I’ve had a really tough time trying to teach the research paper in the past. I assign it, but I find that it’s very difficult for me to bring what I know about writing research papers down to my students’ level. I try to help, and I end up confusing them even more. Somehow, while reading Graff’s book and taking into consideration many of the conversations we’ve had in class, I became inspired. The argument templates on page 169 might be a little too structured, but that kind of structure might be what 9th graders need (they need something involving some kind of structure anyway. They’re animals!) at least to get started on organizing themselves a bit.

I know we’ve talked a lot about not adhering to traditional research papers and the debate over whether students should be able to write an interesting paper or a grammatically correct one, but I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t think we can break the rules until we know them, and so I want my students to know how to set up an argument. To reduce their anxiety over trying to come up with an argument in the first place (a problem I continually have, myself), I’m in the process of thinking of a way to trick them into writing about it before they even know what’s going on. This seems evil and deceitful, but it might work. Graff points out a few times that students know how to argue, but that when they’re told they have to do it, they seem to convince themselves that they can’t do it. This is completely untrue. I hope that I can get them to take an issue they feel strongly towards, and get them to flesh that idea out until it becomes something that they want to investigate. In the past I’ve used the same assignment and everyone in the class was writing on the same topic with some degree of variation (they chose their own sub-topic). I know some people in the class have mentioned how they allow their students to choose their own topics and they have success this way. I guess this is something that I learned in my education classes was bad, but then at the same time, learned that it was “progressive.” Those mixed messages mixed me up and I ended up doing a little of both.

I’m getting a bit off the topic of Graff here, but seeing those templates, as I mentioned before, got me thinking a lot about the research paper my classes are about to begin. I usually dread this. OK, I’m not kidding myself. I STILL dread it. Ninth grade writing is not my idea of a good time. But I’m more interested this year to try out some new Graff-inspired ideas and see where that gets me.