Happy Reserach Memories

Blog prompt: research memories

My first memorable research experience was writing a report on the Virgin Islands in fifth grade. I copied it out of a Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia set my parents owned. In sixth grade my teacher introduced me to the concept of plagiarism, and drew on the metaphor of a bird of prey that found a (dead?) animal and flew away with it--but the dead animal froze to its talons, resulting in a crash landing and the death of the bird. I think the warning was that if we got a hold of the idea of plagiarism, it would catch hold of us and destroy us. That aside, I wrote (much more ethically this time) a report on Louis Pasteur. I misspelled the word "temperature" in my final draft.
In seventh grade I wrote a report on geothermal energy (not the drill-a-well type, but the type that harnesses naturally occurring steam and heat from the earth). As a high school freshman I wrote a report on the crusades. As a high school senior I wrote a paper on Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, and copied it on light pink paper (her nickname was "Pinkie" (sp?)) just as I read she had copied her master's thesis on pink paper.

I believe I enjoyed writing each of the papers except the first one. Well, for one thing, I didn't write the first one. Research becomes refreshing as it becomes our own.