Intuition is the gut feeling one gets in a certain situation. Like when playing a horror video game, and one knows any second a character is going to pop out. Counterintuition is the opposite. In the video game, the developer knows a character should pop out and scare the gamer, but they choose not to do it. It is counterintuitive that the character did not pop out at that moment. Professor David Hodges, a English Composition, from Rowan University focuses on the idea of counterintuitive. With the focus on counterintuitively, some students may be held back from the opinion of the word, the trap of focusing on the white paper, and unreliability that the reader is truly going to listen that all make research papers an insignificant way of judging whether or not a student has obtained knowledge presented in English Composition Two.

Counterintuitiveness can be seen as subjective. Something may make sense to one person that goes right over the head of someone else. For example, when talking about purposeful summaries, Professor Hodges was going over quick examples, “It seems counterintuitive that human life, which everyone knows gets DNA from two parents when male sperm fertilizes a female egg, could ever require, or even make use of, the DNA of three parents. But that’s exactly what is happening.” To some people like Professor Hodges, that may make complete sense. To others, it may not seem that way. At one point, that most certainly sounds counterintuitive, but with recent discoveries and new technology, it may not seem that way. Who is to say that reproducing with three, four, or five is not possible? To those scientists or patients that have seen this first hand, that statement above may seem very intuitive. 

Throughout the entire spring semester, the students are supposed to keep writing on the same article called the white paper. This is just a rough sketch of everything. The students are supposed to keep quotes, ideas, important summaries, articles, and much more onto this document. The whole purpose is to stay organized throughout the year in order to help the student write their research paper. This may work for some students, but it may also cause failure in others. According to Anu Haapala, writer for Central and Eastern European Online Library, states, “According to many recent studies the effect of learning style on academic performance has been found to be significant and mismatch between teaching and learning styles causes learning failure and frustration.” It is known that students learn differently, but students also write differently. Some students may need to write everything out, have two to three attempts at writing an introduction paragraph, plan everything including the paragraph structure, or some students can just naturally write. There is not a right or wrong way to get to a destination as long as they get there. 

The research paper that the students have been working on the entirety of the year according to Professor Hodges, “is to persuade readers of the rightness of your opinion based on the evidence you’ve compiled and synthesized.” This is supposed to be achieved with hours beyond hours of research, but it can all be for nothing. In an example presented by Professor Hodges, there is a bridge that is not wide enough for people to fish and walk by it. Dogs were accidentally getting caught on or eating fish hooks. So, they put up a sign explaining that no one is allowed to fish there anymore. According to Professor Hodges on the Invention by Naming article, “Now that the signs are up, dog walkers can demand the right of way, and the kids with their tackle might grumble, but they leave when they’re told to leave.” The kids do leave after they are told, but they wait until they are told. Before someone walks their dog there, the sign is completely ignored. The same goes with the research papers. Hours are spent obtaining facts and evidence, and like the kids they can just be completely ignored. How is the student supposed to persuade someone who does not want to be pursuaded? 

Likewise, when going over the Stanford Prison experiment, many students explained how it was due to white men that they acted out as they did. A very few students explained how instead it was due to the fact that it was human nature to act out that way. When debating about the topic, the very few students were outnumbered, and their opinions ultimately were ignored. According to Thibault Le Texier who quoted professor Philip Zombardo, “I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in antisocial acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects [. . .] [I wondered] what would happen if we aggregated all of these processes, making some subjects feel deindividuated, others dehumanized within an anonymous environment in the same experimental setting, and where we could carefully document the process over time. (Stanford University News Service, 1997, p. 8)” The ultimate goal was to dehumanize the prisoners. Since everyone is human, regardless of race or gender, the same things would have happened. When explaining this to the other students in the class, the few students were completely ignored. This shows how easy it is to ignore a claim, just because one does not want to believe the opposing side.

Since the topic of the research paper, counterintuition, trapping one into planning and writing a certain way, and the possibility of certain claims being ignored, the research paper to show what knowledge a student has obtained becomes absurd. Counterintuition can be different things depending on the person. Words or phrases mean different things to everyone. Likewise, so do claims. After figuring out a claim, the ability to write the research paper in a certain format may not work depending on what kind of student the writer is. The possibility of their claims being ignored, like the sign on the bridge, may invalidate a writer’s paper strictly due to the reader and their previous viewpoints. While research papers may seem like a good way to see a student’s knowledge, they have many flaws. By providing different ways of allowing a student to show what they have learned, it is a gateway for the best chance of success for every student. 

Work Cited

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