Life. Loss. Love. Tears. Vomit.

Image by comedy_nose on Flickr. Obtained via cc license.

It was never my intention to make two of the girls in the class cry.  All I’d asked was that they write and share a poem.  But there we were, sitting in a circle on the auditorium stage and listening to them choke up as they struggled to get through stories of pain, anger, and fear.

We’d spent the last couple of weeks working on reciting others’ poetry, performing for the national Poetry Out Loud competition, and I had thought that it would be a good idea for students to share their own voices, as they had just shared someone else’s.  There, of course, was the potential for a couple of problems:  tell a teenager you want them to write poetry and they flinch; and I’m the world’s worst poet.

Now, I solved the first problem right away.  Despite having been exposed to free verse much earlier than high school, many students still have this tendency to think that poetry has to rhyme.  I made a point to read, analyze, and discuss a ton of free verse poetry during the previous three weeks so that I could remove the “Does it have to rhyme?” question from the room and hopefully tamper down some of their trepidation toward writing poetry*.  Then, I dug up a bad poem I wrote in high school and read it, promising that on the day when we would all read our poetry to one another, I’d read the worst poem I had ever written.  After all, I told them, you may think your poem isn’t great, but it’s nothing compared to what I will unleash upon you.

The second problem–my being pretty terrible at writing poetry–was a little tougher to solve because it drove to the heart of my actually being qualified to teach.  If I am horrible at writing poetry, then how could I evaluate it?  Am I completely wrong for trying to cover it or even assessing it?  After all, poetry, like any other form of writing, is subjective, and therefore if I have no true expertise on the matter my opinion has no leg to stand on.  Or is this one of those perfect cases of those who can’t, teach?

For the love of longhand

Starting tomorrow, some of my sophomore classes are writing their last essay of the year.  It’s a persuasive essay and it winds up serving as an informal pre-assessment of sorts for their eleventh grade teachers–since persuasive writing makes up most of the eleventh grade curriculum, after all is said and done, I collect the pieces and pass them onto the junior English teachers.  Granted, I’m letting my students write about whatever they want and their eleventh grade teachers will work them toward mastering the art of answering a writing prompt on the forthcoming state exam, but I think that it’ll be a halfway decent indicator of where they are going in.

They’ll be writing the essays in longhand, and what’s funny about this to me (and probably only to me because I’m one of the only people who finds this type of stuff “funny”) is that it’s not due to some pedagogical stance or effort to prove that old-school educational philosophy is alive and well.  It’s because this is testing week and I’d have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa in the auditorium storage closet than an available computer.  Ergo, pen … meet paper.

Although I have to say, having been a “writer” since I discovered my voice (and for a brief time, my muse) in a high school creative writing class (I say “writer” because I don’t have enough published credits to my name), I have written many a first draft in a spiral-bound notebook.  In fact, I still have the green spiral-bound notebook with “Creative Writing Journal, Tom Panarese Period 6″ written on the cover in Sharpie, which I used in the fall semester of 1994 in that creative writing class as well as every notebook I’ve filled since.

Doesn’t make me a writer, makes me a hoarder.

Anyway, while there have been times that I have found writing in longhand inefficient, there are many times when I savor the chance to sit down with a pen, my latest notebook (and maybe my iPod) and a cup of coffee and spend some time working on … whatever I’m working on, especially since they are very rare moments in my very busy life.  That anyone can have the chance to slow things down and get into his own head as a writer is a great chance.  Granted, what’s inside my own head scares me sometimes, but at least I get that chance.

At the same time, I’m grateful for technology.  I was able to write this post via WordPress in one fell swoop, without having to retype it, and published it right away.  When I was in high school in the early 1990s, I would have never had the opportunity to do that.  But it also took me about 45 minutes to write something that probably should have taken maybe half an hour.  Because I had seven tabs open on Chrome and kept switching over to Twitter and Facebook whenever a (1) appeared next to the site’s name in the tab.  Then there was an article I needed to read about Jon Cryer making Superman IV, I discovered a podcast about Saved By the Bell, and had to subscribe to the brand new Two True Freaks podcast feed.

In other words, as much as I love what technology has given me in terms of both efficiency in writing as well as inspiration, I will say it slows down my process because I get incredibly distracted.

So here’s to longhand, may it never die.  Although I will say that there is a downside to the old method–this post was originally supposed to be about something entirely different, but I left my notebook with the draft in my classroom.

