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Facultad de Humanidades

Depto. de Lenguas Modernas


Profesorado de Inglés

COMUNICACIÓN

AVANZADA II

Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado


UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

WRITING
➢ Think about writing, reflect on YOUR writing process. Go back to that day you first wrote a text in
English… remember? Go back in time to primary school and high school. Come back, go through
your university experience? Do you write as a hobby? Have you ever kept a journal/ diary?
➢ Jot down all words/ideas/concepts that come to mind as you take this trip down memory lane….

➢ Now think about yourself as a teacher of English. Think about the nature of the writing process in
relation to writing in Spanish. Think about EFL writing at different levels.

The Four/Five- Paragraph Essay

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Only got 5 minutes?

Many students underestimate the value of good writing. It is easy to get so involved in your
project results and your ideas that you forget about the words that you use to describe them. However,
language and thought are closely tied together. No matter how good the content of your essay is, it
won’t make much sense unless you know how to structure an argument, express yourself clearly and
reference your sources properly.
Getting these things right can make a dramatic difference to your marks. Many markers reserve
around 20 per cent of the available marks for presentation and language skills, although exactly what
they are looking for will vary from subject to subject. These skills matter, not just because they make
your assessments easier to read and understand, but also because clarity of thought and attention to
detail are important intellectual qualities. People who write well are more likely to be thorough and
organized thinkers – and vice versa. So, any time that you spend on your writing skills is also likely to
have an impact on the overall level of your work.
Many of the things that you can do to improve your essay technique are straightforward, practical and
easy when you know how. Often the simplest way to raise the standard of your work is to leave
enough time to check your script carefully, correcting errors and making sure that everything makes
sense. You will also help yourself out if you can devote some time to tracking down really useful
sources either online or in the library.
Good reading material will increase your depth of knowledge about your subject. Looking closely at
this material will also let you see what is expected in your discipline in terms of expression and
presentation.

Writing for your reader


All writing, whether it is a magazine article, a sonnet, or a technical manual on how to
build a racing car, should be angled towards a particular audience. Newspaper companies spend
thousands of pounds on marketing consultants who research the income bracket, shopping
habits, and leisure pursuits of their readers, in the competitive battle to keep circulation numbers
high. Similarly, when writers approach publishers with an idea for a new publication, one of the
first questions they have to answer is: ‘Who will read this book? ’ There is no point producing
material that does not appeal to its target audience. It simply will not sell.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Ask yourself the same question: ‘Who will read my essay? ’ Much of the time your work will be
marked by your own tutor, but it is also likely to be double-marked by other members of staff
who teach on the course. Sometimes marking is reviewed or ‘moderated’ by other members of
staff in the department. This involves checking a random sample of essays. All marking within a
higher education institution is subject to review by external examiners from other institutions,
who have the job of making sure that your tutors are marking fairly and consistently. So, you
cannot assume that your tutor will be the only person who will read your work. You need to
construct a general profile of the kind of reader who might make a judgement on your writing,
and keep this ideal reader in mind as you write.

SIGNPOSTING

This follows on from the previous point. Make it clear to your reader that you see how the
different sections of your essay fit neatly together. Demonstrate that you are building an
argument by providing links between paragraphs and between different sections of the essay.
Your introduction can help with this, but there should also be plenty of signposting within the
body of the essay. You can refer forward to alert the reader to important material coming up. The
end or the beginning of a paragraph is a good place for this. You can also refer the reader back to
something that you mentioned previously which they should be bearing in mind. There is more
about signposting and structuring paragraphs in the following chapter.

REASONING

Try to keep a clear head and look at your topic in a logical, intelligent way. There is no
quick way to learn this skill. Many colleges and universities have philosophy departments which
offer courses in formal logic or critical thinking. This kind of course can certainly boost your
powers of reasoning. However, you do not need to be a trained philosopher to write a well-
reasoned essay. Move through your essay with a sense of purpose, and provide enough evidence
and sensible argument to persuade your reader that your conclusion is valid. Avoid making
jumps and quirky leaps between ideas, and make sure that one thing follows on from another.
Test out your ideas as you go along by asking yourself difficult questions and looking for fl aws in
your own argument. Think critically about what you are saying.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Think critical
‘Critical thinking’ has become a key term in education recently, but most of the techniques of
critical thinking have been around for a long time. Critical thinking is often used specifically as a name for
the process of identifying strategies used to create and recognize logical arguments. This is a useful way of
reading, as it helps you to see how a writer constructs a persuasive text – and where there may be flaws in
their argument. It can also be a useful way of evaluating the effectiveness of your own writing. If you have
studied logic at any point, many of the ideas in critical thinking will be familiar.
The key to critical thinking is understanding how an argument works. This is not quite the same thing as
mapping out a plan to follow for your essay. An argument is an attempt to persuade. An essay should
present a balanced argument. However, this overarching argument may contain two or more subsidiary
arguments which interweave or contradict one another. So, it can be useful to think about the basic
building blocks of one single argument. Most arguments contain the following elements: a premise,
propositions, reasoning and a conclusion. See how these elements might fit into the following question.

Clarity1
After you submit it, your essay will be one in a large stack given to a reader or readers. In
the case of college admissions, readers will have so many essays to read that they will spend only a
few minutes on each. Exit and SAT essays will receive somewhat more time and attention, but it
still holds that one reader will be responsible for a large number of essays. That is why it is
imperative that you not only impress your reader(s) with your unique take on a topic, but also say
exactly what you mean as clearly and, in many cases, as concisely as you can. Your essay goal is to
convey information, including the fact that you can write well. That goal won’t be achieved if your
readers don’t understand your first few sentences or paragraphs, and stop reading, or if they finish
reading but fail to grasp your message. Learning how to be a clear and accurate writer will help
make your essay readable, and will guarantee that those who read it understand exactly what you
mean to say. The five guidelines in this chapter show you how to clarify your writing.

1
Starkey, Lauren. How to write Great Essays. New York: Learning Express, 2014.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

ELIMINATE AMBIGUITY
Ambiguous means having two or more possible meanings. Ambiguous language can either be
words and phrases that have more than one meaning, or word order that conveys a meaning
different from the one intended by the writer.
Example: The quarterback liked to tackle his problems.
This sentence can be read two ways: the quarterback likes to deal with his problems, or his
problems are his opponents on the field whom he grabs and knocks down. This kind of confusion
can happen whenever a word has more than one possible meaning. The quarterback liked to
address his problems is a better sentence, and is unlikely to be misunderstood.

Example: My advisor proofread my essay with the red sports car.


Here, the word order of the sentence, not an individual word, causes the confusion. Did the advisor
proofread the essay with his car? Because the phrase with the red sports car is in the wrong place,
the meaning of the sentence is unclear. Try instead: My advisor with the red sports car proofread
my essay.

CORRECTING AMBIGUOUS LANGUAGE


Ambiguous: When doing the laundry, the phone rang.
Clear: The phone rang when I was doing the laundry.
Ambiguous: She almost waited an hour for her friend.
Clear: She waited almost an hour for her friend.
Ambiguous: I told her I’d give her a ring tomorrow.
Clear: I told her I’d call her tomorrow.
Ambiguous: A speeding motorist hit a student who was jogging through the park in
her blue sedan.
Clear: A speeding motorist in a blue sedan hit a student who was jogging through the park.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

MODIFIERS ADD PRECISION


Clarity in essay writing also involves the thoughtful use of modifiers, which make your point clear
and add meaning and originality to your piece. One way to accomplish this is to use powerful and
specific adjectives and adverbs. Consider the difference between these sets of sentences:

Sentence A: My grandmother put on her sweater.


Sentence B: My grandmother put on her cashmere sweater.
Sentence A: The football team practiced in the rain.
Sentence B: The football team practiced in the torrential downpour.
In both cases, sentence B allows you to hear the “voice” and impressions of the writer, giving a
more accurate and interesting picture of the action. The first sentences are dull, and don’t give the
reader much information.
The right modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) can also get your message across in fewer, more
accurate words. This is critical in an essay with a specified length. You don’t want to sacrifice
unique details, but sometimes one word will do the job better than a few. For example, Chihuahua
can take the place of little dog; exhausted can take the place of really tired; and late can take the
place of somewhat behind schedule.

MODIFIERS QUALIFY AND QUANTIFY


Qualify means to modify or restrict. In this sentence, words that qualify are in italics: I am applying
for a civil engineering internship with the New York State Department of Transportation.
Quantify means to express in numbers or measurement elements such as when, how much, how
many, how often, and what scope. In this sentence, words that quantify are in italics: For over
three years, I have been a volunteer, delivering meals four times a week to over twenty people.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

POWERFUL, PRECISE ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS

unconditionally accepted grueling game


forbidding alley mournful cry
unflagging dedication threadbare clothing
aimlessly walking invaluable lesson

Another technique for precise writing is pinpointing. Why leave your reader guessing,when
you can tell him or her exactly what you mean? When you pinpoint, you replace vague words and
phrases with specific ones. Consider the following sentence:
The character of Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol is miserable.
What does the writer mean by “miserable”? This is a vague word that conveys little meaning. A
better sentence would use precise examples from the story to show what the writer means. For
instance:
The character of Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol is so miserly that he not only refuses
comfortable surroundings for himself, but he also forces his employees to work long hours in a
poorly heated room all winter.

VAGUE AND SPECIFIC SENTENCES


Here are some sentences that lack accuracy, followed by better versions that use pinpointing:
Vague: Janus needs to file his application soon.
Specific: Janus needs to file his application by January 4.
Vague: Space exploration has helped human beings in many ways.
Specific: The many benefits of space travel include the invention of fire detectors, calculators,
Kevlar, and CATscan and MRI technologies.
Vague: Investing money in the stock market can be risky.
Specific: Over the last year, a $1,000 investment in a large-cap stock fund became worth $820. That
same investment placed in a savings account totaled $1,065.
Vague: The new teacher is good.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Specific: The new teacher won “Teacher of the Year” awards six times at her previous school and
has received federal grants for three student-led projects.
BE CONCISE
You won’t score points with your readers by using five sentences that express an idea that
could have been stated in one. Wordiness is boring, and it takes up valuable time and space. You
have just 25 minutes to write the SAT essay, and most application essays are limited to 500 words,
or two pages. That means you don’t have the time or space to waste words. There are two equally
important approaches to more concise writing: eliminating unnecessary words and phrases, and
using the active (as opposed to passive) voice whenever possible. (For more
information on the topic of active versus passive voice, including other reasons why you should
avoid it, read through Chapter 4.)
Many of the words and phrases listed below are both well-known and, unfortunately, well-used.
They don’t convey meaning, and are therefore unnecessary. The following are three of the worst
offenders, with usage examples.

1. Because of the fact that. In most cases, just because will do.

Because of the fact that he was late, he missed his flight.


Because he was late, he missed his flight.

2. That and which phrases. Eliminate them by turning the idea in the that or which phrase into an
adjective.

These were directions that were well-written.


These directions were well-written.

3. That by itself is a word that often clutters sentences unnecessarily, as in the following examples:

The newscaster said that there was a good chance that election turnout would
be low and that it could result in a defeat for our candidate.
The newscaster said there was a good chance election turnout would be low
and it could result in a defeat for our candidate.

WORD CHOICES FOR CONCISE WRITING

Wordy Replace with


a lot of many or much
all of a sudden suddenly
along the lines of like

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

are able to can


as a matter of fact in fact or Delete
as a person Delete
as a whole Delete
as the case may be Delete
at the present time currently or now
both of these both
by and large Delete
by definition Delete
due to the fact that because
for all intents and purposes Delete
has a tendency to often or Delete
has the ability to can
in order to to
in the event that if
in the near future soon
is able to can
it is clear that Delete
last but not least finally
on a daily basis daily
on account of the fact that because
particular Delete
somewhere in the neighborhood of about
take action act
the fact that that or Delete
the majority of most
the reason why the reason or why
through the use of through
with regard to about or regarding
with the exception of except for

WORDY AND CONCISE SENTENCES


Wordy: The students were given detention on account of the fact that they didn’t show up for
class.
Concise: The students were given detention because they didn’t show up for class.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Wordy: Everyone who has the ability to donate time to a charity should do so.
Concise: Everyone who can donate time to a charity should.

Wordy: In a situation in which a replacement for the guidance counselor who is retiring is found, it
is important that our student committee be notified.
Concise: When a replacement for the retiring guidance counselor is found, our student committee
must be notified.

AVOID UNNECESSARY REPETITION


There are a number of reasons why you should eliminate the repetition of ideas and information in
your essay. The first is that unnecessary repetition is a sign of sloppy writing. It’s easy to say the
same thing a number of times, varying it slightly each time. It’s harder to say something well once,
and continue writing about your next idea or example. Second,wordiness wastes valuable time and
space. If you are writing while the clock is ticking, or are limited to a number of words or pages,
say it right the first time and move on.
Example:
Wordy: They met at 4 P.M. in the afternoon.
Concise: They met at 4 P.M.
P.M. means in the afternoon, so there’s no reason to say in the afternoon. It’s a waste of words and
the reader’s time.
Even in short phrases there can be repetition. The list that follows contains dozens of such phrases
that can clutter your essay. Most of them contain a specific word and its more general category. But
why state both? The word “memories” can only refer to the past, so you don’t need to say “past
memories.”We know that blue is a color, so describing something as “blue in color” is repetitive
and therefore unnecessary. In most cases, you can correct the redundant phrase by dropping the
category and retaining the specific word. Some of the phrases use a modifier that is unneeded,

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

because the specific is implied in the general. For instance, the word “consensus” means general
agreement. Therefore, modifying it with the word “general” is repetitive. Similarly, “mathematics”
is a field of study, so it does not need to be modified with the word “field.”You can tighten up your
writing, saying it well one time, by eliminating wordiness.
EXAMPLES PRONOUN USAGE
Incorrect: Both Fellini and Bergman edited his movie.
Correct: Both Fellini and Berman edited Bergman’s movie.
Incorrect: Leave all ingredients out of the recipes that do not belong in a healthy diet.
Correct: Leave all ingredients that do not belong in a healthy diet out of the recipes.
Incorrect: They banned parking in their lot so the snowplows could do their job.
Correct: The owners of the parking lot banned parking in their lot so the snowplows could do
their job.
Incorrect: The Civil War and the Spanish American War took place in the nineteenth century. It
was a turning point for the country.
Correct: The Civil War and the Spanish American War took place in the nineteenth century. The
Civil War was a turning point for the country.

Word Choice
One of the best ways to accurately convey your ideas in your essay is to choose the right
words. Doing so ensures that your audience understands what you are writing. Also, with the
exception of essays on national exams such as the SAT or GED, spelling counts. In fact, it is critical
that your essay be mistake-free. If you are typing your essay, you can use the spell check feature,
but don’t rely on it alone. Knowledge of basic spelling rules will help you to craft an essay that
gives your reader a positive impression. To learn about these topics, keep reading.
This sounds simple, and for the most part, it is.You already have a command of the English
language that includes knowledge of the denotative (literal) meaning of thousands of words.
Therefore, all you need to do is choose the right ones to get your message across. The first section

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

of this chapter explains some of the pitfalls of word choice, including commonly confused and
misused words.
However, saying what you mean takes more than just an understanding of the denotation, or
literal meaning, of a word. Many words also have a connotative meaning. The connotation is a
word’s implied meaning, which involves emotions, cultural assumptions, and suggestions. Both
meanings must be considered when making word choices.
Once you recognize denotative and connotative meaning, you must consider whether the words
you choose might confuse or possibly offend your audience. That means being aware of inclusive
language, and avoiding slang, clichés, and buzzwords. Your essay is an important opportunity to
get a positive message across. Don’t miss it by inadvertently insulting, confusing, or annoying
your reader.

