ast year I had a real spitfire in my eleventhgrade English class. He was the most ready to challenge majority views, push his classmates to support their ideas with credible facts, or listen seriously about the need to tackle clichés in his writing.Then, in January, I made a critical mistake that cost me the vitality of this student.The class writes research papers in January, and I wanted to invite the students to research a social justice issue they knew nearly nothing about. We watched TED talks and read articles on the failings of abstinence-only education, plastic in the ocean's gyres, the Bechdel test, and the crushing standardization of public schools. Their assignment was to research a problem and then argue for a solution or a set of solutions to fix the problem.
I wanted my student to knowwhat was happening to his community. In an informal poll at the beginning of the year, I found out that only two students in all my classes knew what Fracking was --which is a desperate situation considering people in the county, their parents, are leasing their land left and right to the gas companies.What I didn't want was another pro-life diatribe, antimarriage equality tirade, or pro-assault weapon essay that, although properly reflecting the majority beliefs of the community, would not allow enough serious inquiry into the unknown.To facilitate the choosing of a topic, I assigned the students the task of randomly selecting three TED talks or articles and using those texts to generate questions for further research. As each student brought their three texts to me and we discussed their questions and potential for research papers, I made suggestions, offering what I knew on the topic with the intention that the students would have somewhere to start.
A high school English teacher tries to steer a student writing a research paper in a more politically relevant direction and learns something important when her efforts backfire.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.