Thesis Projects

I am sick. So is Melissa. We seem to have the same bug. Poor us. But that means I can totally veg alllll day! I'm so thankful for the good timing of being sick on a Saturday. It's such a pain to miss school days. Anyway, I'm not annoyingly sick, just kind of sick, so I'm well enough to read and blog! What a great sickness.

So we've plunged into Thesis Projects at school. Every year the juniors and seniors must do an extensive thesis on some controversial topic or other, write it up in 10-15 pages, and present it to a panel of scary folk (like me). Last year was the first year we did it, and I ended up being the main advisor (much to my horror), but we muddled through. This year I have that much more experience and am kind of excited about it.

As I often found in college, the hardest part is choosing the topic. I had one student who had an immediate idea, but two who were waffling. Thursday we took a field trip to the Newport Library (what a great place!) and started plunging in. I got a teacher high from helping one of my students come up with a really good idea after a bit of floundering about in the history section and the online card catalogue.

So as of right now the topics are:
Ethics of the genome project (eeek!)
Effects of the 60's
Media Bias

Should be good papers! I get excited about this kind of thing - there are so many things I'd love to really dig into. Many times in my schooling career I was presented with controversial material and longed to be able to really investigate it and find out the truth. I suppose some things will have to wait until Heaven, but who knows, perhaps someday I'll have the time and motivation to explore...

Some topics I'd like to research: Israeli/Palestinian issues, the Crusades, treatment of American Indians, and probably more that aren't at the tip of my brain right now. Wouldn't that be fun? And of course there is so much to learn in the field of Literature... So much to learn if I would just do it! But for now I content myself with the fact that I have broken into the world of scholarly non-fiction with these Louis Markos books (Achilles to Christ and the FANTASTIC book I got for Christmas - thanks Dan and Ruth - Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian World. Woooooooo!). That's a big step forward for the usually totally un-self-motivated me. The next big step is to finish reading them! :)

Whew, this is a lot of teacher-y stuff for a Saturday. I better get right back to vegging.