DENOTATION
The words in this section are frequently used incorrectly. The confusion may stem from words
that sound or look similar (but have very different meanings),words and usages that sound
correct (but in fact are not considered standard English), or words that are misused so often that
their wrong usage is thought to be correct. When you are unsure of the denotation, or dictionary
meaning, of a word, you are more likely to make these kinds of mistakes. As you read this section,
make a note of any words you think you have used incorrectly. Read the definitions carefully, and
be certain that you understand proper usage before moving on.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY
When you use the wrong words, your writing suffers. One incorrect choice—using illicit
when you mean elicit, for example—can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Because
there are many English words that sound or look almost identical, but have very different
meanings, choosing the right one can be difficult. You must understand the correct meaning of
the words you use in order to avoid “mistaken identity.” The following list of the most commonly
confused words can improve your writing by showing you how to avoid such errors. As you read
it, take note of those you have used incorrectly. You may want to write them down, along with a

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

couple of sentences in which you use them correctly. In your essay writing, pay careful attention
to the denotative meaning of every word you use.
CONNOTATION
When you are certain you have selected your words carefully, each one denoting exactly what
you intend it to, you must then consider connotation. What shades of meaning are suggested?
Think beyond the dictionary, or denotative meaning, to what might be implied or inferred by
your writing.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE CONNOTATION


Connotation involves emotions, cultural assumptions, and suggestions. Connotative, or
implied, meanings can be positive, negative, or neutral. Some dictionaries offer usage notes that
help to explain connotative meanings, but they alone can’t be relied on when trying to avoid
offensive or incorrect word choices. Keep in mind that using a word without being aware of its
implied meaning can annoy your reader or make your message unclear.
For example, what feelings come to mind when you hear the words plagiarize or copy? Plagiarize
has negative connotations, while copy is a more neutral selection. Blunder or oversight? Leer or
look?
If you were making travel plans, would you choose to rent a car from an agency whose safety
record was described as adequate? Although the dictionary definition of the word is “sufficient”
or “meeting a requirement,” the connotative meaning is negative: “barely satisfactory.” Consider
all the meanings your words might reveal, and determine whether they belong in your writing.

AVOID OVERLY INFORMAL AND OVERUSED LANGUAGE


Colloquialisms are words and phrases appropriate for speech and very informal or casual
writing. They don’t belong in your essay unless you are trying to imitate speech or assume a very
informal tone for effect. Colloquialisms include vulgarisms (obscene or offensive words), clichés,
and slang. Your reader is not going to consult a dictionary to understand what you’ve written, nor
will he or she be impressed with stale, highly unoriginal language. Eliminate any words or
phrases that are overused, or that might be unfamiliar to your reader. A word or two in a foreign

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

language, which you translate immediately, is ok. The use of confusing technical language or
buzzwords is not.

■ Vulgarisms—the last thing you want to do is turn off or offend your reader. Since you do not

know your audience, you do not know exactly what kinds of language they may find offense or in
poor taste. Err on the side of caution by not including any language considered even mildly
obscene, gross, or otherwise offensive. This includes scatological and sexual terms, and words
such as bitch (as in “life is a bitch”), hell (as in “hotter than hell”), God (as in “oh, God!”), and
damn.

■ Clichés—clichés should be avoided not only because they are too informal, but also because

they are overused. Your essay must not rely on stale phrases such as: one step at a time; no news
is good news; don’t worry, be happy; when life gives you lemons, make lemonade; and no guts, no
glory.

■ Slang—slang is non-standard English. Its significance is typically far-removed from either a

word’s denotative or connotative meaning, and is particular to certain groups (therefore, it


excludes some readers who won’t understand it). Examples include: blow off, canned, no sweat,
and thumbs down (or up). It is also inappropriate and in poor taste to use slang terms for racial or
religious groups.

Communication in a new era: a


world 2.0

Part I

Black Mirror

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

White Christmas
1. Pay attention to composition: What can you say about colors in the scene where Joe and

Beth get out of the cottage? What do colors represent?

2. Refer to the “snapshot moment”. How do you like that way of taking pictures? Is it

better/worse? Why? Will there ever be a limit to technological advances in this matter?

3. Do you think Joe and Beth were “good together” as Joe claims they were?

4. How did Joe and Beth handle the situation once Joe got to know the truth? Who is the one

to blame?

5. Was it a good idea for Joe to go to Beth’s father’s house? What happened with legal

blocks?

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

6. Just like in the rest of the stories, in Joe’s and Beth’s lives, technology advances and the

latest technological gadgets do not seem to have proven useful when it comes to feelings and

emotions. Do you agree?

7. Describe in which way technology affected Joe’s relationship with Beth and the chain of

effects that took place after the break-up.

8. How did the police get Mr Porter’s (Joe) confession? Was technology helpful in that case?

Why?

9. Do you think the confession should be taken into account? Is it “valid”? Why?

10. Do you find it unfair that Joe’s cookie receiving punishment without trial?

11. Where have Mr. Porter (Joe) and Mr. Rent (Matt) been all this time? Compare the two

men. How did they end up in that situation?

12. In the end Matt Rent was on the register. Was that the price to pay? Was it a fair

punishment for him? Why?

13 General Discussion Questions

➢ Why was this title chosen for this episode?

➢ What layers of meaning can you uncover?

➢ This episode sheds light on many debatable issues in present day society. Which are

those issues? List them and elaborate the connection between those issues and the

episode.

➢ Is there a direct message to viewers?

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

1. Describe Lacie
2. Think about the setting and composition. Elaborate on the following idea:
“It’s set in a Truman Show-style universe that seems designed explicitly for Instagram”
3. Explain the episode with the realtor and its consequences

4. Refer to “Reputelligence”

5. What are “prime influencers”?

6. Describe Lacie’s antagonist: the bride-to-be

7. What can you say about Ryan,Lacie’s brother? Do you think that that he would have never
imagined that their quarrel would be become a turning point in Lucie’s life?

8. The lorry driver: analyze her role in this episode

9. Elaborate on the title of this episode

10. What do you think about the following ideas shared by viewers?

“As with so many Black Mirror episodes, the horror lies in imagining all too clearly how such a
situation might feel.”

“The episode aims squarely at the anxiety stoked by a modern obsession with quantification.”
11. Some people´s criticism of this episode revolves around predictability. What’s your view
on this?

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

12. For many viewers, the central theme is powerful yet the episode loses its strength in the
way events are intertwined

13. Do you think that Black Mirror’s Nosedive skewers Social Media?
14. Do you agree with this idea?

For anyone who’s ever made conversation with an Uber driver specifically to upgrade a
passenger rating, or wondered why a tweet isn’t getting more likes, or even checked a credit
score, “Nosedive” surely radiates shivers of anxiety.

Part II

 Read the poem Look Up the article Why Celebrities Should Not Allow "Selfies" with fans
and watch the short film Aspirational

 Kirsten Dust short film Aspirational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwDbOmPQNx0

 Poem

Look Up by Gary Turk


I have 422 friends, yet I am lonely.
I speak to all of them every day, yet none of them really know me.
The problem I have sits in the spaces between
Looking into their eyes, or at a name on a screen.
I took a step back and opened my eyes,
I looked around and realised,
That this media we call social is anything but
When we open our computers and it's our doors we shut
All this technology we have, it's just an illusion
Community, companionship, a sense of inclusion
But when you step away from this device of delusion
You awaken to see a world of confusion.
A world where we're slaves to the technology we mastered
Where information gets sold by some rich greedy bastard
A world of self-interest, self-image and self-promotion
Where we all share our best bits but, leave out the emotion.
We're at our most happy with an experience we share,
But is it the same if no-one is there?

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Be there for your friends and they'll be there too,


But no-one will be if a group message will do.
We edit and exaggerate, crave adulation
We pretend not to notice the social isolation
We put our words into order and tint our lives a-glistening
We don't even know if anyone is listening.
Being alone isn't a problem let me just emphasize
If you read a book, paint a picture, or do some exercise
You're being productive and present, not reserved and recluse
You're being awake and attentive and putting your time to good use.
So when you're in public, and you start to feel alone
Put your hands behind your head, step away from the phone
You don't need to stare at the menu, or at your contact list
Just talk to one another, learn to co-exist.
I can't stand to hear the silence of a busy commuter train
When no one wants to talk for the fear of looking insane.
We're becoming unsocial, it no longer satisfies
To engage with one another, and look into someone's eyes.
We're surrounded by children, who since they were born,
Have watched us living like robots, who now think it's the norm.
It's not very likely you'll make world's greatest dad,
If you can't entertain a child without using an iPad
When I was a child, I'd never be home
Be out with my friends, on our bikes we'd roam
I'd wear holes in my trainers, and graze up my knees
We'd build our own clubhouse, high up in the trees
Now the park's so quiet, it gives me a chill
See no children outside and the swings hanging still.
There's no skipping, no hopscotch, no church and no steeple
We're a generation of idiots, smart phones and dumb people.

Why Celebrities Should Not Allow "Selfies" With Fans


How a stalker can put you in danger

Posted Mar 02, 2017


Dale Hartley Ph.D., MBA

Emma Watson has a new movie coming out, so she’s making the obligatory media rounds to
promote it. In a Vanity Fair interview, she mentioned that she does not allow fans to take “selfies” with
her. Possibly her security staff has warned her about this, and probably her own experience with
intrusive fans has taught her to set boundaries.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

As Watson points out, a selfie posted on Facebook establishes her location “within 10 meters.” This is
a gift to stalkers, who can range from harmless to psychotically violent. During the Reagan
administration, the late NBC News anchor Jessica Savitch was stalked by a man who wrote her that
he was going to kill Vice President Bush or Secretary of State Haig to impress her. One day, he
sneaked past security and entered Savitch’s office. When she realized who he was, she feigned
delight at meeting him — long enough to get by him and out the door.
Being famous practically guarantees that one will have stalkers. It’s so common among people in the
public eye that a significant body of research exists from which to detect some patterns:
Both males and females engage in stalking. Stalkers may fixate on current and former lovers,
strangers, celebrities, or politicians. Female stalkers are more likely to target celebrities than any other
group, but celebrity stalkers are still predominantly males stalking famous women.
“Approach behavior” is key to predicting abusive or even violent behavior. However, far more people
approach celebrities in person (i.e., directly) than communicate with them via phone, mail, or email
(i.e., indirectly). And more people approach celebrities indirectly than commit criminal acts against
them. So the challenge is identifying which of the many thousands of direct and indirect approaches
indicates an actual threat to the celebrity’s person or property. (Remember the woman who repeatedly
broke into David Letterman’s home, claiming to be his wife?)
Research by Dr. Park Dietz indicates that indirect approaches which contain hateful, threatening, or
obscene material were unlikely to lead to any criminal acts. These stalkers seem more interested in
insulting and shocking a target than in committing harmful acts. Many of these offensive
communications are also anonymous, indicating that the sender fears exposing him or herself.
Stalkers who contact their target multiple times using different communication methods (e.g., phone,
mail, email) were more likely to approach directly and commit a criminal act. With each successive
communication, the risk increases — up to the tenth communication. After that, the risk diminishes.
Stalkers whose communications mentioned a desire to meet in person, and who have indicated a
willingness to travel to such a meeting, were more likely to commit an offense. However, those who
mentioned an unrealistic desire to have a relationship (or have children) with the victim were less of a
risk.
Stalkers who are socially isolated are at risk for committing criminal acts against their targets, but so
are stalkers with grandiose, paranoid, or delusional personalities.
There is no black-and-white profile for celebrity stalkers, because so many people approach and
communicate with them, and the vast majorities are harmless. The warning signs mentioned above
are not conclusive, because many people engage in those types of behaviors and yet never commit a
crime against their target. The best course of action for Watson, or anyone who needs to discourage a

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Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

stalker, is to do just what she's doing: Set boundaries and avoid being too approachable and too
vulnerable.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201703/why-celebrities-
should-not-allow-selfies-fans

 Analyze the two episodes from Black Mirror, the short film, the poem and the article.
Think about issues, perspectives, core concepts, ideas, and intended messages.

VOCABULARY2

2
Taken from Mc Carthy, M., O’Dell, F. English Vocabulary in Use –Advanced. England: CUP, 2013

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Replace the words in bold with a suitable word (synonym or “near-synonym”)

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Could you use any of the following words in the previous activity?

Writing

 Read this student’s essay

Describe the purposes of the Internet. Include various viewpoints,


including that of users and providers.
In today’s world, the first place people turn to when there is a question to be answered,
information to be located, or people to be contacted, is often the Internet. The Internet has
supplanted the traditional encyclopedia as well as a number of other sources of service and
information. We can make reservations, plan vacations, play interactive games, learn a language,
listen to music or radio programs, read the newspaper, and find out about a medical condition,

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

without coming face to face with another person. There is no limit to the subject matter you can
research on the Internet. The Internet allows you to remain at your computer and shop no matter
what you wish to purchase. And if you are looking for a bargain or an unusual item, you can go to a
popular auction site and either sell or buy.
But if you do wish to speak directly to a person, there are chat rooms. On practically any given
topic, groups of people converse with each other. They may be giving opinions about a perfect travel
itinerary, a book, or even a political party. But perhaps the widest use of the Internet involves directly
writing to a person by sending e-mail messages to friends and associates. It is possible to
communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere, as long as there is an Internet connection. In addition
to verbal messages, digital pictures may be transmitted on the Internet.
Unfortunately, there are individuals who misuse the opportunities possible on the Internet. They
are less than honest, disguise their identity, bilk people in financial scams, and entice unsuspecting
people, including children, into giving them personal information. They steal people’s identities and
use their credit and good names to make purchases, apply for loans, and steal assets.
Of course, the Internet providers, such as AOL, hope to make a profit, and there is usually a
monthly fee for the hookup. To increase the profits, the providers sell advertising, which may pop up
on the subscriber’s screen and require the user to stop and respond, either positively or negatively, to
the ads. When you consider that you can hear a concert, read a book, visit a museum and view its
contents, visit the websites of numerous individuals and organizations, play a game with one or more
people, and pay your bills, you will realize that the uses of the Internet are too vast for a short list.
Most would agree that much has been added to peoples’ lives by connecting them to the Internet,
and that we probably cannot anticipate what new purposes will be explored in the future.

• Would you say this is a good, solid essay? Think about organization and development
of ideas, writer’s angle, paragraphing, and vocabulary

➢ Write an outline for each of the following statements and then choose one and write a
complete argumentative essay

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

▪ Social media and the development of Technology have


strengthened interpersonal relationships.
▪ It is easy to criticize social media and technological advances. Yet,
many people forget how necessary they were back then when
people struggled relentlessly to reach out to others.
▪ The paradox lies in the fact that far from being connected most
people have lost touched. They are lonely in a world flooded with
groups and memberships.

Logic in Argumentative Writing


 Faulty reasoning
 You must avoid faulty reasoning. When acknowledging opposing viewpoints, you should know
that fallacies or errors in reasoning weaken your arguments, undermine your claims and call
into question the information provided. Some of the most common types of faulty reasoning
are:
➢ Circular reasoning: Cruel and unusual experimentation on helpless animals is inhumane.
➢ Hasty generalization: All instructors at the ETTP firmly believe that courses should be
annual.
➢ False analogy: A human body needs rest after strenuous work, and a car needs rest after a
long trip.
➢ Non sequitur: Because my sister is financially independent, she will make a good parent.
➢ Post- hoc fallacy: Student enrollment plummeted this semester because of the recent
appointment of the new dean.
➢ Either - or fallacy: All drugs may be either legalized or banned…

Read the following sentences. Identify which fallacy weakens the writer’s argument.

a. History classes are difficult.

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

b. The economy collapsed because a new governor was elected.

c. After finishing secondary school, students have two alternatives: studying at university or
working.
d. People who think abortion should be banned have no respect for the rights of women. They
treat them as nothing but baby-making machines. That's wrong. Women must have the right to
choose.
e. Senators who want to increase taxes hate the poor.
f. Cruel and unusual experimentation on helpless animals is inhumane.
g. All instructors at the ETTP firmly believe that courses should be annual.
h. A human body needs rest after strenuous work, and a car needs rest after a long trip.
i. Before discussing whether Television commercials for alcoholic beverages should be banned
or not, we have to think that some parents actually give sips of alcohol to their children

▪ Find the fallacies in the following passages3:

The feminist argument that pornography is harmful has no merit and should not be discussed
in college courses. If pornography were harmful, it would either have to harm the men who read it or
the women who pose in it, and since they both choose these activities, they must not be harmful. Ever
since feminists began attacking our popular culture, the moral foundation of our society has been
weakened; the divorce rate, for example, continues to rise. If feminists would just cease their
hysterical opposition to sex, perhaps relationships in our society would improve. Truly, the feminist
argument is baseless.

▪ Read the following paragraph, does it show logical reasoning?


It is obvious to anyone thinking logically that minimum wage should be increased. The current
minimum wage is an insult and is unfair to the people who receive it. The fact that the last proposed
minimum wage increase was denied is proof that the government of this state is crooked and corrupt.
The only way for them to prove otherwise is to raise minimum wage immediately (SUTEBA union’s
spokesperson, Argentina)

• Logical development of claims


In order to develop a logical argument, the author first needs to determine the logic behind his own
argument. It is likely that the writer did not consider this before writing, which demonstrates that
arguments which could be logical are not automatically logical. They must be made logical by careful
arrangement.

3
“Sample Argument.”The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available online:
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/fallacies/sample-arguments-with-fallacies/(7 Mar. 2014).

