Research Papers Down!
Dec. 19th, 2007 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkstowolvesJust because I know you're all dying to know how my research paper writing class turned out, in the end. Here's the tally:
Student 1: Brilliant student and the only one of two worth anything. Learned the process, practiced the process, wrote several rough drafts, worked with me to improve her drafts, turned in a complete final paper.
Topic: Racism and Social Injustice Portrayed Through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Student 2: An average student, but usually committed to working really hard. Started out working thoroughly but tapered off half-way through the semester into wishy-washiness. Changed his topic three weeks before the paper was due. Still seemed to be on track to getting it done, then just turned up yesterday with nothing. Desperately typed up a page at the library and handed it in to me.
Topic: How Wilson Rawls Wove His Own Life and Experiences Into Where the Red Fern Grows.
Student 3: She was withdrawn from our school (maybe coming back?), but she didn't do much work anyway. She made it half-way through the outlining process, but kept turning in quotes-from-the-book-masquerading-as-plot-summary every time she tried to write a rough draft.
Topic: The Plight of the Black Woman as Interpreted from Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
Student 4: He could have had such an awesome paper. He was a bit lazy, but he worked with me really well up through the outline. He had such a clear and meaty outline too! He should have had no problem getting the required page count. Instead, his work ethic suddenly fizzled out and he turned up yesterday with a "No, I didn't do my paper. This is my last week at this school anyway." As if that makes this semester not count: no, sir, you're going to have to work harder in your senior year now to make up for this.
Topic: Symbolism in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."
Student 5: This fellow fought me from day one. He chose to write his paper on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, assuming it would be easy: and it would have been too, if he'd done even a little bit of work! Yet he didn't even finish reading the novel, much less seek out any sources. I kept meeting with him and reiterating what he needed to do, but it was like trying to drag a mule up an incline it was wholly dedicated to never setting foot on. After all this, though, he claimed he had his paper done and just "forgot it at home." This was an hour and 14 minutes before the deadline, so I told him he better start working on getting it up to the school. He left with some of the other boys in the class to "go get it," except he didn't call back up to the school until 12:36 (nearly an hour after the deadline) to say that he couldn't get a ride back up to the school. This was two hours after he'd left the school. There was no way I was softening on the deadline anyway, but he didn't really try, did he?
Topic: Christian Symbolism in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Student 6: I was so excited when this student first chose his topic. He was going to do a paper using Dr. Seuss! How fresh and invigorating an intellectual exercise that would have been, both for him and me. Definitely not the usual well-trod ground of high school research papers. We worked out a smashing outline togeter-- and then he just stopped working. Going to the library was entirely too much to ask, in his opinion. I did everything I could, but he just refused to write his paper in the end. He gave me a title page and a hand-written sheet of something yesterday. Sigh.
Topic: Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book and The Sneetches as Cautionary Tales.
Student 7: This student has disappeared. We haven't been able to contact him in weeks and none of the numbers we have for him are working. Awesome. Prior to disappearing, he was also dedicated to fighting me every step of the way. He chose the shortest book he could (Jack London's The Call of the Wild), didn't read it, and insisted that he'd never find time in two and a half months to go by a library for research. Apparently neither could he find the time to ever develop an actual topic. He had his mother start making excuses for him before he disappeared. And he obviously didn't turn a paper in yesterday.
Topic: ???? in Jack London's Call of the Wild.
Student 8: This is the plagiarist I posted about the other day: the one who turned up for all of five classes out of the entire semester. He was never present enough to learn the process of writing a research paper and certainly didn't grok it on his own. Meetings with his mother, with him, with him AND his mother never resulted in actual attendance or dedication to picking up the pieces of his education. He turned in a plagiarized rough draft: you all saw my comments on it. He neglected to return to school this week (big surprise, that) and turn in a final paper. Or take his tests in his other classes. Which he also never attended.
Topic: Something about love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Student 9: This student could only be bothered to come to classes half the time and, when he did show up, couldn't be bothered to actually keep up with his homework or attend to what was going on. The only formal work he did for me was work with me on choosing his topic and the early conceptual steps in putting together an outline. And that was where the work got too hard for him to bother with anymore. However, he did turn in a paper yesterday. Complete with screenshots from the film version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." No, I don't know why he thought that was appropriate. I've only glanced at it so far, but it's all biographical information about Poe and loosely-related thoughts on "The Tell-Tale Heart." Clearly written by someone who has no idea how to write a research paper.
Topic: An Analysis of the Mad Narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
This rate of failure makes me feel like a failure. I mean, obviously I'm doing something wrong, right? My teaching style is apparently off and I'm just not doing it right, yeah?
No. Because then I analyze myself and my teaching very carefully and very thoroughly. I often go overboard with the self-analysis, you know. And the truth is that I am NOT a bad teacher and I am NOT a failure. I bend over backwards for these kids and I spoon-feed them and I go really far in putting up with their bullshit before I snap and write snarky comments on their plagiarized rough drafts.
It doesn't matter. These kids are here because they don't care and their parents don't know what else to do with them, but at least have enough money to keep them in a school somewhere and off the streets. Which several of these kids seem to resent: they want to be on the streets. They honestly do not see why they need to have any kind of skills in researching or analytical thinking, and they laugh when I tell them they'll be doing this kind of stuff in college. ("Not at Trenholm Tech!" they crow.) And when I desperately try to appeal to them that these are skills they need in life, that the ability to find information and USE information to analyze, to deduce is vital to any kind of success in life... well, they think that's pretty funny too. Or they just stare at me with blank faces.
