How Should Teachers Teach This Is Water To College Students?

I get fired up thinking about how to teach 'The New Jim Crow' because it’s the kind of book that can flip a classroom from passive learning to a room sparking with outrage, curiosity, and real questions about justice. For me, the starting point is set the stage like you would for a great story or game: create a clear narrative arc. Begin by giving students historical context—Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement—and then pivot to the rise of mass incarceration so they can see the structural through-line Michelle Alexander lays out. I like to open with something visceral and accessible: a short film clip or excerpts from '13th' paired with a raw statistic about incarceration rates. That immediately grounds the theory in human faces and measurable consequences, and establishes why the book matters beyond the classroom. Early weeks should be about mapping terms and frameworks: what does Alexander mean by 'racial caste', how does the criminal justice system function as a social control mechanism, and what are the legal and policy tools that keep the system running? Give students a road map so they’re not lost in dense prose; use timelines, short primary-source packets, and short guided reading questions to scaffold comprehension without dumbing anything down. From there, make it active and interdisciplinary. I love mixing classroom formats: seminars, debates, mock sentencing hearings, and collaborative research projects. Have students annotate key chapters and then use class time for discussion circles where each person brings one concrete policy change they’d research. Bring in law, sociology, public health, and local community perspectives—invite a public defender, someone from a local reentry program, or a formerly incarcerated person (with care and compensation) to speak. Use data labs where students analyze arrest and sentencing data from their state, or map how local policies produce disparate impacts. Creative assignments help too: ask students to create a short documentary, a podcast episode, or even a storyboard for a graphic essay inspired by 'The New Jim Crow'—I’ve found that translating complex arguments into another medium cements understanding. Throughout, build norms for emotional labor: include trigger warnings, optional content flags, and clear support resources. Discussions about race and punishment can be intense; a classroom agreement about listening, interrupting respectfully, and reflecting is essential. Assessment should value critical thinking and civic engagement over rote memorization. Mix reflective essays with policy memos where students propose concrete reforms, and community-engaged projects that partner with local NGOs. Encourage comparison with other works—pair a chapter with a short story, a relevant Supreme Court opinion, or an episode of 'The Wire' to open conversation about lived experience versus theory. Finally, keep the tone hopeful and action-oriented: analyzing systems is heavy work, but students should leave with tools to advocate, research, or volunteer. Personally, teaching 'The New Jim Crow' has been a classroom highlight for me; it lights a fire under students and challenges them to connect scholarship with the messy world outside campus walls, which is exactly the kind of learning I love to see.

Reading 'This Is Water' feels like being handed a mirror that reflects the mundane routines we often drown in without realizing it. David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech-turned-essay isn’t just about awareness; it’s about the exhausting, daily choice to resist default-setting—letting our brains autopilot through irritation at traffic jams or supermarket queues. The real lesson? You can choose to see the checkout line as a shared human experience rather than a personal inconvenience. It’s exhausting work, but that’s the point: empathy and meaning aren’t passive states. They’re muscles you flex, even when it’s easier to default to cynicism. What sticks with me most is Wallace’s brutal honesty about education’s purpose. It’s not about knowledge accumulation but learning 'how to think'—which really means learning how to wrestle your ego into submission. The 'water' metaphor isn’t just poetic; it’s a reminder that the most obvious realities (like the fact that everyone around you has inner lives as vivid as yours) are the hardest to perceive. I revisit this whenever I catch myself mentally narrating life as if I’m the main character and everyone else is an NPC.

The best part is the bookish atmosphere. The smell of old paper, the sound of pages turning, the intense focus of studying together. It's a sensuous experience that gets tied to the romance. The attraction isn't just physical; it's about sharing an intellectual journey. The college setting provides the literal and metaphorical library for that journey. Even the stress of academia becomes a shared experience that bonds them. It's a very specific, cerebral kind of romance that you can't really transplant to an office or a construction site.