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Comunicación Avanzada II
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The writer could choose several different logical approaches to defend this point, such as a syllogism
like this:

Premise 1: Minimum wage should match the cost of living in society.


Premise 2: The current minimum wage does not match the cost of living in society.
Conclusion: Therefore, minimum wage should be increased.

➢ Once the syllogism has been determined, the author needs to elaborate each step in writing
that provides evidence for the premises:

The purpose of minimum wage is to ensure that workers can provide basic amenities to
themselves and their families. A report in the Journal of Economic Studies indicated that workers
cannot live above the poverty line when minimum wage is not proportionate with the cost of living. It is
beneficial to society and individuals for a minimum wage to match living costs.

Unfortunately, our state's minimum wage no longer reflects an increasing cost of living. When the
minimum wage was last set at $5.85, the yearly salary of $12,168 guaranteed by this wage was
already below the poverty line. Years later, after inflation has consistently raised the cost of living,
workers earning minimum wage must struggle to support a family, often taking 2 or 3 jobs just to make
ends meet. 35% of our state's poor population is made up of people with full time minimum wage jobs.

In order to remedy this problem and support the workers of this state, minimum wage must be
increased. A modest increase could help alleviate the burden placed on the many residents who work
too hard for too little just to make ends meet.

• Logic in arguments and counter arguments : Opposing Viewpoints


Read the following excerpts adapted from students’ essays.

Topic: Should Books Be Photocopied in College?

Stand: College students should be able to photocopy books.

Those who advocate the use of books exclusively, often claim that a book is a good investment
since it lasts forever. However, in most of the cases, college students use reading materials for a short
period of time and once they have passed the course for which they needed it, they are not likely to
use that material again. Hence, the so called investment in books is poorly –if ever- justified.

A. Identify the counter argument and student’s claim to support his stand.

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Comunicación Avanzada II
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B. Is there a logical connection between the claims?

Topic: Should Students Take an Entrance Exam Before Entering the ETTP?

Stand: EFL students should take an entrance exam that tests their command of the language.

Many of those who are against entrance examinations contend that having students pass an
admission exam would be an overt violation of students’ right to education. An entrance exam would
prevent those students who fail from pursuing a higher education degree. While no sound person
would deny that students should not be left out of the educational system, an entrance exam would
hardly curtail students’ right. An admission exam would help many students become aware of their
shortcomings. Moreover, failing the entrance exam would simply entail that students will have to
retake the exam the following year.

Topic: Should college students pay tuition fees?

Stand: College students should pay tuition fees.

Opponents of this position claim that the economic funds for higher education should not be
increased at the expense of students. In this line of thought, the government should increase the
budget destined for universities, and college authorities should better distribute the economic
resources. While this may hold true, the need to augment the budget for higher education in a time of
economic crisis supports the need to set tuition fees. In this current economy, even if authorities wisely
redistribute the budget, they will fall short as there are many areas to improve and the economic
resources seem scarce. Tuition fees, then, would increase the budget and would allow authorities to
improve the building, its facilities and faculty’s salaries.

➢ Essay work: read this essay’s intro and first body paragraph; identify strength and weakness if
any. Write second draft, include third paragraph and conclusion.

Topic: Student’s unions should/shouldn’t be banned

Stand: __________________________________

Student’s unions have always played a significant role in public universities in Argentina.
However, their existence has been recently questioned by some faculty members and authorities who
claim that student’s unions should be banned from state owned universities. Those who are against

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student’s unions fail to acknowledge that these organizations are generally set up to look after the
needs of all students and help them through their student’s life. As a result, student’s unions should
not be banned.

Those who are in favor of banning student’s unions claim that these groups often promote
violent behavior since they fight each other to become the leading one at university. Even though this
might be true, it should also be considered that student’s unions aim at supporting students whenever
they are in trouble at university. These organizations may for example help students get a class
offered in both terms in order to avoid students waiting for a year to retake a class in case of failing it
the first time. That’s why student’s unions should not be forbidden in public universities.

Conceding to Opposing Views4

In writing a classical argument, a writer must sometimes concede to an opposing argument rather than
refute it. Sometimes you encounter portions of an argument that you simply can t refute. For example,
suppose you support the legalization of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Adversaries argue that
legalizing hard drugs will increase the number of drug users and addicts. You might dispute the size of their
numbers, but you reluctantly agree that they are right. Your strategy in this case is not to refute the opposing
argument but to concede to it by admitting that legalization of hard drugs will promote heroin and cocaine
addiction. Having made that concession, your task is then to show that the benefits of drug legalization still
outweigh the costs you ve just conceded. As this example shows, the strategy of a concession argument is to
switch from the field of values employed by the writer you disagree with to a different field of values more
favorable to your position. You don t try to refute the writer s stated reason and grounds (by arguing that
legalization will not lead to increased drug usage and addiction) or the writer s warrant (by arguing that
increased drug use and addiction is not a problem). Rather, you shift the argument to a new field of values by
introducing a new warrant, one that you think your audience can share (that the benefits of legalization
eliminating the black market and ending the crime, violence, and prison costs associated with procurement of
drugs outweigh the costs of increased addiction). To the extent that opponents of legalization share your
desire to stop drug-related crime, shifting to this new field of values is a good strategy. Although it may seem
that you weaken your own position by conceding to an opposing argument, you may actually strengthen it by

4
Adapted from Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings.
Boston: Pearson, 2016

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increasing your credibility and gaining your audience s goodwill. Moreover, conceding to one part of an
opposing argument doesn’t mean that you won’t refute other parts of that argument.

Example of a Student Essay Using Refutation Strategy

The following extract from a student essay is the refutation section of a classical argument appealing to
a neutral or undecided audience. In this essay, student writer Marybeth Hamilton argues for continued
taxpayer support of First Place, an alternative public school for homeless children that also provides job
counseling and mental health services for families. Because running First Place is costly and because it can
accommodate only 4 percent of her city s homeless children, Marybeth recognizes that her audience may
object to continued public funding. Consequently, to reach the neutral or skeptical members of her audience,
she devotes the following portion of her argument to summarizing and refuting opposing views.

From First Place: A Healing School


for Homeless Children
By MARYBETH HAMILTON (STUDENT)

As stated earlier, the goal of First Place is to prepare students for returning to mainstream
public schools. Although there are many reasons to continue operating an agency like First Place,
there are some who would argue against it. One argument is that the school is too expensive,
costing many more taxpayer dollars per child than a mainstream school. I can understand this
objection to cost, but one way to look at First Place is as a preventative action by the city to reduce
the future costs of crime and welfare. Because all the students at First Place are at risk for
educational failure, drug and alcohol abuse, or numerous other long-term problems, a program like
First Place attempts to stop the problems before they start. In the long run, the city could be saving
money in areas such as drug rehabilitation, welfare payments, or jail costs.
Others might criticize First Place for spending some of its funding on social services for the
students and their families instead of spending it all on educational needs. When the city is already
making welfare payments and providing a shelter for the families, why do they deserve anything
more? Basically, the job of any school is to help a child become educated and have social skills. At

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Comunicación Avanzada II
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First Place, students needs run deep, and their entire families are in crisis. What good is it to help
just the child when the rest of the family is still suffering? The education of only the child will not
help the family out of poverty. Therefore, First Place helps parents look for jobs by providing job
search help including assistance with résumés. They even supply clothes to wear to an interview.
First Place also provides a parent support group for expressing anxieties and learning coping skills.
This therapy helps parents deal with their struggles in a productive way, reducing the chance that
they will take out their frustration on their child. All these extras are an attempt to help the family
get back on its feet and become self-supporting.
Another objection to an agency like First Place is that the short-term stay at First Place does no
long-term good for the student. However, in talking with Michael Siptroth, a teacher at First Place,
I learned that the individual attention the students receive helps many of them catch up in school
quite quickly. He reported that some students actually made a three-grade-level improvement in
one year. This improvement definitely contributes to the long-term good of the student, especially
in the area of self-esteem. Also, the students at First Place are in desperate situations. For most, any
help is better than no help. Thus First Place provides extended day care for the children so they
won t have to be unsupervised at home while their parents are working or looking for work. For
example, some homeless children live in motels on Aurora Avenue, a major highway that is
overrun with fast cars, prostitutes, and drugs. Aurora Avenue is not a safe place for children to
play, so the extended day care is important for many of First Place’s students.
Finally, opponents might question the value of removing students from mainstream classrooms.
Some might argue that separating children from regular classrooms is not good because it further
highlights their differences from the mainstream children. Also, the separation period might cause
additional alienation when the First Place child does return to a mainstream school. In reality,
though, the effects are quite different. Children at First Place are sympathetic to each other.
Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they do not have to be on the defensive because no one is
going to make fun of them for being homeless; they are all homeless. The time spent at First Place
is usually a time for catching up to the students in mainstream schools. When students catch up,

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they have one fewer reason to be seen as different from mainstream students. If the students stayed
in the mainstream school and continued to fall behind, they would only get teased more.
First Place is a program that merits the community s ongoing moral and financial support. With
more funding, First Place could help many more homeless children and their families along the
path toward self-sufficiency. While this school is not the ultimate answer to the problem of
homelessness, it is a beginning. These children deserve a chance to build their own lives, free from
the stigma of homelessness, and I, as a responsible citizen, feel a civic and moral duty to do all I can
to help them.

Appealing to a Resistant Audience: Dialogic Argument


Whereas classical argument is effective for neutral or undecided audiences, it is often less
effective for audiences strongly opposed to the writer s views. Because resistant audiences hold
values, assumptions, or beliefs widely different from the writer s, they are often unswayed by
classical argument, which attacks their worldview too directly. On many values-laden issues such
as abortion, gun control, gay rights, or the role of religion in the public sphere, the distance
between a writer and a resistant audience can be so great that dialogue seems impossible. In these
cases the writer s goal may be simply to open dialogue by seeking common ground that is, by
finding places where the writer and audience agree. For example, pro-choice and pro-life advocates
may never agree on a woman s right to an abortion, but they might share common ground in
wanting to reduce teenage pregnancy. There is room, in other words, for conversation, if not for
agreement.
Because of these differences in basic beliefs and values, the goal of dialogic argument is seldom
to convert resistant readers to the writer s position. The best a writer can hope for is to reduce
somewhat the level of resistance, perhaps by increasing the reader s willingness to listen as
preparation for future dialogue. In fact, once dialogue is initiated, parties who genuinely listen to
each other and have learned to respect each other’s views might begin finding solutions to shared
problems. A recent example of this process can be seen in former Louisiana senator John Breaux s
call for a common ground strategy for solving the U.S. health care crisis characterized by soaring

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medical costs and rising numbers of Americans without medical insurance. Breaux objects to cable
news talk shows in which political opponents shout at each other. Why not, he asked in an
interview, try a program where the moderator would invite people of opposing philosophies to
seek common ground? * Breaux hopes to address the health care crisis by bringing together liberals
and conservatives, patients and insurance companies, doctors and pharmaceutical executives,
hospital managers and nurses to find common ground on which they can begin a dialogic search
for solutions.

The dialogic strategies we explain in this section the delayed-thesis strategy and Rogerian strategy
are aimed at promoting understanding between a writer and a resistant audience. They work to
disarm hostility by showing the writer s respect for alternative views and by lessening the force
with which the writer presents his or her own views.
Delayed-Thesis Argument
In many cases you can reach a resistant audience by using a delayed-thesis structure in
which you wait until the end of your argument to reveal your thesis. Classical argument asks you
to state your thesis in the introduction, support it with reasons and evidence, and then summarize
and refute opposing views. Rhetorically, however, it is not always advantageous to tell your readers
where you stand at the start of your argument or to separate yourself so definitively from
alternative views. For resistant audiences, it may be better to keep the issue open, delaying the
revelation of your own position until the end of the essay.
To illustrate the different effects of classical versus delayed-thesis arguments, we invite you to read
a delayed-thesis argument by nationally syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman. The article
appeared in 1985 at the height of feminist arguments about pornography. The kairotic moment for
Goodman s article was the nation s shock at a brutal gang rape in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in
which a woman was raped on a pool table by patrons of a local bar.5

Minneapolis Pornography Ordinance


5
The rape was later the subject of an Academy Award winning movie, The Accused, starring Jodie Foster.

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BY ELLEN GOODMAN

Just a couple of months before the pool-table gang rape in New Bedford, Mass., Hustler
magazine printed a photo feature that reads like a blueprint for the actual crime. There were just
two differences between Hustler and real life. In Hustler, the woman enjoyed it. In real life, the
woman charged rape.
There is no evidence that the four men charged with this crime had actually read the
magazine. Nor is there evidence that the spectators who yelled encouragement for two hours had
held previous ringside seats at pornographic events. But there is a growing sense that the violent
pornography being peddled in this country helps to create an atmosphere in which such events
occur.
As recently as last month, a study done by two University of Wisconsin researchers suggested that
even normal men, prescreened college students, were changed by their exposure to violent
pornography. After just ten hours of viewing, reported researcher Edward Donnerstein, the men
were less likely to convict in a rape trial, less likely to see injury to a victim, more likely to see the
victim as responsible. Pornography may not cause rape directly, he said, but it maintains a lot of
very callous attitudes. It justifies aggression. It even says you are doing a favor to the victim.
If we can prove that pornography is harmful, then shouldn’t the victims have legal rights?
This, in any case, is the theory behind a city ordinance that recently passed the Minneapolis City
Council. Vetoed by the mayor last week, it is likely to be back before the Council for an overriding
vote, likely to appear in other cities, other towns. What is unique about the Minneapolis approach
is that for the first time it attacks pornography, not because of nudity or sexual explicitness, but
because it degrades and harms women. It opposes pornography on the basis of sex discrimination.
University of Minnesota Law Professor Catherine MacKinnon, who co-authored the
ordinance with feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, says that they chose this tactic because they
believe that pornography is central to creating and maintaining the inequality of the sexes. . . . Just
being a woman means you are injured by pornography.

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They defined pornography carefully as, the sexually explicit subordination of women,
graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in words. To fit their legal definition it must also
include one of nine conditions that show this subordination, like presenting women who
experience sexual pleasure in being raped or . . .mutilated. . . . Under this law, it would be possible
for a pool-table rape victim to sue Hustler. It would be possible for a woman to sue if she were
forced to act in a pornographic movie. Indeed, since the law describes pornography as oppressive to
all women, it would be possible for any woman to sue those who traffic in the stuff for violating
her civil rights.
In many ways, the Minneapolis ordinance is an appealing attack on an appalling problem. The
authors have tried to resolve a long and bubbling conflict among those who have both a deep
aversion to pornography and a deep loyalty to the value of free speech. To date, says Professor
MacKinnon, people have identified the pornographer s freedom with everybody s freedom. But
we’re saying that the freedom of the pornographer is the subordination of women. It means one
has to take a side.
But the sides are not quite as clear as Professor MacKinnon describes them. Nor is the ordinance.
Even if we accept the argument that pornography is harmful to women and I do then we must also
recognize that anti-Semitic literature is harmful to Jews and racist literature is harmful to blacks.
For that matter, Marxist literature may be harmful to government policy. It isn´t just women
versus pornographers. If women win the right
to sue publishers and producers, then so could Jews, blacks, and a long list of people who may be
able to prove they have been harmed by books, movies, speeches or even records. The Manson
murders, you may recall, were reportedly inspired by the Beatles.
We might prefer a library or book store or lecture hall without Mein Kampf or the Grand Whoever
of the Ku Klux Klan. But a growing list of harmful expressions would inevitably strangle freedom
of speech.

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This ordinance was carefully written to avoid problems of banning and prior restraint, but the
right of any woman to claim damages from pornography is just too broad. It seems destined to lead
to censorship.
What the Minneapolis City Council has before it is a very attractive theory. What and Dworkin
have written is a very persuasive and useful definition of pornography. But they haven t yet
resolved the conflict between the harm of pornography and the value of free speech. In its present
form, this is still a shaky piece of law.

Consider now how this argument s rhetorical effect would be different if Ellen Goodman had
revealed her thesis in the introduction using the classical argument form. Here is how this
introduction might have looked:

Goodman s Introduction Rewritten in Classical Form

Just a couple of months before the pool-table gang rape in New Bedford, Mass., Hustler
magazine printed a photo feature that reads like a blueprint for the actual crime. There were just
two differences between Hustler and real life. In Hustler, the woman enjoyed it. In real life, the
woman charged rape. Of course, there is no evidence that the four men charged with this
crime had actually read the magazine. Nor is there evidence that the spectators who yelled
encouragement for two hours had held previous ringside seats at pornographic events.
But there is a growing sense that the violent pornography being peddled in this country helps to
create an atmosphere in which such events occur. One city is taking a unique approach to attack
this problem. An ordinance recently passed by the Minneapolis City Council outlaws pornography
not because it contains nudity or sexually explicit acts, but because it degrades and harms women.
Unfortunately, despite the proponents good intentions, the Minneapolis ordinance is a bad law
because it has potentially dangerous consequences.

