Blog what you can

So this blog experiment has officially been neglected. All of my concerted efforts to post regularly have failed, so I'll give it the old apathetic one-two. Here's some of what we were doing, as told by me to a colleague through an e-mail. Remember, if you're reading this, you're actually just reading an e-mail I sent to someone else. This is what my blog has become. :( The names have been deleted to protect some measure of anonymity.

E-mail is as follows - this was to a senior year English teacher
I completely understand the problems you had with the research paper, and the 2nd six weeks spilling over into the third, (ours was the same, as it was a shortened six weeks). Initially, the papers were supposed to be finished the first week of the 3rd six weeks, but I had to extend it into the second, and I still have kids coming in after-school to finish.

While I feel that the project itself failed miserably as only a few students came out with legitimate research papers, the skills and knowledge the students gained through the process should be more than beneficial to them as they reach the senior year paper. We pulled texts from other libraries as our own is woefully inadequate, but unfortunately we had to give the books back a week before the papers were due. As such, many of the kids did not have completed research, and our databases were not very 9th grade friendly for our topics (deforestation, endangered animals, global warming, alternative energy, oil spills, and chemical sprays/pesticides). I allowed the kids to use wikipedia for some of their papers solely because of the lack of resources. However, we spent several days learning how to properly cite information from a book or website using in-text citations. Almost all of my students were able to complete this aspect of the project, so at least in this, the project was a success. I did have a few that blatantly plagiarized though, and their grades suffered because of it. They have been given the opportunity to amend their papers and turn them back in for a better grade.

At least the project was a learning experience, and hopefully next year we’ll be teamed with social studies so that the papers can be a more cohesive team effort.