Essay 1 Options for Essay 1 Due on September 16
Option 1:
In an essay of 1,000 words, defend, refute, or complicate Cal Newport’s claim from his book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You that the Passion Hypothesis is dangerous and should be replaced by the craftsman mindset. Your second source will be “In the Name of Love” by Miya Tokumitsu. You won’t receive credit unless you have an MLA format Works Cited page at the end of your essay.
Option 2:
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 3:
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Ibram X. Kendi’s claim in “There Is No Middle Ground on Reparations” that we as a society are morally compelled to implement reparations as a response to slavery and Jim Crow.
August 28 Go over Newport chapters 1-3. Homework #2 for September 4: Read Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me” and Andrea Townsend "A Teacher's Defense of Homework" and in 200-word paragraph, explain the dilemma parents face when struggling with their children’s homework.
September 2 Holiday
September 4 Go over the homework debate. We will also go over Ibram X. Kendi’s supports his claim in “There Is No Middle Ground on Reparations” that we as a society are morally compelled to implement reparations as a response to slavery and Jim Crow.
September 9 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write an introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, and one or two supporting paragraphs.
September 11 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Our goal is to write two supporting paragraphs, a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, a conclusion, and a Works Cited page.
September 16 Essay 1 Due on turnitin.
Suggested Essay Structure:
Paragraph 1: Explain the homework dilemma facing America for your introduction.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that agrees or disagrees with Greenfeld's contention that his daughter is assigned too much homework and this overload points to a broader problem about homework in American society.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph in which you anticipate how your opponents will oppose your thesis and your rebuttal to their counterargument.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion: Dramatic reiteration of your thesis.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.
Sample Introduction and Thesis
Karl Taro Greenfeld writes a sympathetic account of the struggles that he and his daughter must suffer to keep up with his daughter's homework. They feel there is a gun pointed at their heads 24/7, they are sleep deprived, they feel constantly behind in the homework, and the father's complaints to his daughter's teacher are met with the standard "I'm merely following the core standards and if you wish me to demote your daughter to the remedial class, I can make that happen." Not willing to compromise his daughter's educational standing, he backs down, but he wishes to make the case that the American education system is so caught up in teaching core standards that it is unleashing a torrent of homework on children to their detriment.
While I agree with a lot of Greenfeld's observations, I sadly and reluctantly must argue against him. Our teachers have no choice but to continue to push lots of homework on our children in the cause of teaching core standards, in the cause of getting us caught up in STEM, in the cause of acknowledging that career competition is far more ruthless than when Greenfeld was a child, and in the cause of holding teachers accountable for exercising high classroom standards.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,000-word essay
8 Paragraphs, 130 words per paragraph, approx. 1,000 words (1,040 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-5: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 6 & 7: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Should We Give Homework to Children?
One. What are Karl Taro Greenfeld’s concerns about his daughter Esmee’s homework?
One, memory over logic: Esmee chants the mantra, “Memorization, not rationalization,” suggesting it is better to saturation the brain the mindless memory rather than learn logic and the process of higher thinking.
So there is a concern for the type of homework.
Two, unreasonable volume of homework: But secondly, there is a concern for the sheer volume of homework. Esmee is doing three to four hours of homework to pass standardized tests based on core learning requirements that the school is legally bound to perform. In addition to the rigors of 3-4 hours of homework, Esmee, who is 13, is only getting 6.5 hours sleep a night.
Thirdly, Esmee’s pressure to do well in her homework is causing her to fake sleep, get up, and do more homework behind her parents’ backs.
Fourth, when Esmee tries to do his daughter’s homework, he finds it a daunting task. One night is 79 pages of a memoir, a Life Science assignment, and Algebra.
Fifth, the textbooks, such as the one in Life Science, are written in overwrought, crappy academic style that makes them unreadable for anyone, let alone a 13-year-old child.
Sixth, without doing any research, American schools are trying to play catch-up with other countries that are crushing us, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), but our solution may be worse than the problem.
Seven, When a parent such as Greenfeld, approaches a teacher with concern about his daughter’s lack of sleep and overall burnout, the teacher threatens to demote child to remedial class.
Eight, Greenfeld compares parent-teacher conferences to speed dating.
Nine, at times Greenfeld wonders if they have brainwashed his daughter into accepting overwork as natural work since she feels assured she is battle-tested for high school. In a broader problem, we seem to be a culture acclimated to a term coined by Derek Thompson, “Workism,” as he expounds in an essay.