Rogerian Argument

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An even more powerful strategy for addressing resistant audiences is a conciliatory strategy often
called Rogerian argument, named after psychologist Carl Rogers, who used this strategy to help
people resolve differences.* Rogerian argument emphasizes empathic listening, which Rogers
defined as the ability to see an issue sympathetically from another person s perspective. He trained
people to withhold judgment of another person s ideas until after they listened attentively to the
other person, understood that person s reasoning, appreciated that person s values, respected that
person s humanity in short, walked in that person s shoes. What Carl Rogers understood is that
traditional methods of argumentation are threatening. Because Rogerian argument stresses the
psychological as well as logical dimensions of argument, and because it emphasizes reducing threat
and building bridges rather than winning an argument, it is particularly effective when dealing
with emotionally-laden issues.
Under Rogerian strategy, the writer reduces the sense of threat in her argument by showing
that both writer and resistant audience share many basic values. Instead of attacking the audience
as wrongheaded, the Rogerian writer respects the audience s views and demonstrates an
understanding of the audience s position before presenting her own position. Finally, the Rogerian
writer seldom asks the audience to capitulate entirely to the writer s side just to shift somewhat
toward the writer s views. By acknowledging that she has already shifted toward the audience s
views, the writer makes it easier for the audience to accept compromise. All of this negotiation
ideally leads to a compromise between or better, a synthesis of the opposing positions.
The key to successful Rogerian argument, besides the art of listening, is the ability to point out
areas of agreement between the writer s and reader s positions. For example, if you support a
woman s right to choose abortion and you are arguing with someone completely opposed to
abortion, you’re unlikely to convert your reader, but you might reduce the level of resistance. You
begin this process by summarizing your reader s position sympathetically, stressing your shared
values. You might say, for example, that you also value babies; that you also are appalled by people
who treat abortion as a form of birth control; that you also worry that the easy acceptance of

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abortion diminishes the value society places on human life; and that you also agree that accepting
abortion lightly can lead to lack of sexual responsibility. Building bridges like these between you
and your readers makes it more likely that they will listen to you when you present your own
position.
In its emphasis on establishing common ground, Rogerian argument has much in common
with recent feminist theories of argument. Many feminists criticize classical argument as rooted in
a male value system and tainted by metaphors of war and combat. Thus, classical arguments, with
their emphasis on assertion and refutation, are typically praised for being powerful or forceful. The
writer defends his position and attacks his opponent s position using facts and data as ammunition
and reasons as big guns to blow away his opponent s claim. According to some theorists, viewing
argument as war can lead to inauthenticity, posturing, and game playing.

Visual Arguments
Understanding Design Elements in Visual Argument
To understand how visual images can produce an argument, you need to understand the design
elements that work together to create a visual text. In this section we ll explain and illustrate the
four basic components of visual design: use of type, use of space and layout, use of color, and use of
images and graphics.

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Save the Children advocacy ad

An Analysis of a Visual Argument Using All the Design Components

Before we discuss the use of images and graphics in detail, we would like to illustrate how all
four of the design components use of type, layout, color, and images can reinforce and support each
other to achieve a rhetorical effect. Consider the Save the Children advocacy ad appearing as
Figure 1. This advocacy ad combines type, layout, color, and image skillfully and harmoniously
through its dominant image complemented by verbal text that interprets and applies the ideas
conveyed by the image. The layout of the ad divides the page into three main parts, giving central
focus to the image of the mother standing and looking into the eyes of the child she is holding in
her arms. The blank top panel leads readers to look at the image. Two color panels, mauve behind
UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

the child and rose behind the mother, also highlight the two figures, isolate them in time and
space, and concentrate the reader’s attention on them. The large type in the black borders ( SHE S
THE BEST QUALIFIED TEACHER FOR HER CHILDREN and IMAGINE IF SHE HAD AN
EDUCATION ) frames the image, attracts readers eyes, and plants the main idea in readers minds:
mothers should be equipped to teach their children.
This advocacy ad, which appeared in Newsweek, skillfully blends familiar, universal ideas a
mother s love for her child and the tenderness and strength of this bond with unfamiliar, foreign
associations: a mother and child from a third-world country, wearing the traditional clothing of
their country depicted by the head scarf the mother is wearing and the elaborate design on her
sleeve. In addition to the familiar unfamiliar dynamic, a universal-particular dynamic also operates
in this ad. This woman and baby are every mother and child (after all, we don t know exactly
where she is from), but they are also from some specific third-world country. The two figures have
been posed to conjure up Western paintings and statues of the Madonna and Christ child. With
this pose, the ad intends that readers will connect with this image of motherly love and devotion
and respond by supporting the Every Mother/Every Child campaign. Color in this ad also accents
the warm, cozy, hopeful impression of the image; pink in Western culture is a feminine color often
associated with women and babies. In analyzing the photographic image, you should note what is
not shown: any surroundings, any indication of housing or scenery, any concrete sense of place or
culture. The text of the ad interprets the image, provides background information, and seeks to
apply the ideas and feelings evoked by the image to urging readers to
action. The image, without either the large type or the smaller type, does convey an idea as well as
elicit sympathy from readers, but the text adds meaning to the image and builds on those
impressions and applies them.
The ad designer could have focused on poverty, illiteracy, hunger, disease, and high mortality
rates but instead has chosen to evoke positive feelings of identification and to convey hopeful ideas.
While acknowledging their cultural difference from this mother and child, readers recognize their
common humanity and are moved to give mothers and children the best chance to survive and

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thrive. The large amounts of blank space in this ad help convey that the main points here are
important, serious, elemental, but also simple as if the ad has gotten to the heart of the matter. The
bottom panel of the ad gives readers the logo and name of the organization Save the Children and a
phone number and Web address to use to show their support.

EDUCATION: an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in


adversity…

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Lost in the Meritocracy6


By WALTER KIRN

On the bus ride down to St. Paul to take the test that will help determine who will get ahead in life,
who will stay put, and who will fall behind, two of my closest buddies seal their fates by opening pint
bottles of cherry schnapps the moment we leave the high school parking lot. They hide the liquor under
their varsity jackets and monitor the driver's rearview mirror for opportune moments to duck their
heads and swig. A girl sees what they're up to, mutters, "Morons," and goes back to shading in the tiny
ovals in her Scholastic Aptitude Test review book. She dated one of the guys a few months back, but
lately she's grown serious, ambitious; I've heard that she hopes to practice law someday and prosecute
companies that pollute the air. When she notices one of the bottles coming my way, she shoots me a
look of horror.

"No, thanks," I say.

My friends seem wounded by this—aren't we teammates? We play baseball and football together. We
go way back. In our high school class there are only fifteen boys, and every summer some of us camp
out by the river and cannonball from the cliffs into the current. We talk as though we'll be together
forever, though I've always known better: Someday we'll be ranked. Someday we'll be screened and
then separated. I've known this since my first day of kindergarten, when I raised my hand slightly faster
than the other kids—and waved it around to make sure the teacher saw it.

My buddies give me another chance to drink.


"Put that away, guys. Today is a big deal for us."
But they know this already—they just don't like the fact.

6
Taken from The Atlantic. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/01/lost-in-the-
meritocracy/303672/

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"Come on," one says. "A sip."


"I'm sorry. No."
And so I go on to college, and they don't.

Percentile is destiny in America. Four years after that bus ride I'm slumped on an old sofa in the library
of my Princeton eating club, waiting to feel the effects of a black capsule that someone said would help
me finish writing my overdue application for a Rhodes scholarship. At the other end of the sofa sits my
good friend Adam (all names in this piece have been changed)—a Jewish science whiz from the New
York suburbs who ate magic mushrooms one evening, had a vision, and switched from pre-med to
English literature. Adam should be reading Dubliners, which he'll be tested on early tomorrow
morning, but he's preoccupied with an experiment. He's smashing Percocet tablets with a hammer and
trying to smoke the powder through a water pipe.

I have other companions in estrangement, way out here on the bell curve's leading edge, where our
talent for multiple-choice tests has landed us without even the sketchiest survival instructions. Our club
isn't one of the rich, exclusive outfits, where the pedigreed children of the establishment eat chocolate-
dipped strawberries off silver trays carried by black waiters in starched white uniforms, but one that
anyone can join, where geeks and misfits line up with plastic plates for veggie burgers and canned fruit
salad. At the moment the club is struggling financially and has fewer than twenty paid-up members,
including two religious fanatics who came to Princeton as normal young men, I'm told, but failed
somehow to mix and grew withdrawn. Not long from now, one will take a Bible passage too literally
and pluck out one of his eyes in penance for some failing he won't disclose; the other will style himself
a campus messiah and persuade a number of "disciples"—most of them black and here on
scholarships—to renounce their degrees just before graduation as a protest against Princeton's
fallenness.

The rest of us in the club feel almost as lost. One kid, a token North Dakotan (Princeton likes to boast
that it has students from all fifty states), wears the same greaser haircut he brought from Fargo and has
poured all his energy for the past few years into fronting a lackadaisical rock band that specializes in
heartland heavy metal. His soul never made the leap from Main Street to the Ivy League. Another
young man is nearly catatonic from dropping LSD and playing pinball in marathon sessions that
sometimes last twelve hours. Strike a match an inch from his face and he won't flinch—his pupils won't
even contract from the flame.

If my buddies from Minnesota could see me now, they wouldn't have a clue whom they were seeing,
and I—also bewildered—wouldn't be able to help them. Four years ago my SAT scores set me on a
trajectory. One day I looked down at a booklet filled with questions concerning synonyms and
antonyms and the meeting times of trains on opposite tracks, and the next thing I knew I was opening
thick envelopes from half the colleges in the country. One, from Macalester College, in St. Paul,
contained an especially tempting offer: immediate admission as a freshman. I didn't even have to finish
senior year in high school.

I enrolled the next fall, but with no intention of staying. I'd read my Fitzgerald, and I wanted to go east;
I wanted to ride the train to the last station. As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been
amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my
mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I

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knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought
to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was
primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this
struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Before I'd been at Macalester a month, I applied to transfer to Princeton as a sophomore. I was warned
that only twenty students a year got into the university this way, but I was used to being the exception;
it was the only condition I'd ever known. Like a novice gambler on a winning streak, I wasn't even sure
that failure existed, except for others. To bolster my application, I looked around Macalester for a
contest, any contest, that I might place first in, and I hit at last on a poetry competition that seemed to
be attracting few entries. I'd never written serious poetry, but this didn't faze me. My desire to get ahead
was all the inspiration I'd ever needed. Appetite can be a kind of genius.

I won the poetry contest. A few months later I found myself sitting in a Princeton lecture hall that was
older than my home town, writing down a new word: "post-structuralism." I couldn't define it exactly,
but I knew more or less what it meant: I was making progress of sorts. The student next to me bore a
famous last name that I recognized from a high school history text (not Rockefeller, but close).
Discovering that it was still in circulation among living people—individuals whom I was expected to
befriend now and make a career among, if possible—renewed in me a sense of dislocation that I'd been
fighting, and courting, since entering grade school.

Tonight, on speed and applying for the Rhodes in a room full of red-eyed former valedictorians, I'm
more disoriented than ever. Only a few months short of graduation I've run out of thoughts, out of the
stuff that thoughts are made from. I'm mute, aphasic. I can't write a word. A doctor I saw when I went
home last summer pronounced me severely malnourished and put me on a regimen of vitamins, but this
is depletion of another kind. I've been fleeing upward since age five, learning just enough at every level
to make it, barely, to the next one. I'm the system's pure product, clever and adaptable, not so much
educated as wised-up; but now I've hit a wall.

I put my pen down as my friend holds out the water pipe stoked with pulverized pain pills. "You should
try this," he says.

I flash back to that bus, to that bottle of cherry schnapps. Back then I knew where I was going, and that
to get there I'd have to keep a clear head. But now I'm here, and my head doesn't function the way it
used to. All thanks to a test that measured … what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered.
Nothing sustaining. Just "aptitude."

That's why we're here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they
wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for nothing, but a knack for everything.

Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough.

My first semester at Princeton, I had four roommates, who resembled no one I'd ever known: A foppish
piano prodigy with a moustache, who dreamed of writing Broadway musical comedies and spent his
free hours in robe and slippers, smoking Benson & Hedges Menthol 100s and hunching, vulturelike,
over his piano, plinking out show tunes about doe-eyed ingénues who'd been seduced and ruined by

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caddish millionaires. The budding composer's pudgy heiress girlfriend, whose father owned a five-star
Manhattan hotel and regularly sent a limousine on weekends so that his daughter could drink cocktails
with celebrities, who—as I gathered from a snapshot she showed me—included the Bee Gees. The son
of a New York City TV newscaster, who kept his cheeks fresh with Oil of Olay and treated the
composer and the heiress as his surrogate parents, addressing them in baby talk and asking them to tuck
him in at night, which they did, complete with fairy tales. And an earnest Long Island Quaker kid with
a short red beard, who played guitar and protested apartheid, which I pretended to be concerned about
too, although I wasn't certain what it was. The SATs hadn't required such trivial knowledge.

One night a report came over the radio that John Lennon, my Quaker friend's hero, had been
assassinated, which plunged the Quaker into fits of violent weeping in which I felt compelled to join.
Lennon's death meant very little to me (my tastes ran to midwestern stadium rock), but I needed a good
cry that night for other reasons.

It had all started one Sunday when the heiress, Jennifer, returned from one of her weekend jaunts
lugging a case of champagne her father had given her. She saw me watching her from my bedroom
doorway and invited me into the common living room, where we popped the cork on a bottle and drank
the bubbly without glasses, licking the foam when it ran down the neck. This struck me as the height of
decadence, and reason enough for betraying my high school buddies, whom I'd promised to keep in
touch with but hadn't.

When the bottle of champagne was gone, Jennifer said, "You owe me twenty." I looked at her
uncomprehendingly. "It's a good bottle," she said. "You owe me twenty."

I didn't have the money, and I said so. My parents sent checks now and then, but not for much; they
lacked any sense of the cost of living at Princeton. My phone bills alone consumed most of their
remittances, freezing me out of any real social life and limiting my wardrobe to a pair of Levi's; a blue
T-shirt; two white dress shirts, which I seldom found occasion to wear; and one red, lumberjacky
flannel number, which filled me with shame about my regional origins.

"Welsher," Jennifer said, putting me in my place. In Minnesota, I hadn't had a place, but here I did:
several levels down from heiresses who charged their roommates to drink free champagne. It seemed
unfair that I had come so far in life only to find new ways to fall short.

The humiliations mounted. One afternoon a van from Bloomingdale's pulled up in front of our
dormitory, and a crew of men began unloading furniture that appeared to belong on the set of a TV
show about single young socialites. The men placed armchairs, lamps, tables, and a sofa in one corner
of the living room and then unrolled an Oriental rug so vast that its edges curled up against the walls,
blocking the electrical sockets. After directing the placement of each piece, Jennifer and her boyfriend
sought me out in my tiny bedroom, whose only furnishings were a desk, a bed, and a bookcase
fashioned from plastic milk crates. Owing to my budget, many of the books inside it were stolen from
the university bookstore; I'd never bought books before, and couldn't believe how expensive the
damned things were.

"We figured out everyone's share of the new living room," the boyfriend said. "Yours is five hundred
and ten."

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I laughed out loud. "But I didn't order any of it."

"Well, you'll benefit from it, won't you?" Jennifer said. This was my first encounter with a line of
reasoning that would echo through my years at Princeton: even unbidden privileges must be paid for.
Tuition, the university liked to tell us, covered only a fraction of the cost of our education. What's
more, the benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the
duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes. I'd
assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in—
to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up—was an endless dunning for
nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote.

After I told my roommates to stop bothering me, they convened a meeting in the common room and
voted to ban me from touching any item, including the rug, that I had not bought stock in. This put the
entire suite—except for the bathroom, my bedroom, and the hallway leading to the front door—off
limits to me. I raged inside. The common room had evolved into a concentrated version of what the
whole campus had come to represent for me: a private association of the powerful that I'd been
permitted to visit on a day pass, which, I sensed, could be revoked as suddenly as it had been issued.

