslaved by a social class category due to a lack of critical thinking skills that renders them consumer philistines. In contrast, X People demonstrate a more desirable existence evidenced by __________________, ______________________, _________________________, and ________________________.
Another Response
While X People begin their critical thinking journey with noble motivations, their bohemian or hipster lifestyle eventually gets co-opted or appropriated by big industry so that the trappings of X People--clothes, cars, hairstyles, to name a few examples--become part of a consumer script that is just as lame and superficial as any other class designation.
Another Response
Even if, for the sake of argument, my opponent is correct and that X People cultural mores become appropriated by Big Industry, that doesn't make the X Person lifestyle "lame" or superficial." One can embrace an authentic movement or one can simply want that movement's class status. It's a matter of depth of character, motivation, and having a deep knowledge of the X Person lifestyle.
Types of Arguments
(I've adapted these ideas from Chapter 3 of How to Write Anything by John J. Ruszkiewicz.)
Know what kind of argument you are writing:
Argument to advance a thesis:
You argue for a thesis as you champion an idea or a cause.
For example, you might argue for eating steamed vegetables three times a day and provide the many benefits of employing such a practice.
Another example would be a writer who argues that the Paleo diet is the most effective way to maintain lean muscle mass.
Another example would be for a writer to argue for water rationing and triple water bills for homeowners who go over their water threshold.
Refutation argument:
You refute an already existing argument or practice, showing point by point why the argument is weak, precarious, or even fallacious (fallacy-laden).
For example, you might refute Civil War reenactments on the grounds that they are white male fantasies based on the infantile hunger for nostalgia, the toxic Kool-Aid of White Supremacy, and the denial of moral accountability for the evils of slavery.
In your refutation, you paint Civil War reenactments as a grotesque pageantry akin to a racist Disneyworld where are all the actors are white and black history has been erased because "it would be too disturbing" to the bogus, idealized world inhabited by the emotionally-arrested aspirants of "the good old Confederate days" and their other shameless displays of morally-bankrupt tomfoolery.
Once you decide on your argument or claim, you must consider finding compelling reasons to support your claim.
Support Your Claim
Without support consisting of data, statistics, reasoning, logic, and refutations to counterarguments, your opinion exists in an abyss or a vacuum. You must develop a considered or educated opinion, which is the result of fearlessly studying the pros and cons of your subject in which you try to minimize your prejudices, biases, and other emotional baggage that might blind you from the truth.
Understand Opposing Claims and Points of View
You don't have an educated or considered opinion until you have been tested by your opponents' strongest arguments. If you can refute those arguments, then you can continue with your claim.
You will also gain credibility with your readers for showing your understanding of your opponents' views.
You will gain even more credibility when you can refute your opponents with assured insouciance rather than infantile hostility. Also choose polite insouciance over hostility as the former is a sign of intellectual superiority; the latter is a sign of juvenile fear and inexperience.
Give Appropriate Sartorial (Clothing Style) Splendor (Writing Style) to Your Arguments
Your argument is the "body" of the essay. Your writing style is the fashion or sartorial choice you make in order to "dress up" your argument and give it power, moxie, and elan (passion).
Here is the same claim dressed up differently in the following two thesis statements:
Plain
Civil War reenactments are racist gibberish that need to go once and for all.
More Dressed Up
Our moral offense to civil war reenactments rests on our understanding that the participants are engaging in nostalgia for the days when the toxic religion of white supremacy ruled the day, that the participants gleefully and childishly erase black history to the detriment of truth, and that on a larger scale, they engage in the mythical revisionism of the Confederacy narratives, hiding its barbaric practices by esteeming racist thugs as if they were innocent and venerable Disney heroes. Their sham is so morally egregious and spiritually bankrupt that to examine its folly in all its shameless variations compels us to abolish the sordid practice without equivocation.
Plain
We need to stop blaming the poor for their poverty.
More Dressed Up
The idea that the rich are wealthy because of their superior moral character and that the poor live in poverty because of their inferior moral character is a glaring absurdity rooted in willful ignorance, the blind worship of money, and an irrational fear of poverty as if it were some kind of contagious disease.
