What I'm Looking For: In General
Response papers in my courses should do just one thing: they should argue for or against a thesis found in the reading. I want you to identify an explicit thesis stated in the reading, and either give reasons for it, or give reasons for a contrary thesis. A thesis is a single claim, answering a question on which there is controversy. For example, many 19th-century socialists, like Thomas Hodgskin, Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Robert Owen--as well as non-socialists, like Thomas Malthus--held that the only truly productive form of labor is labor that produces useful physical objects. All other forms of labor, they held, are not genuinely productive. So housework, legal services, religious services, and the like are, according to this thesis, unproductive labor. That is a definite thesis, because it takes an explicit stand on a controverted question: what forms of labor are genuinely productive? So if in our readings you happen to find a statement of that thesis, it is a good candidate for a thesis to argue for or against.
Once you have found a definite and controversial thesis in the reading, I want you to do one thing: argue for or against it. If you argue for it, then you have to give good reasons for accepting the thesis, and these reasons should not be those found in the reading: they have to be different reasons that you get from some other source. If instead you want to argue against the thesis, then you have to state and defend an alternative thesis.
So, for example, if you decide to argue for the 19th-century socialists' productive-labor thesis, then you need some other reason than their own rationale, which was that the only genuinely productive form of labor is that which performs the central economic activity, and that the central economic activity is the production of physical commodities, because the true goal of all economic activity is to provide us with an abundance of material goods. But if you are going to argue for their thesis, you need to construct some other rationale for it. If instead you are going to argue against their thesis, then you have to defend an alternative thesis: something like "some forms of labor are truly productive even though they don't produce useful physical objects" or "housework is a truly productive form of labor even though it produces no useful physical objects."
Notice that what I am looking for is an argument or rationale for or against the thesis. I want you to present plausible and uncontroversial premises, and then to explain why, if those premises are true, then we can reliably infer that the thesis is either true or false. So your argument should have three main parts: uncontroversial premises, a conclusion that the thesis is either true or false, and an explanation of why the premises allow us to reliably infer the conclusion. For example, suppose you want to argue that there are genuinely productive forms of labor besides producing physical commodities. You could argue this thesis as follows. One main goal of economic activity is to satisfy people's desires. Any form of labor that achieves a main goal of economic activity is genuinely productive labor. But some forms of labor besides producing physical commodities satisfy desires: legal services is an example, because people often desire legal services. So other forms of labor besides producing physical commodities are genuinely productive labor. That is a decent argument: for it to count as a good one, it would have to explain why we should think that, "Any form of labor that achieves a main goal of economic activity is genuinely productive labor." But it already has the form of a decent argument against the socialists' productive-labor thesis. So a response paper giving basically this argument would be heading into good-paper territory.