Tag: academics

Picking humanities paper topics

Real Social Skills

Picking a good topic for college papers in humanities classes can be challenging. It’s particularly hard if the subject of the class is new to you, and/or if you’re not used to choosing your own topics.

Good topics usually have all of these attributes:

  • You find the topic interesting.
  • The topic is relevant to the class.
  • Enough material is available that you’ll be able to find sources.
  • The topic is small/specific enough that you’ll be able to write about it in the amount of time you have.
  • The teacher knows enough about the topic to be able to help you if you get stuck.

One way to find topics that probably fit into all of those categories is to use the class syllabus:

  • Look through the syllabus of the class.
  • Find the reading that is most interesting to you.
  • When you do that reading, notice what you’re curious or confused about.
  • Is there something that doesn’t make sense?
  • Is there something that makes a surprising amount of sense?
  • Or something that you’d like to know more about?
  • Or something that raises a question?
  • Once you’ve found something you want to know about, write down your question.
  • Then look at the footnotes in the reading.
  • Go look up the sources the reading cites.
  • It can also help to check out the book that the reading came from, or to look up other things by the author.

This usually works well because:

  • If the reading has a citation related to your question, that means there’s material on it.
  • If your topic is related to the reading, your teacher will probably be at least somewhat familiar with it.
  • If you’re raising a question about the reading, it’s more likely that you’ll be able to finish the paper in the amount of time you have.
  • If the topic is coming out of a question you had while reading, you’re more likely to find it interesting while you write.
  • Writing about something closely related to the reading can also help you to review material and prepare for the final exam.

Short version: Picking a paper topic in humanities classes can be hard. Using the readings and the syllabus to find topics can make it easier. Scroll up for some specifics about how to do that.

History and the difficult process of learning to tell better stories

Real Social Skills

Studying history well enables people and cultures to tell better stories, and to change in ways worth changing. This is difficult on a number of levels.

In order to learn things worth knowing about the past, we have to ask good questions, and we have to make an effort to find the real answers to those questions.

The basic premise of historical scholarship is that in order to know what happened in the past, you have to check. You may not find what you expect, and you may not like what you find. But what you find will be worth knowing, and it will inform your understanding of the present.

In historical research, anything can be questioned, and any question may well have an unexpected answer. In order to make a claim about the past within the rules of history, you have to do several things:

  • Explain what your claim is.
  • Reference evidence that supports your claim.
  • (Ex: documents that have survived from the period, artifacts, diaries, graves, laws, TV clips, junk mail, angry letters, hats, etc)
  • Make an argument about why your evidence supports your claim.
  • Reference other arguments, and explain why yours is a better explanation of the evidence

For instance:

  • Say, many historians argue that nobles in the year 500 in Hypothetical Country commonly kept implausible hounds.
  • Their evidence for this is that many nobles kept diaries that reference implausible hounds in great detail.
  • Their diaries also reference business transactions that we have independent evidence occurred.
  • You don’t think implausible hounds exist.
  • You might argue that: we have lots of laws from that period, including livestock laws. None of them reference implausible hounds.
  • We have found discarded animal bones for every animal referenced in the attested livestock laws. No one has ever made a credible claim to have uncovered the skeleton of an implausible hound.
  • These diaries also contain accounts of the authors’ encounters with dragons, and no one cites this as evidence that dragons actually existed.

People may be convinced by your argument, or they may not be. People may make counterarguments. They may argue in favor of positions that no one has ever taken seriously before.

For instance, people who are convinced that implausible hounds existed may start arguing that dragons also existed, making arguments along the lines that:

  • The diarists describe their own implausible hounds using very similar language to their horses and other domestic animals.
  • They describe dragons in very similar terms to lions and other dangerous wildlife.
  • We know from many sources that they raised horses and that lions posed a threat to people and livestock.
  • The diaries also describe unicorns and flying hippopotamuses, and they use very different language to do so. No one claims to have personally encountered or raised one of these animals, it’s always a friend-of-a-friend or an elderly relative’s parent.
  • If dragons and implausible hounds were mythical, they would be described the same way as other mythical creatures, but they’re described in the same way as other real animals.
  • Many buildings were destroyed as a result of the unprecedented forest fires of 1000, including the courthouses that held most of the agricultural legal records.
  • Given that we know so many records were destroyed, there’s no reason to assume that existing legal documents described all domesticated animals and all dangerous predators.
  • It’s generally agreed that implausible hounds were no longer kept after around the year 850, so it’s unsurprisingly that no new implausible hound laws were passed after the fires of 1000.
  • The dragon problem could also have resolved by then. We know that increased human population, agriculture, and improved weapons caused the extinction of several large predators.