Qualify Your Thesis to Make It More Persuasive and Reasonable
Qualifiers such as the following will make your thesis more bullet-proof from your opponents:
some
most
a few
often
under certain conditions
when necessary
occasionally
Example:
Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.
Examine Your Core Assumptions
Assumptions are the principles and values upon which we base our beliefs and actions.
Claim
Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.
Assumption
Treating drug use as a medical problem that requires rehabilitation is morally superior to relying on incarceration. Some may disagree with this assumption, so the writer will have to defend her assumption at some point in her essay.
Notice the link, which is from a community college, is riddled with grammar errors. We all make mistakes from time to time, especially on the Internet, but a pattern of errors is disturbing indeed.
One. Kohn asserts that good teachers de-emphasize grades and that bad teachers, who even lack a conscience, emphasize grades. How compelling is his argument?
Some would accuse him of an over simplification and an either/or fallacy. “Either you drink my Kool-Aid and stop using grades, or you are proving to be a horrible, immoral teacher."
This extreme position, many would say, is an oversimplification and a form of bullying, evidence of a false prophet.
Furthermore, the “three effects of grading” that Kohn refers to could be disputed.
For example, we read, “Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.” What’s the baseline of interest that Kohn assumes will deteriorate if we push grades on students? Is there a baseline? If there is, he doesn't define it in any way.
He also claims that students will shy away from challenging tasks and suffer the reduction of “quality” thinking.
Again, Kohn is throwing an either/or fallacy in our face: Either hold students accountable with grades and suck the creativity out of their learning or cut out grades altogether and inject creativity into their learning. Why can’t there be a balance of both?
Two. What Are Some Possible Refutations of Kohn? (A Defense of Grading)
1. Competition from grading prepares students for real world.
2. Not all students try and perform equally. Those who are superior, as a result of their hard work, should enjoy seeing their hard work rewarded with higher grades.
3. It’s human nature to be motivated by the carrot and the stick. Kohn is living in a candy-coated dream world that ignores the realities of human nature.
4. Grades are not perfect, but they are an important motivational tool.
5. Grades are not perfect, but they do help show the “cream rising to the top,” an important process in any meritocracy. A meritocracy is a society that rewards the people based on merits.
6. It turns out that Kohn also is against homework. Thus, it appears he subscribes to the Cult of Academic Relaxation, a form of “creative laxity,” which I oppose.
7. Kohn's argument contradicts empirical evidence: In my 30 years of teaching, A students tend to be responsible; C and D students tend to be less responsible.
Three. What does Kohn mean when he says grades "spoil relationships with students"?
He uses an anecdote of a teacher whose instruction has been reduced to fanatical grading and that is served as evidence that grading is this monster that takes over teaching. In other words, he uses an extreme example to argue against grading. That's a logical fallacy.
Then there's the argument that a teacher should be less of a grader and more of a friend. Is this a good idea?
What if the student doesn't want to comply with his "friend's" educational goals?
The student might say to the teacher, "Sorry, friend, I don't feel like writing my Works Cited page."
Four. What is the Maternal Fallacy and how does this fallacy apply to Kohn?
The Maternal Fallacy is the emphasis on nurture and protection at the exclusion of discipline and control, qualities associated with the Patriarch or father figure. "Education should be a place of nurture and unconditional acceptance," says this line of thinking. "We don't want to traumatize the students by judging them harshly and hurting their self-esteem."
But in fact coddling students like this makes them weak and helpless in the real world. Creating dysfunctional citizens with no skills for the real world is hardly serving them.
In an affluent society in which the young generation have a foundation of basics in math and writing, some of Kohn's maternal outlets for creative freedom are valid. However, in the absence of these basic skills, grading and basics in education are sometimes necessary.
Five. Would you be more motivated if you did not receive grades? Explain.
Answers may vary.
For me personally, if I had an interest in the class, I might not need to be motivated so much by grades as much as I would be seeking approval from the instructor. But if the class were a requirement outside my sphere of interest, I might not do anything.
Six. Is it fair to compare grading to a polluted city or is this rhetorical demagoguery? Explain.
