5-13 Homework #16 due: Read Bryan Caplan’s “The World Might be Better Off Without College for Everyone” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes the validity of his claim. Watch Hasan Minhaj defend affirmative action in the context of Asian Americans suing Harvard (Netflix Patriotic Act, first episode). Homework #17 due: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend “A Teacher’s Defense of Homework” and explain why giving homework to middle school and high school students is controversial.
5-15 Homework #17 due: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend “A Teacher’s Defense of Homework” and explain why giving homework to middle school and high school students is controversial. Homework #18 due: Read “Choosing School for My Daughter in a Segregated City” and in a 3-paragraph analyze the crisis of race,class, and structural inequality.
5-20 Homework #18 due: Read “Choosing School for My Daughter in a Segregated City” and in a 3-paragraph analyze the crisis of race,class, and structural inequality. For sources, we will look at “Are Private Schools Immoral?” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes the validity of the author’s claim. We will also read Will Stancil’s “School Segregation Is Not a Myth” and examine the validity of the author’s claim. Homework #19: We will cover private school debate, and we will develop a thesis that about the ritualization of violence as described by Steve Almond in his essay “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” and his video “Eager Violence of the Heart--America’s Football Obsession.” As a source, you can also consult The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan Gottschall.
5-22 Homework #19: We will cover private school debate, and we will develop a thesis that about the ritualization of violence as described by Steve Almond in his essay “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” and his video “Eager Violence of the Heart--America’s Football Obsession.” As a source, you can also consult The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan Gottschall. Homework #20: Email me your tentative thesis. I will go over some but not all thesis statements in class. The thesis statements' authors will remain anonymous.
5-27 Holiday
5-29 Do thesis samples in class and provide counterargument samples. Students will show their tentative thesis statements.
6-3 Peer Edit
6-5-18 Essay 5 due. Portfolio due.
Essay #5 Due Date: 6-5-19
You need 5 credible sources for the MLA Works Cited page in your final capstone essay.
Option One: In context of Alfie Kohn’s “From Degrading to De-Grading,” support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s assertion that grading is an inferior education tool that all conscientious teachers should abandon. In other words, will students benefit from an accountability-free education? Why? Explain.
Option Two: Read Bell Hooks’ “Learning in the Shadow of Race and her essay “keeping close to home.” In the context of those essays, support, refute, or complicate the inferred lesson from bell hooks’ essay, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” that upward mobility requires a betrayal of one’s economic class and even family. To rub shoulders with the privileged, do we have to "sell out," to conform to their snobbish ways, and in doing so, are we betraying our core values and turning our backs on our roots?
Option Three. Read Bryan Caplan’s “The World Might be Better Off Without College for Everyone” and write an essay that analyzes the validity of his claim. You should see this critical review in The Washington Post of Caplan’s ideas.
Option Four: See Netflix Explained episode “Why Women Are Paid Less” and develop an argumentative thesis about the “motherhood penalty.”
Option Five: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend “A Teacher’s Defense of Homework” and develop an argumentative essay about giving homework to middle school and high school students.
Option Six: Read “Choosing School for My Daughter in a Segregated City” and develop an argument over what the best moral choice is for Nikole Hannah-Jones as she decides on what kind of school is best for her daughter (vs. the interests of society at large?)
Option Seven: Read “Are Private Schools Immoral?” and write an argument about the moral implications of sending one’s children to private schools. You might want to consult Netflix documentary Teach Us All and Will Stancil essay “School Segregation Is Not a Myth” for your research sources.
Option Eight: See the Netflix documentary Teach Us All and develop an argumentative thesis about school segregation. For a source, consult Will Stancil’s “School Segregation Is Not a Myth.”
Option Nine: Watch Hasan Minhaj defend affirmative action in the context of Asian Americans suing Harvard (Netflix Patriotic Act, first episode), and write a research paper that defends, refutes, or complicates Hasan's argument. Consult "The 'Whitening' of Asian Americans" in The Atlantic; "The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action" in The New Yorker; "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans" in The New Yorker, and a source from a book.
