Calling out all "Top Contributors"?

I don't see the big deal with it. Creativity is what makes us all unique.

I taught my last class in the public school system 15 years ago. I taught in a small rural school where the highlights of many people's lives was graduation and and their own wedding. Not even the Christening of their first child ranked with those two events.

It cost (just for gym decorations) approximately $3000 dollars by the time everything that was purchased to make the gym look like a set for a block buster movie. The walls had to be covered, streamers had to be put up (and the staples in the wall removed the next week) tables had to be disguised from the cigarette burns from the bingo players who used the gym on the weekend, entrance ways had to be constructed, creative designs had to somehow had to cover the basketball hoops, speakers had to be hidden but the sound from them had to be audible, and most lavish of all was the way the screen had to come down with slides of all the grads continuously playing. All this was accomplished by as few as five and as many as 15.

That 3000 dollars (done by fund raising) did not cover any of the family's expenses. A catered meal cost 10 dollars a person and you were allowed 8 guests not including the graduand and his/her escort. The community was isolated so anyone who wanted to attend usually had to set aside a day there and a day back in travelling time (at least).

All in all it might cost the family as much as another 2000. I have to say that the students looked beautiful (girls) and handsome (the boys) and they did concern themselves with who their escorts were going to be, but mostly they worried about how to get this one night organized. I don't know how many man hours that represented, but at 1 dollar an hour, I'd be willing to bet it would bankrupt JP Morgan Chase.

How much more elaborate can it be? And after all that work, the next morning the gym looked like -- well a gym with too many staples in the wall.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.