"Wearing diamonds is equal to killing slave children in Africa," it could be argued, has more of a basis in reality than Kohn's statement above.
More Criticism Against Kohn
We read the following by Daniel Willingham whose link is provided below:
In his book, Punished by Rewards, Kohn claims “Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It gets them to conform to our wishes irrespective of what those wishes are.” (p. 104.) Kohn also argues that praise and rewards for good behavior are destructive to motivation. The truth is actually somewhat more complicated. Rewards can reduce motivation, but only when motivation was somewhat high to start with. If the student is unmotivated to perform some task, rewarding him will not hurt his motivation. Praise can be controlling and exact a psychological cost, but its effect on the recipient depends on how it’s construed: does the child think you are offering sincere appreciation for a job well done, or sending the message that future behavior had better be in line with expectations? There is important psychological work showing that the role of praise and reward is complex. Carol Dweck is a leader in this field and her book, Mindset, provides a good overview.
Regarding self-control, Willingham writes:
In a recent piece in the Phi Delta Kappan, Kohn argues that self-discipline has been over-sold, and indeed, that it has a dark side—too much self-control may be associated with anxiety, compulsiveness, and dampened emotional responses. He notes that some researchers put few or no qualifications on their enthusiasm for self-control, essentially arguing that more is always better. But Kohn proceeds from a definition of “self-control” that differs from that used by these researchers (Roy Baumeister,Angela Duckworth, Walter Mischel, and Marty Seligman), and indeed, by virtually all of the important researchers in the field. They define self-control as the ability to marshal your cognitive and emotional resources to help you attain goals that you consider important. Kohn defines self-control as using willpower to accomplish things that are generally regarded as desirable. Thus by Kohn’s definition, a child shows self-discipline when she determinedly (and miserably) slogs towards a goal that she does not value, but that her parents (or others) deem important. Researchers use the former definition when they claim that they find no disadvantages to self-control, and that they observe positive associations with achievement, social adjustment, mental health. Kohn’s point—that authoritarian control leads to negative outcomes—is not very startling and is shared more or less universally by researchers.
Pointing out Kohn's logical fallacies, Willingham point out:
Kohn falls prey to logical fallacies on occasion. In the same Kappan piece on self-discipline, Kohn writes “Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do. To assume otherwise is to revert to a crude behaviorism long since repudiated by serious scholars.” (p. 170). This is a false dilemma. Kohn offers me the choice of agreeing with his version of a constructivist learning theory or agreeing with a behaviorist theory. Actually, those are not my only choices of learning theories. (I have yet to find a Kohn piece in which behaviorism—a theory whose heyday was fifty years ago, and is now ignored by most learning theorists—did not take a beating.)
Kohn’s work often makes use of misleading vividness, or perhaps better, a variant of that fallacy. His articles are characterized by a long, vehement attack on the target and a brief, subdued qualification of the attack. The pale qualification, though important to an accurate characterization of the literature, is likely forgotten by the reader. For example, the Kappan piece is an attack on three fronts (psychological, philosophical, and political) on the usefulness of self-discipline. Kohn also notes “While I readily admit that persevering at worthwhile tasks is good—and that some students seem to lack this capacity—. . . .” This qualification indicates that an important topic ought to be “when is self-control useful, and when is it destructive?” But the message of the article is unqualified: self-discipline is bad.
Write a personal essay in which you either support or refute Kohn’s argument about grading, using anecdotes from your experience as a student. Do you view grading in a negative or positive light? Why or why not? Make sure to structure your argument by addressing Kohn’s multiple points directly.
Break Down the Prompt into Its Parts
Convert the questions in the assignment into sentences.
Follow instructions
I agree (disagree) with Kohn because . . .
Summarize Kohn's Arguments
“Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself” (238).
“Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenge tasks” (239).
“Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking” (239).
“Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective” (240).
“Grades encourage cheating” (241).
“Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students” (241).
Sample Responses
Student Who Disagrees with Kohn
My experience as a student contradicts everything Kohn tries to say. I’ve walked into classes with absolutely no interest in the subject, but because I had a gun to my head, that is the pressure of grades pointing at my temple, I forced myself to get acquainted with the material. Contrary to Kohn, my being forced to know the material made me respect and like the subject matter far more than a situation in which I knew I would not be graded. Without the pressure of grades, I would remain ignorant of the subject, and that ignorance would perpetuate my lack of interest in the material.
