HBO’s latest show Chernobyl became IMDB’s top-rated show last week with an average rating of 9.6 out of 10. The 5 part drama miniseries tells the story of the nuclear disaster that happened in Chernobyl 33 years ago. The show was able to hit the sweet spot with critics and viewers as the combination of a well-written story while maintaining historical accuracy provided for an enjoyable experience. As the hype built up online, I realized I couldn’t escape the hype so decided to give it a shot.
The show was a masterpiece.
You think the right question will get you the truth? There is no truth.
Going into my first year at Santa Clara University, I expected to be challenged. Academically in class, emotionally with the absence of my parents, and physically as a D1 athlete. Although I expected to struggle with the academic atmosphere, I never thought that about critical thinking and writing. Prior to the first day of class, I assumed that this would be another typical English course. Reading a book with the underlying theme of the class and writing an essay about the key concepts of the book. What I did not anticipate was the class being called food porn. When Professor Leither stated food porn was the theme of the course, I knew that this would be unlike any other class I have taken before.
My first Tuesday at Santa Clara University consisted of waking up way too early to attend an early morning business class and then driving home, thinking about how well I would do in said business class, and then driving back to campus to my first class of Critical Thinking and Writing. I’d never struggled with English classes and was just expecting the same format of reading the typical “classic” literatures and writing papers that dissected themes of the works and what blue curtains meant as opposed to red ones. I had only checked Camino about ten minutes before I left the house for the first class and was surprised to see that I was in a course called “Food Porn” and that one of the assignments would be to photograph food and create my own food porn. At that point, I drove over feeling both confused and excited for what I thought was going to be a very different type of English course, and it definitely was.
Still a Meat-Eater
Most of the first quarter of the course focused on the food industry and all of the shady, horrific, and bloody practices that go on behind the scenes. I will be honest, I was disgusted by it and wished that all of the papers the class wrote that detailed different aspects that were tainted had a noticeable effect besides educating each of us about the industry. The first essay I wrote essentially delivered the message that nothing in the meat industry can change, and people are responsible for it because very few of them care enough. I talked about how I was a staunch meat-eater and that I was disgusted by what I was reading and seeing during the course, but that I knew I would not change. I had to take a statement from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, a statement that I completely supported, and say that it meant nothing to me: “Unsurprisingly, most people are quite aware of animal suffering in the meat industry, “Virtually everyone agrees that animals can suffer in ways that matter…” (Foer 73).
What happens in the meat industry seemed to get more and more brutal as the quarter moved on, and for my third essay I tackled the emotions of people toward the food industry. I discussed PETA, vegetarianism, and veganism. Let me note here that in my first essay I said this about veganism and vegetarianism in my first essay, “The idiocy of veganism and vegetarianism does not stop at the elitist viewpoint, it has a negative effect on physical health.” One aspect of every essay project was to try a writing style experiment. This could be inserting subtitles, creating different types of paragraph breaks, or adding photos. I chose photos for my last essay of the first quarter and I included images of animal abuse in the meat industry.
After writing that those who eat meat have no empathy, I provided hope to meat-eaters, “Research suggests that the answer to this dilemma may be compassion training” (Cummins 11). At the end, I asked the reader if they had simply brushed past the images or if they took a good look at them and had a reaction. I could only judge my reactions and I realized that I do not have the willpower to make any change, even though I’m sickened by what I’m seeing. My own experiment and the freedom of creativity given during the writing process exposed just how little willpower I have to myself.
A Baby-Faced Liar
The second quarter of the course focused on the themes of lying and dishonesty. I consider myself a good liar, and I took this opportunity to sometimes talk about personal experiences I had never mentioned to anyone else before. I cannot honestly say what prompted me to write about said experiences in essays read by both my peers and my professor, perhaps some form of wanting to vent or at least write down things I was not comfortable with about myself. I turned my own dishonesty from high school into fuel for the second essay topic. My topic for the second essay focused on how schools want and encourage students to cheat. I found parallels between the dishonesty of schools and the dishonesty of students. There is so much pressure on students to do well and that pressure comes from parents. I also discussed the recent college admissions scandal and how parents did not trust the abilities of their children so they felt desperate enough to break the law to secure them a place at a university they could be proud of.
