Ten things my students chose to write about for their position papers:
1. Puppy mills. This student went ahead with this despite my recommendations that she choose another topic. The standard for a topic was that reasonable people could disagree about the issue, and she admitted that reasonable people could not defend the heinous practices of puppy mills and yet, there it was, a paper arguing against the heinous practices of puppy mills. Sigh.
2. Electric Vehicles. This one wasn’t so bad, though it was boring to read.
3. Abortion. Natch. This paper was horrendous; it was all I could do to figure out what the student was trying to say.
4. Electroshock therapy. While this student started off strong, the paper fell apart about a quarter of the way in; he focused more on the history of the practice than on arguing that the way it’s currently being applied should be reconsidered.
5. Animal testing. This paper was completely incomprehensible. Observe, a cut-and-pasted paragraph from the essay:
Martasian (student’s beliefs about animal research) found that students have more negative attitudes towards animals testing than undergraduates involved in animal research. The study also shows pervious work by examining feeling towards two nations. Some previous studies of this kind were characterized by a single nation. The same study that involves the two nations, those nations were among the British and Americans. Newkirk (wrote the book Free the animals: the story of the Animal Liberation Front) found animal welfare is more highly developed in North American than in Britain. Two groups were recruited from Britain and the United States.
Really; I have no idea what to do with that.
6. Gay rights. This one appeared in a couple of my classes. One student did okay with it; the other tried to argue that gay marriage should be banned because it does not provide a good environment for children. Needless to say, I eviscerated that paper, pointed the kid in another direction (reasonable people can argue for the separation of civil and religious marriage, so I encouraged him to take that angle) and sent the paper back for revision.
7. Obamacare. I told the students that they were welcomed to write about what they thought was an important issue and that, even if I staunchly disagreed with their position, they’d get the grade if they did good work with it. This kid got all of his information from well known right-wing propaganda machines and forwarded claims that I could debunk on Google. I sent the paper back and told him to try again.
8. Whaling. This was another paper that started out with a good premise but fell apart before we got to page two.
9. NASA funding. I haven’t read this paper yet, but the kid who wrote it wrote a surprisingly effective (and entertaining) analysis about calcium, so I have high hopes.
10. Funding for the arts in schools. This paper is another I haven’t read yet and, to be honest, I’m kind of dreading it; the student who’s writing it hasn’t produced anything of any kind of quality all semester (AND he admitted that he started the paper the night before it was due, despite my trying to get them to run through a drafting and revision process for weeks). Oy.