As Springfield celebrates its bicentennial, Lisa's class at Springfield Elementary School are assigned essays.

So when she assigns essays, Ms. Castellano asks her students to print.

Teachers now assign family time lines, family orchards and essays that give children more freedom in telling their personal histories.

In school he was assigned regular essays to write, but instead he wrote poetry.

Fortunate, too, are those who were given the opportunities of being exposed to teachers who were not too busy or lazy to assign weekly essays and to mark them for style as well as for grammar and mechanics.

What about assigning essays on baseball sketches or movies, from Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine to Kevin Costner's "Field of Dreams"?

To get to know the students, she assigned brief essays in class on how they are unique.

For some teachers who assign long packets or essays during a vacation, the thinking appears to be that a week without classes provides students with time to focus on a longer project.

Nearby, Karuna Balkaran, 16, a student at Brooklyn Technical High School, said she was comfortable with the new essay because her teachers had been assigning essays for homework since September.