Thompson writes:
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.
One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.
As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a viral essay on “Millennial burnout” for BuzzFeed News—building on ideas Malcolm Harris addressed in his book, Kids These Days—Millennials were honed in these decades into machines of self-optimization. They passed through a childhood of extracurricular overachievement and checked every box of the success sequence, only to have the economy blow up their dreams.
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
Among Millennial workers, it seems, overwork and “burnout” are outwardly celebrated (even if, one suspects, they’re inwardly mourned). In a recent New York Times essay, “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?,” the reporter Erin Griffith pays a visit to the co-working space WeWork, where the pillows urge do what you love, and the neon signs implore workers to hustle harder. These dicta resonate with young workers. As several studies show, Millennials are meaning junkies at work. “Like all employees,” one Gallup survey concluded, “millennials care about their income. But for this generation, a job is about more than a paycheck, it’s about a purpose.”
The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffith writes.
There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.
Is America Making Burnout the New Normal?
My students are burned out.
Here are 7 takeaways from my college students:
One. Most of my students are decent people trying to play by society’s rules so they can climb the economic ladder.
Two. Most of my students show up to class with a chronic sleep deficit.
Three. Most of my students don’t have big chunks of time to study and contemplate the joys of education for its own sake. Rather, my students grit their teeth and squeeze in college with the rest of their frantic schedule.
Four. Most of my students live in a state of constant financial insecurity.
Five. Most of my students are playing academic catch-up to make up for wasted time in high school.
Six. The cumulative effect of the above pressure points makes most of my students feel constantly stressed and exhausted, a condition they face with a mix of stoicism and depression.
Seven. The state of affairs described above has gotten progressively worse since I started teaching college in the 1980s.
In Contrast:
My wife’s school district where she teaches sixth grade give limits based on grade: 10 minutes per grade level.
For example, a third-grader gets 30 minutes, a sixth grader gets 60 minutes, and so on.
Also, anything more than 2 hours is considered counterproductive, according to major Stanford Study. In addition, Psychology Today draws from several studies to recommend only one hour of homework a night.
Counterarguments from Andrea Townsend’s “A Teacher’s Defense of Homework”:
Townsend writes that she is obliged to prepare her students for college. She writes:
I teach biology at the Charles School, a five-year early-college high school in Columbus, Ohio. I believe that my job is to prepare my students for college. In order to do that, I teach a wide variety of topics including cells, genetics, evolution, and ecology, using the National Science Standards. I teach each topic in depth so that the students understand and appreciate the information. I teach them about the scientific method, lab procedures, and scientific writing, all skills they will need in college. It’s a lot to fit into one short year, and my class requires a lot of effort from my students.
Townsend wish she could have students do more in-class work to reduce homework load, but the students aren’t efficient with their time. As she writes:
Unfortunately, many kids choose to socialize when I give them time to work on their own. The students always say, “I’ll just do this for homework” and neglect to get much, if any, of the assignment done in class. Then, they come home with a pile of homework, which many parents assume the teachers assigned at the end of class.
Townsend goes on to say that homework may be difficult, but it trains kids for adulthood:
A few times a year, I require students to write a scientific paper. We spend a significant amount of time on these assignments at school, but effort outside of class is required as well. And I think that’s great. Schoolwork prepares students for work-related tasks, financial planning, and any project that ends with the feeling of a job well done. Long-term planning, projects, and deadlines are a key part of adulthood.
Townsend also argues that homework is necessary to compete on the world stage:
Nevertheless, some parents think their kids are getting too much work. One argument, which Greenfeld uses, is to compare American students with those in other countries. In his article, Greenfeld cites the fact that students in many overseas countries are scoring higher than American children, while being assigned less homework. He uses Japan as an example. In 2011, Japan was ranked fourth in science scores in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. But according to a study cited in Greenfeld’s article, Japanese students are actually assigned less homework by their teachers. Why, then, do they achieve more? The answer comes when you look at the differences in our cultures and our views on education. Japanese teachers may not be assigning much homework, but it turns out that Japanese kids are doing plenty of homework anyway.
I spoke with Chris Spackman, who is the English as a Second Language coordinator at my school. Chris taught for 13 years in Japan, and served on the Board of Education in the city of Kanazawa. I asked him why Japanese kids are scoring so high on achievement tests despite having relatively little homework. “Because Japanese kids go to juku,” he answered. He went on to explain that juku is a common after-school program that prepares Japanese kids for achievement testing. In Japan, senior high school is not required or guaranteed. Instead, students compete for spots at prestigious high schools by scoring high on achievement tests. “Some schools are for art, or college prep,” says Chris. “You have to study hard in junior high to get into the high school that you want.” In high school, Japanese kids continue to go to juku so that they can get into the college they want as well. So, Japanese kids do academic work outside of school, just not necessarily work assigned by their classroom teacher.
Townsend finishes her essay by arguing that a compromise should be made and for parents to realize that teachers are fighting for their kids’ best interests:
There is room for compromise on the homework debate. In their book Reforming Homework, Richard Walker and Mike Horsley state that while homework isn’t very beneficial for younger kids, it’s still beneficial for older students. I agree. I’ve learned, while preparing my students to start college early, that study skills become much more important than they were in primary school. It’s also important for teachers to assign work that’s high in quality, instead of quantity. The vast majority of teachers I know are careful to only assign work that’s important for student success. Remember, teachers have to grade all of these assignments – we wouldn’t want to spend extra time grading papers that have no value.
In the comments on Greenfeld’s article, some readers assume that teachers don’t have our students’ best interests at heart. But usually, teachers who aren’t incredibly devoted to their students don’t last in the profession. The teachers who do stay are committed to giving the best education to their students. We wouldn’t be assigning that homework, giving that test, or reading that book if we didn’t truly believe it was worthwhile. All we ask is that you trust us, just a little.
Signal Phrases
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation.
After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument.
Examples of a signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Signal Phrases Used for In-Text Citations
About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.
We use signal phrases to let reader know we are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing.
Here is an exhaustive list of signal phrases.
Adapted from A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines 7th ed. by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers
How can I use them?
Below are some guidelines and tips for using signal phrases.
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Signal phrases usually include the author’s name but can also include the author’s job title or background (“reporter for Washington Post,” “researcher,” “senator,” “scholar,” and so on) and/or the title of the source.
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Signal phrases usually come at the beginning of a sentence before the source material, but they can also occur in the middle of a source or at the end.
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To avoid monotony and repetition, try to vary both the language and placement of your signal phrases.
According to Maxwell and Hanson,…
As the 2017 IRS report indicates, …
Smith and Johnson state that …
Some scholars have shown…
Legal scholar Terrence Roberts offered a persuasive argument: “….”
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Choose a verb that is appropriate to the way you are using your source. Below is a list of verbs that can be used in signal phrases:
acknowledges adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes
4 Steps of MLA In-Text Citations
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase.
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
Example Set 3 Based on Categories PDF
Signal Phrases Examples
“Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition” by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic)
In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.
“Welfare for Those Unwilling to Work? It’s Not as Crazy as You Think” by Christine Emba (Washington Post)
As journalist Annie Lowrey, whose book “Give People Money” surveyed basic income programs around the world, points out, the United States is distinguished both by its exaltation of self-sufficiency and its unique racial divide. As it turns out, racism makes it hard to improve the safety net: Research shows that whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit, even if they themselves are receiving social support. In fact, this was a flaw in the original New Deal: Agricultural and domestic laborers, most of whom were black, were purposefully excluded from many of the New Deal’s most important provisions.
“70,000 Years of Human History in 400 Pages” by Michael Saler (The Nation)
Through the ubiquity of such tools, scholars and laypeople alike are slowly being acclimatized to thinking in the long term, an outlook encouraged by Jo Guldi and David Armitage in The History Manifesto (2014). They argue that an emphasis on what the historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée back in 1958 is now the approach best suited to a world awash in data of extended times and climes. Critics of The History Manifesto reasonably point out that while Big and Deep may be appealing, even seductive, size matters: Extra-large will not fit all, and specific historical questions will always determine the scope and method of investigation. Yet the existence of the debate itself (quite lively on Twitter, of all places) is testimony to the reincarnation of Braudel’s project.
