bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

I find myself going off on something of a tangent here, maybe providing more direction to the narrative. We'll see how that plays out. In the September 2007 College English, there's an article about plagiarism that uses a passage from this blog to examine the issue. I'm not sure I like how I come off, and I don't remember her contacting me, though I think she probably did. I'm somewhat working through my response through this fictional persona in my nanowrimo attempt. I'm going to have to see if I've written anything else about plagiarism in my blog. I don't know one way or the other if I have, though I have in other blogs and on mailing lists. So, whether you care or not, about me, my novel attempt, plagiarism, or anything else, I hope you keep reading.

11/16/05

Grace,

I know this doesn’t have anything to do with what you last asked, but I had to bring it up. Did you see the College Writing article essay that mentioned my work? I was rather astounded when it was pointed out to me that I was prominently mentioned for my work, but I don’t know that I should be flattered. The essay is about plagiarism and the way teachers respond to it. I wrote in a way that showed my conflict with plagiarism, but that conflict doesn’t seem to come through in the essay that used my words to make a point. Now I guess I have a sense of how people feel when they are misquoted. I think maybe, if I understand the author, that I should be angry at the misrepresentation of myself and my thinking. Certainly she is giving me permission to be angry. Maybe what might be more damning than my waffling between anger, blame and responsibility, with a little revenge thrown in, is that my words are contrasted with the words of someone being presented as being more emotionally honest than I am. I’m not sure how to take that.

In fact, the author of the essay prefaces her discussion of me and my words, though I don’t know that they are intended solely for me, with some comments on how we can’t determine the “authenticity” of an academic’s words in anything an academic writes because the readership, presumably other academics (and I assume the bulk of my readers are academics) requires that a certain ethos be maintained. I don’t know that I tried in my writing to maintain the ethos, though I’m sure something comes through, because we all are/have ethos. My words show a greater detachment from the student, and that’s true. The particular student hadn’t been in class for quite some time. In fact, I’d written him off as being among the “disappeared,” those students who vanish, some doing well, some poorly, some getting by, but having disappeared with nary a word, but who then show up again at the last moment, handing in an assignment that just beats the deadline for acceptance (meaning it was at least a week overdue). Frankly, I have no attachment to students of that sort.

The students I become attached to are those who show up each day and do their work, who invest something of themselves in the class and the content of the course, along with the work required to make something happen. When someone flits in and out and doesn’t seem to care, I don’t much care either. I guess this is a bad thing to admit as a teacher, to some, as it runs counter to the “save the world” vocation that is education. But that’s why I work in higher education, not the K12 system. If students don’t care, I don’t care. It’s pretty simple, and this student I wrote about at the time may have cared enough to try to slip the work of someone else by me, to salvage the course and earn the credits, but not enough to actually show up every day and do the work, or if there was something interfering, to keep me in the loop. Instead, he submitted something he had copied from somewhere else, something I found with a simple internet search. As is often the case, the results for the search term were limited, limited to the source of his plagiarism.

This wasn’t a citation error, a forgetting to provide a page number following some quoted material. It was going to a website, copying a whole document, altering a single word in the title, putting his, the student’s name on the essay, and submitting it as if the essay were his. And it was so horribly written. Clearly my student hadn’t learned much, and he was marginal anyway. The essay was copied from the work of some other student who just happened to mention Alexis de Tocqueville near the end, while my assignment called for him to take one of Tocqueville’s ideas from Democracy in America and to develop an argument based on it. That didn’t happen. On top of not following the assigned task, which could lead to a failing grade, though opportunity to revise, the essay contained such garbled and nonsensical prose as “The spotlight will once again branch in it multicultural diversity" and similar non sequitors. What the hell could that mean to anyone with half a brain? My student was so stupid as to write this kind of crap, but he was dumb enough to try to pass it off as his own. Like the writer who produced it, he must have though incomprehensive gibberish with a bit of jargon thrown in would make for something other than the crap it is. As the article noted, I am too smart for that sort of thing to slip by me, though I know many a student has likely slipped other work under my nose.

But getting back to the one implication of the essay, that I don’t care about students enough to be angered, that’s probably true about me and the way I teach. As I said, if they don’t seem to care, I don’t care. One of my colleagues told me about the day in which he had abandoned any metaphysical sense of how things work in the classroom, maybe the world at large. He told of a day in his grade school experience, growing up Catholic in Pittsburgh. The nun teaching the class was walking down the aisles of desks, collecting the day’s homework. One kid didn’t have it. “Where’s your homework?” she’d asked. The kid offered up some typical, and typically lame excuse, and for his efforts he received a slap on the back of his head, the sort the nuns typically gave out during the 1950s and 60s to kids who didn’t do what they were supposed to do. At this point, my colleague told me, he knew that it was a black and white situation. You either did what you were supposed to do, or you didn’t. “Why” didn’t matter. My student plagiarized, conducting an internet search for material he thought would fit the assignment. As close as he came was one element, the use of a particular work, being mentioned in the conclusion of a piece of crap student writing by someone who was only a shade smarter than my student, only he didn’t realize he wasn’t all that bright, “he” being both my student and the writer of the plagiarized work.

So I failed the student and told him that if he challenged that decision, I would, in essence, work to have him removed from the college. In short, he could take a somewhat severe consequence or a much more severe consequence. In the past, when students had plagiarized large chunks of work, I have, and will continue to do so, given them the opportunity to correct their errors. The author saw this as my being unwilling to be “fooled,” to show that I am no fool (I’ll leave that to others to decide somewhere down the road). I’d say I don’t want to be fooled by this sort of thing, to let students cheat. You’ll have to let me know what you think.

B-----