And it's all so very depressing.
Student 1: Brilliant student and the only one of two worth anything. Learned the process, practiced the process, wrote several rough drafts, worked with me to improve her drafts, turned in a complete final paper.
Topic: Racism and Social Injustice Portrayed Through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Student 2: An average student, but usually committed to working really hard. Started out working thoroughly but tapered off half-way through the semester into wishy-washiness. Changed his topic three weeks before the paper was due. Still seemed to be on track to getting it done, then just turned up yesterday with nothing. Desperately typed up a page at the library and handed it in to me.
Topic: How Wilson Rawls Wove His Own Life and Experiences Into Where the Red Fern Grows.
Student 3: She was withdrawn from our school (maybe coming back?), but she didn't do much work anyway. She made it half-way through the outlining process, but kept turning in quotes-from-the-book-masquerading-as-plot-summary every time she tried to write a rough draft.
Topic: The Plight of the Black Woman as Interpreted from Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
Student 4: He could have had such an awesome paper. He was a bit lazy, but he worked with me really well up through the outline. He had such a clear and meaty outline too! He should have had no problem getting the required page count. Instead, his work ethic suddenly fizzled out and he turned up yesterday with a "No, I didn't do my paper. This is my last week at this school anyway." As if that makes this semester not count: no, sir, you're going to have to work harder in your senior year now to make up for this.
Topic: Symbolism in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."
Student 5: This fellow fought me from day one. He chose to write his paper on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, assuming it would be easy: and it would have been too, if he'd done even a little bit of work! Yet he didn't even finish reading the novel, much less seek out any sources. I kept meeting with him and reiterating what he needed to do, but it was like trying to drag a mule up an incline it was wholly dedicated to never setting foot on. After all this, though, he claimed he had his paper done and just "forgot it at home." This was an hour and 14 minutes before the deadline, so I told him he better start working on getting it up to the school. He left with some of the other boys in the class to "go get it," except he didn't call back up to the school until 12:36 (nearly an hour after the deadline) to say that he couldn't get a ride back up to the school. This was two hours after he'd left the school. There was no way I was softening on the deadline anyway, but he didn't really try, did he?
Topic: Christian Symbolism in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Student 6: I was so excited when this student first chose his topic. He was going to do a paper using Dr. Seuss! How fresh and invigorating an intellectual exercise that would have been, both for him and me. Definitely not the usual well-trod ground of high school research papers. We worked out a smashing outline togeter-- and then he just stopped working. Going to the library was entirely too much to ask, in his opinion. I did everything I could, but he just refused to write his paper in the end. He gave me a title page and a hand-written sheet of something yesterday. Sigh.
Topic: Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book and The Sneetches as Cautionary Tales.
Student 7: This student has disappeared. We haven't been able to contact him in weeks and none of the numbers we have for him are working. Awesome. Prior to disappearing, he was also dedicated to fighting me every step of the way. He chose the shortest book he could (Jack London's The Call of the Wild), didn't read it, and insisted that he'd never find time in two and a half months to go by a library for research. Apparently neither could he find the time to ever develop an actual topic. He had his mother start making excuses for him before he disappeared. And he obviously didn't turn a paper in yesterday.
Topic: ???? in Jack London's Call of the Wild.
Student 8: This is the plagiarist I posted about the other day: the one who turned up for all of five classes out of the entire semester. He was never present enough to learn the process of writing a research paper and certainly didn't grok it on his own. Meetings with his mother, with him, with him AND his mother never resulted in actual attendance or dedication to picking up the pieces of his education. He turned in a plagiarized rough draft: you all saw my comments on it. He neglected to return to school this week (big surprise, that) and turn in a final paper. Or take his tests in his other classes. Which he also never attended.
Topic: Something about love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Student 9: This student could only be bothered to come to classes half the time and, when he did show up, couldn't be bothered to actually keep up with his homework or attend to what was going on. The only formal work he did for me was work with me on choosing his topic and the early conceptual steps in putting together an outline. And that was where the work got too hard for him to bother with anymore. However, he did turn in a paper yesterday. Complete with screenshots from the film version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." No, I don't know why he thought that was appropriate. I've only glanced at it so far, but it's all biographical information about Poe and loosely-related thoughts on "The Tell-Tale Heart." Clearly written by someone who has no idea how to write a research paper.
Topic: An Analysis of the Mad Narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
This rate of failure makes me feel like a failure. I mean, obviously I'm doing something wrong, right? My teaching style is apparently off and I'm just not doing it right, yeah?
No. Because then I analyze myself and my teaching very carefully and very thoroughly. I often go overboard with the self-analysis, you know. And the truth is that I am NOT a bad teacher and I am NOT a failure. I bend over backwards for these kids and I spoon-feed them and I go really far in putting up with their bullshit before I snap and write snarky comments on their plagiarized rough drafts.
It doesn't matter. These kids are here because they don't care and their parents don't know what else to do with them, but at least have enough money to keep them in a school somewhere and off the streets. Which several of these kids seem to resent: they want to be on the streets. They honestly do not see why they need to have any kind of skills in researching or analytical thinking, and they laugh when I tell them they'll be doing this kind of stuff in college. ("Not at Trenholm Tech!" they crow.) And when I desperately try to appeal to them that these are skills they need in life, that the ability to find information and USE information to analyze, to deduce is vital to any kind of success in life... well, they think that's pretty funny too. Or they just stare at me with blank faces.
And it's all so very depressing.