Cinnabar and Alabaster

she explains—it's obvious that they've talked about this relatively recently and she's re-explaining—that she's planning a report about the effects of television violence in the form of a children's book, she's thinking of "giving a survey to kids" (by which she means SU students who used to be kids), & "maybe just research."
dave asks her to specify: "what kinds of research might you get or have you been looking for?"
she recounts the trouble she's been having with finding sources in the databases (my first thought as i was listening was that she probably really needed better keywords; i'd have rolled over to the machine with her & tried a few, or at least asked her to produce a list of the ones she'd tried next time) and describes one editorial she's read that really intrigued her.
dave suggests ways a writer can center a piece like that & come at it from different analytical angles, investigating its agenda & using other ideas to do that.
"i'm having a hard time," she says, getting to what i was already seeing as her biggest problem with this project, "because there are so many places i can go."
"can you do all of them," dave asks, giving her the benefit of the doubt, "in the kind of project you're envisioning?"
"i think it would be really jumpy—from one topic to the next."
he offers her some advice about narrowing—that she go through what she's found so far and read for her interests, common themes she sees reocurring, connections between them—look for ways to connect key elements because she won't be able to do everything her rapidly expanding topic makes possible.
"how do you isolate variables to link them to behavior?" he asks rhetorically, having pointed out a ridiculous net of possible variables already—"it can't really be done."
he asks her next about how she envisions her audience, and they talk about the "for dummies" book series as a genre.
"are you going to draw?"
"i might, a little bit. i might use images from cartoons."
"good—connecting claims with examples." they talk a little about what kind of cartoons, what the virtues might be of doing that. "are you gonna make like a book-book? front cover, back cover, bound & everything?"
someone in the class is apparently making her own paper for her project—the range of possibilities for project-scope & the created artifacts to demonstrate their work is really broad.
they return to discussing the potential for her to highlight the editorial she's found, talking about ways to pull out and center its claims to refer other sources to, and then move into talking about how she might do interviews or even simple surveying to gather more information—he suggests strategies so simple as lists of check-boxes or open-ended informative questions—"so and so says x; what do you think about that?" "it also sounds," he says, "like maybe you're having trouble with the scholarly stuff." he's got an old paper from a previous year's student whose bibliography he offers to send her, & suggests she try experimenting more with search terms—"who do your editorials mention? what surveys or sources do they cite or refer to? go to those places first."
then they pull their chairs together to look in detail at what she has so far on the bibliography she brought this her, and he asks questions about each one: "who are these people? what do they say their mission is? who works for them? what clues about this organization can you get from its url?"
he sends her off with an overall evaluation of "cool" & some ideas for "round 2" of her searches—"work over the weekend," he tells her, "and then in class we can sit down together and poke around a bit [on the web]. i don't have any other questions if you're okay."
she is, or says she is, & heads out looking purposeful, while he turns to me to talk about how he's structured the assignment, what ideas she started with and abandoned already, & how beautifully some of their projects (every year) are envisioned, which visions some of them will follow through with triumphantly and others will neglect to the point of atrophy.