FINAL ESSAY OF THE QUARTER

TIPPING POINT : For this assignment, you will upload the final draft copy of your essay to turnitin.

 

The essay should be attached as a Microsoft Word document and should be about 4 pages in length, double spaced.

There are two essay topics to choose from.

Write a 3-4 page double spaced essay on one of the following topics:

1. How might one or more of the ideas in the book The Tipping Point apply to your chosen profession or your major?

2. Locate a trend [social, political, cultural, or other] that seems to exhibit a "tipping point" phenomenon. Provide a brief explanation of why you think this phenomenon meets Gladwell's three criteria for tipping point phenomenon: a) contagiousness b) little causes having big effects c) not gradual but dramatic change.

THIS ESSAY IS DUE TO TURNITIN.COM BY JUNE 9TH, THE LAST DAY OF THE QUARTER. You are more than welcome to bring me a rough draft to revise with you or to turn in the essay early. I have had some great revision-interactions with some of you and would be more than happy to continue that practice!

HERE ARE SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS THAT MIGHT HELP YOU PROCEED--OR THEY MAY CONFUSE YOU MORE---BUT i HOPE NOT!

The Tipping Point is a book that has applications all over the place, so if you have an idea and want to get some conformation on it, post it here--or email me.

Here are some examples that I have thought about in the past week:
>>>food culture(ever since the original Iron Chef, food has become an obsession in the U.S.);
>>>wine culture;
>>>reality tv (be careful--this is not a simple issue)
>>>sushi (seriously, there was a time when Bako had no sushi restaurants);
>>>barefoot running(even Nike now has minimalist shoes);
>>>mud races, color me rad races;
>>>cancer awareness walks;
>>>paper or plastic? ecological awareness;
>>>ipads in the classroom;
>>>common core in education;
>>>slavoj zizek(if you are a philosophy major, you might know him);
>>>ted talks;
>>>digital data storage in hospitals;
>>>smart infusion patient care;
>>>robotic surgery;
>>>various ideas regarding globalization in business(read the World is Flat if you have not);
>>>neuroplasticity in kinesiology.
>>>low carb diets (Bako used to have a krispy kreme. It was killed by the low carb diet trend--so sad!).

That was just a quick brainstorm. People often write about Facebook or other online issues, os if you choose that route, do something unique! But for each of those topics listed, there are implications that can be gleaned by examining the idea in light of the Gladwell book.

Enjoy!

dr. s

WEEK NINE BLOG ENTRY

Ponder a bit on paper, answering one of the following questions:

When you are 90 years old, what will matter most to you?

Imagine I am giving you one billion dollars(you are welcome). Now, the only condition is that you must still find a job to do. What job would you chose, knowing that money is of no concern?

Ask yourself, when did I last push the boundaries of my comfort zone?

To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken?

What is your number one goal for the next six months?

What did JFK mean by this quote? "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them."

WEEK NINE READING

Read the Tipping Point.

WEEK NINE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Just start working on your Tipping Point essay this week.
I will post that essay assignment shortly.

WEEK EIGHT BLOG ENTRY

HELLLLP! Seriously, it is the 8th or so week of the Spring Quarter. I think I have senioritis even worse than my daughter who is a high school senior. At this time of the quarter, what do you do to stay focused, to power through, to complete the term on the right track? Give me and your fellow students some good advice.

WEEK EIGHT READING

Start reading the Tipping Point this week. It is our final book. It is also quite fascinating.

WEEK EIGHT WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Write down one sentence you found interesting from the book. What made you notice that one sentence in particular?

WEEK SEVEN BLOG ENTRY

What is the single most important day in either
1. the history of the world?

--or--

2. in your life?

WEEK SEVEN READING

Q: What day most changed the course of history?

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Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
June 28, 1914. Franz Ferdinand’s carriage driver took a wrong turn and they ended up in a cul-de-sac, giving the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip a chance to kill the archduke. This was the first in a set of dominoes that put in motion the two largest wars in world history—and it all came down to a wrong turn by a carriage driver.

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Timothy Snyder, professor of history, Yale University
On December 11, 1241, the Mongol warrior Batu Khan was poised to take Vienna and destroy the Holy Roman Empire. No European force could have kept his armies from reaching the Atlantic. But the death of Ögedei Khan, the second Great Khan of the Mongol empire, forced Batu Khan to return to Mongolia to discuss the succession. Had Ögedei Khan died a few years later, European history as we know it would not have happened.

