Since you just received a score on the Kennedy analysis, I’ve included a few resources to help you understand how you can do better on the next one.
- Kennedy Sample Essays (an actual 9)
- Annotated Prompt with my suggestions for annotation. Scroll down for the prompt)
Some general comments:
- Don’t talk about vague references to rhetorical devices, especially in the thesis statement. Unless the passage has a dominant set of devices, just leave that out.
- Kennedy uses really powerful language to condemn the steel companies, to argue they are selfish/destructive. Emphasize that powerful diction.
- The structure of much of the piece is the contrast between the small number of steel company executives and the interests of the whole nation. That constant use of juxtaposition and antithesis is critical to the text.
- A logical structure for diving the piece is: attack on the selfishness of the steel companies, and illustration that they don’t need the increase, and his threat of government action.
- Sharpen topic sentences. They don’t need to be four lines long.
- Combine sentences.
According to the Washington Post, the annual cost for day care in 31 states is higher than the cost of a year of tuition and fees at in-state college:
A report last fall by Child Care Aware America, a national organization of child-care resource and referral agencies, found that the annual cost of day care for an infant exceeds the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states. The biggest gap is in New York, where day care will set you back nearly 15 grand, but in-state college tuition is only $6,500 — a difference of over $8,000. Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado and Oregon also have large gaps, driven primarily by the high cost of day care in those states. At the other end of the spectrum is South Carolina, where in-state tuition is higher than the cost of day care by about $4,000 a year.
According to The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman, Gothenburg, Sweden wants to find out what six hour work days will do for health and the economy:
In 1930, in the throes of the Great Depression, cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg decided to conduct an experiment. He replaced the three daily eight-hour shifts at his plant in Battle Creek, Michigan with four six-hour shifts. The results? The company hired hundreds of new people, production costs plummeted, and employees operated more efficiently, learning to prioritize leisure over work. Vestiges of the system remained in place until 1985.
Now the Swedish city of Gothenburg is considering a similar experiment. The governing coalition has proposed a year-long trial that would divide some municipal workers into a test and control group at the same pay rate, with the test group working six-hour days and the control group working the traditional eight. (It’s unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme.)
From Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom:
“This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me from bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher.”
From Joseph Conrad:
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Our discussion about Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made it clear that the US media doesn’t fully inform the American public. Paul Buchheit, writing at Alternet, gives eight examples of things the media just isn’t telling us, including the fact that many American companies generate most of their revenue in the U.S. and pay more taxes outside it.
Citigroup had 42% of its 2011-13 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) and made $32 billion in profits, but received a U.S. current income tax benefit all three years.
Pfizer had 40% of its 2011-13 revenues and nearly half of its physical assets in the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in U.S. losses to go along with nearly $50 billion in foreign profits.
In 2013 Exxon had about 43% of management, 36% of sales, 40% of long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive oil and gas wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its total income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something called a “theoretical” tax.
