Just to clarify, since a number of people wrote to me to defend it, I should say that I too love the essay.
Indeed, it is a sacred form. Somewhere Susan Sontag talks of the years it takes to write a good one. I agree.
Rich K. wrote to say that he learned to write and think by sculpting arguments in essays. Me too.
If I could convince students of this or be a bit more of a hard ass in my insistence about the old ways, maybe my students would, a few decades from now, be grateful.
And, anyway, my goal is to sneak them into the elements of essay writing without ever using that word.
Because beyond how easy it is to have an AI engine write for you now, and beyond my belief that argument means something different in our connected world, the careerism of contemporary education makes "the essay” and “the college essay” the same thing. That is, part of the reason students freeze up or skate over the challenges and rewards of facing a blank page is that they view it in the most transactional and terminal of contexts: This will get me what I want, and then I will be done with it forever.
Better, I think, to avoid that thinking, or push it off as long as possible.
That said, going through some old notebooks I need to get rid of before I travel to Johannesburg, I found something tangential I had scrawled out:
The least interesting question in education is how to use tech in class. There are only two answers:
Not at all
To connect Pakistan to Provo, Paris to Poland.
Otherwise, the use of tech should be to connect money toward equalizing resources in schools so that a school in a refugee camp has a larger cut of global wealth.
Given that the school where I will be teaching already represents an entire continent, I’ll go with the no-tech option . . . unless of course, anyone out there wants a pen pal.
About the offense . . . while I am happy Mr. Hamlin, the football player who had a heart attack early into an NFL game last week, is starting to recover, I struggle with all the “God is powerful” and “prayer works” language that has surrounded this very public incident. It is bad enough when offered proudly and unreflectively by those on YouTube who do not seem to consider all those folks their God does not save, but worse still when it is stated by news reporters as a given. That, I believe, crosses a line.
It is worth pointing out that had someone said to the medics who spent nine minutes doing emergency work on the field or to the many doctors and nurses who have cared for him since: “No no, stand back. We are praying and we know payer works” Mr. Hamlin’s fate would have been sealed.
Nor should we forget that just this kind of thinking, in less dramatic and less stark forms cost many people their lives because, based somehow on God’s sanction, masking was scoffed at by many believers.
If prayer helps those who pray, then wonderful. And not even as cold a rationalist as I may sound like here would say, “don’t bother sending a good thought to Mr. Hamlin or his family.” But offhanded and presumed acceptance of the supernatural has been a blight on the development of science, women’s rights, the rights of gay people, and so on. To forget that in the midst of public spectacle and when it is easiest and most convenient to send “thoughts and prayers” and claim God was at work is a mistake.
Nor should we fail to notice that the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is powered, as ever, by religious sanction. Theocracy has its foot in the door, in other words, when someone who claims to report the news says, “prayer works.” And for all our sakes, believer and non-believer alike, I would have it otherwise.