However, parents also feel a pressure to get the best for their child by securing them the best schools so that they can feel content and also for bragging rights. This essay also introduced conducting our own primary research, and I got mine through a survey I typed out and gave to people at my gym. There was one comment that stood out at that time and still stands out to me as I write this, ““College is great, but trade school is a totally legit option. It’s still respectable and there is really good money there.” I come from a household where college is seen as a necessity, so I, sadly, adopted that stigma as my own viewpoint.
The final essay of the second quarter upon me, I decided to discuss the form of dishonesty that is voter suppression. One aspect of this essay that was different was creating a narrative for the essay that furthered my case. My narrative for the essay discussed voter suppression during the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia. Alongside the narrative, I also focused on creating a strong opposition, one that I could still dismantle, but it was unlike my oppositions in previous essays where I had created them with intentional holes. I had to go to sources and people I did not agree with and give them an equal voice, “In fact, by the time of the election that Abrams lost three months ago, the state had 6,933,816 registered voters, the most in Georgia’s entire history” (Spakovsky).
I also had to spend much more time on research since this was a research-intensive subject. I looked into the voter registration process in Georgia, interviews with residents, two constitutional amendments, and the actions of the young adult leaders in my generation. I also found an experiment that compared the truth discerning abilities of young and old voters, “About a third of 18- to 49-year-olds (32%) correctly identified all five of the factual statements as factual, compared with two-in-ten among those ages 50 and older” (Gottfried). The themes of lying once again forced me to look at myself and how I lie, and the lying in one of the oldest and most important American systems in voting.
Does This Mean No More Essays?
After two quarters of this course, I am can definitely say I am a better writer. Conducting research, narrowing my arguments, and conducting my own primary research allowed me to put that much more of my own voice and style into my writings. Finding my own voice was something I had struggle with throughout all of my writings in high school and finally being given more creative license was refreshing.
Both quarters made me look at both my writing style and I, and I think that there will be permanent, positive impacts on both. I learned about my hypocritical tendencies and how I am aware of the issue that is the meat industry but don’t feel like making any change because it’s too much effort. I learned that I am a liar but at the same time I have morals. So, there were good and bad aspects to be discovered but I think Dan Ariely, author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, summarized the bad in the best way possible: “The good news is that we all have a moral compass. The bad news is that we can’t just assume that our consciences will effortlessly and continuously protect us” (Ariely).
Works
Cited:
Ariely,
Dan. “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.” Harper
Collins, 2012.
I walked into Creative Thinking and Writing “Food Porn” on my first day of classes as a freshman at Santa Clara University. I thought to myself “Great, another English class I can write mediocre papers about topics and books I don’t really care about and get out with at least a C+.” just like every other English class throughout my twelve years of Jesuit Education. Yet our professor, Nick Leither, immediately shattered my hopes of coasting through my mandatory college writing courses. I knew it was going to be hard, but I was certain my twelve years of practice, hard work, and refinement of my one skill would suffice, bullshitting. Every English course prior to this course was simple and asked very little of the students. Read
On September 18, 2017 I attended my first classes at Santa Clara University. After an early start to my day with an 8 a.m. chemistry lecture and 11:45 a.m. calculus lecture, I felt like my day should have been over.
Nope, a 7 hour gap before my 7:20 pm Critical Thinking and Writing English class teased me. And yes, I did say 7:20 PM! I was pre-enrolled for my CTW so was automatically opposed to the class, especially because of the super late time. I remember sitting in our class the first day thinking how unusual of a time it was to be in class. Our CTW class started off as a group of students sitting in awkward silence. The silence would last for minutes and I applaud our professor, Nicholas Leither for being persistent and making us sit through that silence. Eventually our discussions started to flow more as we grew closer as a class and awkward silence was not an issue we had to worry about.