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Christina H. Paxson, president, Brown University
The day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440, Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge. The ensuing democratization of ideas had a profound impact on societies in the second half of the second millennium.

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Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religion, Penn State University
For several years leading up to June 22, 1941, it had looked as though dictators and militarists would soon rule virtually the whole world outside North America. But Operation Barbarossa—Germany’s decision to send 3 million of its soldiers smashing across the Soviet border—would ultimately lead to Hitler’s defeat and the destruction of Nazism.

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Neera Tanden, president, Center for American Progress
By empowering half the population with the responsibilities of citizenship, August 26, 1920—the day women gained the right to vote—allowed the U.S. to live up to its fundamental values of opportunity and equality.

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Paul Kennedy, professor of history, Yale University
The day Thomas Newcomen invented his steam engine. America would be like a giant Angola without it.

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Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of physics, Institute for Advanced Study
The day the asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.
Note: This article originally stated that Freeman Dyson is a professor emeritus at Princeton University.

---

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series
The day, in 1675, that Anton van Leeuwenhoek first looked through the lens of the microscope he invented. There are a whole lot of people making history who wouldn’t have been here save for the discoveries that followed from that drop of pond water.

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W. Kamau Bell, host, Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell
There’s no way I can get this correct, so: It has to have affected me personally. It has to have had a big impact on America, culturally and historically. And it has to have involved sequins. Therefore, the obvious answer is May 16, 1983, when Michael Jackson first performed the moonwalk on TV. I think it’s one of the reasons we have a black president today. People went, Wow, black people are sort of magical. And Barack Obama is basically a walking sequin.

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Oliver Stone, director and co-author of The Untold History of the United States
July 20, 1944, when Henry Wallace lost the vice-presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Had he won, Wallace, not Harry S. Truman, would have become president when Roosevelt died. The U.S. would have had a much better relationship with the Soviet Union, and I don’t think Wallace would have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, Atlantic contributing editor and professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University
Trite as it may seem, the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, was the first public assertion of human equality as a legitimate rationale for political action. The Declaration would eventually eat away at the formal barriers of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and any other differences that human beings have created to hold some down and raise others up.

WEEK SEVEN WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Of the events or moments listed, which one do you most AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH AND WHY?

WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY

What is the best way to assess your understanding of something learned in a school setting?

By the way, while some personal reflection is acceptable, do not simply react autobiographically; instead, think in terms of the best way to show what you know about any subject. Is it a test, multiple choice, writing of some sort, talking about the subject, or something else?

WEEK SIX READING

HERE S A GOOD BOOK REVIEW OF THE TORTILLA CURTAIN:

The Pilgrim of Topanga Creek Date: September 3, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Scott Spencer;