Kohn’s second assertion is that grading will discourage me from embracing challenging tasks. He’s assuming that without grades, I’d be more inclined to take intellectual and creative risks. He is wrong. When I was a college student, I was lazy and was not predisposed to taking on any kind of challenge. The path of least resistance was my work ethic. Grades or not, I was an incurably lazy human being. If anything, I needed grades to prompt me off my butt and to do some actual homework.
Kohn’s third assertion is that grading will compromise my critical thinking skills. Again, I don’t think Kohn knows what he’s talking about. When I was in college, I had no critical thinking skills to lose. Grades were hardly the reason I was so ignorant. My youthful naiveté, my laziness, and my being sheltered in the suburbs had far more to do with my lack of critical thinking skills than any teacher’s grading system.
Kohn’s fourth argument is that grading is not a reliable system because the teachers can be biased, unfair, and use unreliable grading measures. I’ll admit these are possible scenarios, but in my years at high school and college, it seems that over 95% of the time, students did indeed get the grades they deserved. If there is a five percent error, that is hardly sufficient reason for dumping grades.
Kohn goes on to say that grades encourage cheating and spoil students’ relationship with teachers. Of course, a grading system is going compel students to cheat. They want to be up to par with the A students whose A performance has earned them top honors. Any system with a top and a bottom is going to have cheaters. To deny that reality is to try to create a world that does not exist. And that world is the one provided by Alfie Kohn.
Regarding the final point about our relationship with teachers, Kohn is assuming there is this great relationship that is forged without grades and that grades spoils the deal. Again, he is in error. We are not friends with the teachers. They are hired to do what they do because of their presumed expertise and authority in the subject. They are our guides and mentors, and their grading system is their way of showing us how well we are at reaching the benchmarks that are part of each class. Kohn’s assertion that these benchmarks measured by a grading system is a degradation of the student-teacher relationship has no bearing in reality and again shows that he is trying to impose an artificial world on the real one. For all these reasons, I have dismissed Kohn convincingly. Can we move on to a new topic, please? (avoid hubris in the conclusion)
Student Defense of Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn is trying to save education from being a terrible place of fear, elitism, and students being helpless pawns before their maniacal teachers who use grades to bully, control, and traumatize their students.
First off, everyone knows that grades are unfair. Teachers don’t really care how well you write. All they care about is that you agree with them, so you spend your time kissing up to them, trying to make your essays reflect what your instructors say in the class.
Secondly, Kohn is right that grades reduce interest. How can you focus on the subject with any interest when you’re always worried about achieving a 4.0 so that you can get into a good university? Interest is irrelevant. It’s all about the grades. And seeing some students get As while others get Cs is traumatizing for the lower students who feel stigmatized and shamed, often wearing these negative emotions for the rest of their lives. How dare we let teachers have so much power over our self-esteem. We should cut their grading power out from under them just as Alfie Kohn says we should.
Third, Kohn is so correct to point out that grading makes us students avoid challenging approaches to the subject matter. We always seek the easiest path to The Land of A. Why take risks by doing something more challenging than we have to?
Finally, what kind of relationship can I have with my teachers when I fear their power over me? Their grade determines my place in the world. One wrong move and my life as a successful banker could be diminished to a milk truck driver. It’s impossible to develop strong relationships with figures that wield so much power. Therefore, I commend Alfie Kohn for telling us to stop the insanity, cut out grades, and bring real education back to the classrooms.
Refutation of the Above Response
While I concede that there are too many teachers who want their students to regurgitate their ideas rather than think critically for themselves, the rest of the student’s defense of Alfie Kohn is a mishmash of egregious fallacies, clichés, and sloppy thinking, all of which serves to highlight Kohn’s dangerous arguments for ending grading systems as we know them.
