Bernie and examining for inauthenticity

That word: inauthentic. It just has a really negative feeling to it. It doesn't even sound good when you try to say it. Now, how to get around giving your students inauthentic tasks.
As teachers, aren't we supposed to help students learn to communicate? If we are, they must be able to communicate in the written word as well as the spoken word. How will they practice the written word with an authentic task? When I think of inauthentic tasks, I think of the term paper; the trap that Bernie was discussing. Did I create inauthentic tasks? Yes, I probably did. When will an adult have to imagine they are living in 1892? When will an adult read the poem "The Colossus" and dissect it and reflect upon it? I also tried my best to differentiate the projects enough to bring out the different learning strengths. I think my best task was for Team 2009 where they had to design a new monument for "the Mall" in Washington, D.C. dedicated to immigration. I'd love to see this concept come to fruition. How would students choose to present it? In clay model, in papier mache, in a drawing? At the end, I wanted the two teams of students to debate the immigration policies of each time period and how difficult the process towards citizenship may have been. I threw in the question of discrimination at the conclusion as an afterthought. ( Just something I was doing today at one of my schools. ) This is the last piece of thinking I wanted to leave them with and an idea of how to apply what they learned to today's culture. Hopefully this would open the door to the next unit on Constitutional Amendments and the history of discrimination in the US.