I avoided my roommates and focused on my classwork. I chose to concentrate on English, since it


sounded like something I might already know. I assumed that my classmates and I would study the
classics and analyze their major themes, but instead we were buffeted, almost from day one, with talk
of "theory," whatever that was. The basic meanings of the poems, short stories, and plays drawn from
the hefty Norton anthologies that anchored our entry-level reading lists were treated as trivial, almost
beneath discussion; what mattered, we learned, were our "critical assumptions."

I, for one, wasn't aware of having any. Until I was sixteen or so, my only reading had consisted of
Hardy Boys mysteries, books on UFOs, world almanacs, a Time-Life history of World War II, and a
handful of pulpy best sellers linked to movies (The Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist stand out),
which I'd read for their sex scenes. I knew a few great authors' names from scanning dust jackets in the
town library and watching the better TV quiz shows, but the only serious novels I'd ever cracked
were Moby-Dick and Frankenstein—both sold to me by a crafty high school teacher as gripping tales of
adventure, which they weren't.

With no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for
mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas disguised as conclusions that I'd
reached myself. The deployment of key words was crucial, as the recognition of them had been on the
SATs. With one professor the charm was "ambiguity." With another "heuristic" usually did the trick.
Even when a poem or a story fundamentally puzzled me, I found that I could save face through
terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as "semiotically unstable."

The need to finesse my ignorance through such stunts left me feeling hollow and vaguely hunted. I
sought solace in the company of other frauds (we seemed to recognize one another instantly), and
together we refined our acts. We toted around books by Jacques Derrida, and spoke of "playfulness"
and "textuality." We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a
hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that
it was our sacred duty to transcend—or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the

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latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors—the ones who drank with us in the
Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up pants
and skirts—we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary
knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place.

I came to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were actors. In
classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers,
whose patient, sedimentary study habits were ill adapted, I concluded, to the new world of antic
postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature
was a con, and I—a born con man who hadn't read any great literature and was looking for any excuse
not to—was eager to agree with them.

This lucky convergence of intellectual fashion and my illiteracy restored my pride and emboldened me
socially. Maybe I belonged at Princeton after all. I took up with a moody crowd of avant-gardists, who
hung around one of the campus theaters tripping on acid and staging absurdist plays by Sartre, Albee,
and Ionesco. One production, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage filled
with unoccupied metal folding chairs. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings, making bets on
how long it would take for people to leave.

Who knew that serious drama could be like this? Who knew that the essence of high culture would turn
out to be teasing the poor fools who still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the
joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now, not with a straight face. It
embarrassed me that I'd ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the East Coast (people like
me—the new me) had been laughing at us all along.

It frightened me that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this; I might have
remained a rube forever. This realization altered my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave
behind the folks who'd raised me and stand with the people who'd clued me in.

My closest friend as a junior was V, a Pakistani boy who'd disappointed his family—and even, as he
told it, his nation's leaders—by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He
claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the artsy
eastern prep-school graduates who composed the campus's tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue
just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, whereas engineering was deemed unsuitable for anyone other than indentured
Third Worlders whose governments were paying their tuition in return for future work designing
missiles and irrigation projects.

This had been V's deal. Once he broke it, whether out of conviction or in deference to fashion, he
couldn't go home again. That made two of us.

One cold winter night we set out down Prospect Avenue toward one of the eating clubs that wouldn't
have us. On the way we talked Wittgenstein, loudly, so that others would hear us. Drunk on a mixture
of beer, resentment, and longing, we were determined to crash a party we'd heard about. Girls went by,
but not a lot of them, and few that were available to our kind. Twelve years after Princeton had gone
coed, the campus sex ratio still favored males by a considerable margin, placing a premium on pretty

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women that only rich boys and quarterbacks could pay. Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking
brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with
them.

This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only
promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class
beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a
cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the WASP New Englanders with
weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their
parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. They didn't have our test scores, but
they had style, a charismatic aura of entitlement, and V and I were desperate for a piece of it.

Somehow we slipped past the door into a room jammed with handsome, arrhythmic dancers in pastel
polo shirts with turned-up collars. When we tried to join the fun, the crowd contracted and squeezed us
out in a kind of reflexive mass immune response. We retreated to the professionally staffed bar, and in
no time I was drunk and plotting revenge.

I targeted a girl with pearl earrings whose solid, columnar figure, husky voice, and rubber-banded sheaf
of wheaty hair held no physical attraction for me but aroused my inner revolutionary. Like a frustrated
stableboy in an old novel, I wanted to seduce and ruin her. Amazingly, we ended up alone on the bare
wood floor of an empty upstairs room. The girl lay under me, kissing with a suction that actually drew
blood from my chapped lips. She tugged at my zipper and muttered hearty obscenities. Her passion was
frank, elemental, and intimidating, permitting me no illusion of domination. I was servicing a fair-
haired warrior goddess, bred to lead and to give birth to leaders.

But she was drunker than I knew; as the act began in earnest, she fell asleep—a total power outage.
Should I press on? Here was my chance to vent a primitive fury on a symbol of everything that tortured
me.

I couldn't do it. I fled downstairs, found V, and made him leave with me. On the walk back to his room
he said, "What assholes."

"We're just as bad," I said. I didn't explain.

We sobered up in V's room by drinking coffee. As he tended to do when pressured by strong emotion,
he launched into one of his disquisitions on language, and I chimed in with my own thoughts now and
then, though my mind was on the girl back at the club. V's point, I gathered, was his usual one: words
referred to other words, not to the world, and the noblest, grandest words, such as "truth" and "God,"
referred to nothing. Or maybe I misunderstood. It hardly mattered. It had been years since I'd known
what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to educate or enlighten me; I just
expected them to sound good. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of the short-
lived high school class in which we'd tried to learn German phonetically, by repeating sentences from
tapes.

Tonight, though, I couldn't bear the posing, and I understood why V's government was mad at him. I
excused myself to use the bathroom, filled a glass with water from the tap, looked in the mirror, and

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

beheld an absence—nothing but the reflected door behind me and a bathrobe hanging on a hook.
Where was my face? I knew it still existed, because I could feel it with my fingertips, but I couldn't
find it with my eyes—a hallucination in reverse.

"I need a doctor," I told V when I came back. "How late is the clinic open?"

He ignored me. He'd been holding a thought about Hegel all this time and was writing it down so that
he wouldn't forget it later. I left him and walked back down Prospect Avenue toward the elitist eating
club, thinking that if I could find the girl I'd left there and have a normal human word with her, it would
help me see my face again. But the party was over and the door was locked.

I didn't have to wait long for my crack-up.

During a Chaucer lecture the next semester I lost the ability to discern the boundaries between spoken
words. Professor F. opened his mouth and out flowed slushy streams of sonic nonsense with no meter,
no structure, no definition. I closed my notebook and managed to isolate a few short phrases from the
garbled flow, but l couldn't link them into sentences.

I decided I was tired, and I must have been, because once I lay down, I slept for twenty hours. When I
finally got up, the floor felt like a waterbed, and I had to brace myself against a chair. A moment later I
heard rats inside the walls. I knew that the noises came from warming water pipes, but I couldn't stop
picturing hungry rodents nibbling through the plaster into my room.

I started skipping classes, which wasn't like me, since the heart of my personal program for winning
distinction, despite my baseline bafflement, was the diligent daily maintenance of friendly relations
with my professors. I'd learned that by showing up early to say hello and chat with them, staying late to
ask them extra questions, and dropping in during office hours to drink their stale coffee and let them
bum my cigarettes (they had always just quit smoking, it seemed, but without conviction), I could pull
down Bs, at least. If I also showed signs of having read their books (particularly if the course did not
require me to), I could manage As.

But I'd grown too blurred to keep up this trickery. I embraced dissociation instead.

There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can't just get high; they have to know why
they're doing it. They have to back up their mischief with manifestos. The most popular one among the
students I knew held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, helped to break down the rigid mental
structures that restricted one's full humanity. This belief in creative derangement came down to us from
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Beat poets, but in my case it didn't quite apply, because my mind had
little structure to begin with.

Our LSD sessions were the opposite of parties; they brought on bouts of crushing introspection and
spirals of anxious cerebration. One evening at dinner Adam, my ex—pre-med friend, slipped me a
square of perforated blotter paper and invited me to walk with him to the Institute for Advanced Study,
a lofty think tank secluded in the woods. The place was best known as a haven for world-class
physicists, including Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, and through its golden windows we glimpsed the
silhouettes of Nobel Prize winners, their heads surrounded by pulsing pink coronas that persisted even

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

when we blinked. Now and then someone would pass us in the darkness, absorbed, we suspected, in
algebraic reveries related to fusion reactors and plasma beams. Toward midnight we sat down under a
tree—a benevolent presence that seemed to offer shelter from the sinister brilliance all around us—and
reached the conclusion that Princeton was a portal for arrogant, Luciferian energies bent on the
overthrow of God and Nature. We vowed to fight back. Scooping up clods of mud, we smeared it on
our faces and then danced like druids, at last attracting attention from a guard whose flashlight beam
swarmed with photons the size of snowflakes. He asked us what we were doing. "Repenting," we said.

Every month or so one of my acid-head friends would crack, and the mood of our demimonde would
darken. One night at an off-campus communal house a buddy of mine who studied architecture mixed
peyote with amphetamines and decided that the key to time travel was to stand in the basement and
repeat the mantra "I am willing, sir." After he'd chanted for three hours, we tried to rescue him, but he
punched and kicked until we backed away. Toward morning we found him praying on his knees
wearing only his boxer shorts and socks. He was holding a lighted white candle, and in its radiance we
could see teardrops dripping off his chin.

Then there was the girl who climbed onto the rail of her dormitory's interior staircase and hurled herself
onto a landing four floors down, clutching a copy of Anna Karenina. She survived, but she had to wear
a back brace for the rest of the semester. She told me she'd jumped to prove her love for Adam and
would do it again unless he married her. Her voice was rough and lumpy (from tranquilizers?), and her
hands slowly opened and closed like gasping fish.

My aphasia worsened by the day. I could feel words disappearing from my memory like defective
bulbs in a strand of Christmas lights. My right eyelid twitched when I read. Straight lines of print
rippled and broke apart. My education was running in reverse as my mind shed its outermost layer of
signs and symbols and shrank back to its mute, preliterate core.

My breakdown climaxed with a strange prank that could have been taken straight from a bad novel
about collegiate social Darwinism. I was flying on acid in the Terrace Club library, along with a couple
of visual-arts majors who were trying their hands at Pollock-style "action painting," when in walked
Leslie, a handsome blond campus prince—the descendant of a legendary industrialist—whom I knew
from our vicious little theater scene but had never felt worthy of engaging in conversation.

"Walter, may I talk to you?" he said. I was astonished that he knew my name.

I followed him outside to his car, a new European sports coupe with leather seats, where he asked me
to help him with a "trust experiment" related to his sociology thesis. He couldn't describe the
experiment, he said, because it might prejudice the results, and I didn't press him. I was glad to help.
This was the social break I'd waited years for.

Leslie started the car as I buckled in next to him. His instructions were simple: don't speak and don't
resist. Then he blindfolded me with a strip of fuzzy dark cloth. He turned on a Laurie Anderson tape
full blast—a gale of futuristic electronica that made me ashamed of my Top 40 tastes—and drove
without stopping for what seemed like an hour, ending up on a bumpy stretch of road that I took to be
rural and remote. At some point my blindfold loosened and slipped down, and I resecured it without
being asked.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

The car stopped moving. Leslie got out, walked around to my side, opened the door, set his hands on
my shoulders, and marched me forward across an expanse of spongy, uneven earth. He halted and
commanded me to kneel, urging me down by pressing on my skull. I suspected by then that I'd been
lured into a sadistic hazing ritual, but instead of lashing out or fleeing, I fantasized about the sort of
club that I'd been deemed worthy of auditioning for.

"Remove the blindfold," Leslie said.

When I raised my dazzled eyes, I saw, about fifty yards in front of me, surrounded by stately trees, an
actual castle, with countless tall windows and pediments and columns. In the center of its crescent
driveway stood an enormous dry fountain of leaping cupids.

"My family's estate," Leslie said. "Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!"

With that he ran back to his car and drove away.

It took me three hours, walking and hitchhiking, to make it back to the campus. The LSD turned the
trip into an odyssey of spectral laughing faces in the sky and dark, miasmic whirlpools underfoot.
When I finally lay down in my room, I asked myself why I'd been chosen for this elaborate
humiliation, and concluded that the answer lay in the success of a play on, of all subjects, 1960s pop art
that I'd written and staged. I burned with shame for obeying Leslie's orders and blamed the drugs for
my craven passivity, though I knew deep down that the problem was ambition. The drugs I could give
up, but not the ambition.

W hen summer vacation arrived, a few weeks later, I chose to stay in Princeton and find a job rather
than go home and shock my family with my listlessness and dissipation. I also set out to rebuild my
brain.

I bought a dictionary and a thesaurus and instituted a daily regimen of linguistic calisthenics. My alarm
clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I'd lie in bed, with my reference
books propped up against my knees, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single
page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. I found the ritual humbling but soothing, and for
the first time in my academic career I could feel myself making measurable strides, however tiny.
"Militate." "Militia." "Milk." I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones—an
act of contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise.

My job, at Firestone Library, helped advance this program of self-styled mental reconstruction.
Working under a young crew boss who belonged to a self-improvement cult led by Werner Erhard, the
founder of est, I emptied quarter-mile-long shelves of books, loaded them onto rolling metal carts, and
transferred them to new shelves, one floor down, in perfect Dewey decimal order. When breaks were
called, I opened whichever volume I happened to be holding at the moment and read until it was time
to go to work again, picking up reams of miscellaneous knowledge about such topics as Zoroastrianism
and the history of animal husbandry. And unlike the material from my classes and lectures, these
fragments stuck with me—maybe because I'd collected them for their own sake, not as cards to be
played at final-exam time and then forgotten when a new hand was dealt.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

One day, during lunch, my boss sat down beside me while I was reading up on Zarathustra, whom I'd
known before then only as a word in the title of a book by Nietzsche that I'd often argued with V about,
despite never having gotten through the preface.

"Perpetual self-betterment," my boss said. "That's man's purpose on earth, you know."
I nodded.
"Can you come to a meeting of people who share your drive?" he said. "It's absolutely free of charge."
"I'm sorry. I have to do this thing alone."
"What thing?"
"Reconnecting certain wires."

By August, I felt human again. The hollow feeling behind my forehead was replaced by a reassuring
fullness. The tics and twitches subsided. By all appearances, I'd saved myself—at least for the time
being. With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even any career desires (my vague
interest in writing poetry didn't qualify), the only game I knew how to play—scaling the American
meritocratic mountain, not to gain wisdom but just because it was there—was, I feared, about to end.

Making money didn't interest me. While my classmates streamed into on-campus interviews with Wall
Street brokerage firms (becoming an "arbitrageur" was all the rage then, even among students who as
juniors had vowed to spend their lives painting or composing), I cast about for another test to take,
another contest to compete in. I needed medals, acceptance letters, status. To me, wealth and influence
were trivial by-products of improving one's statistical scores in the great generational tournament of
worthiness. The score itself was the essential prize.

I applied for two scholarships to Oxford, an institution I regarded much as I'd once regarded
Princeton—as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold classes in the back. The first was the
Rhodes, created to fashion leaders for some future utopian global order. Why I imagined that I was
"Rhodes material"—which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely
known recipient of the honor—I had no idea. The other students I knew of who had applied were
conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was a
nervous loner in an old raincoat whose most notable accomplishment was writing and staging a blank-
verse play loosely based on Andy Warhol. Still, I sensed I had a chance. I'd learned by then that the
Masters of Advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-
card slots for overreaching oddballs.

When a letter arrived informing me that I'd been chosen as a state finalist, I bought a blue suit on credit
and flew back to Minnesota for my interviews. A doorman at the Minneapolis Club directed me to a
gloomy paneled room, where my nametagged fellow candidates were enjoying a get-acquainted
cocktail party with the members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning.

I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking
for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten a jump on me and wouldn't make space in
the tight perimeters around the professors and business people tasked with assessing our leadership
potential. I noticed that none of the other candidates were drinking their wine; they were using their
glasses as props. I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been impersonal,
statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group. This time the competition was all too
personal—about a dozen of us remained. One short-haired young woman in a dark suit was holding
forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept looking past her at a prettier girl whose panty
lines were discernible through her skirt. A handsome young brute whose tag identified him as a West
Point cadet was discussing his fitness regimen with a lady on the committee who seemed to be sleeping
standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom
scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

By the time I managed to corner a few committee members, I was feeling drunk and squirrelly. To give
the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and
combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary straight out of my thesaurus exercises. I got off the word
"heuristic" once, a magical bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I pronounced it in the manner of Johnny
Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but I couldn't stop myself. Even worse, I'd lit a cigarette, making me
the party's only smoker aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whom I knew to be an English
professor at a local college. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my
love of Whitman, a name I'd picked out of a hat. He seemed to sense this.

