33

THE SPECIALIST

Any child who already shows a disposition to specialize should be given his head: for, when the use of the tools has been well and truly learned, it is available for any study whatever. It would be well, I think, that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge.

—Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

SUBJECT: Junior and senior project

TIME REQUIRED: 2 to 3 hours or more per week in grades 11 and 12

 

In the preceding chapters, you will have noticed that the number of subjects studied are reduced in the junior and senior years of high school. For example, math and language study can be completed in tenth or eleventh grade; the formal study of writing ends. By the junior year in high school, the typical student of rhetoric is spending two hours per day studying great books, an additional hour and a half two days per week studying science, and a couple of hours twice a week dealing with art and music. He’s also pursuing an elective—computer programming, advanced language, or Advanced Placement math. This schedule leaves time for the junior and senior writing projects. Eleventh and twelfth graders should choose a major research project in a field that interests them and carry this project out. This is the equivalent of a high-school “honors” program.

During the high-school years, most students begin to develop a “speciality,” a skill or branch of learning in which they have a particular talent and interest. Computer programming, Victorian novels, ancient Britain, Renaissance art, French poetry, piano performance, gymnastics, baseball, writing fiction—whatever the student chooses to spend his time doing can become a speciality.

The junior and senior projects give the student an opportunity to exercise all his hard-learned skills in writing and reasoning on a subject that excites him. The opportunity to do in-depth reading and writing on these subjects may steer him toward (or away from) a college major.

GENERAL GUIDELINES

The junior and senior projects are wider in scope than the ninth-and tenth-grade research papers. Research papers focus on a topic that can be summarized in a thesis statement; they tend to deal with a single time and place (that is, they are synchronic—they examine a particular point in time). The junior and senior projects should be more complex—they should be diachronic (moving through history, examining the origins and historical development of the topic under study).

Any subject, Neil Postman observes, can be given scholarly value if the student traces its historical development, reflects on its origins, and theorizes about its future.1 Every topic treated in this way sheds insight on human endeavor—the way we live. Baseball, for example, becomes a fascinating and fruitful study if the student follows it back to its beginnings and traces it from there. Bat-and-ball games were played as far back as the Aztecs; baseball became a popular child’s game in the nineteenth century; the mutation of baseball into a professional sport parallels the general shift in American culture from rural-centered to urban-centered; baseball clubs, first formed in the 1870s, were plagued by corruption; in the twentieth century, baseball heroes were carefully shielded by the media, which felt they had a duty to protect the hero status of baseball players by not reporting on their misdeeds; baseball players evolved into “celebrities” and so forth. This study pinpoints a number of cultural shifts in American life—amateur to professional, rural to urban, hero to celebrity. Any student who completes this project will have a better understanding not only of baseball, but of his own culture and history.

The student should keep these questions in mind while developing his topic of study:

• When did this begin? What was its original form? What cultural purpose did it serve?
• Who performed this activity? What cultural place did they occupy? How were they regarded by others?
• What prior historical events did this event/activity resemble? Is this coincidental? Did this event/activity model itself on something that came before? What philosophy does this reveal? (The Olympics, for example, obviously owe a great deal to the ancient Greeks and their ideas about what makes an ideal human being.)
• What ideal picture of human beings does this activity/event hold up?
• How did this activity develop from its beginnings to the present day?
• What effects did this event have on its surroundings? On the generation directly after? Five hundred years later? The present day?
• How did this activity/event change the way people viewed nature? How did it change the way they thought about God?
• What current cultural trends are reflected in this activity? What cultural trends resulted from this event?

Not all of these questions will be applicable to every topic. But if the student can answer some form of these queries, his paper will begin to take shape.

