Tips for Teachers
Research Communicate 6
When I started my first project it was about railroad workers in the South. I have to say it was
not my favorite project. I didn't take my own advice here and I didn't focus on my own interests.
The second project was about railroad workers and music and I was interested in music. I was
interested in folk music, rock music, blues music and so the subject kind of sang to me a little bit
more if you will. It resonated with me a little bit more. I learned more about it; I didn't want to
put it down. And so when you're thinking about your project, think about things that interest you.
Think about connecting to things that you already care about. If you do that, you communicate
your excitement and your fascination with those topics in your writing and it leads to new
directions so that your continually learning, your continually figuring new things out. So don't be
afraid to drift towards things that fascinate you. That's what you should be doing. If you love it,
that is not passing like work and you're going to continually learn.
Student Research Communicate 7
The more of yourself you put into your topic, the more attached you get to it and sometimes that
makes it hard to get criticism about it. And sometimes you see the criticism of the topic as a
criticism of you and you need to figure out a way of separating you from the topic. This thing
that you made that's very personal, that's very connected to the things that interest you, you want
to make sure that you're ready for someone to say, "I don't believe it." Or, "It's not convincing."
Or, "Who cares." You want to be ready for that because people can be mean, people can be
obnoxious, people can be difficult. It turns out when you write about things that people are
concerned about, I ended up writing a little bit about Superman. I had no idea that there were
millions of people just waiting in the wings to attack me about Superman. So you want to think
about, you want to be ready for criticism. You want to be prepared for. And the best way to do
that I think is to take this thing that you've written and separated from yourself. Recognize that
the criticism of the thing is not the criticism of you. You want to get a thicker skin sometimes
about that because writers, when you're writing, you put a lot of yourself into it and sometimes
the criticism of it can, can hurt. And one way to do that is to be prepared for it, to get ready for it.
The criticism is an important part of the revision process but it sometimes hurts. To do that, you
want to make sure you're ready.
Student Research Plan 5
Keywords and search terms. You can spend your life figuring out how to do better and better at
search terms. One term to, one thing to think about is if you're looking for primary sources, that
is first-hand sources, try to find some of the unique language that was used in the. That you're
describing. I was writing about the war of 1812 and discovered that victualling is a word. It
means, and victualling yards is a term that used to describe the places where ships came to get
meat and flour and things like that before they went out to battle. If you do a search for
victualling yards in Google, you'll only get primary sources, usually, because no one today uses
that term but people in the 18 teens knew that term. That was a term that they used. Such
undefined unique phrases that are distinctive to the period that you're looking at is one way of
sharpening your searching. Another way is, you got Google but there is something called Google
scholar, scholar.Google.com. And if you use Google scholar it will only search legitimate,
scholarly articles and books and it won't give you the crazy websites by, about Paris Hilton and
those, those other sorts of things. It subtracts that stuff away. It subtracts the, the, the work by
buffs and by other people who don't know a whole lot and limits it to people who study this stuff.
So scholar.Google is a great way to start off and to look for real secondary sources not just here's
what I learned. The search terms are something that you're going to work on. You're going to
discover that, that you're looking for unique phrases. For example, if you want to study the civil
rights movement, you put civil rights act in brackets and that's just going to pop up the things
that are connected to the civil rights act in the United States roughly in the 1960s. So there's a
civil rights act in the 1860s as well. So, as you start to play around, save those search terms.
Write them down in a book or save them in a word file. Those are going to be your "go to"
places. When you go back to look something up, remember those search terms. Save them
someplace. And work on finding the term that's going to pull up the best information for you.
Link to tips/tutorials for
Google searching
Google Advanced
Student Research Synthesize 2
(to help students understand audience)
When you synthesize, when you come up with maybe a different idea or a different interpretation
or different way of thinking about things, it's, you need to try it out on people. You need to
present it to a teacher. Present it to a librarian. Present it to a friend. Try the story out, see how
it works and get their feedback, get, hear from them whether they believe it, whether they're
convinced, whether they're interested in the thing and that's, that's the, a good way of kind of
feeling your way forward in this process.
I'm an historian. And the way historians work is a whole process of trying things out. So one
way of doing this is we, when we start with the topic, we'll come up, we'll look at some sources.
We'll write a preliminary observations; it would be about 10 or 15 pages. And then we presented
at a conference. We stand up; we read little bit of it and then somebody in the audience says,
"Wait a second. What about this? What about that?" That's the first way of trying something
out that historians do. The second way is the article. That's the next step, where you write
something. It's about 50 or 60 pages. It's got all the footnotes in it. And you give this to a
journal and the journal publishes it and then you get feedback from other scholars, like people
who say, "I don't believe it" or "What about this?" or that sort of thing. The third process, the
third result is, usually for us, a book where you've actually now summarized enough of it.
You've tried out those ideas enough times both verbally and in a literary sense so that you can
actually publish a book. So that process of going back and forth is built into every profession,
every science, every, every biologist, every chemist, every physicist has to have this back and
forth with an audience of people who have the same skills that he or she does. And the, it's
critical. This is what you want to do also. You want to try things out. You want to give it a
shot. You want to see what people say and then, so that the final product is a little bit more
refined, a little bit more convincing, a little bit more interesting.
Student Research Synthesis 4
(This is a good example of the recursive nature of the process – not like a recipe)
Inference, one of the things about inference is you're mixing what you know with what you're
reading to make something new. And one example of this is the process of drilling holes to
make, to make, drilling little holes to make big holes in the side of a mountain. The way you do
that is you drill these little robins eggs nest size holes in the side of the mountain. You put
nitroglycerin in them. You blow them up. You run away first; blow them up then you run back
into the tunnel. That process of drilling is what John Henry was doing; that's what he was, he
was swinging a hammer and hitting this spike. The spike was digging into the side of the
mountain so that he could make those holes. A steam drill did the same thing but it was powered
by a steam engine. So the story is that John Henry must've been the strongest man there was if
he could defeat a steam drill. Well, I was reading about steam drills in the 1860s and 70s and
realized that they broke down all the time. The inference that I could draw from that is that
maybe wasn't, that the John Henry wasn't the strongest man there was, that beating a steam drill
was actually pretty easy to do in the 1860s and 1870s. He might not have been the strongest man
alive. It might have been pretty easy for this to happen. And so the story might not have been
about a heroic exploit; it might've been a story about somebody who died, a lot of people who
died in the construction of a tunnel. Maybe it wasn't a happy song; maybe it was a sad song.
And so thinking about how, once you start to look at the sources, once you start to make, draw
some conclusions, then you can kind of think backwards and say, "Huh. Well, maybe, maybe
this wasn't a miracle; maybe this is something else. Maybe this is the story about dead people.
Maybe this is a story about lots of people who died building a tunnel." That, I think, is the story
of John Henry and that's inference. That's mixing what you know with the research that you
have in front of you.