11 Pieces of Unsolicited Advice for Bloggers (because, you know, nobody asked)

So I was making my usual rounds of blog reading yesterday and I saw that John Spencer had a post called “Advice for New Bloggers.” It’s a great post that has honest and practical advice that anyone who is starting out in the world of blogging really should read and follow.  In fact, I found myself reading it for my own education (and, admittedly, so that I could reassure myself by reading each item and saying, “Oh yeah, I do that.  I did that too.”) and also found myself sitting there and saying, “Why didn’t I do that?”  In fact, I told John as much (and to his credit, he actually encouraged me to do this).  I mean, I’ve been blogging for the better part of eleven years, so I have a little bit of experience and maybe I would have some good advice?  Okay, it’s probably crap advice … and I seriously would advise you to go read John’s post because I’m going to do my best to not duplicate his advice (my intent is to add to it in a manner of speaking). And why 11 instead of 10?  [Insert overused Spinal Tap joke here]

1. Get yourself on a schedule.  John’s first couple of pieces of advice are about figuring out what to write about and finding your voice.  I’d like to add to that by saying that you should know when you’re going to write.  When I started my other blog, Pop Culture Affidavit, I decided that I was going to go back to my college days of writing a column once a week in the student newspaper and made a commitment to write one post per week for the blog (in the case of PopAff, it’s a random or obscure piece of popular culture).  It allowed me and still allows me to pace myself and not get burned out too quickly, which tends to happen with a lot of blogs.  You get all psyched up and you pump out five or six blog posts in a week and by week two, you find yourself writing four, then three the next week, and then all of the sudden your blog is that blog that has a great title that someone else wants but can’t have and it’s even more irritating that you haven’t updated in a decade.  If you commit to at least a minimum number of posts or even a maximum number of posts, you will start to ensure your own longevity.
2. Don’t worry if you’re not current enough.  Blogging about education can be like blogging about popular culture: more than likely, there is someone out there who is also covering it and covering it more quickly.  And chances are, that person is getting paid to do said blogging, which makes it kind of hard to compete if you’re like me and hold down a steady day job and also have a family.  So if you have a topic you want to discuss and it seems that every teacher blogger talked about this two weeks ago, go ahead and talk about it.  It’s your space and your voice.
3. That being said, keep on top of current events.  I find that one of the best sources for post topics is The Washington Post.  Granted, I live in Virginia and while I’m no longer “local” to the Post’s main readership, I did live in that area once and I still read it on a daily basis and still look at what they’re writing about education.  Same can be said for The New York Times, since I’m a native New Yorker.  Nothing helps you get a quick and easy blog post up than a response to something you read in the paper.   You might actually get more out of it than you thought you would.
4. Read.  And read outside your “box.”  One of the most important things I tell my students when they are writing is that all good writers read (and then I make them read things similar to what they’ll be writing).  If you’re blogging, then you should be reading other people’s blogs.  If you’re blogging about a topic as specific as education, you should be reading other people who blog about education.  But make sure that you read beyond just that topic.  I have learned so much about my job as a teacher from sources outside of those in education and read about a variety of topics on a regular basis that range from politics and business to comic books and stand-up comedy.  It allows me to be a better writer as well as a better teacher of writing.

When the authentic audience is a hostile audience

Image copyright Joakim Westerlund. Used under cc license.

As an English teacher who really loves to focus on strengthening my students’ writing skills, I’m often reading about better ways to do so.  Because as a (wannabe? struggling?) writer myself, I know that I don’t have all the answers as to what makes great writing, let alone all the answers on how to transfer that great writing to the mind of another person.  So I seek answers elsewhere while knowing that I have to continue to focus on the all-important fundamentals of writing: fully fleshing out and organizing your ideas, writing a full draft and then (most importantly) revising that draft before presenting a final copy.  Often lately, I have heard the same phrase repeated over and over in what I’ve read:  authentic audience.

I’ve posted on this before and at the risk of repeating myself (which you don’t want me to do) or quoting myself (which … ugh), I’ll just say that my feelings on what so many refer to as an “authentic audience” are mixed.  On one hand, students getting their work out to an audience wider than simply their teachers and classmates can be a fulfilling and rewarding experience and it can push them in the direction of trying to develop those skills further and becoming better writers.  On the other hand, I still think that the phrase is used to further put teachers in their place by people who obviously don’t think that teachers play an important enough role in education.  Yes, I’m painting with a very broad brush in that last sentence, but there is a passive-aggressive “you’re not good enough” thing going on in the insistence on giving them an “authentic audience.”

