kubus english

How this class works... and a little about your assignment

We spend five class periods progressing toward writing two college essays.  Some class time is dedicated to guided free writing on various topics that may be of use to you as you prepare to think about your essays.  The remainder of the class time is dedicated to looking at model personal essays, with the hope that we might be able to understand what kind of thought goes into a personal essay, and that we might be able to emulate such work.

Your assignment is to use that portfolio of preliminary writing as a springboard to writing two complete college essays.  The list of subject matter is below.  You are to choose one of the prompts.  

Due Dates

First draft of essay #1 = Wednesday

First draft of essay #2 = Thursday

Final version of both essays = Friday

Your essay should be no more than 650 words.

2019 National Common Application Essay Prompts for 2019-2020 Application Year

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

4. Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 

6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more? 

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. 

2019 Apply Texas Essay Prompts for 2019-2020 Application Year

1. Tell us your story. What unique opportunities or challenges have you experienced throughout your high school career that have shaped who you are today?

2. Most students have an identity, an interest, or a talent that defines them in an essential way. Tell us about yourself. 

3. You’ve got a ticket in your hand – Where will you go? What will you do? What will happen when you get there? 

University of Chicago Past Essay Prompts (to get your creative juices flowing)

"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." –Oscar Wilde.
Othello and Iago. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch. Autobots and Decepticons. History and art are full of heroes and their enemies. Tell us about the relationship between you and your arch-nemesis (either real or imagined).
—Inspired by Martin Krzywy, admitted student Class of 2016.

Heisenberg claims that you cannot know both the position and momentum of an electron with total certainty. Choose two other concepts that cannot be known simultaneously and discuss the implications. (Do not consider yourself limited to the field of physics).
—Inspired by Doran Bennett, BS'07 Chemistry and Mathematics.

Susan Sontag, AB'51, wrote that "[s]ilence remains, inescapably, a form of speech." Write about an issue or a situation when you remained silent, and explain how silence may speak in ways that you did or did not intend. The Aesthetics of Silence, 1967.
—Anonymous submission

"…I [was] eager to escape backward again, to be off to invent a past for the present." –The Rose Rabbi by Daniel Stern
Present: pres·ent
1. Something that is offered, presented, or given as a gift.
Let's stick with this definition. Unusual presents, accidental presents, metaphorical presents, re-gifted presents, etc. — pick any present you have ever received and invent a past for it.
—Inspired by Jennifer Qin, admitted student Class of 2016.

So where is Waldo, really?
—Inspired by Robin Ye, admitted student Class of 2016.

Find x.
—Inspired by Benjamin Nuzzo, an admitted student from Eton College, UK

Dog and Cat. Coffee and Tea. Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. Everyone knows there are two types of people in the world. What are they?
—Inspired by an alumna of the Class of 2006

How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.)
—Proposed by Kelly Kennedy, BA '10 Statistics. (2009–2010)

Chicago author Nelson Algren said, "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.
(2008–2009)

UChicago professor W. J. T. Mitchell entitled his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want? Describe a picture, and explore what it wants.
—Proposed by Anna Andel, a graduate of Bard High School Early College, New York, NY (2007–2008)

In Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, he writes a parable entitled "Borges y yo," which translates as "Borges and I." In it, Borges writes about "the other one," his counterpart, who shares his preference for "hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson," but is not the same as he. "The other one" is the famous author; "the other one" is the one "things happen to." He concludes this parable with the line, "I do not know which of us has written this page." Write a page. Who has written it?
—Proposed by Zhuyi Elizabeth Sun, a graduate of Inglemoor High School, Bothell, WA (2007–2008)

Modern improvisational comedy had its start with the Compass Players, a group of University of Chicago students who later formed the Second City comedy troupe. Here is a chance to play along. Improvise a story, essay, or script that meets all of the following requirements:
It must include the line "And yes I said yes I will Yes" (Ulysses, by James Joyce). Its characters may not have superpowers.
Your work has to mention the University of Chicago, but please, no accounts of a high school student applying to the University—this is fiction, not autobiography.
Your work must include at least four of the following elements: a paper airplane, a transformation, a shoe, the invisible hand, two doors, pointillism, a fanciful explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem, a ventriloquist or ventriloquism, the periodic table of the elements, the concept of jeong, number two pencils.
(2007–2008)

"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."—Miles Davis (1926–91)
—Inspired by Jack Reeves, a graduate of Ridgefield High School, Ridgefield, CT (2006–2007)

The Cartesian coordinate system is a popular method of representing real numbers and is the bane of eighth graders everywhere. Since its introduction by Descartes in 1637, this means of visually characterizing mathematical values has swept the globe, earning a significant role in branches of mathematics such as algebra, geometry, and calculus. Describe yourself as a point or series of points on this axial arrangement. If you are a function, what are you? In which quadrants do you lie? Are x and y enough for you, or do you warrant some love from the z-axis? Be sure to include your domain, range, derivative, and asymptotes, should any apply. Your possibilities are positively and negatively unbounded.
—Inspired by Joshua Nalven, a graduate of West Orange High School, West Orange, NJ (2006–2007)

