Yesterday I had a very interesting lesson on what a real research paper should be like. The teacher was a sub, and probably the most interesting/different teacher I've ever met. He was bashing on how the "traditional" research papers most college classes require turn good writers into bad ones and how devastating they are to our brain cells, because all we are trying to do with those "research projects" is to put them in the format that satisfies what the teachers are looking for, but we never really care much about the research themselves. He believes that research should lead to more questions, instead of definite answers.
I have to admit that I totally agree with him. Fortunately, I only had to write the bad kind of paper once in my BYU years, and that was for English 115. All the other papers I had to write for my economics classes were truly research oriented. I enjoyed the processes of trying to reach a conclusion but often times getting to some points totally unexpected. Although I have to say that the writing part was never fun no matter how good the research is, but when I want to express my opinions on something, it is much easier to write than when I HAVE TO write something.
The sad thing is that the fear of this English teacher is not completely unnecessary, because some of us, college students, have been destroyed by the set frame of papers and the expectation of reaching a result that coincide with the thesis statement we have to come up before finishing the project. In the few semesters I TAed one of my favorite econ classes, which inevitably is the most difficult undergraduate econ class BYU offers, I had at least one student each semester coming to me concerned and lost because he or she did not come to the conclusion they wanted to reach. It always took me some time to convince them that it was ok, because we did not want them to predict things without exploring the truth, and if the result of the exploration contradicts the original hypothesis, it is fine. One semester I had a student who had an A going into the finals yet only received a C in the class because he failed to turn in his research project, and the reason was he did not reach any significant results in his estimation. I talked to him a few times saying it was ok to write a paper saying the conclusion is that what I thought was true was not, but apparently he did not think it was good enough. Sad!
So, anyway, I guess my point is, maybe we do need a some kind of reform to liberate the minds of the students who have been bounded by the set rules and mentality that writing a good research paper means reaching a solid result that was expected. Only when the mind is free, then can we truly enjoy the process of searching for answers, instead of being tied up with the anxiety of not failing in obtaining one.
Oh, just to show how interesting the sub teacher is, our assignment for the weekend is to buy a drink for some stranger at a gas station and write a paragraph about the experience, so I guess I am off to helping a homeless person get his beer today. :P
M&M
