Essay Writing Strategies for Teaching 1A and 1C in the Fall of 2023
English 1A
One. Is Dieting a Fool’s Errand?
Two. A defense of teaching Jim Crow and systemic racism against the charge that to do so is to be anti-American and brainwash people with a radical ideology often called Woke ideology or CRT.
Three. The dehumanization, dumbing-down, political polarization, and anti-democratic forces from living online.
Four. The Sunken Place and the story of the greatest American who resisted The Sunken Place: Frederick Douglass, Jordan Peele, and Black Panther, art, literacy, and self-agency.
English 1C
Essay 1: The Rise and Fall of the Liver King
How is the rise and fall of the Liver King an instructive lesson on moral depravity, Faustian Bargains, the absence of positive male role models, the grift of Bro Culture, and the dehumanization of the social media age? In your analysis of the Liver King’s consignment to the Shame Dungeon, consult the Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Naomi Fry's essay “‘Fake Famous’ and the Tedium of Influencer Culture,” and Shirley Li’s “The Horrors of Being Extremely Online.” With these sources, develop an argumentative thesis about the connection between our thirst for fame and attention and our inevitable depravity and dehumanization.
Related movies: Fake Famous, Not Okay, The Deep End.
Consider Scott Galloway’s critique on modern society and the plight of young men. He has YouTube videos about this subject. In a related subject, consider Tom Nichols' essay on Narcissistic Young Men.
Consider Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves.
What does the rise and fall of the Liver King say about the contradictions of Bro Culture and social media? How does the artifice of the Liver King speak to our hunger for authenticity and dramatic personal change? How does social media relax our critical thinking skills so that we are seduced by salient images of power, transformation, authenticity, and masculinity?
Your Short Liver King Essay:
Many of us have gleefully witnessed the fiery crash of the charlatan Liver King, a ripped bodybuilder claiming to be an all-natural practitioner of “ancestral” living when in reality his own liver was saturated with Performance-Enhancing-Drugs.
But beyond the schadenfreude we enjoy for his consignment to the Shame Dungeon, we can see his rise as a social media star teaches us important lessons about the search for meaning in the social media age. Millions of men are hungry for positive images of masculinity, a healthy lifestyle that treats the mind, body, and soul with respect, and a lifestyle that gives men a sense of purpose, belonging, and self-worth. The Liver King pressed all those buttons and relaxed people’s critical thinking skills so that they swallowed disbelief and embraced him as Natural Man. He manipulated social media’s algorithms by curating an extreme image of a muscle man dragging trees and boulders while nourishing himself with bloody organs.
Our outrage over the Liver King’s fall seems disingenuous. We knew all along we were embracing a fictional demigod to fuel our own Alpha Male fantasies. We should replace those adolescent longings by taking care of our bodies in a healthy way and freeing ourselves from social-media-fueled images of hypermasculinity.
Exercise and nutrition are vital to our self-worth and sense of purpose, but we don’t need grotesque bodybuilding caricatures to inspire us. As an alternative to the Liver King, I recommend you watch the Netflix documentary Stutz in which therapist Phil Stutz argues persuasively that taking care of our bodies is essential to summoning the Life Force. We can embrace self-care while at the same time repel mountebanks like the Liver King.
Essay 2: Complicating the Life Force
Essay 2: What is the relationship between the body and the Life Force?
Option A for Essay 2
Watch the Amazon Prime documentary Ronnie Coleman: The King. Considered to be the greatest bodybuilder of all time, Coleman is now on crutches, faces a lifetime of excruciating pain, must take opioid pain medication, may have to be consigned to a wheelchair, and by most accounts, the abuse he took to become a champion bodybuilder is the reason for his condition. The film celebrates Coleman’s life principle to persist in doing what he loves, but doing what he loves comes with a price: excruciating, life-altering injuries. Is doing what we love worth it? In this context, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the notion that in order to achieve exceptional success, we are justified to make sacrifices of our bodies, minds, and souls. Is Coleman’s current condition justified by his success and his heroic drive to do what he loves? Had he trained with less intensity, would he even be “Ronnie Coleman”? Is the training intensity that connected him to the Life Force the same intensity that crippled him? In other words, do we really choose our actions or do we do what we do because of psychological determinism? Address these questions and be sure to have a counterargument section. Opponents may point out that Coleman was addicted to his intensity training, that he had a meaning of life crisis, and that he tried to fill the void with bodybuilding greatness. Are there rebuttals to those charges?
Option B for Essay 2
Watch the Netflix documentary Stutz and read Xochitl Gonzalez’s essay “In the Age of Ozempic, What’s the Point of Working Out?” Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the struggle Jonah Hill and Xochitl Gonzalez have with their Life Force, their mental health, and their bodies.
Option C
Addressing Xochitl Gonzalez’s essay “In the Age of Ozempic, What’s the Point of Working Out?," Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence" and Sandra Aamodt's "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet," develop a thesis about the quest for self-worth and its connection to health and weight management.
Essay 3: Can Anecdotes and Exaggerations Create a False Narrative?
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that The Atlantic essay “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, is a failed argument about the supposed spread of snowflake college students who are ruining education and themselves. The failure of this essay, allegedly, rests on poor data, sensationalism, social media tropes, faulty causes, and other fallacies. Further, the dysfunction of young people can not be attributed to trigger warnings and coddling; rather, Jean Twenge’s essay “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” provides a more persuasive cause of young people’s problems. To help in your research, I recommend you listen to the If Books Could Kill podcast, March 9, 2023, titled, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Essay 4: Return to Gustavo Arellano
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