Due: February 19^th at 11:30am
Ms. Wolf’s Government and Civics Class
Room 214
Marsh Valley High School

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Description:

You will use the sources that you used for your annotated bibliography to save your life when a teenage boy, maybe a year older than you, barges into the classroom next to yours and you hear the gunshots that don’t sound at all like the pop pop pop television told you they would. 

In this essay, you should make a thoughtful argument about the impact of gun control laws on high school students like the ones pressed up against you as you crouch under the tables on      the far side of the classroom. You’ve heard the lockdown announcement in Ms. Wolf’s class before, but every other time, she’d tell you at the start of class that you would be having a drill and now she’s facing the door, body stick-still, hands moving fast across her phone. 

To persuade your audience—politicians with the ability to make a change despite their unwillingness to do so—you’ll need to use at least five different sources and put them in conversation with each other. But right now, you don’t remember what conversations are. Rachel is squished next to you just like you’d wished she’d been at Marty’s party last week. Her face is flushed, like yours, you guess, and her hands are clammy. You want to tell her that she will be okay, that she’ll be able to finish her essay on time. Her eyes trace the fluorescent bulbs that are dead dark now to convince the shooter there are no targets in this classroom.

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Essay Requirements:

Sources should be a mix of articles, books, and videos. You should use electronic sources to shield yourself from the arguments about mental health and how many doors your school should have, and the physical books to try in vain to block the bullets you can hear through the thin classroom walls. Unmistakable but indecipherable shouts pepper the hallway and your ears while you try to remember that your sources must work together to showcase what you’ve learned about the worth of your life. 

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To successfully ace this essay and survive this class you must: 

• Defend a complex, original, and thoughtful thesis that considers both sides of the argument on gun control. Remember that your thesis must be debatable. While you crouch under a rickety metal table and try to keep yourself from shaking so much that last year’s gum falls into your hair, politicians continue to claim that there are intelligent and research-based claims to be made against gun control laws. 
• Refer to at least 5 sources—count the seconds until bullets shred the wall or the shooter moves one room over—one of which should be a book with at least four bullet holes in it.
• Slide your phone out of your pocket and turn the brightness all the way down because even as you risk your safety to draft and redraft a text to your mom, you don’t want Rachel to die because you couldn’t follow the rules of lockdown. Don’t simply restate the main idea of each source: Compare and contrast them as you apologize for the fight you had about missing curfew to play Call of Duty with Isaac. 
• Include correct in-text citations and a bibliography page in MLA citation style. You learned how to do this last year. It should be easy for you as soon as you can hear your own thoughts instead of Rachel’s sobbing as she rocks back and forth on her new white sneakers you meant to compliment her on this morning. 

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General Formatting:

• Your final draft must be in Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced, a thud doubly as loud as the ones before. Your face as white as the printer paper. 
• Your final draft must be printed on letter-size paper with 1-inch margins that are devoid of the blood splatter you try not to imagine coating the walls next door. You hear new shouts, deeper than the teenage shooter’s and you’re trying to remember what proper grammar looks like in an essay you’re living through. 
• Your final draft must be at least 4 pages long. When your phone battery dies before you can send one last text to your parents, use the back of the pages to write a goodbye letter filled with apologies that you won’t finish because now the door is opening. 

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Ariel M. Goldenthal is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, JMWW, Exposition Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com.