If you're hunting for a transcript of 'This Is Water', there are a few solid places I always check first and they usually turn up a clean text or a reliable source. Start with the published route: the speech was turned into a short book/essay and published, so bookstores and library catalogs (WorldCat, your local library site) will show the official edition. If you want a free online version, look to reputable archives and literary sites that quote or host the full text—university pages, lecture archives, and longform essay sites often repost it with attribution. A careful Google search with the phrase "'This Is Water' transcript" plus filters like "site:edu" or "PDF" narrows things down fast. Another practical trick: the Kenyon commencement video is widely circulated online, and many YouTube uploads include captions you can open and copy. The Internet Archive sometimes has uploads or PDFs of older web copies, and sites like Wikiquote or major literary blogs will carry extended excerpts if not the full text. If you want the cleanest, authoritative reading experience, the published Little, Brown edition or a library copy is the way to go. Personally, I like reading the transcript side-by-side with the speech audio—some lines hit harder when you can hear the cadence. Finding a good transcript helped me catch little rhetorical moves I missed the first time, and the whole speech still feels quietly revolutionary to me.

I get a little giddy thinking about how to teach the myth of Sisyphus because it’s one of those stories that can be a real classroom chameleon — it can be a literal myth retelling, a springboard into existential philosophy, a prompt for creative projects, or even a quiet moment of empathy-building. On a rainy morning, with a mug that’s gone cold next to my laptop and sticky notes everywhere, I sketch a lesson that feels more like a conversation than a lecture. Start by having students tell the story aloud in pairs: no notes, just what they remember or imagine. That immediate oral retelling surfaces preconceptions and mythic energy, and it’s always fun to hear the inventive details they invent. After that I bring in a short, vivid text chunk — a translation of the Greek myth or the opening pages from Camus’ essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus' — and ask them to mark phrases that surprise them. The difference between mythic cruelty and Camus’ philosophical gaze usually sparks a lively debate about purpose, punishment, and meaning. Next, I design three simultaneous activities so different learners all get something they love. One table acts like a theatrical troupe: they script and perform a two-minute scene depicting Sisyphus at a different life stage — youthful pride, middle-aged resignation, late-life acceptance. Another group is the philosophers’ corner: they map Camus’ argument about the absurd, drawing arrows between terms like revolt, freedom, and recognition. The third group becomes visual artists or memers: they create a single image or comic strip that reimagines Sisyphus in a modern setting — a commuter pushing a spreadsheet, a gamer grinding levels, or a coder debugging forever. I circulate, asking high-leverage questions like, 'If Sisyphus had a smartphone, what would his home screen look like?' Small, playful prompts like that let students apply the myth in ways that stick. For assessment and follow-up I keep it flexible and humane. Students can write a reflective journal, a short analytical paragraph comparing the ancient myth and Camus’ reading, or a creative piece: a letter from Sisyphus to a friend, a poem, or a short film storyboard. I also invite them to bring in pop culture parallels — 'Groundhog Day', a character from a manga, or a repetitive job in a family member’s life — and explain the link. At the end, rather than forcing a single conclusion, I ask the class to vote on whether Sisyphus is tragic, heroic, or something else entirely, and then explain why. It’s not about making everyone agree; it’s about leaving with a better question in your pocket. Walking out, I usually feel pleased and a little nostalgic, like the bell has rung on a lesson that let students meet both the ancient and the deeply personal.

David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' hit me like a lightning bolt during a particularly grumpy commute. It’s not some preachy self-help spiel—it’s a raw, funny, and uncomfortably accurate mirror held up to our default-setting selfishness. The grocery store example? Genius. Wallace paints this mundane scenario where everyone around you seems like an obstacle, then flips it: What if that screaming kid is terrified, or the cashier’s working a double shift after her chemo session? That shift from 'the world revolves around me' to 'everyone’s fighting invisible battles' is where real compassion grows. What sticks with me is how he frames awareness as an active choice, not some fluffy virtue. You don’t just wake up compassionate—you practice noticing the humanity in irritating moments. When I catch myself raging at slow walkers now, I hear Wallace’s voice: 'This is water.' It’s not about being perfect; it’s about interrupting your own ego long enough to choose kindness. That’s why the speech resonates years later—it treats compassion as a rebellious act against our natural pettiness.

