Eve of the First Paper

My hope is that our class is busy putting the finishing touches on thoughtful and engaged essays. My fear is that students haven’t started yet or are rushing to produce philosophical sound and fury. I haven’t heard much at all from our class, and so I don’t know if that means that all is under control or that students were afraid to ask questions (or still haven’t started). Of course, it is just the first paper, but I want everyone to do well.

 

And it is a daunting task, as hardly anyone in the class has ever written a philosophy paper before. I used to come up with a list for such people of definite things to do and temptations to avoid, but I found that students never read these lists and so I stopped making them. However, the list of temptations is easy to distill into a few key ones. First, there is the temptation to get caught up in an issue that interests the student (whether its personal or general, political or moral) and that keeps them from ever closely engaging the course material (the readings, films, class discussions). The second major temptation is to tackle too much, such as trying to solve the issue of why people suffer … in just three pages. It’s always best to keep things focused on some particular question; doing that will lead you into the deeper issues while keeping you from getting lost. The third major temptation is to try to touch on everything that we’ve done. And the last temptation is to think that one has been thinking hard all along and can just sit down and churn the paper out … only to realize that s/he doesn’t really understand anything.

 

With respect to this last temptation, I should note that if you have been thinking hard all alonge, then there’s nothing wrong with sitting down to write the paper the night before: if you’ve been actively thinking about everything all this time, then you will find that you are ready to write when you sit down. If you understand things and have a sense of what interests you, then you’ll be able to pick and choose from our material as needed. It’s the prior thinking and engagement that is crucial.

 

So those are the temptations to be avoided. It is perhaps also possible to distill the things that should be done. The main suggestion I have is this: I believe that every class period could be treated as a draft for a paper, and so one could simply write about what was done in a particular class (assuming that one can make a claim and provide a supporting reason regarding what was said and done). I approach each class with a particular question or set of questions in mind (along with the topic for the day that is stated in the syllabus), which I attempt to answer in part by looking at the movies and at other thinkers and at small snippets of life. This is, in essence, what you should be doing in your papers. I thus want you to engage these thinkers, and the best way to mull them over is to try to understand some particular thing that they are saying (something you can do by comparing them to each other and by applying them to the films) and what the implications of that are. I’m less worried about you being right and more worried about you being engaged and pushing your thought somewhere new (and doing so in a manner that you can clearly articulate).

 

How do you know if you’ve done this? You have to give it shot. You have to try. It’s a moment of crisis, yes, but until you make the attempt, you won’t know what’s going well and what’s not going well. And it’s only 10% of your grade, and you can rewrite it if you’re desperate (assuming that you actually turned in an actual essay in the first place – you can’t rewrite something that hasn’t already been written).