“Can You Believe YouTube Caused the Rise in Flat-Earthers?” by Madison Malone Kircher
When YouTube said earlier this year that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways,” people praised the decision. A certain ex-engineer called it a “historic victory” on Twitter and applauded the company for making such a move, possibly at a great expense to its business model. Which … ha. Among the types of videos YouTube said it would cut back on recommending was flat-Earth content. As in, videos peddling the idea that the Earth is not, as science has repeatedly proven, round. And while I’m all for quashing the spread of truly wrongheaded and potentially dangerous ideas, in the case of flat-Earth indoctrination, the damage has long since been done.
Researchers from Texas Tech University believe they’ve isolated YouTube videos as ground zero for the spread of flat-earth theories, The Guardianreports. Speaking with attendees at the biggest annual gathering of flat-Earthers both in 2017 and 2018, the research team found that people who fell into the world of the flat Earth were often those who were already spending time on YouTube watching other conspiracy videos (about 9/11, for example). This feedback loop — where watching conspiracy videos leads to being shown more conspiracy videos, which in turn motivates creators to make more conspiracy content — was also cited by the above-mentioned ex-YouTube engineer. It’s that circle that has enabled flat-Earth content to thrive. Researchers said one of the most popular videos is a nearly two-hour-long piece that details myriad reasons why, if you’re smart enough to think beyond what has been crammed into your brain by society for your whole life, the Earth is so obviously flat.
Study Questions for Ibram X. Kendi’s essay “There Is No Middle Ground on Reparations.”
One. How does Kendi address his opponents’ charge that slavery reparations are a politically radical and extreme idea?
Kendi shows that Abraham Lincolon, hardly a radical, proposed compensating freed slaves with reparations. Kendi writes:
On December 1, 1862—a month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation—President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Congress. He was not yet the Great Emancipator. Instead, he proposed to become the Great Compensator.
Lincoln proposed a Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: the most expansive and expensive slavery-reparations plan ever put forth by a U.S. president. “Every State wherein slavery now exists shall abolish the same therein at any time or times before” January 1, 1900, and slaveholders “shall receive compensation from the United States” for emancipating the enslaved.
Lincoln stressed to his fellow citizens that “we cannot escape history.” Pursuing gradual emancipation, and compensating the enslavers for their lost labor and wealth—and not the enslaved for their lost labor and wealth—would repair a broken America once and for all. “Other means may succeed,” he said in closing; “this could not fail.”
Indeed, Lincoln’s proposal did not fail to escape history. His politically expedient plan made and portended history, projecting a middle ground for Americans to stand between permanent slavery and inequality, and immediate emancipation and equality.
Two. What compelling reason does Kendi present to defend his claim that we are morally compelled to provide reparations?
The wealth gap is immorally huge. We read in The Washington Post and elsewhere that white wealth is 10:1 over black wealth in America.
Netflix Explained has episode explaining the racial wealth gap.
Kendi argues that economic disparity is an extension of slavery. Kendi writes:
Today, many Americans who oppose reparations, including a slight majority of Democrats, stand on this middle ground. These Americans self-identify as “not racist,” but do nothing in the face of the racial wealth gap that grows as white people are compensated by past and present racist policies. Or they support small-scale solutions that barely keep up with this growth. Or they support class-based solutions that are bound to partially fail in solving this class- and race-based problem. Or they oppose reparations because they’ve consumed the racist idea that black people will waste the “handouts,” that the reparations bill will be too expensive, or that black America is not too big to fail.
Kendi’s claim is reinforced in The Washington Post Sheryll Cashin essay “Reparations for Slavery Aren’t Enough” in which the author claims that economic disparity continues through racist policies that happened after abolition of slavery.
Three. What moral deficits are evidenced in being against reparations?
According to Kendi, rather than address the “urgency” of racist-driven poverty, those who reject reparations are more interested in “political expediency” and placating white racists who feel wounded and threatened in a diverse America. Kendi writes:
Americans who prefer gradual approaches that do not radically disrupt inequality and who label their approaches “plain, peaceful, generous, just,” to use Lincoln’s words, carelessly ignore or understate the complex, violent, stingy, and unjust damage wrought by inequality. These Americans care more about responding to political expediency than about the emergency of inequality, care more about repairing alienated white Americans than about repairing pillaged black coffers, and claim to be horrified by slavery and “not racist” but end up, knowingly or unknowingly, compensating the white beneficiaries of slavery and racism.
