Just a reminder…

Please take some time to explore the collaboration between my students and Dana Huff’s students all the way across the country. The main focus of the project was to create living histories in remembrance of the Holocaust, and to explore the similar roots all cultures share.
Visit us over at Never Forget

Never Forget

My students spent quite a bit of this semester learning about the Holocaust, and their research took them to real stories of real Holocaust survivors. In addition to watching video, exploring websites, reading plays and other documents of these events, the students delved into some pretty thorough research in an effort to make sense [...]

Search and Destroy

While I take the time to go over the students’ research papers for a quick grade and check for authenticity — there’s still a little worry within me that somehow my students have completely plagiarized their work; even though, every. freaking. day. I have to explain to them that I’m not plagiarizing when I write [...]

How not planning works to your benefit.

Last week I scheduled three day sin the computer lab so that my students could complete their research papers for the Never Forget project. I gave them the ultimatum that the paper was worth 25 points, due Friday (4.6.07). If the students finished on Friday, they got full points. If they finished [...]

When the Punishment is Better than the Original Plan

Just before spring break I told one of my classes to throw all of their work in the garbage — everything we’ve been doing in service to a website and cross-country project with Dana Huff.
This is the first time I’ve linked to the site, and I think it’s the right time because the site is [...]

More Mnemonics

Thanks for all the comments on my post about creating a mnemonic for MLA citation and websites. It seems to have gone over wonderfully, because what kid doesn’t like alcohol? Or dying? Or turtles?
I’m still trying to figure out a mmnemonic for citing a book. Maybe I’ll let my students work [...]

Last Year vs. This Year — how and why to do research

Part of keeping this blog is so that I can revisit some of the work I’ve asked my prior students to write their research paper in the narrative form. I wanted to read what they’d learned in a story version where they led from introductory materials toward the climax of their story. I [...]

The Machinery of MLA

I’d like to go into the process of exactly how I taught MLA citation — the stuff in (parentheses) as well as the Works Cited page — because the kids took to it very weel. As a matter of fact, I’ve been trying to do this all year long, but subtly. Each time [...]