Interested

I don't see how my College Comp II kids are struggling with their topics for their exploratory essays.

How can they not be interested in any number of things?

I told them they had free reign over the topics. The only thing I didn't want was a summary of an issue.

Now, certainly, some had trouble with such an open topic (not to mention form), but I'm trying hard to break them of the "just tell me what you want/tell me what to think/tell me what to write" mentality.

Kristie has been devouring books like mad on her Kindle (she just finished The Last Dickens, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now she is on to Bloodroot), so I told my kids about this and suggested they explore the novels they love. I have a few takers: one is writing on good and evil in Harry Potter; another is looking at the Twilight books; and, finally, I think another is looking at the book, Dear John.

It just boggles my mind that students are not just inundated with things to explore and learn more about (I blame those damned state tests and our narrowed curriculum).

In addition to my original list of topics that I shared with them (Ken Robinson's ideas on how schools kill creativity, the Ostfront, E.D. Hirsch JR's concept of Cultural Literacy, and flow), I have now also added the mythical Viking torture of the "Blood Eagle" (saw it on a History Channel episode), the history of coffee (again, I caught this on Modern Marvels), the French press style of making coffee, river loggers (thanks to Ax Men), and now Norwegian Death Metal (thanks to a documentary on VH1).

The complaint should not be "I don't know what to write about." Rather, it should be "I don't have enough time to write about it all."