A well-designed assignment can teach students valuable research skills and improve the quality of their papers. Unfortunately, assignments also have the potential to confuse and frustrate students, leading to a poorly-written product.

We build our programs around what I called The Prime Questions in the October, 1997 issue of From Now On, "The Question is the Answer:" http://fno.org/oct97/question.html Why How Which is best? We transform topical research into projects which demand that students move past mere gathering of information to the construction of new meanings and insight. Example: Instead of asking why events turned out particular ways in our past (a question fraught with plagiaristic opportunities since historians have probably already offered answers), we might ask students to hypothesize why various outcomes did not occur. Example: Instead of asking how we might protect an endangered species whose chances have already been improved (the bald eagle), we might focus on one which no one has managed to protect (various Australian marsupials, for example). Example: Instead of asking students to study a single country or city, we might ask them to decide which is best for various purposes (the Winter Olympics, a university degree, the building of a theme park, etc.).

Reading and writing gave me skills to create with and to act on the world... through assignments like these I was learning how to marshal evidence and frame an argument. And I was also becoming more adept at handling a sentence, folding information onto it, making a complex point without losing the reader. These skills played out again and again on different topics and in different settings, leading to the ability to write a research article, a memo advocating a course of action, a newspaper opinion piece, an essay like the present one... All of the forgoing helped me develop a sense of myself as knowledgeable and capable of using what I know. This is a lovely and powerful quality-- cognitive, emotional, and existential all in one. It has to do with identity and agency, with how we define ourselves, not only in matters academic but also in the way we interact with others and with institutions. It has to do with how we move through our economic and civic lives. Education gave me the competence and confidence to independently seek out information and make decisions, to advocate for myself and my parents and those I taught, to probe political issues, to resist simple answers to messy social problems, to assume that I could figure things out and act on what I learned. In a sense, this was the best training I could have gotten for vocation and citizenship.

I've heard some teachers claim that this is nothing new. Kids have always been bored in school. But I think now it's different. Some of the boredom, of course, comes from the contrast with the more engaging learning opportunities kids have outside of school. Others blame it on today's "continuous partial attention" (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need "to be a live node on the network," continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. "It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis," she writes. "We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything."