This article shows how students confront offensive language head-on by researching its history and reconsidering its use in contemporary conversation. It describes an assignment in which students study the histories and social reception of words (in some cases considered obscenities) used to insult people of various social categories. Students…

As online research has become an increasingly standard activity for middle school and high school students, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has simultaneously emerged as the bane of many teachers who include research-focused assignments in their courses. An online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit its entries, Wikipedia has educators…

In this article, the author relates her library experiences in high school. She considers those trips to the central library in downtown Buffalo as the hallmark of her eleventh-grade education. Now, she observes how the old way of doing research in the library was so different from what is practiced nowadays. Students nowadays who are considered…