For example, suppose the high-school junior loves the novels of Jane Austen. If he decides to do a project on Austen’s novels, he needs to think widely about the origins of the novel, its development, Austen’s use of it, and the effects of Austen’s work on present-day readers. His questions, then, might take the following form:

• When were the first novels written? What were the first novels? (Don Quixote is widely regarded as the first European novel.) What cultural shifts around the time of Cervantes led him to create this new form?
• Who originally wrote novels? (Men.) What cultural place did they occupy? (They were thinkers and philosophers.) How were they regarded by others?
• What is the relationship between the historical forms that came before the novel (the epic poem, the fable) and the novel itself? How do novels differ from epic poems and fables? How are they the same? What can a novel do that a poem or fable can’t?
• How did novel reading develop from Cervantes to Austen? (This is an immensely fruitful area—novels were viewed with suspicion by the Church; novel reading became a silly, “female” activity and thus was considered trivial and a waste of time; the “lady novelist” was a figure of fun.)
• How did novel reading develop from Austen to the present? (Novels slowly regained their position as serious reflections on the human condition, paralleling in some ways the rise in status of women in society.)
• What effects did Austen’s novels have on novel writing in general? (The “novel of manners”—a new genre—was created.) What is the twentieth-century equivalent of the novel of manners?
• What is the relationship of “women’s fiction” in the twentieth century to Austen’s novels? Have certain types of novel become (once more) the province of “lady novelists”?
• What does the current popularity of Austen’s novels say about our own culture? (Quite a bit has been written about the postmodern longing for a return to proper etiquette and manners.)

As in preparation for writing the research papers for ninth and tenth grades, the student should plan on doing a great deal of prereading (the entire fall semester can be spent prereading). Extensive reading in criticism, history, and theory can clarify which of the questions can be answered and which don’t apply.

After prereading, the student can follow the general guidelines for preparing the research paper, given in Chapter 26. We suggest that you buy and use Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Research Papers, the text recommended in that chapter.

The junior paper should be fifteen to twenty pages long; the senior paper, twenty or more pages long.

FLEXIBILITY

Allow some room for creativity. At least one of the projects (ideally, the junior project) should be in standard research-paper form. But permit the second to vary. A student with an interest in creative writing could research the novel in the junior year and write part of a novel for the senior project. The junior with an interest in physics can write a historical study of some development in physics during the junior year; in the senior year, he could perform a complex experiment and document it. The musical student could write a music-history paper in the junior year and give a recital (or compose a piece) for the senior project. The gymnast can write a history of gymnastics in the junior year and prepare for a serious competition to take place the year after.

Just keep the following guideline in mind: whatever creative project is undertaken for the senior year must be documented—it must involve writing. The high-school scientist can perform experiments, but he must then write an article about his findings—just as practicing scientists do. The gymnast must write an account of his preparation and competition. The musician must write an essay explaining his choice of recital pieces or analyzing the form of his composition. If the senior writing project is combined with some other activity, it can be shorter (ten pages is a good rule of thumb), but it can’t disappear entirely. These writing projects force the student to evaluate what he’s doing. They also serve as documentation of the senior project for school boards and college admissions officers.

SPECIFIC GUIDELINES

During the rhetoric stage, as Dorothy Sayers writes in “The Lost Tools of Learning,” all subjects tend to run together; knowledge is interrelated.2 The student writing a history paper will find himself discussing scientific developments; the physicist will have to deal with the religious implications of discoveries in physics (something that occupied Einstein); the musician will find himself studying philosophy. However, projects in each area of knowledge should follow specific guidelines.

History

The student who chooses to research a historical event or era should be careful not to get “stuck in the past.” He should deal with the event’s relationship to similar prior events, its effect on the surrounding cultures, and any effects that stretch to the present day. The student working on a historical topic should always conclude his paper by answering the question: What does this tell me about my own day and culture?

Research on the lost continent of Atlantis, for example, should deal with early stories of lost civilizations, early volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters that wiped out entire groups of people, the specific events surrounding the loss of Atlantis, the stories of the lost continent told by different cultures (each one varies slightly, depending on the culture that tells it), and the theme of a lost country in twentieth-century American science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. You might answer the question “What does Atlantis tell me about my own day and culture?” by saying: “We have a constant longing to find an ‘unspoiled’ country, free from the problems we see around us.”

For a shining example of this sort of history, read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which the author relates the copying activities of a group of Irish monks to both ancient culture and the preservation of Western civilization in our own day. (He also points out eerie parallels between the descent of darkness in the Middle Ages and the “new barbarism” of our own times.)

