A
10:002 or 10:003 Unit ~ Christian Science, Euthanasia, and the Rhetoric
of Suffering
|
|
|
Assignments
|
|||||||
|
I strongly suggest assigning the formal writing assignment after the formal speech. I find it works best to use the “mapping” speeches on various controversies as a way to expose students to 5 or 6 controversies (in addition to euthanasia and Christian Science) which they can address and respond to in their essays. This saves the student some of the initial leg work of research to find a topic and also encourages them to pick the topic they find most interesting. Often, students simply choose the first topic they research because they are not sufficiently motivated to keep researching until they find something that really provokes them. But by organizing the class in this manner, students are familiarized with major stances on 5 to 6 major controversies, and are in a better position to find a debate they really have something personal to contribute to. This also gives them a vested interest in paying adequate, sincere attention to their peers’ speeches. 1. Ideally, the formal essay for this unit will be a 5 to 6-page advocacy essay in which a student simultaneously expresses his or her own opinion about the controversy and “maps” that opinion in relation to others. Given the specific purpose of this unit and its focus on underlying values and assumptions, I also strongly encourage you to require that students not only advocate their view in relation to other major opinions, but also consciously address their own underlying assumptions and values about suffering, as well as those underlying the opinions they are “mapping” themselves against. In other words, they should take issue with the controversy by addressing the underlying assumptions about suffering. In other words, their argument about the controversy should, to some extent, try to incorporate an argument about suffering and its instrumental role in the controversy. 2. Additionally, as an informal writing activity early in the unit (or perhaps as a writing diagnostic if you begin the semester with this unit), I find it helpful to assign a shorter 3-page essay which asks students to identify any opinion in their lives (large or small) which changed as a result of any experience with suffering (physical or emotional). For example, they might write about the way their views on abortion shifted from pro-life to pro-choice (or vice versa) after witnessing a friend’s experience with teen pregnancy and social isolation. They might write about how their view of wearing seatbelts was changed by a painful or psychologically-traumatic car accident. They might discuss how their views on smoking changed after watching an uncle die of lung cancer, etc. Not only is this a useful diagnostic early in the semester, but it also can be used as a vehicle to address specific problems or weaknesses in the student’s writing prior to the formal essay for this unit. Moreover, it gives the course material a more personally-relevant feel by encouraging them to make early connections between suffering and its relevance to their own lives. Naturally, this activity should not be substituted for the formal essay since it does not adequately fulfill the controversy-based curriculum requirements. 3. Alternatively, as an informal writing activity (or perhaps a writing diagnostic), you might assign students to write a short essay discussing and mapping the various approaches to suffering in some of the “representations” texts listed above (Lewis, Fishman, Donne, and Morris in particular) or in supplementary readings (perhaps readings of the student’s own choosing), and then map their own values about suffering in relation to these others. This will force students to more closely reflect on their own values about suffering and begin engaging the material which will ultimately help “resuscitate” the controversial nature of the euthanasia and Christian Science debates. |