Listen, Freckafree, I may be stupid, but I’m not crazy! 
The ‘hooey’ thing was just one of those deals that I got lucky on!
best wishes,
hh
If you were in the teacher’s position, and a student turned in a well-written, thought out piece about why the war in Iraq was necessary, would you be able to give it a good grade? Why would the person in the opposite position be any different?
Thanks! Just curious, I went to Catholic schools throughout (except for my earliest years when I went to the Hippy Dippy Progressive School) so I sometimes discover that what we were doing is not what everybody else was doing.
But this was for history class. English focused on short essay writing during that time because we were all researching for the term paper.
You’re right. 16 turning 17 would be an 11th grader in the US system. I didn’t realize that you had already converted it 
Still a bitch of a project. Still impressed.
I don’t remember having to write anything nearly that long in high school. (I graduated there in 2000.) And I was in the smart kid classes.
I’m pretty sure we would have started a riot. My schoolmates started riots for lesser reasons.
I think it highly possible that your son’s teacher’s politics differ from those of her husband.
Not that it should matter.
I would, however, stick a strict injunction on your husband having anything to do with the teacher or her husband.
At a certain stage kids should be taught how to write a persuasive argument for something that they really disagree with - to learn the structure of argument.
Preaching to the converted is rhetoric, insidious persuasion is an art.
I’m not sure how old a kid is, in the 6th Grade in the USA, possibly not old enough to be devious.
I would be interested to see the rest of your son’s paragraph, as I suspect would some others, it would also be useful for him as he would get examples of an alternative approach.
Certainly a good teacher would not punish an essay that she disagrees with; however, one cannot assume, especially so soon into the school year, the the teacher is one. In 8th grade, I wrote an essay opposing embryonic stem cell research for a tree-hugging English teacher (who made us mass-produce environmentalist letters to corporations for a grade, but that’s another story.) I got a C, the only sub-B+ grade in the class except for one student who wrote a single paragraph. Fun times.
Heh. When I was a high school senior, I had to write a persuasive research paper on the topic of my choice. My best friend had just come out to me, and I chose to write a pro-gay, what the Bible really says about homosexuality paper. This was in a tiny town in Iowa, rampant homophobia, and I was so scared because I knew my teacher was extremely conservative and would disagree strongly with everything I wrote.
I got the paper back, and written on the top was, “I disagree with you, but this was very well written. A-.”
What really made me happy, though, was that, as part of the process of writing this paper, we had to have our classmates read and critique them, and most of my classmates who read my paper told me that it changed their views about homosexuality, so that was pretty cool.
Oh God! The bloody posters! I’d forgotten about them. Hated them with a passion. I got so fed up that when a teacher announced we would be designing posters again I asked “Can’t be bothered to teach us then?”
I had experiences with teachers in college that graded both up and down depending on how much they agreed with your political POV. This worked against me when I was younger but I worked it to my advantage when I returned to college as an older student. Theoretically it doesn’t happen, but my personal experience tells me that it does. But it was never severe, maybe making an A and A+ or an A down to a B. Not enough to make a federal case about. No one is truly objective, particulalry on emotional subjects.
I guess it certainly would be unusual to write a 20 page paper and not have a single footnote.
Or do you mean you’re discounting pages of endnotes?
No. The paper had to have footnotes, not endnotes and certainly none of this parenthetical reference foolishness. The page count was made exclusive of footnotes.
Back in the day when these things were typed, this was achieved by counting the number of lines in your final draft. I do not recall how many lines actually counted as one page, but it was some given number. The number of actual pieces of paper used was not part of the question.
10th grade History teacher checking in.
A professional teacher will never “punish” a student for expressing views with which they disagree. The merits of the paper are in the writing, the research, the quality of the arguments and the way they are presented. I have often given back papers to my students with “I totally disagree with your thesis. Good job. A” written across the top.
As for the question of papers…granted, I teach AP, but my sophomores turn in 3 formal research papers a year (8-10 pages each, APA format). This in addition to the multitude of shorter essays I assign at my whim. The current estimate is that students do more formal writing in my class than they do in their 3 years of high school English combined. My regular Government kids, all seniors, will do 2 formal papers and the aforementioned plethora of shorted essays. In fact, I just got through grading the ones they did on “Should the ‘Full-Faith-and-Credence’ clause in the Constitution apply to gay marriages performed in other states?” I was quite pleased to see that most of them thought “marriage is marriage” and that “Protection of Marriage” laws were stupid. 
I am very much afraid that I am going to have to deduct points for spelling and grammar.
That’s “Full Faith and Credit” clause.