At the end of the party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the first slot: seven sharp. I
showed up pale and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cinnamon bun I'd wolfed.
My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them reading The New York Times. This
was a masterly touch—one I wished I'd thought of.

My name was called, and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of poker-faced interrogators
equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. "What, in your opinion, is the primary problem
facing our world today?" one woman asked, not even giving me time to sip my coffee.

The moisture inside my mouth evaporated; I'd expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to
answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people, dedicated to
serving humanity by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations ambassadors. The
only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and nuclear
proliferation. My chance to exhibit originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: "And how
would you deal with this problem?" That's where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry—but
how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless
through a concern with the basic global values of justice and mutual respect?

That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

But I couldn't. Instead I said, "Miscommunication. I think that's the biggest problem we face these
days."

"Expand on that," a quiet female voice said. "Miscommunication between whom?"

I offered a list of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women,
and even—absurdly—animals and human beings. Sometime during my speech I realized I'd lost. I'd

56
UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

never lost at anything before, not even a spelling bee, and the feeling was like waking on the Moon
after going to bed on Earth. No sounds, no light, no air, no gravity.

I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later. My rivals scanned my face for clues: how had my
interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win
their favor for the future. Someday one of them might run the country, and I wanted to be remembered
as a good sport.

"You're safe," I told them all. "I screwed it up."

They couldn't help smiling. Then one girl hugged me. "You really shouldn't consider it a loss," she
said. "You should feel honored you reached the final group." I returned the hug and left the building,
unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I found out that one of them was the girl who'd
tried to boost my spirits, which made her gesture seem patronizing in retrospect. She knew she was
bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely practicing her royal manners.

I was two weeks away from an interview for another scholarship, sponsored by the Keasbey
Foundation, less coveted than the Rhodes but more exclusive (only a handful were given out each
year). Yet my broken momentum had sapped my confidence, and I did nothing to prepare myself. I
drifted through classes and lectures, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected
me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, even the few I'd managed to read, and my math
skills, once adequate for the SATs, had shriveled to nothing through lack of use. The lone science class
I'd been required to take, an introductory geology course, was graded pass/fail, and though I'd passed it
(barely), I still wasn't sure what "igneous" meant.

All around me friends were securing places in grad schools and signing contracts with worldwide
corporations, but I found myself without prospects, in a vacuum. I'd never bothered to contemplate the
moment when the quest for trophies would end and the game of trading on them would begin. Once, I'd
had nowhere to go but up. Now, it seemed, I had nowhere to go at all.

For my interview I drove down to Philadelphia with Princeton's other Keasbey nominee, the football
team's starting quarterback. I'd never expected to meet him in this life. He was smaller than I thought
he'd be, and a faster, more impressive talker. Under his short haircut he seemed sad, though, as if he,
too, feared his life had already run its course. His car was old, not a quarterback's car at all, and I
realized that he wasn't one anymore, except in memory. The season was over.

In the elegant conference room of a downtown law firm the Keasbey Foundation's trustees explained
the peculiar history of their fellowship to me. Its founder, now deceased, was a wealthy daughter of
industry who'd never married. One spring, however, as a blushing society girl, she'd attended an Oxford
college ball with an English boy whose demeanor had so charmed her that she later devised a way to
re-create him by funding the education of young Americans who, with the proper training, it was
hoped, might wear his cummerbund. Pure Henry James, this story. The trustees went on to tell us that
Miss Keasbey had intended the fellowship for young men only, but a court challenge had made young
women eligible.

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UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

The trustees interviewed the ex-quarterback first, which gave me an hour to work on my persona as a
young aristocrat in the rough. If my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself—my
words, my range of references, my body language—into whatever shape the day required, and by the
time I sat down in the conference room, I'd hit on a pose of dreamy provincial yearning à la the
youthful Tennessee Williams, but marginally more virile. When asked who my favorite author was, I
answered Lord Byron—for the life he'd lived as much as for his writings. (I might not have understood
Romantic poetry, but I knew what the names of the poets signified.) When someone brought up my D
in Spanish—that glaring stain on my academic record, which the Rhodes committee had also noted,
provoking in me much defensive stuttering—I confessed that I'd stayed up late drinking before the final
and let it go at that. This elicited broad smiles. The next question touched on my athletic interests—or,
rather, my apparent lack thereof. I replied that I liked to exert myself in solitude, by taking long walks.
"Very British," one man said.

I could feel in the trustees' handshakes, as we parted, a distinct congratulatory warmth. I'd won again,
and by doing what I did best: exploiting my meticulously indexed collection of lofty buzzwords,
charming gestures, and apt allusions. Just days before, I'd felt a reckoning looming, but now I was off
to Oxford. I'd been spared.

"I flubbed it," the ex-quarterback told me on the drive back. "How did you do, you think?"

I didn't dare tell him.

The summer before I left for Oxford, I found myself back home, drinking beer with a high school
friend in a pickup truck parked next to the river. His name was Karl, and he'd stuck around to lend a
hand on his family's dairy farm. Most everyone else from our crowd had moved away, part of the
ongoing small-town diaspora that will someday completely depopulate rural America. Our old buddies
worked on salmon boats in Alaska. They dealt cards in Las Vegas. They sold Fords in Denver. Some,
having grown fed up with low-wage jobs, were studying computer programming or starting small
businesses with borrowed money. I had a hard time imagining their lives, especially if they'd married
and had kids, but I didn't have to: they were gone. I was gone too, up a ladder into the clouds. Up a
ladder made of clouds.

"So, what are your views on Emerson?" Karl asked me.

We'd been discussing books, at his request. He'd looked me up that night for this very purpose. While
I'd been off at Princeton, polishing my act, he'd become a real reader and also a devoted Buddhist. He
said he had no one to talk to, no one who shared his interest in art and literature, so when he'd heard I
was home, he'd driven right over. We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn't, in fact, and I didn't know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn't quote the
Transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone. I'd honed more-
marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations
according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the
background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes
when someone spoke too earnestly about some "classic" work of "literature," for veering left when the
conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed.

58
UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism. I'd gone to Princeton, and soon I'd go to Oxford,
and these, I was about to tell Karl, are the ways one gets ahead now—not by memorizing old Ralph
Waldo. I'd learned a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new
class the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs
things. The class that makes the headlines—that writes the headlines, and the stories under them.

But I kept all this to myself; I didn't tell Karl. He was a reader, a Buddhist, and an old friend, and there
were some things he might not want to know. I wasn't so sure I wanted to know them either.

My cynicism had peaked, but later that summer something happened that changed me—not instantly
but decisively. A month before I was scheduled to fly to England and resume my career as a facile
ignoramus, I came down with a mild summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia,
forcing me to spend two weeks in bed. One feverish night I found myself standing in front of a
bookcase in the living room that held a row of fancy leather-bound volumes my mother had bought
through the mail when I was little. Assuming that the books were chiefly decorative, I'd never even
bothered to read their titles, but that night, bored and sick, I picked one up: The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it back to my bedroom and
actually read it—every chapter, every page. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great
Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I'd somehow made it through Princeton without opening.

And so, belatedly, haltingly, and almost accidentally, it began: the education I'd put off while learning
to pass as someone in the know. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or
how long it might take to complete, but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room,
exhausted and apprehensive, I no longer cared about self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I
wanted to read. I wanted to find out what others thought.

BAD EDUCATION7
By Malcom Harris

The Project on Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with
$24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single
largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American
consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly
axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble
to expand to the point of bursting.

7
Taken from N+1 Magazine. Available at https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/bad-education/

59
UNMdP- Facultad de Humanidades
Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above
inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US
economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during
those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased,
employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages
for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished.
Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007
recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs
it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing
both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global
workforce?

During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage
risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed
housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and
theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating
agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t
be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its
equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).

SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as
part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million
of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of
SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000 in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth
quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity
is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop.
SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds
and the elderly.

With the secondary market in such good shape, primary lenders have been eager to help students
with out-of-control costs. In addition to the knowledge that they can move these loans off their
balance sheets quickly, they have had another reason not to worry: federal guarantees. Under the
just-ended Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), the US Treasury backed private loans
to college students. This meant that even if the secondary market collapsed and there were an
anomalous wave of defaults, the federal government had already built a lender bailout into the law.
And if that weren’t enough, in May 2008 President Bush signed the Ensuring Continued Access to
Student Loans Act, which authorized the Department of Education to purchase FFELP loans

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outright if secondary demand dipped. In 2010, as a cost-offset attached to health reform legislation,
President Obama ended the FFELP, but not before it had grown to a $60 billion-a-year operation.

Even with the Treasury no longer acting as co-signer on private loans, the flow of SLABS won’t
end any time soon. What analysts at Barclays Capital wrote of the securities in 2006 still rings true:
“For this sector, we expect sustainable growth in new issuance volume as the growth in education
costs continues to outpace increases in family incomes, grants, and federal loans.” The loans and
costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable
and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more
loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders
can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs.
The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and
the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.

If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market
don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit
colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of
the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree
programs. For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this
opportunity.

While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have
apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent
are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as
applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in
straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission,
falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal
financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-
profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly
every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly
amount of money on advertising, a fact that probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s notice.

But despite the attention the for-profit sector has attracted (including congressional hearings), as in
the housing crisis it’s hard to see where the bad apples stop and the barrel begins. For-profits have
quickly tied themselves to traditional powers in education, politics, and media. Just a few examples:
Richard C. Blum, University of California regent (and husband of California Sen. Dianne
Feinstein), is also through his investment firm the majority stakeholder in two of the largest for-
profit colleges. The Washington Post Co. owns Kaplan Higher Education, forcing the company’s
flagship paper to print a steady stream of embarrassing parenthetical disclosures in articles on the
subject of for-profits. Industry leader University of Phoenix has even developed an extensive

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partnership with GOOD magazine, sponsoring an education editor. Thanks to these connections,
billions more in advertising, and nearly $9 million in combined lobbying and campaign
contributions in 2010 alone, for-profits have become the fastest growing sector in American higher
education.

If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when
the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first
two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005.
Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the
majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will
calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than
two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double,
from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back
loans (except by taking on more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

Unlike during the housing crisis, the government’s response to a national wave of defaults that
could pop the higher-ed bubble is already written into law. In the event of foreclosure on a
government-backed loan, the holder submits a request to what’s called a state guaranty agency,
which then submits a claim to the feds. The federal disbursement rate is tied to the guaranty
agency’s fiscal year default rate: for loans issued after October 1998, if the rate exceeds 5 percent,
the disbursement drops to 85 percent of principal and interest accrued; if the rate exceeds 9
percent, the disbursement falls to 75 percent. But the guaranty agency rates are computed in such a
way that they do not reflect the rate of default as students experience it; of all the guaranty
agencies applying for federal reimbursement last year, none hit the 5 percent trigger rate.

With all of these protections in place, SLABS are a better investment than most housing-backed
securities ever were. The advantage of a preemptive bailout is that it can make itself unnecessary: if
investors know they’re insulated from risk, there’s less reason for them to get skittish if the
securities dip, and a much lower chance of a speculative collapse. The worst-case scenario seems to
involve the federal government paying for students to go to college, and aside from the enrichment
of the parasitic private lenders and speculators, this might not look too bad if you believe in big
government, free education, or even Keynesian fiscal stimulus. But until now, we have only
examined one side of the exchange. When students agree to take out a loan, the fairness of the deal
is premised on the value for the student of their borrowed dollars. If an 18-year-old takes out
$200,000 in loans, he or she better be not only getting the full value, but investing it well too.

Higher education seems an unlikely site for this kind of speculative bubble. While housing prices
are based on what competing buyers are willing to pay, postsecondary education’s price is
supposedly linked to its costs (with the exception of the for-profits). But the rapid growth in
tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or

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the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t
stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly? “Because
they can” answers this question for home-sellers out to get the biggest return on their investments,
or for-profits out to grab as much Pell Grant money as possible, but it seems an awfully cynical
answer when it comes to nonprofit education.
First, where the money hasn’t gone: instruction. As Marc Bousquet, a leading researcher into the
changing structures of higher education, wrote in How The University Works (2008):
If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the
four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and
service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure
system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has
started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never
publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job
because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the
delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working
at your institution three years from now.

This is not an improvement; fewer than forty years ago, when the explosive growth in tuition
began, these proportions were reversed. Highly represented among the new precarious teachers are
graduate students; with so much available debt, universities can force graduate student workers to
scrape by on sub-minimum-wage, making them a great source of cheap instructional labor. Fewer
tenure-track jobs mean that recent PhDs, overwhelmed with debt, have no choice but to accept
insecure adjunct positions with wages kept down by the new crop of graduate student-workers.
Rather than producing a better-trained, more professional teaching corps, increased tuition and
debt have enabled the opposite.

If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted
of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become
increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly,
administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function
more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few
entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-
revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at
nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure
salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And
while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has
skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of
Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American
four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available

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funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over
the past fifteen years.

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition
dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of
the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private
colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly
even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in
Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize
the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win
the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate
universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have
to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students
paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product. And if a
humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to
haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces
cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the
message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major.

When President Obama spoke in the State of the Union of the need to send more Americans to
college, it was in the context of economic competition with China, phrased as if we ought to
produce graduates like steel. As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students
pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the
academy. Parents understandably worried about their children make sure they never forget about
the importance of an attractive résumé. It was easier for students to believe a college education was
priceless when it wasn’t bought and sold from every angle.

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student
services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most
students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one
more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

We know the consequences of default for lenders, investors, and their backers at the Treasury, but
what of the defaulters? Homeowners who found themselves with negative equity (owing more on
their houses than the houses were worth) could always walk away. Students aren’t as lucky:
graduates can’t ditch their degrees, even if they borrowed more money than their accredited labor
power can command on the market. Americans overwhelmed with normal consumer debt (like
credit card debt) have the option of bankruptcy, and although it’s an arduous and credit-score-
killing process, not having ready access to thousands in pre-approved cash is not always such a bad
thing. But students don’t have that option either. Before 2005, students could use bankruptcy to

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escape education loans that weren’t provided directly by the federal government, but the
facetiously named “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act” extended non-
dischargeability to all education loans, even credit cards used to pay school bills.

Today, student debt is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through
bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social
security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty
agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover
from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a
financial incentive to dog former students to the grave.

When the housing bubble collapsed, the results (relatively good for most investors, bad for the
government, worse for homeowners) were predictable but not foreordained. With the student-loan
bubble, the resolution is much the same, and it’s decided in advance.

In addition to the billions colleges have spent on advertising, sports programs, campus aesthetics,
and marketable luxuries, they’ve benefited from a public discourse that depicts higher education as
an unmitigated social good. Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a
panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales
about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong
satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these
narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete
with loan forms.