These Americans claim they oppose racism and reparations. They support the drive for economic equality between the races at the same time they are pumping the brakes on the only foreseeable policy that can dramatically close the growing racial wealth gap. Only an expansive and expensive compensation policy for the descendants of the enslaved and relegated of the scale Lincoln proposed for the enslavers and subsidized could prevent the racial wealth gap from compounding and being passed onto another generation.
Four. Is the racial wealth gap “repairing” on its own?
In short, no. To the contrary, the racial wealth gap is worsening. Kendi writes:
For every $100 of wealth that white families hold, black families hold just $5. One in four black households has zero or negative wealth, in contrast to one in 10 white households. White households make up 96 percent of the top 1 percent, while black households constitute 2 percent of that highest wealth bracket.
The racial wealth gap will not repair itself. And it is growing.
From 1983 to 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent as the wealth of the median white household increased 14 percent. By 2020, black people are projected to lose an additional 18 percent of wealth, and white households will own 86 times as much wealth as their black counterparts. By 2053, the median black household is projected to flatline at $0. Generally speaking, black people are facing economic death.
Five. What “alternative history” impedes exacting justice in the form of reparations to ancestors of slaves?
This fake history paints white racists as the victims who need compensation. Kendi writes:
State-sanctioned racist policies, which have opened, sustained, and broadened the racial wealth gap, have often been ironically framed as reparative for white people. Wealthy-white victimhood has been the creed of racist history since long before Donald Trump vowed to repair America’s greatness from the tyranny of the first black president. The Founding Fathers identified only themselves as the victims of tyranny. Slaveholders cast themselves as under siege by abolitionists, runaways, and especially revolting captives. Confederates fought the so-called War of Northern Aggression. Whites described civil- and voting-rights bills and judgments as “made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to quote President Andrew Johnson’s reasoning for vetoing the first Civil Rights Act in 1866. Klansmen and lynchers said they were fighting against black debauchery. Whites complained they were subjected to affirmative action, welfare queens, the Central Park Five, reverse discrimination, race cards, and roving and ravishing migrants and immigrants.
Throughout this alternative history, white people were collectively accumulating, compounding, and passing down wealth from selling black bodies; exploiting no-wage or low-wage black labor; stealing black assets, from the days of whitecapping to the foreclosure era; seizing opportunities, such as the New Deal or GI Bill, that were denied to black people; utilizing family wealth to start businesses; owning government-subsidized homes in government-subsidized white suburbs or gentrified neighborhoods; and cashing in on Reagan-, Bush-, and Trump-era tax cuts for the already wealthy.
Racist policies have historically compensated people for their whiteness and extracted wealth from people because of their blackness. But Americans occupying the middle ground do not attack these policies like they attack reparations. They support (what they don’t call) reparations for white people at the same time they oppose reparations for black people.
Six. Is there any “middle ground” in the reparations debate?
No, according to Kendi. He writes:
Reparations is not my litmus test for presidential candidates. But it is a litmus test for whether a person is being a racist or anti-racist when it comes to one of the most damaging racial inequities of our time, of all American time—the racial wealth gap. To oppose reparations is to be racist. To support reparations is to be anti-racist. The middle ground is racist ground. It is occupied by people passively doing nothing in the face of racial inequity, or actively supporting policies that reproduce racial inequity. The anti-racist approach requires standing up for the policies, like reparations, that can create racial equity.
Take Lincoln’s compensation plan in 1862. He considered it a “compromise among friends.” Opposition to his planned Emancipation Proclamation had been mounting like casualties from the Civil War. In the November 1862 midterm elections, Democrats gained 34 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives shouting at Republicans like Lincoln: We are warring for reunion with our Southern brethren, not for emancipation. Lincoln shuddered and related. In the summer of 1862, he had publicly declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”
Lincoln’s reparations plan went nowhere. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation as scheduled, on January 1, 1863, as “a necessary war measure” to save the Union. But when slavery reemerged in another form after the Civil War, when former slaveholders received a different manner of compensation from Jim Crow, when a civil war had to be fought each time black people proclaimed they should be the ones receiving reparations, it renewed the questions Lincoln answered with his plans to compensate the slaveholders. These questions still divide Americans today. Who is being damaged? Who is being compensated and repaired?
The slaveholder still—or will it finally be the enslaved?
Review of Kend’s Major Arguments
One. To support reparations is to be anti-racist because in part these reparations are just compensation for America’s greatest sin: slavery.
Two. To be opposed to reparations or to be passive or neutral or to take some “middle ground” position is to be racist because such apathy perpetuates the racial income gap.