As more investigation is done, researchers may turn up evidence that calls more things into question, for instance:

  • People who argue seriously that dragons existed search archives closely for dragon-related materials — and find some laws restricting dragon-hunting.
  • Or petitions to the king asserting that the local lord was neglecting his duty to provide adequate dragon-proof roofs.
  • A dig at a previously unexplored abandoned farm uncovers an unfamiliar animal skull that may be from an implausible hound.
  • Or a discarded merchants’ log listing dragon scale inventories and sales.
  • These documents and artifacts may be found to be a fraud, they may be found to be genuine, or there may be legitimate arguments to be made in both directions.
  • Or: Newly uncovered diagrams in a clearly authentic diary may have drawings of the animals called “implausible hounds”.
  • The drawings look like horses and not canines, and look similar to drawings explicitly labeled as horses.
  • Many historians start arguing that “implausible hound” is how people referred to particularly good-tempered horses.
  • Or: There may be evidence discovered that dogs were unknown in Hypothetical Country until 1200.
  • (For instance, there may be records of foreign merchants importing hunting dogs in 1200, sparking a decades-long contentious theological and legal controversy about whether it was blasphemous to domesticate a predator.)

If people care enough to investigate the issue of implausible hounds, dragons, and life in Hypothetical Country, there’s probably a reason they care about it personally. That means that what they uncover may have implications that they don’t like, or have trouble assimilating into their worldview constructively.

For instance, implausible hounds, and the story of their past, may be greatly culturally important, maybe with this kind of story:

  • Implausible hounds allowed the nobles to oppress everyone else.
  • They were vicious attack dogs, and no other people were permitted to own dogs.
  • Eventually, the common people courageously disobeyed these laws. They started raising their own dogs, for protection and companionship rather than attack and oppression.
  • The nobles tried to crack down on the peasants and their dogs, but failed because of the fundamental truth that a man and his dog are not easily separated. (And that these days, we understand the importance of including women in dog culture.).
  • Resistance aided by dogs showed us that it is possible to rebel and win if we stick together, and led to the greater democratization of society.
  • This story is regularly referenced by preachers, politicians, teachers, writers, and just about everyone else.
  • In this context, uncovering evidence that implausible hounds may not have existed or may not have been dogs may feel deeply threatening.
  • People who make this argument may be seen as unpatriotic or immoral.
  • But even if implausible hounds didn’t exist, the country does.
  • And it has a real past, and some of what it believes about itself is true.
  • It can become more true, as it incorporates better understandings of what descriptions of implausible hounds meant
  • And where the cultural importance of dogs came from
  • And what role that played in democracy.
  • There are probably important truths in the stories about dogs and democracy, even if parts of them aren’t true
  • Learning what really happened doesn’t have to break the stories, but it does have to change them.
  • This doesn’t happen overnight, and can be difficult and uncomfortable.

More generally speaking: Historical evidence with unexpected implications can be threatening to your identity, values, or understanding of your culture. Most cultures have deeply held cultural believes about the past. Often, the best available evidence contradicts these beliefs. It can be very difficult to engage with both your culture and your understanding of the evidence at the same time. It’s also possible, and important.

Studying history involves emotional skills as much as it involves academic skills. One of the skills you need to do history well is to learn how to care more about understanding what really did happen than you do about believing the stories your culture has taught you. You don’t have to reject your culture to do take historical evidence seriously, and you don’t have to stand alone. You can learn these truths, as a member of your culture and tradition, and incorporate what you learn into your cultural self-understanding. This involves learning to construct a new kind of identity that can adapt to accommodate changes in your understanding of the past.

This is hard, but it gets easier — and it’s absolutely worth it. The real past is much more complex and amazing than the imagined past. Learning about what really happened and how we got here can give us a much deeper understanding of who we really are. Seeing nuance in the past allows us to face complexity in the present. When we seek the truth about the past and take what we find seriously, it enables us to build a better future.

Uncertain abilities and the right to fail

Real Social Skills

Being disabled often means being unable to reliably predict what you will and won’t be able to do. Or whether something will be hard or easy. Sometimes this is for physical reasons; sometimes it’s because of how people treat us; often it’s both.

For instance, taking a class might involve uncertainty about any or all of these things (and lots of other things that I didn’t think of):

  • Am I cognitively capable of learning the material?
  • Am I physically capable of doing everything the class requires?
  • Will anyone be willing to do the group work with me in a way that makes it possible?
  • Will I be well enough to come to class regularly?
  • Will I live long enough to get the chance to apply what I learn in the class to my work?
  • Do I have the executive functioning to do this when I’m also doing other things?
  • Will the class material be so triggering that I dissociate frequently and miss a lot of what’s going on?
  • If I miss material for disability-related reasons, will there be a way to make it up?
  • Will I be able to get into the classroom?
  • Will I be able to stay in the classroom safely?
  • Will the teacher want me there?
  • Will they get me accessible materials in a timely manner?
  • Will they teacher have the skills to figure out how to teach me?
  • Will they allowed to be flexible in the ways I need them to be?
  • Will I have to fight for what I need? Will the fight be successful?