The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.
—"Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes

Perhaps you recognize this poem. If you do, then your mind has probably moved on to the question the next line poses: "I wonder if it's that simple?" Saying who we are is never simple (read the entire poem if you need evidence of that). Write a truthful page about yourself for us, an audience you do not know—a very tall order. Hughes begins: "I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem./I went to school there, then Durham, then here/to this college on the hill above Harlem./I am the only colored student in my class." That is, each of us is of a certain age and of a particular family background. We have lived somewhere and been schooled. We are each what we feel and see and hear. Begin there and see what happens.
(2005–2006)

University of Chicago alumna and renowned author/critic Susan Sontag said, "The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions." We all have heard serious questions, absurd questions, and seriously absurd questions, some of which cannot be answered without obliterating the very question. Destroy a question with your answer.
Inspired by Aleksandra Ciric, Oyster Bay High School, Oyster Bay, New York (2005-2006)
Mind that does not stick means "mind that does not stick."
—Zen Master Shoitsu (1202–80) | (2005–2006)

Superstring theory has revolutionized speculation about the physical world by suggesting that strings play a pivotal role in the universe. Strings, however, always have explained or enriched our lives, from Theseus's escape route from the Labyrinth, to kittens playing with balls of yarn, to the single hair that held the sword above Damocles, to the basic awfulness of string cheese, to the Old Norse tradition that one's life is a thread woven into a tapestry of fate, to the beautiful sounds of the finely tuned string of a violin, to the children's game of cat's cradle, to the concept of stringing someone along. Use the power of string to explain the biggest or the smallest phenomenon.
—Inspired by Adam Sobolweski, Pittsford Mendon High School, Pittsford, New York (2005–2006)

Have you ever walked through the aisles of a warehouse store like Costco or Sam's Club and wondered who would buy a jar of mustard a foot and a half tall? We've bought it, but it didn't stop us from wondering about other things, like absurd eating contests, impulse buys, excess, unimagined uses for mustard, storage, preservatives, notions of bigness…and dozens of other ideas both silly and serious. Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.
—Based on a suggestion by Katherine Gold of Cherry Hill High School East, Cherry Hill, NJ (2004–2005)

People often think of language as a connector, something that brings people together by helping them share experiences, feelings, ideas, etc. We, however, are interested in how language sets people apart. Start with the peculiarities of your own personal language—the voice you use when speaking most intimately to yourself, the vocabulary that spills out when you're startled, or special phrases and gestures that no one else seems to use or even understand—and tell us how your language makes you unique. You may want to think about subtle riffs or idiosyncrasies based on cadence, rhythm, rhyme, or (mis)pronunciation.
—Based on a suggestion by Kimberly Traube of La Jolla Country Day School, La Jolla, CA (2004–2005)

In a book entitled The Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett posed the following problem: Suppose you are an astronaut stranded on Mars whose spaceship has broken down beyond repair. In your disabled craft there is a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter that can swiftly and painlessly dismantle your body, producing a molecule-by-molecule blueprint to be beamed to Earth. There, a Teleclone receiver stocked with the requisite atoms will produce, from the beamed instructions, you—complete with all your memories, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. If you activate the Teleclone Mark IV, which astronaut are you—the one dismantled on Mars or the one produced from a blueprint on Earth? Suppose further that an improved Teleclone Mark V is developed that can obtain its blueprint without destroying the original. Are you then two astronauts at once? If not, which one are you? To celebrate twenty years of uncommon essay questions, we brought back this favorite from 1984.
(2004–2005)

If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net.)
—Inspired by Emma Ross, a graduate of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North, Plainsboro, NJ (2003–2004)

Albert Einstein once said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Propose your own original theory to explain one of the 16 mysteries below. Your theory does not need to be testable or even probable; however, it should provide some laws, principles, and/or causes to explain the facts, phenomena, or existence of one of these mysteries. You can make your theory artistic, scientific, conspiracy-driven, quantum, fanciful, or otherwise ingenious—but be sure it is your own and gives us an impression of how you think about the world.

Love, Non-Dairy Creamer, Sleep and Dreams, Gray, Crop Circles, The Platypus, The Beginning of Everything, Art, Time Travel, Language, The End of Everything, The Roanoke Colony, Numbers, Mona Lisa's Smile, The College Rankings in U.S. News and World Report, Consciousness
—Inspired by Akash Goel, a graduate of Saint Bede Academy, Peru, IL (2003–2004)

How do you feel about Wednesday?
—Inspired by Maximilian Pascual Ortega, a graduate of Maine Township High School South, Park Ridge, IL (2002–2003)