Literature

The student working on literature should always treat the development of the genre under study, from its roots to the present day. This will yield a number of insights, as is illustrated by the Jane Austen example, above. Why was novel reading considered a female activity? Why has the epic poem fallen out of favor? Why was philosophy first written in verse and then in prose? These sorts of questions will widen the study of literature.

Mathematics

Mathematics projects can take two forms: the historical development of a type of mathematics (from Pythagoras and Euclid to the present) and the application of mathematics to specific scientific problems. Generally, the junior mathematics project should trace historical development. The senior project can involve the solving of problems, as long as the student writes up his findings as though for publication.

Science

Scientific projects should follow the same guidelines as those given in “Mathematics,” above. A historical survey in the junior year can be followed by experimentation or projects in the senior year, providing everything is properly documented.

Foreign Languages

The language student can write a paper on the literature of another country, following the “Literature” guidelines, above. For a more challenging project, he can write a literature, history, or creative paper in the foreign language of his choice. Like the science student, the language student can do a project for the senior year (teaching a language class to other home schoolers; going abroad to the country where that language is spoken). This project should be summarized in a ten-page essay.

Computer Programming

Any student planning to specialize in computers must write a junior or senior paper following Neil Postman’s guidelines:

Indicate, first, what you believe are or will be the main advantages of computer technology, and why; second, indicate what are or will be the main disadvantages of computer technology, and why.3

This will help prevent “Computer Programmer’s Disease”—the belief that computers are the center of existence.

The second project can be a programming one, which must be properly documented. A manual to accompany the project could fulfill this requirement.

Religion

A paper on religion will resemble a history paper in that it will trace the development of a certain aspect of faith and practice and will reflect on present-day effects and applications. Ethics papers should follow the same general guidelines. Any paper treating the ethical aspect of some behavior (assisted suicide or cloning, for example) must examine the history of the issue as well as proposing present guidelines.

The Arts: Painting, Sculpture, Theater, Music

As in science and math, the junior project should be a historical survey (of a painting or sculptural style or school, the development of a particular theatrical convention, the performance history of one of Shakespeare’s plays, the development over time of a particular musical form or style, the development of an instrument). The senior project can be a recital, an art exhibit, or a theatrical performance. A ten-page essay should document and explain this project.

Sports

As demonstrated in the discussion of baseball, sports can provide great cultural insight if studied historically. Sports are a type of performance, and, as with the performing arts, the student should write one historical study. The senior year can be devoted to a sports performance, properly documented with a ten-page essay.

EVALUATION

We strongly suggest that you find someone to evaluate the junior and senior projects. Enlist local college faculty members or experts in the student’s field. You can also write to authors, musicians, and scholars, asking them to evaluate the junior and senior papers and projects. If you can afford it, you should offer to pay for these evaluations. (If you can’t, the student has the chance to write a persuasive essay, explaining why he’s worthy of the scholar’s time and energy.)

If the expert will agree, the student should follow this pattern:

1. Preread.
2. Make an appointment to discuss the topic with the expert, either in writing or by phone, on the Internet or in person. The expert will have additional suggestions, clarifying questions, and resources for the student to investigate.
3. Write or perform the project.
4. Submit the project for evaluation. Ask the expert to comment on and evaluate it.
5. Rewrite the project according to suggestions made by the expert.
6. Resubmit the completed, revised project.

Since this will take a fair amount of time and effort on the part of the expert, you should offer him or her a one-hundred-dollar honorarium, a small but acceptable token of good faith (it shows that you’re not just wasting his or her time).

This evaluation has two purposes. (1) The student is submitting his work to an expert, who can help him to sharpen and improve his knowledge in the specific area. (2) The expert is now in a position to write letters of reference for the student when the student applies to colleges.

SCHEDULE

Eleventh grade		Allow 2–3 hours or more per week in the fall for prereading, 2–3 hours or more per week in the spring for writing.
Twelfth grade		Allow 2–3 hours or more per week in the fall for prereading or preparation, 2–3 hours or more per week for writing or performance.

RESOURCE

Rozakis, Laurie. Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Research Papers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999.