Memo #5

          At this point in my research,  I am wondering if I want to focus more on the teacher survey responses or the governmental policies that teachers have to abide by.  I think both are extremely important and in many ways they go together, but I previously wanted to focus on the specific laws and cases.  I think this is evidence of my project reaching out and becoming more of an experience rather than a typical research paper.

          I am surprised with the turn out of my teacher surveys in two ways.  First,  I am a little upset that I only received four responses after sending 180 emails out to various teachers.  I did hope that I would gather more responses, but I am super impressed with the honesty and experience that I received in the four responses.  Of the four, there was only one account of an administrator or parent censoring the student's work, but I learned a number of strategies for helping students take risks in their writing.  I also noticed a number of "self-censorship" instances where teachers had students avoid certain topics so that the work would not be challenged.  

          I wish that I had more surveys from teachers, because it would offer more evidence of censorship in the classroom.  At the same time, perhaps censorship doesn't happen as often as I had imagined it did.  The evidence that I gathered from the teacher surveys was very helpful to me as a future English teacher and I'm glad that I was able to collect the data.  

          I wonder if I should keep or abandon the student's view of censorship.  I think it is great to offer both the teacher and student side, but I wonder if I will be able to focus on both in the same project.  If I had done student surveys, I could have offered more support to the article as there is not much information about censorship from the student's point of view.  I would also assume that the majority of students that I would talk to would have little or no experience with censorship in their educational career, especially based on the teacher responses. A teacher has 100's of students a year, but a student only have 10-20 teachers in high school.  

          The question that I am now wondering is whether or not teachers are holding their students back by giving them limitations on their papers.  Is there a way to have students focus on hot topics but still treat the situation carefully and maturely?  How will I encourage students to take risks in their writing, after reading ideas from other teachers?