Questions
1. What are the effects on children whose parents push them in sports?
2. Should college athletes be paid?
3. How has affirmative action increased racial animosity in our country?
4. Does working more actually reduce productivity?
Statements
1. Due to the extremely competitive nature in sports, overbearing parents that place extreme pressure on their kids to succeed will ultimately lead to broken relationship, between the kid and the sport, as well as the kid and the parent(s).
2. Due to the benefits college athletes already receive, it would be immature to think that they need a paycheck after every game.
3. Affirmative action has led to increased racial animosity in our country because the focus of college acceptance is no longer solely based on aptitude, but filling a quota. This not only does not make up for past racial discrimination, but brings forth new racial controversies, only furthering the problem.
4. As Americans, we have pushed the world to new levels of work, yet we are still well behind many European countries in terms of economic and scientific success. Conclusively, I believe working more not only reduces productivity in the workplace, but outside the workplace as well.
1.) I would stay away from theses that involve family pressure -- In my experience as a teacher, it is hard to find/decide what kind of sources you can use to support and challenge your argument, even though you may be able to make some good points by pure argumentation. I had one student write about 'family pressure' to choose a major or a job, and the research turned into anecdotal evidence, which is ok, but needs to be supplemented with other evidence.
ReplyDelete2.) If you do this, since you are taking the opposite position of a paper I have recently read, you will want to think about how you can counter these arguments. However, I will warn you, there are some damn good arguments for college athletes getting paid. Still, it would be interesting to see what you can do with this.
3.) Affirmative action is a fascinating topic and the argument you put forth is one that has circulated for awhile now. If you are going to do this topic, you will have to research the opposing side and be prepared to really take on some quite convincing arguments. There's an episode of Melissa Harris Perry--or maybe its Up with Chris Hayes that I will try and get ahold of and send to you if you are going to do this topic (great arguments/discussions that you will be able to cite). The advantages of this topic is that there's a lot of research out there, the disadvantages is that you will have to do a lot of "counter-argument," which, while making a stronger and contestable paper, can also be intimidating.
4.) I think that this is a fascinating topic, but you will have to define what you mean by "working more," which is a vague term -- do you mean in man hours? Do you mean a longer working week? What constitutes "work." You could ground this in statistics, but you would be responsible for finding this research. Furthermore, you will have to define "productivity." Again, this will be hard to do qualitiatively and so you will probably have to look at quantitative research.
I realize I have no told you which of these to do and that is because this is up to you. I have merely pointed out some of the challenges and benefits of picking them. I hope this helps!