THE WORD
May I do your homework?
By The Word May 6, 2007

Over a few days last fall, I got three similar e-mails from three high-school students in a town outside Boston.

Their AP English class had read my Word column about the history and uses of tart (both pastry and prostitute) and its various connotations, they said. And now they were supposed to research and write something similar, on a different subject: a short paper comparing two words with overlapping senses, like art and craft, club and gang, labor and work.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they thought I might help. Could I supply, they politely asked, "any information about my two words' origins, social timelines, denotations, etc."? Or "websites good for research on the origins, uses, and meanings of the words"? Or "anything at all on these two words"?

I was, of course, pleased to be held up as a model for what sounded like a fun assignment. But I couldn't and wouldn't do their research, I replied. They would have to make do with dictionaries, libraries, online resources, and their own bright young minds. I suggested a couple of approaches -- they might collect examples of current usage from Google News, say, and tally and compare various senses -- and wished them luck.

I couldn't decide, though, what to make of their appeal. Did they really imagine that I had all the information they needed in my head? That my secret decoder ring could transfer that knowledge into a convenient e-mail attachment, ready to send?

And if they did think that, did they also think it was an acceptable way to do research, and would their teacher agree? In other words: Were they clueless and lazy, or gutsy and enterprising
?
There was no consensus among my friends and colleagues. Some thought it was only natural that the students would ask me how to do it, since I'd been offered as the model. Maybe they meant to credit me in their papers, and hoped to win points for going to what they thought of as the source. To the typical high-schooler, several suggested, a newspaper writer is probably just another online source like Wikipedia (for better or worse).

Others weren't so generous. "It would be different if they had done some legwork and wanted you to suggest further avenues for research, but that is so completely not what is on their minds," said one friend, speaking as a writer and the parent of a teenager.

She may be right. (I even asked the students, promising confidentiality, what their teacher would think of their query to me, but they weren't telling.) But even if their motives were shady, I would feel more sorrow than anger at their waste of opportunity.

When I was in high school, long ago and far away, a topic like theirs would have been a treat; what we got were exercises in paraphrasing and footnoting. Even at 17, I knew I would learn little -- and contribute nothing -- by summarizing a few encyclopedia entries on the battle of Fort Sumter; my little "research paper" was grammatically correct, impeccably punctuated, and of no earthly interest to anyone.

There's no need for that sort of rote dullness nowadays, when any teenager can call up thousands of original texts and documents on the Web. The glory of real research, however modest its range, is being face to face with the evidence, not someone else's version of it -- and that's true whether you're digging through fading letters in a library basement or combing Google hits for evidence of usage change.

Not to mention the joys of serendipity. If an assistant had researched gone missing for me, I wouldn't have spotted the fulsome that caught my eye in an 1893 New York Times story, used in a way many now consider wrong: "A young man who, on one Yuletide, had fulsome reason for considering himself blessed." Or an 1881 reference to "a stumpy wisp-broom"; ancestor of whisk-broom, or merely a cousin?

Recreational reading, too, is full of language discoveries: Jane Austen's characters using "hey-day" as a greeting, or Angela Thirkell's, a century and a half later, grumbling about the changing pronunciation of controversy.

So how do you beat down a teenager's resistance to delight? Just a good assignment obviously isn't enough, if they're so estranged from their own intelligence that they picture knowledge as a bottle of capsules, preferably swallowed whole. Whatever my student petitioners' intent, they obviously didn't see what struck me hardest: They were asking me to do the fun part of their assignment.

I'm not sure where the blame belongs, given the abundance of potholes along the road to joyful learning: MCAS tests, SATs, the winner-take-all economy, our focus on credentials rather than content. Then, of course, there's the laziness, orneriness, and resistance to authority with which the human race is naturally endowed. That we probably can't change; for the rest, we've got to do better.