Greetings,
Below is a copy of the out of class essay assignment I distributed and discussed in class on Friday.
Also, be sure to check the blog again over the weekend. I will be posting a sample student essay response for out of class essay #2.
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OUT OF CLASS ESSAY ASSIGNMENT #2
Date assigned: Thursday, June 12th
Rough draft (optional): due no later than Tuesday, June English 20, Summer 2014,
C. Fraga
17 (please submit as a Word document
via e-mail BY 10 pm.)
Final draft due: Thursday, June 19th
Details/Requirements:
1. Follow MLA format for the set-up
of your essay and for your documentation of sources.
2. A minimum of 5 outside sources on
your Works Cited page. If you utilize personal interviews, be sure there are
not MORE interviews than resources from professional and/or academic
publications. The best place to start is the home page of the Sacramento State
Library. By this time in your college career, you should be very familiar with
the AMAZING databases available to you, just a click away!
3. Please, no Wikipedia or encyclopedias
as primary sources
4. No formulaic, 5 paragraph
essay
ESSAY PROMPT:
Among many things, the series Breaking
Bad focuses on the family entity and what happens when something quite
extraordinary occurs—how do various members of the family cope, adjust, and/or
“deal” with the event/situation? (In the case of this series, obviously it is
Walter’s cancer that is the ‘event’).
I am not referring to the everyday
“bumps in the road” that occur for all families. Instead, I am asking you to
consider the family unit when faced with an especially challenging
situation. These situations could include but are not limited to:
death
bipolar
disorder
birth
asberger’s
syndrome
infidelity
complications
from a stroke
serious
injury
alcoholism
dementia
drug abuse
serious
illness
incarceration
divorce
anorexia
unemployment
bulimia
new
employment
spousal abuse
moving to a new home/state/area/country
the return of a war veteran
moving BACK home after initially
moving OUT
suicide
severe depression
‘coming out’ in the LBGT community
adoption
autism
deafness
sexual abuse
Select ONE situation that you are most
interested in exploring. You will conduct research (and possibly personal
interviews) in order to write an essay that offers the reader a brief
background on the topic and makes an assertion about what the
most significant challenges are for a family coping with a significant issue,
and support your assertions logically and interestingly.
For example, imagine that
you choose to explore how unemployment impacts a family unit. As you research,
you will narrow your topic and select the supportive details that will make the
most compelling argument. Let’s suppose that you discovered that the following
issues are the repercussions of unemployment when the main “breadwinner” loses
her job: depression; low self
esteem; problems with intimacy; insomnia; eating disorders; financial hardship;
foreclosure; etc. As the writer, you will need to select the issues that YOU,
based on YOUR research, believe are the MOST challenging of all the issues.
If you wish to focus on a situation
that you are familiar with firsthand, that is fine. However, this essay is not
a narrative. It is a research and analysis essay. In other words, you can
certainly utilize personal observations and experiences but you CANNOT rely on
them to in any way be the main supports for your essay.
Your thesis might read something like
this:
When a family member develops
dementia, the challenges are often devastating, yet the disease definitely
impacts family members more than the dementia patient.
Or…
When a couple divorces, it most
certainly impacts the children still living at home; however, it is the older
children who have already moved away that are most affected by the split.
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