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Hi, I'm Sid Dobrin. In this video, I'm going to talk about teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Nothing
is so Necessary for a Young Man..." I'll be talking about teaching his essay in the context
of first year writing, and I'll be addressing the essay specifically from a rhetorical situational
approach, and thinking specifically about the piece as a response.
When I teach Coates' essay I usually start by asking students some basic, key questions:
For whom does Coates write? What else do you know about the situation in which he participates?
What is Coates' thesis? Where does he state it? How does he state it? That is, I want
to encourage students to start their own responses to Coates by looking at the situation and
then developing a strong thesis designed for that situation, so I start by asking them
to look for the same kinds of things Coates does to establish his thesis and his position
in the situation. Coates' essay is an interesting kind of response,
because in one sense he is responding to the situation of his father and Citizen E urging
him to read War and Peace, but Coates uses that particular situation as an avenue toward
addressing how he reads Western literature through an Afrocentric lens. But, even that
isn't really Coates' primary point. And perhaps that is why I teach this essay as such a wonderful
piece of writing to respond: it shows Coates' ecology. It shows his process for thinking
from the immediate, the singular, to the larger, more complex.
Coates' essay, that is, is not really about reading War and Peace; it's about aesthetics,
about synthesis and connection. So, what I try to get my students to see about Coates'
essay is that response can lead to more critical thought, to more complex response. Coates
writes not just his response to overlapping situations, but he exposes his thinking through
difficult subjects. And, I think that's what makes this piece so useful in terms of writing
to respond: the idea of exposure. In many ways, writing to respond is an act
of exposing. Response works to expose parts of the text or situation or whatever is being
responded to, certainly. But, more so, it exposes the writer and the writer's position
in a situation. Exposure, of course, is a risk; to expose is to make vulnerable.
Coates makes Tolstoy vulnerable, makes Western literature vulnerable, and the entrenchment
of aesthetic vulnerable. But, he also exposes his father's vulnerabilities, his own vulnerabilities,
and, perhaps most important, he makes the relationship between the Western literary
tradition and the African American experience vulnerable. These are the rhetorical moves
I want students to see in Coates' writing and how those moves make his response effective.
Coates' essay is ripe for conversation, both in terms of content analysis and situational
analysis. It is also a wonderful piece for talking with students about how separating
situation and content sometimes serves little purpose. Coates' essay is a great example
to talk about synthesis, relations, and power. So, those are some of the key aspects of how
I teach Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Nothing Is so Necessary for a Young Man. . ." You will probably have
other approaches you find useful, too, that you might want to share as well. So, how do
you teach this essay? Post a response to this video—either in the comment section or as
a video response—and share your thoughts on teaching this essay, as well. Thanks for
watching!