Mapping out a unit on 'Waiting for Godot' feels like planning a scavenger hunt for ideas — there’s texture everywhere if you know where to look. I usually start with a bite-sized historical/contextual primer: a short, punchy mini-lecture or a handout about Beckett, post-war Europe, and Theatre of the Absurd. Then I throw students straight into the text with a read-aloud (assign funny or deliberately miscast roles once) so they hear the rhythm and silences. From there I split work: close reading groups that annotate language, and performance groups that stage tiny vignettes focused on one moment (the boots, the tree, the pause). This mix keeps both analytical and kinetic learners engaged. To deepen things, I pair the play with creative tasks — modernizing a scene into a short film, or writing voicemail messages from Vladimir and Estragon — and scaffold reflection with guiding questions about waiting, meaning, and agency. For assessment I prefer portfolios: annotations, a reflective piece, and either a performance or a creative reinterpretation. It’s messy, often hilarious, and occasionally uncomfortable in a good way; students leave thinking differently about silence and presence.

During my commute yesterday I found myself thinking about 'This is Water' and how it feels like a cheat code for everyday mindfulness. David Foster Wallace's core idea — that the default setting of our minds runs on autopilot judgments and self-centered narratives — maps so cleanly onto modern mindfulness practices. Instead of meditation apps promising zen in five minutes, 'This is Water' asks a quieter question: what do you choose to pay attention to? That resonated with me because attention is the currency of both a hectic city commute and a binge-watching session of 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' where every frame demands focus. What I love is how the speech complements formal techniques: when I sit for a short breath-count, I’m practicing the same freedom Wallace talks about — choosing perspective. Mindfulness gives a toolkit (breathing, body scans, noting thoughts), while 'This is Water' gives the ethic behind the tools — to be compassionate, to resist default solipsism. It’s practical too: pausing for three breaths before responding to an angry email or taking a mindful snack break instead of scrolling through social feeds can shift my whole day. So for me these ideas blend into a daily rhythm: small, intentional moments of noticing, mixed with a broader project of choosing kindness. The payoff isn’t dramatic enlightenment; it’s less reactivity, more curiosity, and the occasional surprising sense that life, even in traffic or on the 7th episode of a show, can be inhabited with a little more grace. I keep coming back to it — it’s oddly motivating.

Teaching quotes have this magical way of cutting through the noise and reminding us why we bother with education in the first place. I stumbled upon one from Rita Pierson—'Every kid needs a champion'—during a rough patch in my tutoring days, and it reframed everything. It wasn’t just about algebra or essays; it was about showing up for them. Teachers lugging stacks of papers home at midnight might roll their eyes at 'inspiration,' but a well-timed quote can be like caffeine for the soul. Then there’s the student side. I’ve seen high schoolers scribble 'You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take' (thanks, Gretzky) on their notebooks before exams. It’s not about the words—it’s about wearing bravery like armor. Quotes become shared language; my literature teacher used to throw out lines from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' like confetti, and suddenly we were all debating empathy instead of SparkNotes summaries. That’s the alchemy—they turn abstract values into something you can hold.

I totally get why you'd want to check out 'This Is Water'—it's such a profound little speech-turned-essay by David Foster Wallace! But here's the thing: while I've stumbled across snippets and quotes floating around online, the full PDF isn't legally available for free since it's still under copyright. Publishers keep a tight grip on Wallace's works, and rightfully so. That said, if you're curious, I'd recommend grabbing the paperback or ebook—it's super affordable, and supporting the author's estate feels like the right move. Plus, there's something special about holding a physical copy of something that makes you rethink life. If you're tight on cash, libraries often have it, or you might find used copies for a few bucks!