Academic Essays
Over the years of my formal education, I have written a few essays on various topics that are not totally hideous. Actually, some of them are quite hideous, but I find it funny and like to think I can mark progress by examining old essays. Thus, I haven’t changed many of them as I have progressed through grades. If I did, I have saved versions, which are noted here.
The Book of Job as Hip-Hop Poetry
This was submitted for a course titled “The Bible as Literature” during my college years. The title is pretty indicative of the content: I used an instrumental hip-hop track to keep my rhythm, and wrote this little ditty summarizing the debate in the Book of Job. 29 October 2006.
Une présentation orale en français
C’est une présentation courts qui a écrit pour BI, et s’addresse les problèmes du système d’éducation aux Etats-Unis. Ce n’est pas élégant ou complexe. 26 février 2003.
Pedro Páramo and Chronicle of a Death Foretold
This was also submitted for an IB internal assessment (Higher Level Assessment I), and is a comparative essay that relates the issues of guilt, understanding, and confession in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was written in my junior year (spring) of high school, with very little editing during my senior year before submission, and I feel the… immaturity shows. I enjoyed writing this, however, as I was one of the few that enjoyed the books immensely due to their complexity. It had a word limit of 1 000 to 1 500.
XHTML – The submitted draft.
The House of the Spirits
This was submitted for an IB internal assessment (Higher Level Assessment IIc), and deals with the barbarism that seems to be inherent in the characters of Esteban Trueba and Barabas in The House of the Spirits. It had a word limit of 1 000 to 1 500. Overall, it was something of a quickie essay, although I enjoyed the topic.
XHTML – The submitted draft, February of 2003.
Stephen Hawking’s “Black Holes and Baby Universes”
A rhetorical analysis of the above lecture/essay. This is my second essay written in college, and was interesting in that I actually found Stephen Hawking to be too nice after having read George Dawkins’ writing in class. It had a word limit of 1 200 to 1 500. Submitted October 13, 2003.
XHTML – The submitted draft.
Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2
A post-submission version of an interpretive essay handling the above novel. It deals primarily with a tiny section of the novel that confused both me and my professor royally–when Richard is told that all his work with the artificially intelligent computers was truly for the goal of “teaching a human to tell”. I decided to figure out what Powers meant. Submitted November 4, 2003. Modified to fix my many silly errors in MUGS. There was a 1 500 word limit, but I ignored it.
pdf, XHTML – The post-submitted draft.
Theory of Knowledge Essay
Written way back in… 2003, this was submitted for an IB internal assessment in Theory of Knowledge. The question it’s addressing is “Should a knower’s personal point of view be considered an asset in the pursuit of knowledge, or an obstacle to be overcome?”
XHTML – The submitted draft.
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