Perhaps the biggest danger is this idea that we are hurting students’ self-esteem and subjecting them to lifelong traumas by judging them with clear benchmarks to see if they are fulfilling course requirements. The sentiment of preserving self-esteem has everything to do with the fantasy of staying home in the safety of Mother’s House and nothing to do with the reality of competing in the real world. The fantasy of preserving the Big Baby for eternity is typically an upper class one. Narcissistic, well-to-do parents who can’t accept the foibles of their “perfect” Junior want teachers who can only mutter obsequious flattery, and if their grading system in any way is less than flattering, then clearly grading, as Kohn argues, is the enemy of all: self-esteem, creativity, student interest, the buddy-buddy relationship with student and teacher.
Of course, this fantasy bears no resemblance to the real world. Imagine a jiu-jitsu instructor who elevates his students’ self-esteem by giving everyone a black belt. The tournament comes along and that instructor’s students have to spar with real black belts. I think we all know what the outcome will be.
Kohn is the instructor who’d love to give everyone a black belt, which of course is a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Second Writing Prompt
Kohn writes about the need to move a school “from a grade orientation to a learning orientation” (pp. 239, 243). What do you think he means? How, according to Kohn, does grading make it harder to focus on learning? Write an essay in which you discuss the characteristics of these two orientations. Do you think it’s possible to have an educational system that emphasizes both?
Break Down the Assignment into Your Own Words
We're asked in the prompt to explain, perhaps in one sentence, what Kohn means when he says we must move from a grade to a learning orientation. Clearly, a grading orientation for Kohn excludes learning. We have to explain why Kohn believes this and then explain whether or not we agree with him.
Student Refutation of Kohn
Kohn has created a false opposition, between grading and learning, to propel is phony argument that grades are a plague ruining schools and minds. What Kohn and his ilk are afraid of is this big scary thing called judgment. Grades are a form of judgment, and judgments for Kohn are a very scary thing because they take a child’s fragile self-esteem, Kohn’s view, and dismantle it.
I’ve got some scary news for Kohn. Judgment is here to stay. Judgment is everywhere. Judgment is how we survive. Judgment is how we flourish. And judgment is how we measure our educational success. When we choose toothpaste or a cold cereal or a web browser, or a laptop, or a smartphone, or a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, we exercise judgment. When a university picks students from a pool of community college students, the university exercises judgment.
Kohn’s argument is so removed from reality that it seems he must live inside a bubble in which he talks only to himself or his Kool-Aid drinking believers. Grades aren’t going anywhere. Grades are a normal part of the judgment process. And Kohn’s fantasy of taking judgment out of the education process is so lunatic that he is nothing more than a provocateur and a demagogue whose flea-sized arguments will be crushed in the elephantine marketplace of real ideas.
“Preparing Minds for Markets” by Jonathan Kozol (301)
One. Why are all the high school practice jobs manager positions in the service industry like being a cashier or manager at Walmart or Sears or Home Depot or Pet Smart?
It appears the teachers have low expectations for their poor students who they feel are either going to prison or, as their salvation, getting a mediocre job in the service industry.
Perhaps the teachers have good intentions. Perhaps not. But in any case, they have prescribed a narrow role for their students. As one principal says, “I’m in the business of developing minds to meet a market demand.”
Many would argue this isn’t the role of education. Education should expose students to as many opportunities as possible. Would you want your children trained exclusively for service industry jobs at school as if to say, “This is all you can do”?
Part of the problem is financial. A lot of poor schools don’t have computers, so they can’t teach computer literacy, or beyond that, computer code. Some schools don't even have books.
Two. What is the psychological devastation that results from treating students like they’re on the road to prison or a service-industry job?
Demoralization, a crushed spirit, disconnection from the teacher, hatred of education are all results of the system described in Kozol’s essay.
I know an English professor and published author who grew up in the inner city of Detroit, and he said his teachers were scared of him, in part because he’s six feet six inches and weighs 300 pounds. One day in high school he blew up and said to a teacher, “If you keep treating me like a gangster, I’m going to become one just because you're making me very upset!”
The conditions Kozol and others describe is a scandal that underscores how the disparity between the haves and the have-nots contradicts notions we have about American freedom, American democracy, and the American Dream.