THE TORTILLA CURTAIN By T. Coraghessan Boyle.  VIKING has somehow got the idea it has another "Grapes of Wrath" on its hands. Then again, T. Coraghessan Boyle may have contributed to the delusion by using a few lines from Steinbeck's novel as the epigraph to his own meditation on the dispossessed and the American dream, California style. But while Steinbeck's tale of the Joad family was the very apotheosis of the proletarian novel, with its almost surreal emotional clarity and passages of nearly overpowering pathos, "The Tortilla Curtain" is, as the dust jacket would have it, about "the Okies of the 1990's." This apparently means that the narrative contains no real heroes or villains, and that the suddenly old-fashioned hopefulness of Steinbeck's book is nowhere to be found. In "The Tortilla Curtain," Mr. Boyle deftly portrays Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, catching both its privileged society and its underlying geological and ecological instability. But while the book has heft, its story is slight, and not unfamiliar: An undocumented Mexican couple struggle for survival in the interstices of society and in the canyon itself, even as an affluent Anglo couple live their fearful, selfish existence behind the dubious protection of a walled development called Arroyo Blanco Estates. We first meet Candido Rincon when he is hit by a car driven by the male half of the novel's Anglo couple, a self-styled Annie Dillard disciple named Delaney Mossbacher. Candido is in California with his young pregnant wife, America, having recently braved another crossing of the border. Candido and America are part of California's unacknowledged work force, cogs in the vast human machine that does the state's brute labor and without whom (Proposition 187 to the contrary) the state could probably not survive. Mr. Boyle is first-rate in capturing the terror of looking for work in an alien society, as in this passage describing Candido's experience at a parking-lot labor exchange: "The contractors began to arrive, the white men with their big bleached faces and soulless eyes, enthroned in their trucks. They wanted two men or three, they wanted four or five, no questions asked, no wage stipulated, no conditions or terms of employment. A man could be pouring concrete one day, spraying pesticide the next -- or swabbing out urinals, spreading manure, painting, weeding, hauling, laying brick or setting tile. You didn't ask questions. You got in the back of the truck and you went where they took you." Mr. Boyle is convincing, and even stirring, in his telling of Candido and America's story, bringing to it an agitprop artist's perspective on both society's injustices and the cold implacability of the privileged classes, as well as a Brechtian vision of how those cast to the bottom of society blindly victimize one another. Indeed, the journey of the Rincons -- from their desolate Mexican village to the terrors of exploitation on the undocumented edge of American society and finally into the whirling, pyrotechnically presented catastrophe toward which the story builds -- more than confirms Mr. Boyle's reputation as a novelist of exuberance and invention, gained with such pop extravaganzas as "World's End" and "The Road to Wellville." It also adds to his fictional range an openhearted compassion for those whom society fears and reviles. But Mr. Boyle was clearly not interested in merely writing a novel about illegal aliens scrabbling for a living. For he has divided his considerable narrative and stylistic gifts between the Rincons' story and that of Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, the rather contemptible yuppie couple whose deeply unremarkable experiences are set in opposition to the Rincons'. It is here, alas, that Mr. Boyle undoes himself. Delaney is described on the very first page as "a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates." It is a mode of portrayal that is characteristic of much of Mr. Boyle's earlier work, a kind of comedy that finds its roots in sarcasm. In Mr. Boyle's case, this sarcasm is often taken for buoyancy and even daring, but in "The Tortilla Curtain" it rings hollow. When a character is described in terms of his driving record and his vanity plates, the reader can only hope that character is a minor one, a walk-on. But when you realize that you are being asked to read on and on about someone the author obviously doesn't care deeply about (and has, in fact, just trashed with the flick of an easy laugh), your heart begins to sink. Even when the novel's plot begins to activate Delaney and sour his usually beatific goofy world view, our reaction to the transformation is interrupted by the necessity of coping with Mr. Boyle's persistent elbow in our ribs: "He was in a rage, and he tried to calm himself. It seemed he was always in a rage lately -- he, Delaney Mossbacher, the Pilgrim of Topanga Creek -- he who led the least stressful existence of anybody on earth besides maybe a handful of Tibetan lamas." Like her nature-writer husband, Kyra Mossbacher is cut up and offered to us on a Lazy Susan of rude remarks. "Real estate was her life," the omnipotent narrator would have us believe, the moment Kyra appears on the scene. A bit later, we learn the following: "For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs -- and who was Delaney to argue? She'd been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gall bladder operation." Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles. The great risk of a novel with a dual structure is that the reader will fasten on one of the stories at the expense of the other. In "The Tortilla Curtain," the drama, feeling and stylistic bravado, the emotional reach that Mr. Boyle brings to the story of the Rincons so profoundly exceed what he brings to the Mossbachers that the book itself ends up feeling as disunited as the society Mr. Boyle is attempting to portray. And that's a pity, because there is life here and moments of very fine writing. ("The fire sat low on the horizon, like a gas burner glowing under the great black pot of the sky.") A few months ago, Mr. Boyle was asked in an interview how he voted on Proposition 187. Perhaps anticipating being asked the same question over and over on his upcoming book tour, he replied, "I don't want to reveal that. I'm not running for office." It's hard to imagine John Steinbeck being quite so coy about the rights of migrant workers or the importance of unions, but, as they say on television, "Hey, it's the 90's!" "The Tortilla Curtain" is a political novel for an age that has come to distrust not only politicians but political solutions, a modernist muckraking novel by an author who sees the muck not only in class structure and prejudice but in the souls of human beings. Yet where the socially engaged novel once offered critique, Mr. Boyle provides contempt -- even poor Candido, whose plight has been engaging our sympathies throughout this novel, is eventually seen "weaving his way through the scrub, drawn like an insect to the promise of distant lights." Contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch. Despite his celebrated gifts, T. Coraghessan Boyle may be the most contemptuous of our well-known novelists.

WEEK SIX WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

What did you think of the book review? What should a good book review do?