And then there is the fact that this authentic audience that is so sought after is often sought using the internet.  After all, “student work + authentic audience + technology = INNOVATIVE!,” right?  Well, that would be absolutely great if the internet was a field of amber waves of grain where there are rainbows and puppy dogs and lollipops all the time, but let’s be authentic here: you don’t need a “digital native” to tell you that the internet is more like a dark forest filled with trolls and pornography.  Okay, you can avoid the pornography pretty easily, but one of the big downsides of the internet’s biggest upside is that while the internet has been able to give everyone a voice, that voice can often be anonymous and particularly nasty.

Again, this is nothing new.  Anonymous idiots and trolls have been around since before I got my very first email account in the fall of 1995.  Entire studies have been done on how we feel safe hurling vulgarities at someone from behind the cloak of anonymity that a user name can provide.  Want some proof?  Take a look at the current campaign of harrassment being waged against Anita Sarkeesian, who runs a great blog called The Feminist Frequency and has been looking for funding via Kickstarter for a video series she calls Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.  A look at the video on Kickstarter shows what promises to be a great series–in fact, I’ve been looking at some of her other entries and am going to go and watch her previous series, Tropes vs. Women because what I’ve seen so far is brilliant–and being that there is quite an amount of negative depictions of women in our popular culture, a necessary piece of education.  However, as detailed on both FF and in a couple of other blogs, her trailer for Tropes was the recipient of an enormous amount of trolling by means of misogynistic comments that were often vulgar, harassment that got so bad that her Wikipedia page was even vandalized with porn, as detailed in “The All-Too-Familiar Harassment Against Feminist Frequency, and What the Gaming Community Can Do About It” on The Mary Sue [warning: language]:

Whether or not you like Sarkeesian’s work is utterly moot. You might disagree with some of her points. You might disagree with all of her points. You might even vehemently disagree. That’s not the issue here. The issue lies in this: A woman declared her intent to publicly voice her opinions about video games. For that, she was called a bitch, a whore, a slut, a cunt, a dyke, and a baffling assortment of racial slurs. She was threatened with violence, rape, and death. She was told to shut her mouth, get back in the kitchen, and die of cancer. Her video was repeatedly flagged for terrorism in an effort to get YouTube to pull it. Her Wikipedia page was defaced with pornography and profanity. All for the crime of being a woman talking about women in video games. No, not for being a woman talking about video games. For being a woman who had announced that she would, at some point in the future, be talking about video games.

There’s also a piece on Wired, “Feminist Take on Video Games Draws Crude Ridicule, Massive Support,” which gives another good account of the story.

Yet another defense of writing a paper

I created this particular wordle about essays using my advanced English 10 essay rubric (I might have added a word or two).

I was reading another post on “The Innovative Educator” the other morning and in tune with most of the other posts on that site, it advocates for caring about students and making their experiences meaningful.  They are hard things to disagree with, especially when you want your classes to care as much as you do about their learning.  But somewhere on the way to proving her point, the post’s author implies that a critical essay about literature is not a worthwhile task; at least it seems that those teachers who assign such tasks aren’t doing enough.

I guess the critical essay does sound a bit luddite and wouldn’t really be an example of a meaningful task because when students hand in a paper they are doing for me to grade and not publishing to a wiki or blog or anything for the greater world to see.  After all, I am not a real audience for them, just an example of an outdated piece of a machine that ruins any shot they have at real inteligence.  At least that’s the impression I got.

Let’s set aside those things and look at the issue at hand, which is that there is still value to be found in a critical literature essay.  I’ll make a bit of a switch and call it a “paper” instead of an “essay” because to me, “essay” implies either a piece of personal writing and not analytic writing, and I want to be clear that I am not referring to that scourge of high school English class, the five-paragraph essay.  Furthermore, since the literature paper is still a viable form of assessment, then it’s right to consider that the teacher is still a genuine audience (then again, I’ll go out on a limb and say that teachers not being “genuine” is simply a label meant to denigrate the profession and harp on the already-tired “industrial model” talking point).

