Instructions
Participating students should make it clear to readers (1) whether they believe America in the 21st century has abandoned Excellence and (2) whether each one personally values the pursuit of excellence enough to strive for it in his/her life. Students should support, with sound reasoning, the positions advocated in their essays.
Individual teachers must decide how much time can be allocated to this project. The linked web sites (found below #6) offer group activities and learning experiences. Most can be adapted to individuals. Please tell us about your experience if students use any of the material provided at these web sites.
1-
Email
submittals only
All
essays must be submitted via email. Do not send print copies.
We
suggest that the most computer-literate student in the class assume the
responsibility for seeing that all essays reach the Foundation via email.
Floppies can be brought from home and sent via a school computer and modem or
submitted from a home with the teacher's permission.
Please
do not submit essays until all are ready. The body of the email should
list the name of the school, school fax and phone numbers, teacher’s name
and email address and the name of every student-participant exactly
as he/she would like it to appear on a certificate.
We will accept essays as attached MS Word documents, plain text or Rich Text
Format (rtf) or as text copied into the body of an email. We are not
responsible for documents that are lost or distorted during transmission or
that reach us in a format that we cannot open.
2-
Grammar,
Spelling and Misconceptions
All essays must be checked by the teacher for grammatical
and spelling errors and these must be corrected by the student. The teacher
must certify that the paper has been corrected and is ready for submittal. The
Foundation will return
papers that have grammar and spelling mistakes. We have not done so in the
past but instead have done a great deal of editing for the sake of the public
that visits our web site. We recently decided that a better policy is to allow
the students to benefit from editing their own papers under the teacher’s
guidance. Faulty reasoning and
misconceptions should also be corrected under a teacher’s guidance, if
possible in the form of a classroom discussion.
3-
Quotations
All quotations used in essays must be noted and
cited at the end of the work. The only notation in the body of the
paper should be quotation marks. No quote should exceed four sentences.
4-
Format
Example
for centered Heading for each essay:
Valley
Springs High School
Valley
Springs, Arkansas
Teacher:
Jane Doe
Title
of Particular Paper
By
John Doe
12th grade
line
1= name of school
line
2 = town and state
line
3 = name of teacher
line
4 = title of essay
line 5 = student's name
line
6 = grade
Single
spacing 12 pt font.
(Arial preferred but we can change any font submitted) No indented paragraphs ¾
use doubling spacing between paragraphs.
5-
Photos
If you want student photos displayed, send email
attachments clearly labeled with the student’s name.
Example
of student photo
Relevant information can be found at these two web sites. Browse them.
www.32keys.com/18responsibility.html and www.school-for-champions.com/excellence.htm
7- Questions
If
you have trouble accessing any of this information, try again at a different
time. Server access depends on traffic and other conditions. Let us know if
you have tried unsuccessfully more than three times at different times of the
day (or night) and we will help.
Please
be sure to keep copies at your end until you receive your awards.
Essays
will be posted on the Foundation web site as they are read. Entries, upon
submittal, become the property of The Harry Singer Foundation.
If
you have questions or problems: email staff@singerfoundation.org or phone
(831) 625-4223 fax (831)
624-7994
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