[Assignment #1 -- Specific Guidelines]
                 [Assignment #2 -- Specific Guidelines]
                [Assignment #3 - - Threaded Discussion]
                     FINAL EXAM ASSIGNMENT

In the writing assignments I ask you to carefully review a good part of the readings (or film, etc.). A review may be done in more than one way. One approach could be to write a cogent summary of the contents of the readings, and follow this with some analysis of your own. A second way might be to compare and contrast the content of the readings, including both the conclusions and the arguments behind those conclusions. A third way might be to stake out a position of your own at the beginning and then show in some detail exactly where it is the same or different from the positions in the readings. Or aspects of these three could be mixed.

A review requires getting all the major specifics correct and assembling them in a coherent and understandable order. This is tedious work. It is tedious because it demands clarity of understanding. Repeatedly, a person has to go back to the readings or to class notes and try again to understand things clearly enough to be able to summarize them with precision. This produces a clear, coherent and thorough understanding that probably cannot be achieved without such a painstaking process.

It is good to take a position in these assignments, to offer your own reflections. But this is not required. In any case do not indulge yourself too much in such ruminations. These are a wonderful by-product of the review process. They will be part of your discussions now and life-long reflections. But first build a strong base for your current and future thoughts. Review well and carefully.

ILLUSTRATION OF HOW TO WRITE A REVIEW. These two paragraphs (with an extra line or two) illustrate the method of first summarizing and then commenting. The second paragraph is probably longer than it ought to be in a summary-plus-commentary form, long enough to begin to slip in some "summary" type material as part of its exposition, closer to the third approach mentioned above.
 

SUMMARY AND COMMENTARY
[Summary. (Note that it begins with a review of Skinner's basic position. It would continue with a review of Sartre's basic position, perhaps partly by contrast with Skinner's.)]
       B. F. Skinner and Jean Paul Sartre take stridently opposite positions on individual responsibility. Skinner argues that the decisions we make, and the values upon which we base those decisions, are products of our long-term interaction with our environment. This interaction includes physical experiences of pleasure and pain. Ice cream tastes good. Whoever has a taste of ice cream will tend to seek to taste it again. This interaction also includes the effect of other people on us. Parents give ice cream for what the parents call good behavior. If the parents respond to their children's good behavior by immediately offering the children ice cream, even if the parents do not say they are doing it as a reward, the children will nonetheless experience this behavior as reward-producing (or, perhaps more exactly, as reward-producing when done in the presence of parents) and have a greater tendency to engage in that behavior again when their parents are around. A life time of rewarding experiences gradually produces a complex layer of learned behavioral tendencies; similarly, painful experiences will produce their own layers of behavioral tendencies, intermingled with the results of the rewarding experiences. In general, the best way to understand the behavior of any adult is as the product of a life-time of conditioning, not as the result of free and responsible individual decisions. So says Skinner.
      Sartre, on the other hand, places full responsibility for every person's life and behavior in the free choices of each individual. . . . . [The summary continues with Sartre's position.]

[Commentary]
     Neither of the two positions seems adequate. An obvious reason is that each is extreme. A combination of the two, a middle ground, might be better. But a middle ground would still not be enough, because the basic flaws in each position is more than just a matter of excess in one direction. First of all, Skinner overlook implications of his own goals. While he argues that we are puppets of our environment, that inner intentions do not count, he nonetheless has a set of intentions of his own that he believes does count. There is a difference between unintended conditioning and intended conditioning. Parents may condition their children to like broccoli by always mixing it with good tasting sesame seeds and oil, not because they intend to train their children but because that is the only way the parents like their broccoli. Skinner wrote his book, however, because he wants people to decide just which behaviors they are intentionally going to try to promote by connecting those behaviors with rewards. He is a parent who deliberately decides to connect broccoli eating with whatever good tastes it may take to produce a love of broccoli. He argues that we need to condition each other to behave in ways that promote ecological wisdom and avoid nuclear war. But he is not at all clear on how he came to be conditioned to prefer those values. He may claim that his environment conditioned him to prefer clean air and no nukes. But obviously not everyone's environment has had the same effect. Skinner seems to believe that he and others can intervene in the unintentional process of conditioning that all people undergo and add some intentional conditioning. So inner intentions, and the thoughts and plans and feelings that are involved in those intentions, are a significant part of Skinner's program. That means that . . . .
[The commentary on Skinner would then be followed by a commentary on Sartre. I do not know whether I could sustain the claim I began with in the commentary, that finding a middle ground will still not be enough. These sample paragraphs are to illustrate that you should include a detailed review of the relevant positions, not just offer your own thoughts about the topics.]