Option Ten. Develop a thesis that about the ritualization of violence as described by Steve Almond in his essay “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” and his video “Eager Violence of the Heart--America’s Football Obsession.” As a source, you can also consult The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan Gottschall.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards
length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Option Three. Read Bryan Caplan’s “The World Might be Better Off Without College for Everyone” and write an essay that analyzes the validity of his claim. You should see this critical review in The Washington Post of Caplan’s ideas. You can also use The Ivory Tower documentary as one of your 5 sources.
Summary of Caplan's Essay
One. There is a disconnect between "college curricula and the job market." In other words, the subject matter is too often irrelevant to the labor market.
Rebuttal: This is true, but labor market requires college degrees and other credentials, so even though college is faulty and shows weakness in its demonstration of creating a bridge between classwork and the local business community, Caplan's conclusion that people should ditch college has no logical basis. Nurses, physical therapists, accountants, and others need their degrees and credentials. Caplan should be making the claim that there should be mandatory college reform, not an exodus of young people away from college. This is the major weakness of his claim.
Two. Students don't retain knowledge.
Rebuttal: No one retains knowledge in any context, college or otherwise, unless we are subject to consistency and repetition. It is therefore not logical to single out college has some place where humans show a frailty of memory. A lot of rote memory tests prove more than short-term memory; they separate those who have the discipline to study for the exam over those who do not.
Three. Students are "philistines," which means they are soulless materialists who care only about money and status.
Rebuttal: Caplan's observation that students are philistines is problematic for a variety of reasons. What he calls a philistine may just be a tired student trying to scrape by an education to get a decent job. That a student doesn't have the privilege that Caplan had to luxuriate in free time during the college experience hardly gives Caplan the moral footing to condemn students as philistines or soulless anti-intellectuals.
Another problem is that even if a student is a superficial materialist, it does not logically follow that that student is better off not being in college. Caplan is serving up a non sequitur, which takes away from the coherence (logical and unified) of his argument.
Four. We have "credential inflation," which results in a lot of worthless credentials.
Rebuttal: Regardless of "credential inflation," 65% of the near future jobs will require a college credential or degree; therefore, the notion of "credential inflation" doesn't hold any water in terms of the best available future jobs for young people.
Five. The dogma that we must go to college makes us neglect vocational training.
Rebuttal: While I agree with Caplan that in some cases trade school is a better alternative for some students, he should have revised his thesis to argue that jobs in the future will require either college credentials or trade school credentials and students need to decide for themselves what is the better route to take. This would have been a more appropriate emphasis for Caplan's essay rather than for him to discourage young people from going to college in mass. With a few tweaks in his thesis, he would have won a more sympathetic reader.
From Washing Post Book Review by Sarah Carr:
First, his analysis treats education and teachers as a monolith — that is to say, pretty universally a waste of time and money. He makes significant distinctions only when it comes to subject areas, deriding the humanities as “Mickey Mouse” majors, for instance.
With this largely macro lens, he misses an important opportunity to scrutinize the startling gaps in educational quality across states, districts, institutions, schools and teachers. Had he drilled down to compare the quality of education — and attendant student and societal outcomes — in a small group of high schools of varying quality, for instance, we might get a very different view of both the role of “signaling” and the state of the American education system.
[Are colleges preparing students for the automated future of work?]
That’s not the mission of a man who declares that “all things considered, I favor full separation of school and state.” Nor is it his mission to fully consider the impact of his not-so-modest proposals on the country’s poorest citizens — the kinds of people who would never be able to afford an education if public funding of all kinds disappeared. Caplan fleetingly addresses what he calls “our commitment as a society to our least fortunate members” over the course of two out of nearly 300 pages.
He concludes that covering the cost of education for all is like covering the cost of everyone’s diamond wedding rings — a subsidy that diminishes the value of a good by making it universally accessible. “To detect subsidies’ downside for social justice, you must dwell on the opportunities the poor have lost because of credential inflation. When most Americans didn’t finish high school, dropouts faced little stigma in the labor market.”
As in “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids,” his argument seems to hinge on a dangerous faith in biological determinism that borders on a defense of institutionalized classism. In the unlikely event that it’s embraced (I worry more that by entering the mainstream, his ideas may subtly and incrementally push the debate in the wrong direction), his proposal would transform an admittedly deeply unequal society into a serfdom — more permanently consigning low-income citizens to minimum-wage jobs that require next to no literacy or numeracy skills. Or no jobs at all.
“The Case Against Education” raises some important questions, but beyond that it offers little more than dangerous, extravagant ideology masking as creative data analysis.
10 Trending College Careers for Future
Resources
Ivory Tower documentary (2014)
Community College Transfer and Graduation Rates
Importance of Those First 20 Units in Community College
Time and Cost of Getting a Bachelor's Degree for Community College Students
"Education Isn't the Key to a Good Income" by Rachel Cohen in The Atlantic
Why Are You In College?
Consider the notion of specificity in your college goals.
Micro: Specialize in major to make money
Mid-level Macro: Learn fundamentals to apply to all classes and life challenges
Maximum Macro: Become a critical thinker rather than a mindless consumer
McMahon's Experience with College "Nay-Sayers," which would be my mapping points for essay.
They overreact to a short snapshot in time. For example, they'll cite studies right after Great Recession of 2008.
They fail to see the long-term benefits of education.
They dismiss education with examples of heavy debt, so they fail to complicate the discussion by talking about benefit-cost ratio.
They fail to acknowledge how first-family college graduates create a rippling effect on their family.
They fail to acknowledge late-bloomers who are considered non-college material (as I was).
They cite devastating community college statistics, but don't talk about the importance of the First 20 Units.
Why Students Argue for Not Going to College
One. Treadmill to Nowhere Theory
Two. High cost and debt combined with nightmare stories of unemployment and low-paying jobs
Three. Anxiety due to cultural war that is getting worse
Four. Anxiety due to war between real news and fake news
Counterargument
Anxieties and anecdotes are not solid grounds for dropping out of college.
"America's Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor's Degree" by Marty Nemko
Option Four: See Netflix Explained episode “Why Women Are Paid Less” and develop an argumentative thesis about the “motherhood penalty.” This is an 18-minute documentary.
New York Times: "The Gender Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood"
American Center for Progress: "7 Actions that Could Shrink the Gender Wage Gap"
Forbes offers two solutions.
Future Women offers counterarguments and rebuttals.
The Guardian offers counterarguments and rebuttals.
How to Frame Your Thesis for Gender Wage Gap Topic:
Is there really a form of social injustice that explains the gender wage gap, or are there reasonable explanations for the wage gap that cannot be changed by government legislation?
Sample Thesis #1:
Claims that the gender wage gap is a "natural state of affairs" are rooted in an ignorance of the socially unjust forces that drive a wedge between male and female wages.
Sample Thesis #2
Arguing for "social justice" by government engineering is misguided when we consider that the real factors behind the gender wage gap are not from sexism or gender discrimination but from behaviorial and biological forces we cannot control.
Overuse of Semicolons
Students tend to overuse semicolons. Usually, a period is better.
Often, students incorrectly substitute commas with semicolons. This is wrong.
I love my Honda's 2.0 turbo. However, I am more comfortable with a naturally aspirated engine.
Sometimes students substitute colons with semicolons. This is wrong.
I must now announce my favorite five candy bars of all time: Twix, Almond Joy, Mounds, Butterfinger, and Whatchamacallit.
We use semicolons to show close relationship between two sentences:
My second favorite candy bar of all time is the Rocky Road; my first favorite is the O'Henry Bar.
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