Daniel Shotkin is a senior at Westwood Regional High School in New Jersey. Born in New York, he lived in Bangkok for the first fourteen years of his life. Back in the United States, he has made repeated attempts at non-fiction writing. Among other things, his work has received a national medal in journalism at the Scholastic Writing Awards. Outside of writing, his favorite book is Nabokov’s Pale Fire and you can find him listening to João Gilberto. He hopes to contribute a younger perspective to 3 Quarks Daily. Email: dshotkinjr [at] gmail.com
by Daniel Shotkin Conflict follows us everywhere. Terrible drivers, horrible friends, evil politicians—the list goes on and on. For me, most conflicts never really made much sense. I avoid clashing with people as much as possible. It feels self-righteous, almost cringey, to be in a state of dispute. Ironic, because my favorite club in high…
by Daniel Shotkin As any teacher would agree, it’s incredibly difficult to get a classroom of teens to focus on a common topic. Yet at noon on May 8th, all 16 high school seniors in my AP Lit class were transfixed by one event: on the other side of the Atlantic, white smoke had come…
by Daniel Shotkin Last summer, I wrote an article about Affirmative Action, college admissions, and what it meant for me as a high school senior. At the time, I’d just begun the arduous process of applying to colleges, and I was frustrated. Getting into a ‘top’ college had been my dream for the past four years,…
by Daniel Shotkin As a senior in high school, I’ve spent four consecutive years in English classes, during which my teachers have hammered home the idea that fiction follows a set progression—Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, Romantics, Transcendentalism, Victorian literature, realism, existentialism, modernism, and, today, postmodernism. If each past period has been clearly defined—Romantics love the…
by Daniel Shotkin This week, electors from across the country will cast their votes for the next president of the United States. Only now, more than a month after Election Day, will Uncle Sam officially wave goodbye to election season. That seasonal bout of incessant campaign mail and debate fever has found its way off…
by Daniel Shotkin I was in 9th grade when I first heard the name Rudyard Kipling mentioned in school. My history teacher had decided to inaugurate a unit on imperialism, and Kipling’s zealous verses soon rang loudly through the classroom: Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your…
by Daniel Shotkin This week marks one year since Affirmative Action was repealed by the Supreme Court. The landmark ruling was a watershed moment in how we think of race and social mobility in the United States. But for high schoolers, the crux of the case lies somewhere else entirely. Like many others, getting admission…
by Daniel Shotkin In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau prophetically declared that “we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Rousseau’s words seem clairvoyant in their relevancy to schooling in the United States. Education has come to the forefront of the array of issues emerging in…