Yesterday I whined about research papers. But I think I’m starting to get this research thing dialed in a bit. It all starts with the right questions. Here’s the list from yesterday. We’re trying to decide which ones would be good research-type questions. 1. Why are flamingos pink? 2. Who invented the car? 3. What was the first video game? 4. Is global warming real? 5. Should I buy an Apple or a Windows computer? 6. What other explanations are there for UFO sightings? 7. How many rides have they had in the history of Disneyland, and what are they? 8. Why is the sky blue? 9. Does watching violent media make kids act more violently? 10. Why did the Titanic sink? The Answers: 1. No Dice, Cheese Slice. They eat shrimp. 30 seconds on Google, and etc. No thesis here, let’s move on. 2. Nyet, nyet, Soviet. See #1, except for the shrimp-eating part. 3. Oh Noes! Pong. I had it. It was boring. Still no research questions yet. 4. That’s what I’m talking about. On the surface, a yes/no question, but the research you need to do to come to that answer! 5. Yessss. Again, like #4, it
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Raise your hand if you are sick of teaching the dreaded “research paper.” Not to mention having to read the gems you usually end up with. I know, I know, it’s my job to show them how to find the joy in learning how to research and prove their thesis that dolphins would make a great pet. But after a couple of weeks of pretending that it really matters that you format your work cited entries exactly like the latest MLA standard (God forbid you use the one from two years ago), and riding herd on them in the library as they complain that “they don’t have any books on my topic,” I’m ready to chuck the whole thing for a class wiki. I’m thinking next year, I hand the “research unit” off to the social studies department, who always complain that we English teachers don’t do it right. It’s all yours, baby. Every year my list of banned topics gets larger. Here’s this year’s list: No: skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, particular cars or planes, mass murderers/mafia/criminals, bios of sports stars, celebrities, or rock stars, animals just because they’re cute, video games, Disney or Disneyland, “all about” papers, “history of” papers.
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Every time I smell a Sharpie, I flash back to the summer between seventh and eighth grade. I spent many an hour in my closet that summer with the smell of felt pens and burning hair. No, it’s not what you think. (What WERE you thinking, anyway?) That was the summer I dug out my dad’s 8mm movie camera, and invested almost $20 (a fortune for me in 1974) in film and developing, and made a couple of movies. One was a skateboard movie. I had seen Endless Summer, and wanted to make a similar sort of skateboard movie about skating in our neighborhood. I used three reels of film at about 4 minutes each. My friend Ziggy and I used his dad’s old-school film editor, and literally taped together a masterpiece. It only survived 4 or 5 showings before some of the splices melted, and well…today all I have is a reel of outtakes. The other movie was a cartoon (of sorts), and thus has the Sharpie connection, since I used Sharpies for my “artwork.” The pens were of the old formulation – I used to get mighty loopy after a couple of hours in the closet with my
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Poem #435 by that strange duck (really) Emily Dickinson is a pretty good intro for Bradbury’s “The Earth Men.” And the idea that the majority decides who’s normal and who’s not (and everything else) really gets some of the kids angry. Seventh graders are strange ducks as well. They like to think of themselves as unique (If I ask, “How many of you are weird?” every hand will go up), but their biggest fear is not fitting in. And they all like think of themselves as rugged individualists. “The majority doesn’t decide EVERYTHING!” “Like what do they not decide?” Lots of hemming and hawing. “Coolness? Weirdness? Lameness? What?” More hemming and hawing. “How about things like murder and child abuse and racism?” “Racism is an easy one. Even in the time Tom Sawyer is set, you would hear sermons in churches about how slavery was God’s will. But, hmmm. You might be right about the murder one; some things are probably built into us. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that the majority of us think that now. Hmmm. But…well, let’s talk about Romeo and Juliet again (we talked about it before when we had soliloquy as a vocabulary word
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We’re picking and choosing our way through Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. We just finished the story “The Earth Men.” Even when we read the whole thing like a novel (which we’re not doing this time: I think we’ll only read 4 or 5 this time – and this time we’re doing all the reading in class), I always start with this story. The kids always wonder why we start on p16, but EMen, as we call it, has much more of a hook than “Ylla,” the jealous husband story that begins the book (after the scientifically implausible 1-pager, “Rocket Summer”). And since most of the short stories weren’t originally intended to be connected in a novel, we have some wiggle room on the selection and the order. Now of course telepathy – the key element of the story – is just as scientifically implausible as a rocket changing the weather, but it’s a lot more fun to speculate upon. After Mrs. Ttt (which we shorten to Mrs. T – some of them even chuckle when we meet Mr.T – “I pity the fool”) says, “I not speaking, I’m thinking. Telepathy,” I stop and ask, “How many of you would
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First off: Ok, Ok. I’m starting to find my happy place with research. Thank you for the comments and suggestions; I think next year will be better. You guys gave me some good ideas. We’re working on outlines this week, prepping for research. Among other activities, I give them partially completed outlines and word banks to fill them in with. I strategically place a few clues in the outline, and they have to determine the hierarchy of the various entries I provide, and fill in the blanks. Like this (the stats are kinda dated, but it’s a topic near to my heart): Topic: The automobile has become the American Nightmare kills 265,000 and injures millions annually, road rage and reckless driving have increased, better city design to decrease auto dependence, leading source of air pollution, alternatives to the automobile, main means of transportation, too many people dependent on the car, large SUV’s: rollovers and danger to smaller cars, more cars and more roads mean more traffic congestion, average car: 5 tons of carbon dioxide each year, contributes to acid rain and smog, leading cause of death and injury, new dangers with 2 recent developments, public transportation I. Main means of [...]
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