But why, if said paper may never go beyond the classroom or past my desk, do I consider myself a genuine audience for my students and consider their writing a paper a genuine assessment of what they have learned in the study of literature?  I’ve touched on this subject before, but I did want to come back to it here and talk a little more about my experiences with the literature paper this year with my advanced sophomore English class.  I know that many of them are considering colleges and having gotten to know a good number of the 25 students in that particular class, I can see several of them going after acceptance from a competitive school like Virginia or William & Mary (if this were my old high school, they would be applying to at least one Ivy).  So, their immediate future more than likely involves a classroom or lecture hall and if they wind up taking a class in the humanities, they may wind up doing some sort of critical analysis by way of a paper.  So it’s still a relevant way to use a skill that’s been labeled “21st Century,” although to be honest, the lit paper has been around for quite a long time.

And come to think of it, the idea of a “closed” audience, no matter how collaborative an environment you work in, is also relevant as well.  I spent quite a number of years in sales support and marketing positions where my work was done for either my boss or someone in another department or a partner and the only people outside our company/firm who saw it were clients.  So the idea that you are producing something that’s for a specific audience and not “published” in the sense that it is available for a mass audience is also important and therefore those types of audiences (your clients, your boss, your teacher), are genuine audiences.

Loopy from the Feedback

One of the best articles I read when I was on my way to entering this profession was about the “myth” of self-esteem, and I wish I remember where it came from so I could provide a  link, but the gist of it was that because we have focused on students’ self-esteem so much throughout their lives, we have “created a monster” so to speak.  That monster has two heads: the entitled brat with a helicopter parent and the teacher who is scared to even give a single word of negative feedback because he has heard that the school system “damages” children (or “steals dreams” or whatever the talking point is now).

I’ve been thinking a lot about feedback lately, probably because I have spent most of my nights this week grading essays and proofing yearbook pages.  So I guess I’m more or less ensconced in feedback, but while I’m plowing through my work, I have been thinking, perhaps a little too much about whether or not the feedback that I give is helpful.  Now, I’m pretty comfortable with the grading process for an essay because the rubric I use is very clear and straightforward so students aren’t left wondering why their grades have the numbers that they have.  It’s the feedback itself, which is mostly expressed through comments made on the essay (both in the margins and at the end), that I have been wondering about.  

Part of this comes from an argument I had back in October over the Internet about the nature of feedback and something I said about my “feedback philosophy” if you will:

Students need to know what constructive criticism is and why that is more important than a pat on the back.  I don’t use red pen on their essays because I want to crush their self-esteem.  I do it because it shows up and they can see my comments clearly.  I also don’t mark up their papers because they are bad papers.  I do it because I want them to see where and how they can improve.  Just because I was thorough in my comments and you got a C doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer, that you’re stupid, or that I hate you.

 Btw, I am really really really sorry I just quoted myself.  It makes me feel dirty and I just … need a shower.

Anyway, the response I got to that was:

If I got graded on all my writing, I would not like writing.  Let students make mistakes without pointing it out.  Focus on what is good.  Don’t turn them off to a subject and associate it with everything they do that is wrong.  A wise teacher shared this advice with me.  Ask students what kind of feedback they are looking for and give that to them. I think this is so smart.  Another analogy is this.  I have taught more than a dozen people in their 30s and 40s to snowboard.  I never focus on what they are doing wrong.  They are usually frustrated in those first few days.  I build them up and focus on the great things they are doing.  I have gotten every single person on black diamonds by weekend 5.  My key, focus on what is good. 

Asking people what they want to hear and then telling them that instead of giving them the truth — isn’t that how we wound up in Iraq?  

Snark aside, the comment got me thinking about grading, because I come from a “workshopping” background in that I spent much of my college career and my pre-teaching career in situations where my creative output was often commented and criticized by multiple people before it was finally submitted to wherever it was going, whether it be to a professor for review or a potential client.  Sometimes that commentary I got on my work was pretty brutal and had I not been used to receiving negative feedback from time to time I would have gotten more upset than I did when, for instance, a partner at my former law firm asked aloud in a meeting why the heck we even paid for a marketing department. 

Ah, lawyers.  The only people with worse manners than teenagers.

Walt Whitman vs. Public Enemy

Walt Whitman is also the recipient of New Jersey's highest honor.

One of the more notable features of any English textbook teacher’s edition is what I like to call the “monkey margins.”  These are the notes and guides that are placed in the margins of the pages that are designed to make teaching that particular piece of text so easy that a monkey could do it.  I’ll admit that there are times when I have found the monkey margins useful, like last week when I was able to use them to answer a student’s question about a story’s historical context.