The revolution that could change the way your


child is taught8
By Doug Lemov

The video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are
watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey.
Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-
old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. “What might a character be
feeling in a story?” she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-
tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she
moves smartly around her classroom.
8
Taken from The Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/11/revolution-changing-
way-your-child-taught

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On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of
teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov’s book,
Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of
thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of
Hinton’s lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and
pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third
time.
Here is what Lemov sees in the video: he sees Hinton placing herself at the vantage points
from which she can best scan the faces of her pupils (“hotspots”). He sees that after she first
asks a question, hands that spring up immediately go back down again, in response to an
almost imperceptible gesture from Hinton, to give the other children more time to think
(“wait time”). He sees her repeat the question so that this pause in the conversation doesn’t
slow its rhythm.
He sees Hinton constantly changing the angle of her gaze to check that every pupil is paying
attention to whoever in the room is speaking, and silencing anyone who is not doing so with a
subtle wave of her hand. He sees her use similar gestures to gently but effectively recall errant
students into line without interrupting her own flow or that of the student speaking at the
time (“non-verbal corrections”). He sees Hinton venture away from the hotspots to move
down the sides of the class, letting her students know, with her movement, that there is always
a chance she will be beside their desk in the next few seconds. He sees that in one particular
instance she moves toward a particular student while making it look to the rest of the class as
if she is simply changing her perspective, so that she can correct his behaviour without
embarrassing him – and he sees that she does so with the grace of an elite tennis player
delivering a disguised drop shot.
He sees that Hinton is smiling throughout, beaming warmth to her class, and varying the
volume of her voice to convey enthusiasm for her topic. He sees that children from one of the
poorest neighbourhoods in America – children who elsewhere might have been tacitly
expected to misbehave, or to withhold their attention from a class on English literature – are
utterly captivated, eager to pitch in with their own thoughts, avid for learning. He sees, finally,
that behind this self-effacing display of apparently effortless mastery there are thousands of
hours of deliberate, carefully considered practise.
Lemov never considered himself a brilliant teacher. When he taught at a school in a poor
neighbourhood of Boston, he enjoyed training days, and left them eager to apply what he had
learned in planning the next day’s lessons. Then the next day arrived, and his plan collapsed:
instead of inspiring kids with his enthusiasm for English or history, he spent his time
imploring them to be quiet when he was talking and to stop throwing pens.
In the staffroom one day, a more experienced colleague gave him a piece of advice. “When you
want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you’re walking around passing out papers it
looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you’re doing.” This
was a revelation.
It was exactly the kind of guidance – clear, practical, precise – that Lemov had been missing.
And it worked.
Lemov, who has an MBA from Harvard, likes precision, and he likes to break a problem down
into its component parts before putting together an answer. That was how he set about solving
the problem of becoming a better teacher, and it is also how he thinks about the problem that

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preoccupies him more than any other: closing the “achievement gap” between poor students
and everyone else. In fact he has come to see the two problems as inextricably linked.
After leaving the school in Boston, Lemov worked for a time as a consultant to failing schools.
He came to realise that although he might be able to help them implement better assessment
systems, or to use technology more effectively, nothing would work unless the teachers got
better at helping the children learn. How could he help with that?
Characteristically, he started with a spreadsheet. Cross-referencing test scores and
demographics, he identified which schools were achieving the most exceptional results with
poor students. Then he visited the classrooms of the best teachers in those schools with a
videographer. He watched and rewatched the lessons he recorded, like a football coach
studying the tape of a game, analysing in minute detail what these outstanding teachers were
doing. He gave names to the techniques he saw them use. Then he circulated his notes to the
teachers he worked with.
Those teachers passed them on to teachers they knew, who passed them on in turn, until the
document, known at that time only as “the taxonomy”, took on a samizdat life of its own.
Lemov realised how far word of it had spread when a teacher from California got in touch to
request a copy. In 2010, he was persuaded to turn his notes into a book, which became a
surprise best-seller in education circles. In its latest edition, Teach Like a Champion lists “62
techniques that put students on the path to college”. Lemov says that some of the advice in the
book is probably wrong, and he does not pretend it is comprehensive. But it has become the
key text of an incipient transformation of teaching that has little to do with government edict
or official policy.
Hardly anything matters more than education, yet when we talk about education we spend a
lot of time arguing over things that do not matter very much. Class sizes, uniforms,
curriculum design, which politician runs the Department for Education – none of our
favourite flashpoints make a lot of difference to whether children do well at school. For all that
parents worry over which school to send their children to, more important is who teaches
them when they get there. Professor John Hattie, of the University of Melbourne, has
undertaken a rigorous assessment of the thousands of empirical studies that have been
carried out on educational achievement. He concluded that, other than the raw cognitive
ability of the child herself, only one variable really counts: “What teachers do, know and care
about.”
The evidence suggests that a child at a bad school taught by a good teacher is better off than
one with a bad teacher at a good school. The benefits of having been in the class of a good
teacher cascade down the years; the same is true of the penalty for having had a bad teacher.
Such effects do not fall evenly upon the population: the children who gain most from good
teachers are those from disadvantaged homes in which parental time, money and books are in
short supply. Being in the classroom of a great teacher is the best hope these children have of
catching up with their more fortunate peers.
In 1992, an economist called Eric Hanushek reached a remarkable conclusion by analysing
decades of data on teacher effectiveness: a student in the class of a very ineffective teacher –
one ranked in the bottom 5% – will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one
school year, whereas if she was in the class of a very effective teacher – in the top 5% – she
would learn a year and a half’s worth of material. In other words, the difference between a
good and a bad teacher is worth a whole year.

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“A child at a bad school taught by a good teacher is better off than one with a bad teacher at
a good school”
Hanushek’s proposed solution to the question of how to raise educational standards was
brutally simple: fire the worst 10% of teachers and replace them with better ones. Education
reformers in America used his findings to argue that schools should have more power to sack
under-performing teachers and attract better ones with higher salaries. This “accountability”
movement, backed by politicians such as Barack Obama and philanthropists including Bill
Gates, has been closely associated with the rise of charter schools in the US and academies in
Britain. But it has turned out to be a lot harder than reformers initially envisaged to raise
standards. Performance pay has had mixed results, and it has proven difficult to
systematically separate good and bad teachers. The reformers can point to some striking
successes, but overall, children at charter schools and academies are no more likely to do well
than children at run-of-the-mill schools.
Meanwhile, teaching unions on both sides of the Atlantic have stubbornly resisted attempts to
differentiate between effective and ineffective teachers – and they are quick to level
accusations of “teacher-bashing” at those who attempt to do so. This is understandable.
Politicians can take an unholy glee in berating “bad teachers”, and you do not have to be
paranoid to see such rhetoric as a thinly disguised attack on the whole profession. On the
other hand, given that teaching is such a demanding and complex job, it would be bizarre if
there was not a wide gap between the best performers and the worst.
Globalisation has increased the pressure on education systems to improve, but the pressure is
now coming from the bottom up too. The rise of charter schools and academies has
precipitated a Cambrian explosion of new ideas and innovations, stimulating a debate about
methodology led by teachers themselves. The internet has provided platforms for teachers to
talk to other teachers, beyond their own schools and outside official oversight. On social
media, teachers are sharing ideas, evidence and techniques, organising conferences on
education research, and arguing about the most effective way to teach reading or maths.
After years of debate among academics and politicians over how to raise teacher standards,
the problem is being solved by the practitioners. And it has become apparent that the noisy
argument over “bad teachers” was drowning out a much better question: how do you turn a
bad teacher into a good one?
And what makes a good teacher good?
In 2010, the Los Angeles Times triggered a minor earthquake in a city familiar with such
events. The Los Angeles school district – the second largest in the United States – had
collected detailed data on the performance of its roughly 6,000 teachers, that it had not
released. The newspaper used a freedom of information request to get its hands on this
database, and after conducting an analysis, published a list of all the teachers in Los Angeles,
ranked by effectiveness. It turned out that the very best teachers were getting results that were
not only much better than low-ranked teachers, but twice as good as good teachers. At the
very top of the list was a woman called Zenaida Tan.
Tan taught at Morningside Elementary, a decent if unremarkable school with an intake of
mainly poor students, many of whom struggled with English. Year after year, students were
entering Tan’s class with below-average ability in maths and English, and leaving it with
above-average scores. You might imagine that before the Los Angeles Times published its
rankings, Tan would have already been celebrated for her ability by her peers – that her

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brilliance would be well-known to fellow teachers eager to learn her secrets. You would be
wrong on all counts.
When the Los Angeles Times sent a correspondent to interview Tan, they found her quietly
carrying out her work, unheralded except by those who had taken her class and knew what a
difference it had made to their lives. “Nobody tells me that I’m a strong teacher,” Tan told the
reporter. She guessed that her colleagues thought her “strict, even mean”. On a recent
evaluation, her headmaster noted she had been late to pick up her students from recess three
times. It was as if Lionel Messi’s teammates considered him a useful midfielder who needed to
work on his tackling.
There is entrenched resistance, in the education establishment, to singling out individuals,
even to praise or emulate them. The only options for Tan’s evaluation were “meets standard
performance” and “below standard performance”. But if Tan and others like her go unnoticed
it is also because they do not look the part. Ask someone to describe a great teacher, and they
are likely to conjure up someone like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society: eccentric,
flamboyant, prone to leaping on to desks. When we see a teacher effortlessly commanding her
class’s attention, our instinct is to put it down to some quality of their personality – great
teachers, it is said, just have something. They are possessed of an innate ability to inspire.
Sam Freedman, the head of research at Teach First, which places high-achieving graduates
into schools with disadvantaged intakes, said that even among teachers, there is hostility to
the notion that what they do can be analysed and replicated: “The idea of learning heuristics
seems bad because you’re not discovering your inner teacher.” But the myth of the magical
teacher subtly undermines the status of teaching, by obscuring the extraordinary skill
required to perform the job to a high level. It also implies that great teaching cannot be
taught.
At training college, budding teachers learn theories of child development and are told about
the importance of concepts such as “feedback” and “high expectations”. But they get
surprisingly little help with actual teaching. Imagine being told you need to show high
expectations of your students. “It’s like telling a kid to get better GCSEs,” Jenny Thompson, a
teacher at Dixons Trinity Academy in Bradford, told me. The reason teachers respond so
enthusiastically to Doug Lemov’s ideas is that he is right there with them at the front of the
class.
Tall and wide-chested, Lemov is built like an American football player. In fact, his favourite
sport is soccer, which he played at college in upstate New York. His coaches there did not
spend much time discussing the game in the abstract. Instead, they told him to “narrow the
angle” or “close the space”. In his books and workshops, Lemov talks about what pace to move
around the classroom, what language to use when praising a student, how to adjust the angle
of your head to let students know you’re looking at them. Teaching, he says, is “a performance
profession”.
Sports coaches know that what looks effortlessly achieved, like the way Roger Federer hits a
backhand, is in fact the product of countless hours of practice and analysis. Faced with a
problem – a weakness in their game – they break it down into parts and work on the
execution of each one before putting it all back together. Successful sportspeople have what
the psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset” – the belief that talent is intelligently
applied effort in disguise. The ones who understand this principle best are those born without
the supreme talent of a Federer – the ones who have had to strive for every millimetre of
improvement.

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The best teachers do not necessarily understand how teaching works, because their own
technique is invisible to them; sports psychologists call this “expert-induced amnesia”. When
the Los Angeles Times asked some of the teachers who topped their list what made them so
effective, one replied that great teachers simply love their students and love their job: “You
can’t bottle that, and you can’t teach it.”
At Lemov’s workshop, the teachers rehearsed asking questions and taking answers – not
something I had imagined would require practice. A few minutes earlier, Lemov had cited
research that found the average time a teacher leaves between question and answer is 1.5
seconds. That is not enough, he said. The teachers, all of whom had several years of
experience, agreed. As they discussed why, I began to understand something about how
absurdly difficult the job is, and the fundamental reason for its difficulty: thinking is invisible.
Imagine you’re a teacher, standing in front of your class. You ask a question: “What was the
immediate cause of the first world war?” Three hands go up immediately. You decide which
one to pick. “OK, Leon.” Leon gives the answer you taught last week: the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Things are going well, aren’t they? But what if there is a child in the third row who was on her
way to getting the answer right but gives up the moment she sees Leon raise his hand? What if
there is another student, in the back row, who does not even bother thinking any more
because he knows Leon always gets there first?
Lemov played a clip of a teacher called Maggie Johnson. Johnson asks her class: “What does
Atticus say about mockingbirds?” After leaving a gap of several seconds, she takes an answer.
Lemov played the clip again and this time, with the help of the teachers in the room, he
dissected Johnson’s technique – showing how she used “wait time” to enact high expectations
and make everyone in her class feel they might have an answer worth sharing. Before she has
even finished asking the question, one boy has his hand up. Johnson waits. Two more hands
go up. Johnson walks slowly across the front of the classroom, smiling, her gaze criss-crossing
the class, as more and more hands spring up. Her movement, and her smile, dissipates any
tension before it arises, either in herself or her students.
Another lesson that Lemov learned from his football days was that if he really wanted to
improve, playing in matches was not enough. He needed to practice techniques and routines,
preferably with teammates. Teachers like Maggie Johnson have honed their skills outside the
classroom, in countless coffee-fuelled staffroom sessions with colleagues. This means they are
able to execute classroom routines with the minimum of conscious effort, leaving them free to
concentrate on the headspinning complexities of tracking which child has understood what,
and who needs what kind of help.
The rhetoric of “bad teachers” and “good teachers” not only reinforces the perception that
teaching ability is a gift someone either has or does not have, it also undermines the kind of
informal collaboration Lemov advocates (a problem with linking pay to performance is that it
incentivises teachers not to help each other improve). Indeed, the set-up of most schools is
inimical to collaboration. In a hangover from the days when monks taught in cells, the most
important work in a traditional school is done behind closed doors, by individuals separated
from their peers (educationalists call it the “egg crate model”). As a consequence, teachers
have never developed a shared vocabulary for discussing their work in detail. One reason they
enthuse over Teach Like a Champion is that it offers one. A teacher at the workshop told me:
“I can say to my colleagues, ‘Have you tried cold calling? And they immediately understand
what I mean. That makes a huge difference.”

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Lemov played the video of Maggie Johnson a third time, and paused it about two-thirds of the
way through. He pointed to a girl in the front row, slight and bespectacled, with her hair in
neat plaits. At a point when most of the class have their hands in the air, hers is still down.
Her teacher waits. The girl stares intently at her notes. Her hand creeps up to her neck, and
goes down again. Her teacher is still waiting. The girl puts her hand up, this time with
conviction, and this time she holds it there.
Lemov is wary of big ideas and educational philosophies. Most of the tools in Teach Like a
Champion, he says, remain beneath the notice of theorists of education. But he does have a
philosophy, even if he wouldn’t call it that. One of its tenets is that teachers need to maximise
the amount of thinking and learning going on in their classroom at any one time, and to
ensure that this effort is widely distributed.
Take “cold calling”. Instead of asking a question of the class and then picking a hand, you call
on a student regardless of whether they have raised their hand. It sounds too simple to be
significant. But, to use one of Lemov’s favourite phrases, cold calling is “a small change that
cascades”. Cold calling enables the teacher to check on the level of learning of any student in
the class; it keeps the pace of the lesson high, because the teacher no longer has to wait for
volunteers; it makes the teacher look more authoritative. Crucially, it increases the amount of
thinking going on in the classroom at any one time because everyone knows the next question
might be for them.
Another of Lemov’s tenets is that mundane routines can have magical effects. He often opens
his sessions by showing a clip of a teacher called Doug McCurry at Amistad Academy in New
Haven, Connecticut – another school that achieves exceptional results with underprivileged
students. McCurry is instructing his pupils, on their first day at school, on how to pass out
papers. Though it happens several times every hour of teaching, it is not the kind of thing you
get taught at training college.
McCurry takes a minute to explain how he wants it done (pass across rows, start on his
command, only the person passing gets out of his or her seat). Then he has his students
practice it while he times them with a stopwatch. “Ten seconds. Pretty good. Let’s see if we can
get them back out in eight.” When Lemov plays this clip, many teachers are sceptical. Why is
McCurry focusing on this menial task? Is he trying to turn his students into automatons?
Quite the opposite, says Lemov. Assume that the average class passes papers out or back 20
times a day, and that they take 80 seconds to do it. If McCurry’s students accomplish this task
in 20 seconds, they will save 20 minutes a day. The school has increased its most precious
asset – teaching time – by 4%, without any spending any more money.
In case that sounds like arid managerialism, consider what it means in practice: 20 minutes
not spent passing papers back and forth is 20 minutes that a child who grew up in a home
with no books can spend learning about how Charles Dickens uses imagery; 20 minutes not
shuffling paper is 20 minutes that a girl who believes she is hopelessly bad at maths can be
taught how to calculate the area of a circle. Over a school year, those minutes add up to eight
school days: time for a whole unit on 20th-century poetry or coordinate geometry; time
enough to get hooked on the life-expanding pleasures of learning difficult things.
Gareth Cook, a slender young man with feline eyes, is watching himself, on a laptop screen,
address a group of 12-year-old boys sitting on artificial grass, clutching footballs. In a crisply
delivered speech, Cook, a former school teacher, explains to the children how to react when
your team loses possession. When the video is paused, Cook sits back and says, “Too much

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Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

talking.” Next to him, Martin Diggle nods, pointing to a time code under the picture: “29
minutes of talking in a 90 minute session.”
Cook is a junior coach at the academy of Liverpool Football Club. Diggle is employed by the
Football Association to mentor club coaches, part of the FA’s effort to raise the technical
standards of the national game. Staff at top clubs do not generally relish being told how to do
their job by the sport’s governing body, but Diggle, an experienced coach possessed of a
reassuring manner, is listened to. “My job isn’t to tell them how to coach,” he told me. “My job
is to help them think about what they’re doing.”
Earlier in the day I watched Nick Marshall, the academy’s head of operations, deliver an
appraisal to another young coach. Topics included the importance of attending to the
individual as well as the group, and how to make children want to follow rules rather than feel
they have to. “As coaches, we tend to get obsessed by tactics,” Marshall told me afterwards.
“But instead of studying tactical diagrams until 3am, why aren’t we reading Carol Dweck, or
the neuroscience of the teenage brain?”
Just as sports coaches are becoming polymaths, teachers are adopting coaching’s focus on
constant, self-reflective improvement. Traditionally, teachers haven’t necessarily been
expected to get better at teaching once they have mastered the basics of the job. According to
Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of London’s
Institute of Education, and a former teacher, the evidence suggests that most new teachers
improve for the first two to three years of their career, as they learn how to manage classroom
behaviour, and then stop improving. “People make claims about having 20 years’ experience,”
Wiliam told me, “but they really just have one year’s experience repeated 20 times.”

