Here is, verbatim, and in its entirety, a conversation I had three years ago. I present it here, without context and for no clear reason.
"So Ray."
(long pause)
"Uh... yeah?"
"Julie wants to know if we ever talk to each other by yelling through the bathroom wall."
(another long pause)
'Well, this would be the first time."
(my turn to pause)
"Okay, talk to you later."
"Yeah."
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
In-Class Essays; or rather, an Essay on Classes
As a person who is not currently a student (in any formal sense), but has spent practically his whole life up to this point as a student, I have spent a great deal of time thinking of the nature of "the class" as an entity. Not the people who make up the class, nor the classroom the class is held in. Rather, The Class. English 1304, Communications 1301, etc. In this time spent thinking, I have come to two conclusions.
1) Classes are stupid.
2) The classes that I had the easiest time focusing on, regardless of content, were the classes that were structured like five-paragraph essays.
Everybody knows the basic essay format: you write your first paragraph which includes a thesis, and spend the rest of that paragraph making broad brush strokes illustrating why your thesis needed to be said (these two things do not need to happen in that order, but it is understood that they must both happen in the first paragraph). You then spend three paragraphs illustrating why your thesis is a good and proper thesis, and is in fact far superior to other theses which might disagree with it. Finally, you write a concluding paragraph that sums up your previous four paragraphs. This paragraph may or may not include a lazily-paraphrased restatement of your original thesis, depending on how late at night you finished your essay and how interested you are in your subject matter at this point in the process.
Classes that follow the same structure have a way of making a class bearable for me, probably because it follows the recovering procrastinator's rule of "breaking the big thing into smaller things so it won't seem so big." In my mind, this happens thusly:
Syllabus Day - The Opening Paragraph
This seems self-explanatory and like something one could easily jump past, but in my experience as a student who has been both highly successful and embarrassingly unsuccessful, a class's opening paragraph is vital to how I will perform in a class. The opening day needs to introduce me to the ideas we will cover in class in a way that makes me want to care. The phrasing here is important: nobody can make anybody care about anything in a significant way in a single class period, but they can make somebody want to care about it. Nobody cares about anything until they've sacrificed something for it, and they won't sacrifice anything unless it's something they believe they could care about.
So a thesis statement for an American Literature class's opening paragraph might say something like, "This semester, you're going to learn about the evolution of philosophy in America throughout its history by examining its literature." The professor would then tell us which stories and authors in particular illustrated which philosophies without needing to elaborate on who those authors were or what those philosophies entailed; that is what the rest of the semester is for. Every class in which a professor has done something like this has resulted in me actually doing my homework for at least the first third of the class.
The problems that arose for me were when a professor did not really present an opening paragraph. Rather, they would pass out a syllabus, explain the attendance requirements, and tell us what books we needed and then send us away telling us that we needed to have such and such homework done by the next class meeting. Often, they would simply read verbatim from the syllabus. I believe that these professors really thought they were giving us an opening paragraph. But the essay had no thesis, and it had no hook. In retrospect, if I ever did that first assignment, it always felt like I was working ahead rather than simply keeping up. And now I think I understand why: I had no idea where the assignment was taking me, because I had no clearly defined thesis for the class.
Most of the Rest of the Class: Lectures & Exams - Supporting Paragraphs
The first assignment, given on syllabus day, is the opening sentence of the second paragraph. The first test is a comprehension check on how well you read that paragraph. And so on and so forth for the rest of the semester, until...
The Final: The Concluding Paragraph
If a professor has written their essay well, everything that was briefly touched upon during the first paragraph has now been covered in-depth over the rest of the semester. Now the student must take their last comprehension check: the final. It's never as difficult as the previous tests, but it does sort of lazily graze over the points that were made in those paragraphs. The student should now be able to regurgitate the general ideas behind the first paragraph that the professor gave on the opening day, but now they should actually understand what it all means and why it needed to be said. They know why Benjamin Franklin was a perfect example of Enlightenment thinking and they probably have some sort of opinion on Langston Hughes. Maybe, at the end of it all, they don't actually care about the subject, but the professor has successfully made them attempt to care. In my case, if I was doing well in the class, it was because I had finally started caring sometime after the first test.