But most of the time, the monkey margins are ridiculous and seeing them reminds me of a time four years ago when I was in my third year of teaching and was at the beginning of my Harlem Renaissance unit in my eleventh grade English class.  I started with Walt Whitman.  Which to someone unfamiliar with the Harlem Renaissance seems to be an odd place to start, but since one of my featured poems was Langston Hughes’s “I, Too,” I felt that it would be great to start with the “source material” so to speak.  Besides, “I Hear America Singing” was in the eleventh grade textbook that every student had so there was no copying necessary.

As textbook publishers often do (in this case, it was Prentice Hall), there were a few poems next to Whitman’s in a “compare/contrast” type of thing and some of the questions the book asked students had to do with looking at the different messages the poems were sending.  I had this in mind anyway when I came up with the idea to use those two poems; after all, so many of us look at the same piece in different ways that I thought it would be good to see different interpretations of the same idea before opening students up to making interpretations themselves.

From the Bookshelf: Kick Me

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

When I was fresh out of college in 1999, teen television shows and movies were experiencing a renaissance.  American Pie was one the biggest hits of that summer’s box office and Dawson’s Creek was still going pretty strong on the WB.  Having seen this success, television networks did what they always do when a concept is successful: copy it and hope that it works.  That fall, we were treated to teen aliens in Roswell, inter-clique fighting with Popular, and the angst of Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway on Get Real.  But my favorite show out of the teen explosion–well, the only one I actually watched–was Freaks and Geeks.

Set at McKinley High School in Michigan in the 1980-1981 school year, Freaks and Geeks follows a brother and sister, Sam and Lindsay Weir, through the travails of going to McKinley.  When the series opens, Sam is the geek, finding himself tortured by a bully and having a hopeless crush on a cheerleader; conversely, Lindsay has thrown aside her geek friends and is hanging out with the stoners and burnouts who make up the “freaks” of the title.  NBC cancelled the show in the middle of its season due to terrible ratings (it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, losing in the ratings to COPS and Early Edition), although fans poured enough effort into a “save the show” campaign that three more episodes were aired in July 2000 (I contributed myself and have a T-shirt to prove it).

The men responsible for getting this show off the ground were Judd Apatow (he of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame) and Paul Feig (who recently directed Bridesmaids).  Feig is credited as the show’s creator and in 2002, he published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence.  The stories about torture at the hands of bullies and ineptitude around the opposite sex (something he would further document in Superstud) are clearly the inspiration for a number of the storylines on Freaks and Geeks, as Feig is brutally honest about the ridiculousness of his formative years while at the same time being hilarious enough to not have a pity party.  It’s kind of like he found the correct way to answer that torturous standardized test writing prompt, “What is your most embarrassing moment?”  and answered it enough times for an entire book.

Listen to the students and help them use their voice the right way.

Recently, a couple of posts over on The Innovative Educator have focused on the need for students to have a voice, and how that voice is largely ignored when it comes to just about anything in the school system.  The posts themselves employ a rather melodramatic tone, using words such as discrimination and oppression to make a villain out of the “system,” almost going out of the way at times to paint the public school system as some sort of Orwellian nightmare (though, in all honesty, Kafkaesque would be more appropriate).  It’s the kind of rhetoric that gets people reading despite what facts may or may not be valid in the actual content.

Commentary about hyperbolic metaphors aside, there is a valid point in her hand-wringing.  Students are under-represented in the national discussion about education, even less than teachers.  I’ve read too many articles and books about the theory of instruction that discount the variable the student brings to the actual practice too instruction; furthermore, there are way too many school policies created that pay lip service to students in the name of “protecting” them but seriously make you wonder if the people making those policies really had the students best interests in mind.

So, that being said, if students are lacking a clear voice in the educational discourse, how can they get that voice?  And how can they use that voice  without sounding like they’re whiny kids throwing a temper tantrum?

The quick and easy answer to both of those problems is what students themselves often think of when they are, as a group, upset about something: petition and protest.  Both are fine ideas, but in the long run I often wonder if they are effective.  Getting enough of your peers to mindlessly sign a petition might get it into the hands of building administration and organizing a class walkout (always a favorite, even back to my days in junior high school) might get their attention.  However, sometimes you don’t become known as the person who helped Donna Martin graduate; you wind up being the cause of 50 new truancy cases.