“People make claims about having 20 years’ experience, but they really just have one year’s
experience repeated 20 times”
For years, British football coaching was stymied by a macho disdain for new ideas imported
from the European clubs that regularly beat them in competition. In education, when Asian
countries top international tables of achievement, we make derisory noises about hothousing.
But the reason Shanghai’s schools are recognised as among the best in the world is because
their teachers never stop thinking about how to get better at teaching. When Marc Tucker, the
president of NCEE, an American education thinktank, went to Shanghai, he discovered a
system designed to elicit continual improvement. Staff meet once a week by grade and subject,
and break into teams to work on problems of their choice – at one school, the teachers had
rearranged their floor plan so that teachers from the same grade level shared an office. Every
young teacher has an older mentor, of proven achievement, assigned to them. The Shanghai
system, Tucker said, revolves around the premise that “not only is it possible for you to get
better, it is your job to get better and it never ends”.
Nick Marshall reminded me that there have always been forward-thinking football coaches in
this country. But they are now more likely to find a home that makes the most of their talents,
and to choose an employer on that basis. Similarly, ambitious teachers now want to work for a
school that helps them improve, rather than one where they are so busy struggling to impose
their will on the classroom that they cannot develop their skills. “You’d be amazed,” Sam
Freedman told me, “at how many schools there are where a teacher can discipline a child by
sending him out of the room, only for the deputy head to pass by a few minutes later and send
him back in.” At successful schools, everyone abides by the same rules, while at the same time

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

understanding that the rules are a means to an end. The best instil a hunger to learn, and not
just in their pupils.
Introducing his workshop for educators, Doug Lemov showed a scatter graph, plotting
achievement in maths, on the horizontal axis, against socioeconomic status on the vertical
axis. Each dot represented a school in America. The dots clustered together into fuzzy but
unmistakable line running from top-left to bottom-right: the poorer you are, the less likely
you are to achieve the kind of education that might enable you to stop being poor. The same
applies here: in England, if you are a high-achieving 11-year-old from a poor family, you are
only 30% as likely to attend university as your richer peers.
After inviting us to consider anew the enormity of this grim truth, Lemov pointed to some
stray dots that had escaped from the main cluster to find their own space. In these schools,
children from poor neighbourhoods were doing as well or better than middle-class peers. If
they can do it, he said, why can’t any school? And why isn’t every other school in the land
scrabbling to find out what these schools are doing right, so that they can copy it?
Almost the first thing Jenny Thompson does when I arrive at her school on a freezing Monday
morning is to take me outside. “Come and stand on the step with me,” she says, “This is what I
do every morning.” Thompson, 34, is senior vice principal at Dixons Trinity Academy, which
Sam Freedman told me was the best school he had visited in England. It’s early – before 8am
– and night still lingers; I wonder if I should go back and get my coat. But now here come the
children, some arriving alone, some in twos or threes, some grinning, some with heads down.
Thompson has a word for everyone. “How are you this morning, Ahmed? Did you sleep OK,
Shazia? Ben, have you recovered?”
Academies may not, on average, be better than regular schools, but the best ones are doing
astonishing things. Shortly after he started videoing great teachers, Lemov co-founded a chain
of charter schools. Uncommon Schools aims to help children born into poverty get to
university. Its 40 or so schools, scattered across north-eastern cities such as Boston and New
York, serve the urban poor, which means, for the most part, African-Americans. In a reversal
of national norms, its black students outperform local white students in tests of maths and
reading, and consistently beat state averages, often dramatically so. Lemov’s workshop in
London was hosted by All Saints Academy, part of the Ark chain, whose schools are achieving
similarly impressive results in underprivileged areas.
Dixons Trinity, which opened in 2012, draws its pupils from one of the most deprived parts of
Bradford, a town yet to regain the prosperity it enjoyed in its industrial heyday. Around half of
the pupils live in the city’s five poorest wards. Many are the children of immigrants from
Pakistan or India, and many do not speak English at home. But its students out-perform the
UK average in English and maths, and the ones who enter Dixons Trinity with the lowest
achievement levels do better than anyone else. This is a source of particular satisfaction to the
school’s principal, Luke Sparkes, who tells me that the school is designed around its most
vulnerable pupils. “If you get it right with them, you get it right with everyone.”
It is 8am now, five minutes before the start of the school day. Children tumble out of parental
cars and run. Thompson reassures them: “It’s OK. You’re not late!” By 8.05 all the children
are inside. It is an earlier start than at most schools, but the children’s punctuality record – at
Dixons Trinity, they keep data on everything – is almost 100%. “The thing is,” Thompson
says, “they want to be here on time.”
Doug Lemov says his techniques work best when the pupils understand when and why they
are being used; they are not intended to be secret weapons. The spirit of transparency

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

permeates Dixons Trinity. When new pupils join they are asked to sign up – literally – to the
school’s values of “hard work, trust and fairness”. After that, “we over-explain everything,”
Thompson says. There is no rule or routine, from being silent in the corridor to lining up in
the playground after lunch, that isn’t painstakingly explained and re-explained to the pupils.
“We have high standards, and that means rules,” Sparkes says. “But we don’t want the kids to
feel they have to kick against them, so they need to feel part of it.”
I watch as Dani Quinn, head of maths, teaches her class how to calculate the area under a
curve. She begins with an explanation of why they are doing the lesson at all, given that they
covered the same material last week: “We know from research in psychology that when your
brain is forced to retrieve something from memory, it sinks in deeper.” When two girls start to
whisper to each other as Quinn is talking, she silences them with a swift but detailed
explanation of why she is doing so: “It means the others can’t hear me properly, which
prevents them learning, which isn’t fair on them and damages the trust we have in each other.
OK, so how do we calculate this value?”
Sparkes, a self-possessed 35-year-old from Liverpool, was at pains to stress that most of the
school’s practices are adopted from other good schools. “Very little of it is new,” he told me, as
we stood in the playground and watched two teachers line up the entire school as a post-lunch
reset. “The only difference is, we do what we say.” At Dixons Trinity, there is no single
innovation or magical personality around which everything revolves, just a shared and
relentless attention to better execution. That can make it a hard place to work. “You need a
self-critical disposition to work here,” said Thompson. On the other hand, there is pleasure to
be found in obsessing over the details of an inexhaustibly interesting job. Dani Quinn
describes herself as a “pedagogy geek”.
On a table in Sparkes’s office are copies of Teach Like a Champion. “We buy it for every
teacher,” he told me. At least two mornings a week, the teachers get together in a group or in
paired sessions between younger and more experienced teachers. When I visited, they were
focused on honing two of Lemov’s techniques: “no opt out” – insisting, when a child gives an
answer, that she repeat it until it is 100% correct, and “positive framing” – making critical
feedback encouraging. Small things, said Sparkes, but teaching is complex, and in the
classroom, “you need to have this stuff down so that you can think”. Not to mention that for
pedagogy geeks, this is fun.
What the teachers at Dixons Trinity tell the children, they apply to themselves: that it is vital
to push yourself, that the road to mastery leads through hard work, that you should never stop
trying to get better. Somehow, though, these imperatives do not sound like strictures. The
school runs on rules, but it is animated by something else. In the videos that Doug Lemov
shows, what impresses you is the teaching, but what moves you is the palpable joy that the
students are taking in being taught. In the days after my trip to Dixons Trinity, what stayed
with me was the image of Jenny Thompson, radiating bonhomie into the chill Yorkshire air,
children rushing up the steps to school.
Before I leave, I ask Thompson where she finds the will to get out of bed at 5am every day; to
work weekends and evenings; to endure the punishing constraint of thinking self-critically
about everything she does. At least in sport or business, I suggest, there are prizes. “Oh, but I
think it’s easier for us to get motivated,” Thompson says, noting that she was still paid less
than the salary she was offered to join Goldman Sachs as a graduate trainee. She laughs. “I
wouldn’t work this hard if I was at a private school.”

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

Condoms in Schools9
Should public schools actively promote the use of condoms as a way to prevent pregnancy,
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and the proliferation of HIV infection? While
scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the contention that condoms, when properly used,
reduce the incidence of these problems, numerous critics fear that advocating condom use would
encourage children to become sexually active earlier than they otherwise would. In particular,
more conservative religious traditions, as well as religious groups that oppose contraception,
oppose the distribution of condoms in schools out of fear that such access might undermine basic
religious values in their children.
Claims in favor and against….

➢ Providing condoms to students is a wise investment of government funds. World


governments spend a fortune annually addressing the public health problems created by
risky sexual behavior. The cost of raising the many children created through unintended
pregnancies over a lifetime can be astronomical. The cost of treating a patient with HIV
can be enormous.

➢ The effectiveness of condoms is grossly exaggerated. If not used properly, condoms can be
highly ineffective. Young people are more likely to use condoms incorrectly, due to lack of
experience or because they are drunk. Moreover, the temptation to have sex without a
condom may be significant where the supply of condoms is not plentiful.

➢ Providing condoms to students in public schools will reduce the incidence of underage
pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

➢ Taxpayers should not have to support programs that they find morally objectionable, even
if there seem to be pragmatic justifications for the action. Moreover, if overall sexual
activity increases as the result of encouraging “safer sex,” the number of people

9
Trapp, Robert. The Debatabase Book. New York: International Debate Education Association, 2009.

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

occasionally engaging in risky behavior will increase, and the risk of these problems
spreading will increase with it.

➢ Providing students with condoms actually encourages beginning sexual activity earlier.

➢ Providing condoms to students is the pragmatic thing to do. Educators need not endorse
sexual activity, but they can encourage students to make wise choices if they decide to
have sex. Such an approach is sensible because it accepts the inevitability that some young
people, regardless of the strength of an abstinence message, will still have sex.

➢ Presenting condoms to students in public schools is offensive to people from a variety of


religions who oppose birth control and sex outside of marriage.

➢ Condom distribution encourages the responsibility of men and increases choices for
women. It can also establish condom use as the norm, not something that women
continually have to negotiate, often from a position of weakness.

➢ Condoms are one of the most effective and cost-effective means of protecting against
sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, and pregnancy.

HOMESCHOOLING

Over one million children in the United States currently learn at home. Homeschooling is
increasing in popularity, with a growth rate of 7% to 15% annually. Parents choose homeschooling for
four reasons: dissatisfaction with the public schools, concern about academic excellence, the wish to
build stronger family bonds, and the desire to freely impart religious values. Research has shown that
homeschooled children do well on standardized tests and are welcome at even highly competitive
colleges. As adults, they have a reputation for being self-directed learners and reliable employees. Yet
traditional educators have serious concerns, among them fear that the academic quality of

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Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

homeschooling may be substandard and that homeschooled children lose the benefits of interacting
with their peers.

PROS
Parents are responsible for ensuring that their children receive the best education possible. They
do not have to surrender that responsibility to the state; if they think it best, they have the right to
educate their children at home. Studies have shown that homeschooling can be as effective as
traditional education. If some homeschooling has failed, so has state education. Moreover, this is a
debate about who has the greater right to guide a child— the state or the parents. We stand firmly on
the side of the parents; given the responsibilities inherent in raising a child, parents should have the
freedom to choice.
CONS
This debate should focus on how best to educate our children, not on parental rights. With their
resources, experience, and expertise, traditional schools can do this best. High-minded arguments
about parental rights are all well and good, but a child’s future is at stake. You cannot make up for bad
schooling, and no one has developed a reliable method for ensuring the quality of homeschooling.
This debate is therefore not about a right and not about a choice—parents have no right to choose to
fail their child in her or his education.

PROS
Parents are entitled to make judgments about the quality of public schools. If they think these schools
are failing, why shouldn’t they be allowed to make the considerable sacrifice that becoming a “home
teacher” constitutes?

CONS
Hundreds of educational researchers and experts with many years of experience labor to ensure that
schools employ the best pedagogical methods. How presumptuous of parents to think that they know
better. Public schools may not be perfect, but they will only get worse as those who can afford to opt
to educate at home.

PROS

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Saying that homeschooling necessarily will be of poor quality is ridiculous. Many parents will be
fantastic teachers. Furthermore, it’s not as if learning occurs in a vacuum simply because education
occurs in the home. In the United States, a network of homeschool support groups and businesses
provides expertise on curriculum subjects and teaching methods. The Internet makes all this possible
in a way previously unattainable and allows every home to have better research facilities than any
school library had 10 years ago.
CONS
It’s a pretty good bet that parents won’t be as good as a teacher, unless they are a member of that
profession. Furthermore, even if parents excel in one area, will they cover all the things a school
does? Support groups can’t make a parent into a teacher, any more than a book on engineering
makes one an engineer.
PROS
Homes beat schools on two significant fronts: facilities and an atmosphere that encourages learning.
The needs of one or a very small number of students are the focus of the entire educative process.
Parents often find that local and woefully ill-equipped public schools cannot address their child’s
specific needs or adapt to a child’s learning style. The home also lacks the many distractions found in
schools: peer pressure, social stigma attached to achievement, bullying, show-offs, general
rowdiness.
CONS
Schools beat homes on the two fronts the affirmative has mentioned. For example, homes are very
unlikely to have extensive science laboratories. Also, having a parent ask a young child to switch from
“learning mode” to “play mode” in the same environment must be very confusing. For the older child,
homeschooling gives ample opportunities for abuse—for pushing activities they enjoy instead of a
lesson or manipulating the parent to slack off “just this once.” Schools are for learning—that’s their
essence, their function. The home is an altogether more complex environment, ill-suited to instruction.

School Vouchers
Over the past decades, Americans have been increasingly concerned about the quality of public
education, particularly in inner-city neighborhoods, where many public schools are failing. One of the
most controversial suggestions for improving education for all children is to establish school voucher
programs. Although the specifics of these programs vary with locality, all would distribute monetary
vouchers to parents who could then use them to help pay the cost of private, including parochial

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(religious), schools. Critics fear that vouchers would further damage public schools and argue that
they subvert the separation of church and state. Supporters say they will help the children most in
need.
PROS
The current public education system is failing countless students, particularly in inner-city
neighborhoods. In an era where education is the key to success, these children are not being provided
with the chance to develop the skills necessary to compete in the modern world. Vouchers give poor
parents the ability to send their children to better schools. These children should not be sacrificed
while we wait for public school reform.
CONS
The American public education system has been central to American democracy. It has provided
education for all children regardless of their ethnic background, their religion, their academic talents, or
their ability to pay. It has helped millions of immigrants assimilate and provided the civic education
necessary for future citizens to understand American values. Establishing a voucher system is saying
that we are giving up on public education. Instead of giving up, we should put our efforts into reforming
the system.
PROS
The competition for students will force all schools to improve. They will have to use their
resources to educate their students rather than squander them on bureaucracies as many do today.
Eventually, the unsalvageable schools will close and the others will grow stronger, producing an
overall better learning environment. The market will regulate the education produced.
CONS
The competition for students would destroy inner-city public schools. Much of their student body
would flee to “better” private schools, leaving inner-city schools with little to no funding. Most states’
funding of public schools is determined by number of students enrolled. If enrollment lags, then the
school is not as well funded as it was the previous year. If enrollment booms, then funding increases.
Thus, even if urban schools are motivated to improve they will lack the resources to do so.
PROS
The money would help some families, and that is worth the risks. Not all students in
nonperforming schools will be able to attend a private school. However, after the students who can
afford such an opportunity leave nonperforming schools, more resources will be available at those
nonperforming schools to educate the remaining students. Private schools would have no reason to
change admission standards or tuition, nor is there reason to think that a great swell in private school
enrollment would result.

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Depto. de Lenguas Modernas
Comunicación Avanzada II
Prof. M.A. Carlos Machado

CONS
The government vouchers are not monetarily substantial enough to give true financial aid to
students. They are not large enough to help poor students go to private schools. The vouchers make
private education more affordable for people who could already afford it. In addition, private schools
may not be willing to accept all students with vouchers. They could always raise tuition or standards
for admission, neutralizing any impact vouchers would have.

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