Imagine being a first year college student who is both excited and nervous for finally attending college. You are getting ready for your first quarter of college and after figuring out how to find your classes online, you realize that you are pre-enrolled in a class called “Food Porn.”
I think baffled would be an understatement of how I felt. Food Porn was definitely not a class I thought I would be taking at a Jesuit institution. But, yet that was the class I was enrolled in.
What I didn’t know was how much I would learn from this course. This was not like all the other typical English courses that I took in the past. Nor was it solely focused on food porn. There was so much more in store.
Oh, boy let me shed some light on the new knowledge that this first year college student found out.
When coming into freshman year of college, I had the illusion that I would be done with mindless writing assignments that had absolutely no real-world application extending beyond the stylistic devices employed by some author of some poem that I had to read for AP English class. So, when I found myself in a critical thinking and writing class at the beginning of the year I went into it moaning and groaning, preparing myself for two more quarters of mind numbing syntax and diction analyzing monotony.
The first day of class started with Professor Leither marching into the room at exactly the 5:40 start time and putting up our class’ introduction page. The title of the course was first to flash onto the screen- “FOOD PORN”. Well, this might get interesting after all, I thought. Next, Leither launched into a brief description of the course and how we would be discussing and writing about “food, self, and culture” over the course of this class. This is the moment that I stared in disbelief at the professor. Continue reading What are they feeding us? // Aidan Fromm→
Authors: Beshoy Eskarous, Mayra Sierra-Rivera, Andrew Mauzy, and Nico Ray Benito
“The waste-management company was dumping the Compost into Landfill, so the university switched companies,” our professor, Nick Leither told us. Was this true? Did Santa Clara University change companies because they cared that compost wasn’t properly disposed of, or was it due to the bad publicity they would receive?
We wanted to find out: Does Santa Clara University actually care about sustainability? Or are they simply doing the right thing – but for the wrong reasons?
Sustainability is the ability to maintain a specific set of operations for an indefinite amount of time without harming the environment. It is a continuous mission that requires vigilance from those who pursue it, and yet it may never be fully achieved. Today, Santa Clara University prides itself on its journey towards sustainability, specifically its mission of becoming waste free by the year 2020, focusing its resources on recycling, composting and food recovery. It has become a key attraction in the University’s advertisement to alumni and prospective students. The school has worked hard to create this image – founded on its Jesuit values – and the community works each day to reinforce it. In the past few years, Santa Clara University has begun a process similar to many movements across the country. But does this process stem from a place of good intention, or are there ulterior motivations for this movement, such as marketing the school.Continue reading Doing Right By Doing Wrong?→
When I read my freshman course descriptions for my first year at Santa Clara University, I was excited that my Critical Thinking and Writing class would be focused on the topic, ‘Food, Culture and Self’. I thought that the entire class would consist of talking about our favorite foods and different types of food around the world. Boy, was I wrong! One of our first assignments was to watch a YouTube video showing the cruel treatment towards pigs and cows in factory farms. I could barely watch the screen as pigs were castrated without pain relievers and cows’ throats were sliced open as they were hanging upside down, still alive. Continue reading Sorry to Burst Your Bubble // Sarah Thomas→
*There are spoilers in the post * Late Saturday night, my best friend Rachel and I decided to stay in and watch a movie. With the Oscar buzz still in the air, we decided to watch Dallas Buyers Club. Both of us were very eager to see Mathew Mcconaughey’s award winning performance.
ould receive? 
n its Jesuit values – and the community works each day to reinforce it. In the past few years, Santa Clara University has begun a process similar to many movements across the country. But does this process stem from a place of good intention, or are there ulterior motivations for this movement, such as marketing the school.
Tense Present 