So there you have it: five paragraphs. I have no idea if any other students feel this way about their classes; I only know that this is how my mind operated during the many years I spent in school. And it was consistent; I can think back on specific classes in which I did very, very well (Psychology, one of my four music histories, and Intro to Communications in particular) and this is definitely how they were structured. Of course, I did fine in several classes that weren't structured this way simply because I had to, and I did miserably in one class that was structured exactly this way because after attempting to care about the subject I found that I really, really, really did NOT care about it at all. So obviously it's not a hard and fast rule. And I think I like it more that way; if it were one of those things that were always true, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to think about.
It would be too much like math.
1) Classes are stupid.
2) The classes that I had the easiest time focusing on, regardless of content, were the classes that were structured like five-paragraph essays.
Everybody knows the basic essay format: you write your first paragraph which includes a thesis, and spend the rest of that paragraph making broad brush strokes illustrating why your thesis needed to be said (these two things do not need to happen in that order, but it is understood that they must both happen in the first paragraph). You then spend three paragraphs illustrating why your thesis is a good and proper thesis, and is in fact far superior to other theses which might disagree with it. Finally, you write a concluding paragraph that sums up your previous four paragraphs. This paragraph may or may not include a lazily-paraphrased restatement of your original thesis, depending on how late at night you finished your essay and how interested you are in your subject matter at this point in the process.
Classes that follow the same structure have a way of making a class bearable for me, probably because it follows the recovering procrastinator's rule of "breaking the big thing into smaller things so it won't seem so big." In my mind, this happens thusly:
Syllabus Day - The Opening Paragraph
This seems self-explanatory and like something one could easily jump past, but in my experience as a student who has been both highly successful and embarrassingly unsuccessful, a class's opening paragraph is vital to how I will perform in a class. The opening day needs to introduce me to the ideas we will cover in class in a way that makes me want to care. The phrasing here is important: nobody can make anybody care about anything in a significant way in a single class period, but they can make somebody want to care about it. Nobody cares about anything until they've sacrificed something for it, and they won't sacrifice anything unless it's something they believe they could care about.
So a thesis statement for an American Literature class's opening paragraph might say something like, "This semester, you're going to learn about the evolution of philosophy in America throughout its history by examining its literature." The professor would then tell us which stories and authors in particular illustrated which philosophies without needing to elaborate on who those authors were or what those philosophies entailed; that is what the rest of the semester is for. Every class in which a professor has done something like this has resulted in me actually doing my homework for at least the first third of the class.
The problems that arose for me were when a professor did not really present an opening paragraph. Rather, they would pass out a syllabus, explain the attendance requirements, and tell us what books we needed and then send us away telling us that we needed to have such and such homework done by the next class meeting. Often, they would simply read verbatim from the syllabus. I believe that these professors really thought they were giving us an opening paragraph. But the essay had no thesis, and it had no hook. In retrospect, if I ever did that first assignment, it always felt like I was working ahead rather than simply keeping up. And now I think I understand why: I had no idea where the assignment was taking me, because I had no clearly defined thesis for the class.
Most of the Rest of the Class: Lectures & Exams - Supporting Paragraphs
The first assignment, given on syllabus day, is the opening sentence of the second paragraph. The first test is a comprehension check on how well you read that paragraph. And so on and so forth for the rest of the semester, until...
The Final: The Concluding Paragraph
If a professor has written their essay well, everything that was briefly touched upon during the first paragraph has now been covered in-depth over the rest of the semester. Now the student must take their last comprehension check: the final. It's never as difficult as the previous tests, but it does sort of lazily graze over the points that were made in those paragraphs. The student should now be able to regurgitate the general ideas behind the first paragraph that the professor gave on the opening day, but now they should actually understand what it all means and why it needed to be said. They know why Benjamin Franklin was a perfect example of Enlightenment thinking and they probably have some sort of opinion on Langston Hughes. Maybe, at the end of it all, they don't actually care about the subject, but the professor has successfully made them attempt to care. In my case, if I was doing well in the class, it was because I had finally started caring sometime after the first test.
So there you have it: five paragraphs. I have no idea if any other students feel this way about their classes; I only know that this is how my mind operated during the many years I spent in school. And it was consistent; I can think back on specific classes in which I did very, very well (Psychology, one of my four music histories, and Intro to Communications in particular) and this is definitely how they were structured. Of course, I did fine in several classes that weren't structured this way simply because I had to, and I did miserably in one class that was structured exactly this way because after attempting to care about the subject I found that I really, really, really did NOT care about it at all. So obviously it's not a hard and fast rule. And I think I like it more that way; if it were one of those things that were always true, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to think about.
It would be too much like math.
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