After four decades of teaching college writing, you’d think I’d have my units and essay prompts locked in, shrink-wrapped, and ready to microwave. Not quite. The world moves fast. Prompts that feel brilliant on Tuesday can feel dated by Friday. TikTok didn’t exist when I started teaching. Neither did smartphones, influencers, or GLP-1 agonists. So instead of clinging to yesterday’s prompts like a hoarder clutching expired coupons, I chase the deeper prize: Enduring Understandings—those sticky, soul-level questions that live beyond the classroom and follow students into the messiness of real life. (Hat tip to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, who gave this idea a name and a purpose.)
This fall, my freshman comp class includes the college football team, which means our opening unit now tackles (yes, pun intended) the sport that defines American spectacle and denial. But this isn’t your uncle’s barstool rant about “kids these days.” We’ll use football as a lens to examine risk, consent, identity, and systemic power—big stuff disguised in helmets and shoulder pads.
Whether my students wear cleats or Converse, I want them grappling with questions that matter: Why do we chase short-term glory when the long-term cost might be our body, our brain, or our soul? What do we sacrifice on the altar of performance—on the field, online, or in life?
Here’s how the year breaks down:
Freshman Composition and Critical Thinking
Freshman Composition Class
Unit 1: Gladiators in Pads: Risk, Consent, and the Business of Football
Is football a sacred rite of passage or a meat grinder in cleats? Students will write about acceptable risk, consent, glory, money, and whether football is a path to opportunity—or exploitation wrapped in pageantry.
Unit 2: Heroism and Resistance to the Sunken Place
From Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, from Get Out to Black Panther, students will explore how marginalized figures resist dehumanization and transform themselves. We’ll examine what it means to climb out of the “Sunken Place”—and why it matters.
Unit 3: The Loneliness of the Digitally Depressed
With help from Black Mirror (“Nosedive” and “Fifteen Million Merits”), students will explore the connection between online performance and psychological breakdown. Are we curating ourselves into oblivion?
Critical Thinking Class
Unit 1: Willpower Is Not a Weight-Loss Strategy
Ozempic is here, and the willpower gospel is wobbling. Students will unpack the moral panic surrounding weight-loss drugs and debate what happens when biotech and body image collide.
Unit 2: The Mirage of Self-Reinvention
From Fitzgerald’s doomed dreamers to Black Mirror’s algorithmic puppets, we’ll examine how the myth of personal reinvention can go horribly wrong—and why losing control of your narrative is the ultimate modern horror.
Unit 3: Culinary Code-Switching or Cultural Betrayal?
Food as survival, as art, as compromise. We’ll trace the tangled line between adaptation and erasure in the Americanization of Chinese and Mexican cuisines. When is fusion a celebration—and when is it a sellout?
Teaching writing in this century means teaching students how to think clearly while the world gaslights them with dopamine and distraction. These units won’t solve that problem, but they’ll make sure we’re asking the right questions while we’re still allowed to.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment