It's fun to make up a statistic. Here goes. Right around 96.5 % of all school work carried out in the United States this year will be thrown away after it has been completed.* Sure, you might come up with a different number--after all, students make cool stuff worth keeping in art classes, for example. But most of the rest is tossed away at the end. It's a test, really, in which we say to students:

• How long are you willing to carry on doing things you would never in your right mind choose for yourself to do? If your answer is "a long time," then you're the one we want. You're just our kind of young worker.

But it doesn't always have to be that way. Find an out-of-print document that tells part of the history of your town, say, a pre-1923 text with no copyright problems attached, and work up a small custom-published print-on-demand edition of it with your students. Study the context, the main players, the key terms. Gloss difficult references. Write an introduction together that helps a reader make good use of the text. Proofread it like crazy. Hold a public reading. Get your students into the newspaper with their project. Have a companion website. Blog the whole process. With the students, finish up by writing a guide to how to carry out this kind of project. Etc.

• For example, in the history museum here is a log book of all trading post sales made in the earliest days of this settlement. How cool is that? I don't know, I've never seen it. It's fragile and not on display for the public and it has never been published. Correct me if I'm wrong, but people would love to have access to it, yes?

Next year, have the new students update the little volume and then make another. Send your students on their way with 21st century publishing skills and a clear memory of a time when they made something in school that was of use in the world.

*Just to make sure I'm being clear: I made up the number, for fun. But it's more or less correct, isn't it?