Three. The racial income gap is evidence of the evil legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Four. The racial wealth gap is not “repairing on its own” but worsening.
Five. Justification for impeding reparations is based on white supremacist “alternative history,” which paints whites as victims; in short, such whites create a moral inversion by gas lighting their opponents.
What are arguments against reparations?
In this Washington Post Megan McArdle essay, we see four objections:
One. Price is too costly.
Two. Identifying who’s eligible is too problematic.
Three. Reparations will cause too much division.
Four. Looking at Germany’s payment to Israel is a faulty comparison.
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize Kendi's argument
Paragraph 2: Develop a claim that agrees or disagrees with Kendi's argument.
Paragraphs 3-6: Supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of thesis
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes and cliches (long list of cliches):
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
Rick Wilson, author of "Bob Woodward, Bane of Presidents, Turns His Fire on Cheeto Jesus," opens his essay with cogent language:
Washington, D.C. may soon be littered with the political bodies of people who believed they could spin their way out of the impact of the new Bob Woodward book, Fear. I’ve been to the Washington rodeo enough times to know that Woodward’s methodical, grinding style of investigation doesn’t lend itself to escaping unscathed, especially for bad actors and loose cannons. Hell, as a young Department of Defense aide in 1990, I saw it up close when his book, The Commanders, led to the firing of USAF Chief of Staff Mike Dugan. He had tapes then, as he does now.
This week, it’s Donald Trump’s turn under Woodward’s political electron microscope, and the President’s hissy-fit reaction tells us how close Woodward’s work has struck. Trump knows his White House staff, up to and including his daughter, thinks he’s off the rails, a danger to himself and the country, and unable to execute the duties of a Waffle House manager much less the President of the United States.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
Stanley was a big proponent of "follow your dreams." After he graduated from high school in 1977 and took some acting classes at a local community college, he dropped out to move to Los Angeles where he spent the 1980s working as a waiter and trying to make a break into Hollywood. He spent his money on coaches, mentors, acting gurus, body language masters, voice instructors, New Age positive thinking experts, all in an attempt to step up his game. He landed a few small parts here and there, just enough work to make him feel he was on the verge of making it. His optimism grew in the 1990s when he met some film directors who gave him some small roles and hinted at getting him larger roles when the opportunity came. Feeding on these dreams while living in a squalid apartment in the 1990s, Stanley continued to live a life of abject obscurity and futility with the hope that he just had to follow his dream and be persistent and that these two qualities would guarantee his success. He remained inside this delusional bubble for nearly two more decades while he lived in a roach-infested apartment in downtown L.A. where he supplemented his income by delivering plasma and working as a masseuse, a job he had to give up when his hands become afflicted with arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome. At the age of 60, around 2018, Stanley got strep throat and couldn't afford antibiotics since none of his part-time gigs offered health insurance. Curled into the fetal position on his apartment's bare mattress with roaches crawling over him, he wept as he felt betrayed by the fact that he had done what the American Dream told him to do: He sacrificed everything to follow his passion and remained tenacious over four decades to bring his dreams to fruition, but he knew in that moment that he was a pathetic, miserable failure, and that his dreams had soured and curdled into rotten milk.
This curdling of our dreams and the false promise of following those dreams is explored in Cal Newport's important book So Good They Can't Ignore You and his accompanying YouTube video "'Follow Your Passion' Is Bad Advice" in which Newport makes a persuasive case for replacing the Passion Hypothesis with the craftsman mindset. His claim rests on four compelling observations. Passion without spending time mastering a craft is worthless. Passion is not some low-hanging fruit that we pick from a tree, but an asset we develop over 10,000 hours of sustained hard work and tedium. Only 2% of the human race work at a "dream job." Most of us must find happiness because we are a "dream employer" who is valued based on the mastery of our craft. And finally, courage to pursue your dream without an honest of assessment of your capital is dangerous and self-destructive.
Second Example:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misconception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Healthcare
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Civil War in America
In the South, it is still common to hear white people speak of the Civil War by denying its connection to the evils of slavery and treason. Rather, it is commonly spouted by white people in the south that the Civil War was the result of "Northern aggression" and "state rights," but these explanations are odious poppycock and are part of America's shameful history of fake news, which afflicts our country like an ugly, festering cancer sore to this very day.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
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