Teacher's pest

While scanning the Internet to see if a paper had been plagiarized, I came across a paper site that had an interesting section on plagiarism.

It turns out, lazy, procrastinating students aren't to blame, but rather overworked, "uninformed" teachers who shirk additional mountains of work. See, teachers are really to blame, since we don't require students to turn in outlines, drafts, etc.

Why don't teachers follow these 4 quick and easy steps? Are They overworked? Lets see… How long does it take them to have the students place the papers on their desk? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? So perhaps before a teacher gets on the band wagon of, "Lets kill the evil Free Essay Sites", they can help students not get into a situation where they think plagiarizing is their only choice. Maybe they can look inward and help students not be procrastinators.

Ah, looking inward. That's awfully audacious from a web site that promotes cheating and plagiarism. I especially like the reasoning that it's viable to have students submit all that preliminary work. In my experience, there's seldom enough lead time for students to turn in something like a draft far enough in advance for the teacher to have an opportunity to read it and make comments on it, return it to the student, and give the student enough time to incorporate that feedback into the final product. And I like the assumption that students won't bitch if they have to submit a rough draft without getting any feedback on it.

But what do I know? I'm just a stupid, lazy, uninformed teacher who refuses to look inward when my students plagiarize their papers. Evidently I'd also be too dumb to notice if a student copied a paper from the encyclopedia. Because I was too stupid to catch the students copying large sections of text from Spark Notes and other free essay sites.

Them's fightin' words

Jackaninny San Jose fans booed "O Canada" before Game 5 against Edmonton tonight.

I can't wait to see how Edmonton fans return the favor up in Alberta Wednesday night. And best of all, I get to watch the broadcast on the CBC.

Color me skeptical

From a Times article proclaiming the dawn of the digital library:

What is the technology telling us? That copies don't count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library. Soon a book outside the library will be like a Web page outside the Web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

Now, I certainly welcome the trend toward digitized versions of hard copies. It's a big step for preservation at the very least and, as this article notes, it will certainly make information more accessible, also good.

But I think it's preposterous, not to mention shortsighted, to assume that this will signal the virtual end of the printed book. At the very least, in the academic community, lots of scholars and students and the like will still want hard copies to make notes, have a handy reference, etc. And while it might be true that some day we'll all own iPods loaded with most of the world's books, I still think there will always be people who just prefer hard copies. Then there's the matter of 500-year-old technologies dying hard.

And that's where I think the real problem is with this article. It's predicated on a blind, total faith in technological progress, which strikes me as entirely misplaced. For one thing, I don't know that people realize how unwieldy this universal library could be to search, especially if the full text of books is made searchable, which could be more of a hindrance than a benefit.

Brutal

And now I bitch.

I've begun the long, arduous task of grading my own students' papers, roughly half of which are on one of the two topics about the Russian revolutions of 1917.

I'm finding the reading and the grading rather trying and depressing because I've encountered so many papers that can only be described as bad to terrible. I've already given two zeros, both to papers that weren't even halfway to the 7- to 8-page limit required for the assignment. I've also given out a few D's for papers that are really quite terrible. But in general I've been utterly appalled by some students' total inability to write comprehensible prose. I mean, normally the emphasis in grading is -- or at least ought to be -- on assessing the quality of the argumentation and analysis. There's still plenty of room for that, but I'm finding myself having to do the prose equivalent of yelling at my students for being crappy writers. "Since your prose doesn't make any sense, I can't begin to ascertain what argument you're trying to make, let alone assess whether you've made this argument persuasively." Or something to that effect.

It's challenging, because normally I try to say at least something positive about every paper, just to give students some hope of improvement. But with some of these papers I don't think I could do that without being completely dishonest. Some students' papers truly have no redeeming qualities. It's flabbergasting.

And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of big, glaring historical mistakes. Many of my students have a greatly flawed understanding of the general contours and chronology of the revolutionary process in Russia. No, Bloody Sunday did not occur in 1917; try 1905. No, the Bolsheviks did not overthrow the tsar in February 1917; they overthrew the Provisional Government in October 1917. Good grief. I wouldn't necessarily expect my students to understand all the nuances of the revolutionary epoch in Russia, but at the very least you'd think they could walk away from this course with the big picture of what happened in 1917. How in good conscience can I give a paper like that a respectable grade?

So, I'm flummoxed. Even students who did well on the midterm are now demonstrating a startling inability to write a coherent sentence. Damn the mean, these papers are going to produce the worst grades I've ever given in a course. And the hell of it is that I'm not sure whether I'm not being punitive enough. And I still have another 20 essays to read. Argh.