Acting Out Culture Essay Assignment Clusters
Essay 1: Social Media Pathologies (two essays from Chapter 6 and one essay from Chapter 2.
Chapter 6 has two essays, “The Quagmire of Social Media Friendships” and “The Empathy Deficit,” you can pair with Sherry Turkle’s “Flight from Conversation.” You can also include “The Flip Side of Internet Fame” by Jessica Bennett on page 90.
Essay 2: Choose from the following:
Support, refute, or complicate that we can reasonably infer from the context of David Brooks’ “People Like Us” that diversity is more often shunned in favor of tribalism.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that while Stephen Asma’s essay “Green Guilt” is chock-full of keen insights about guilt and societal cooperation, it fails to see that “green guilt” is largely a product of liberal middle-class identity. Consider the following question: Do the privileged middle class check their excesses with guilt or do they consume and waste with reckless abandonment as a result of their sense of entitlement?
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that in the context of Debra J. Dickerson’s “The Great White Way” that race is not biological but rather a social construction designed to support the privilege of an elite group over an underclass.
Support, refute, or complicate Nicholas Kristof’s assertion (from “Prudence or Cruelty?”) that the movement to cut food stamps is morally indefensible.
Essay 3: Choose from the following:
Support, refute, or complicate Alfie Kohn’s contention from his essay “From Degrading to De-Grading” that grading is a tool that seriously compromises education in several serious ways.
In the context of Kristina Rizga’s “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong,” support, refute, or complicate the assertion that standardized tests are a canard that reinforce class divisions, make profits for big corporations, and evidence educational buffoonery in the tests and their grading.
Addressing John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” Bell Hooks’ “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” and Jonathan Kozol’s “Preparing Minds for Markets,” support, refute, or complicate the assertion that American education is not about a healthy democracy that encourages upward social mobility but a machine that reinforces rigid class division and requires class betrayal in order to achieve class ascent.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethical system is, in the context of Harriet McBryde Johnson’s “Unspeakable Conversations,” is a morally abhorrent, indefensible system.
In the context of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Our Baby, Her Womb,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that renting a woman’s womb is a moral abomination.
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