Yes, it's term paper season! I love this, I really do and it's not just b/c my grading for the fourth quarter is waaaaay easier than the rest of the year, but it helps;) I personally would rather write a research paper than any other kind of paper, as I found out in college. In middle school and high school I was all about that reflective writing crap--we did A LOT of journaling for warm-ups--and writing what I considered to be deep, introspective analysis of literature, myself and the world in general. I know now that while I have always been someone who writes well, that that was mostly CRAP. The only things that really impressed my adult self were my old research papers. College was where I was able to seriously hone my research skills and where I discovered how satisfying that type of writing is. I also do like a solid literary anaylsis---when I say solid, I mean relying on analysis of the text, biographical info about the author, the historical time period in which the novel was written and when the novel itself is meant to take place. None of this moralistic/I feel crap. So yeah, I like reading the term paper and helping the students with their research just about more than anything else we do all year. Although the utopia groups are pretty cool too. I know teaching isn't supposed to be about me, but honestly, how can you expect students to have a buy-in to something that the teacher doesn't? So yeah, I get hell of amped about the parts of the curriculum that I like and try to bring at least the "practicality" buy-in to the rest of the stuff. Gah! I do have to thank BTSA for letting me keep my kids separate so that I can control how they are going about this. I know we are supposed to be having the same format and all , but ehhhh....note cards are note cards which is why I haven't been stressing the complete sentence thing this time around. Most of the kids get it---well, they know to use complete sentences when they write a paragraph, b/c the sample paragrpahs turned out pretty well. They are better at this then they think they are. Their over-all lack of confidence in academic skills makes me wanna cry sometimes. It's not that they are all geniuses or anything, but with some hard work, these are some really succesful students who will get a decent education from a crazy situation. My current assessment of the situation howver, is that those kids who are getting their work done are doing a decent job. Although I am concerened about the level of unintentional plagairism for a coupld of them. Ah my low ELLs! AND these 2 are RSP. God love 'em!