That’s not to say that students shouldn’t organize and/or protest.  It’s just that if you are a student who wants to do so, you have to be savvy about your audience and the world in which they exist.  Is a board of education going to see you as a voice worth listening to or are they going to just think you’re throwing a tantrum?  What gets through to them?  Furthermore, what role do teachers play in this equation?  Well, we can, as teachers, show them how to be effective …

The Paper Problem

Image by ilovebutter from Flickr (CC licensed)

The best thing I read yesterday was on Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” blog.  Valerie Strauss posted something written by Steven Horowitz, an economics professor from St. Lawrence University.  Called “A guide to writing an academic paper”, it is a quick-and-dirty look (okay, it’s 4,000 words long, so not exactly quick-and-dirty, but you get the gist) at writing your average term paper:

Though it may seem excessive to write almost 4,000 words on how to write better papers, the reality is that writing papers in college (and the sort of writing you will do for the rest of your life) is not the same as you were asked to do in high school.  My purpose in writing this guide is to help make you into better writers and to help you become better able to articulate your perspective….The point is not to give you pages of rules and regulations, but to give you the things you need to know to create and present your ideas in a legitimate and persuasive way.

He walks through each of the different parts of the paper and what constitutes a good paper, even getting into the details of proper formatting (the best moment comes when he says: “Automatically numbered pages.  Figure out how to do it in Word.”).  And it gets to the heart of the truly good academic paper: one that is clearly organized, whose thesis is exact, and that supports said thesis with thorough proof that is properly cited.

So naturally, being a high school English teacher, I had to ask myself where his need to write a 4,000-word piece on how to write an academic paper comes from.  Why can’t college freshmen write?

I have two guesses as to the answer.  One is obvious, and that’s standardized testing.  If you look at the way classes across various subjects have changed due to an increased focus on passing state tests, you can definitely see that the idea of the academic paper would fall by the wayside.  But in all honesty, spending any more than a couple of sentences complaining about testing is kind of a waste of time because it’s taking the easy way out.

Besides, testing has been around for so long that teachers like myself are trying to find a way to teach what’s important in spite of the test (and even in spite of how tests have “damaged” incoming students), so it’s not like I am going to throw my hands in the air and not attempt it because it’s “not on the test.”

But again … why?  Why is it so hard for them to grasp a concept that I have to say (not to brag … okay, to brag) that while I didn’t completely grasp in high school, at least had a decent amount of practice in (full disclosure: my big paper in my Ancient World History/Lit/Philosophy course my first semester of freshman year was a disaster; then again, that may have more to do with the fact that the semester itself was a disaster)?

I blame technology.

Now, I’m not going to go on some rant about Wikipedia in an effort to sound like every other scared English teacher out there.  I happen to really like Wikipedia.  I’d never cite it–for the same reasons I don’t cite the World Book Encyclopedia–but I still like it.  Where I see part of the problem is in this push for project-based “meaningful” work for students when they are tackling large subjects.  In theory, it’s a good idea because it seems more engaging and students can get their hands dirty and work with media that are better suited to their strengths.  But in practice, it has resulted in a downgrading of the paper to something that is considered as much of a relic as the desks-in-rows “industrial model” lecture-based classroom that is the ire of all reformers and innovators (at least that’s what the talking points seem to be).

It’s also resulted in countless bad PowerPoint presentations that feature groups of students standing in front of a class reading off paragraphs worth of information they have crammed onto a slide (and probably copied and pasted from Wikipedia, mind you), a clear demonstration of … well, that they know how to copy and paste and read what is on a slide.

I know that sounds flip, and I know that the point of doing something like a research project or a paper isn’t the end product, but teaching or developing the skills that lead to that end product, but if we keep throwing out the individually written academic paper in favor of PowerPoints or Prezis or something creative with iMovie or a Twitter feed, we aren’t necessarily preparing those who want to go to college for what their professors will expect.

And yes, I can hear the voices of protest: not everyone goes to college, our job isn’t to prepare kids for college, papers aren’t the future.  But when you have colleges like CUNY overloaded with remedial writing courses and professors complaining to the heavens that their students can’t properly write a basic research paper, talking about all those new things and collaboration sounds more defensive than anything.

We need to make sure we don’t lose it completely.  For my part, by the time my advanced English 10 students leave the classroom in June, they will have written at least four academic papers (in addition to at least two personal essays) because many of them have their eyes set on AP-level coursework and then college, so I would like for them to at least not be completely shocked when they’re assigned a 4-5 pager on The Aeneid three weeks into their very first semester.

For more information on how to write a research paper, check this out.