Disability typically involves a lot of uncertainty. It means that it’s often completely unknowable whether or not you will be able to do something. This means that the risk of failure is often much higher than it is for people without disabilities. If we try new things, we’ll usually fail at more of them than people without disabilities.

Sometimes people take that to mean that we should only be allowed to do things that are definitely within our abilities, to spare us the pain of failure. Or, to spare them and us the pain of having to notice that we’re disabled and that there are things we can’t do, no matter how hard we try.

This has disastrous consequences for children in special education and adults who live in the system, who may never be allowed to attempt anything harder than preschool curriculum. And, when we’re allowed in mainstream settings, we’re often terrified that failure may mean that we’ll be kicked out and sent to segregated settings.

When we’re not allowed to fail, we’re also not allowed to succeed. Because for all people, success rests on a lot of failed attempts. And because disability typically involves uncertain abilities, we usually need to make a lot more failed attempts than nondisabled people as we figure it out. Watching our peers succeed at things we fail at can be painful. So can trying really hard and finding that something we wanted to do is not possible for us. So can finding that something is dramatically more difficult for us than anyone else we know. That pain is real; it’s also bearable. We can fail and be ok. We can bump up against our limitations and be ok. We don’t need to live in cages full of easy tasks to avoid these things.

Short version: Being disabled means we often can’t reliably predict what we can and can’t do. (Or how hard something will be.) Finding the things we can do well often involves trying and failing at a lot of things.  The only way to find out is by trying things. Sometimes people try to prevent us from ever trying anything because they think that the pain of failure is unbearable. When we’re not allowed to fail, we’re not allowed to succeed either. We need space to fail without shame or punishment, so that we can find the things that we can do. It’s ok to be disabled. It’s ok to not know what you can do. It’s ok to try things that you might fail at. It’s ok to fail and keep trying, or to give up and try something else. It’s ok to decide that it’s not a good time to take those kinds of risks. We all learn to calibrate when to take these risks and when not to, and these are decisions that we need to be allowed to make.

Remembering to ask questions

Real Social Skills

Some phrases in academic argument are used to assert that an argument has been successfully been made. If someone’s really good at using them, it can make their arguments feel better than they actually are.

One countermeasure is to learn what those phrases are, and to use them as indications that it’s time to check to see if you agree with their argument.

A few examples of phrases that often work this way:

  • “It is clear that…”
  • “We have seen..“
  • “Now it is evident..”
  • “It has been demonstrated…”
  • “It follows from…”
  • “It goes without saying that…”

If you get into the habit of reading things like this as  questions, it becomes much easier to tell what you think the answer is.

eg:

  • Do you think it’s clear?
  • Have you seen the point being made? Do you agree with it?
  • Do you think it’s evident from the evidence the author brought?
  • Do you think it has been demonstrated?
  • Do you think it follows from that?
  • Do you think it goes without saying? Do you think it’s true at all?

Short version: Some rhetorical devices make arguments feel better than they are. Getting into the habit of seeing them as indications that it’s time to ask a question makes it easier to evaluate arguments on their merits.

When teachers refuse to accommodate your disability

Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

What to do if teachers refuse to give you the accommodation? I couldn’t ever finish my work because they would refuse to write down things ect

realsocialskills said:

That’s a hard problem.

In my experience, you usually can’t make them write down assignments if they’re not doing it willingly (even with a letter). Sometimes you can, if you’re sufficiently insistent.

I’ve had surprisingly good results with reminding a teacher politely and discretely the first time, reminding them in front of other students the second time, and insisting more bluntly that it’s not ok for them to neglect to do this the third time. I’ve also had this blow up in my face. Your milage may vary. It’s not something I’d wholeheartedly recommend, but it does work sometimes.

Also, if the problem is that they don’t remember (or can’t be bothered to remember), sometimes reminding them by email works. Eg, by sending an email after every class asking them what the assignment is.

Another thing that can help is getting support from other students rather than the teacher. For instance, getting the assignment from a peer who is able to write it down. Or getting other students to also ask in the moment for it to be written down so it doesn’t have to come just from you all the time. (That helps me both in terms of getting what I need, and in not feeling like I’m alone and unreasonably demanding.)

If you are in college, another thing you can do is change classes. If a teacher is not treating you well and is making it impossible to do the work, treating that as a red flag and changing to a different class can make things a lot better. In college, there is often a lot more flexibility to work with people who are willing to accommodate you, and it’s important to learn how to take advantage of that flexibility.