We watch Shark Tank and say, “See, everyone, the American Dream is still alive!” But only a minuscule percentage of the show’s aspiring entrepreneurs come from a school in which they were trained to be service workers and managers in department stores.
Writing Prompt from Page 313
From very different perspectives, Kozol and Mike Rose invite readers to take a closer look at the way cultural stereotypes about different jobs can influence how we define legitimate or valid intelligence. Write an essay in which you identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare. How does each understand the connection between work and learning? What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Key words and passages
Identify and assess how these writers’ respective commentaries compare.
How does each understand the connection between work and learning?
What sort of conclusions or critique does each offer? And which do you find more convincing or compelling? Why?
Sample Responses
Support of the Authors
Rose, Gatto and Kozol are allies in the battle against economic class warfare, which perpetuates the divisions between the lower and upper classes evidenced by _____________, ________________, ________________, and __________________.
Refutation of the Authors
Rose and Kozol are shrill liberals whose attempts to bridge the gap between the poorer working classes and the more affluent classes prove misguided when we consider that Rose is guilty of glorifying blue-collar work and making it attractive to those who should aspire to greater career goals; Kozol is guilty of dismissing vocational training in low-income schools that are giving students options that they otherwise would not have; both are guilty of intrusive and unrealistic social engineering and economic redistribution.
Sentence Fragments
No main verb
Fragment
An essay with a clear thesis and organization.
Corrected
An essay with a clear thesis and organization has a stronger probability of succeeding.
Fragment
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests
Corrected
An education system based on standardized tests with no flexible interpretation of those tests will inevitably discriminate against non-native speakers.
No main subject
Fragment
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students
Corrected
With too much emphasis on standardized tests targeting upper class Anglo students, No Child Left Behind remains a form of discrimination.
Fragment
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese
Correct
With my fish tacos overloaded with mango salsa and Manchego cheese, they fell apart upon the first bite.
Fragment
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos
Correct
Until you learn to not overload your fish tacos, your tacos will fall apart.
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
Between you and (I, me), the fat cats have all the cheese while the rest of us fight for the crumbs.
Subject-pronoun agreement
A person who doesn't plan ahead finds they cannot go to the big party.
Consistent point of view
When one ponders the state of education, we can't help wonder why you are lagging in critical thinking skills and one has to ask if there need to be improvements in this regard. Therefore, a person taking a critical thinking class should be prepared when they are asked to identify logical fallacies and other elements of critical thinking.
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates of food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
One. What do super rich people look for in a house?
A long driveway and a driveway that cannot even be found is the ideal. You can set your GPS to the address of a rich person’s mansion, arrive at the mailbox and the front security gate, and then have to drive a few miles before you get to the actual front door of the mansion.
The rich want isolation, and isolation kills empathy from the rest of the human race.
Two. What is the relationship between television at mealtimes and social class?
The lower the class the higher the dependence on television to replace conversation at mealtimes.
According to Fussell, the more conspicuous the TV the lower the class. His book is outdated. In the age of flat-screen TVs, the rich are getting huge high-end television sets as part of their “entertainment rooms.”
We could say Fussell’s book is dated here. Since this book was written in the 1980s, the television has been replaced by the smartphone.
Three. What do the rich look for in a bathroom?
In a word, SIZE. The bigger the bathroom, the better. Bathroom size today is the result of market research, which has shown that people associate the bathroom with childhood and shame. As people grow up, the bathroom should represent independence from adults and their shaming ways. A big bathroom means you’re an adult who can enjoy privacy without shame.
This principle has been applied to all the finest hotels.
Four. How has consumerism changed since Fussell wrote his book in the 1980s?
The middle class has shrunk. Now when journalists and politicians refer to America, only two classes are mentioned: The 1% and “average Americans.” See the above links.
Five. What is the role of college and class?
According to Fussell, Americans lack “a system of hereditary ranks and titles,” but they want to be snobs just like people in other countries, so they rely on “their college and university hierarchy.”
According to Forbes, 40% of Americans have an associate’s degree or above. About 30% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or above.
Six. Is college about status today or survival?
Perhaps college was a status symbol three decades ago or so, but today it is more about survival than anything.