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(I am the English III Team Leader (and only teach English III) in a suburban school which toppled over capacity by about 600 students students this year. We're currently over 2,900 students in one school. I teach just over 170 of them. These are some notes I made about this morning's department meeting.)
On Plagiarism and Its Handling Within the Department:
High school students should be allowed a second chance on plagiarized work because sometimes they don’t mean it, and sometimes they do it by accident. Also, if we fail them for just having plagiarized, is that an accurate assessment of their mastery of the content and skills? No, we need to see them attempt the concepts and skills even if their first attempt was plagiarism.
The Writer’s Notebook:
A new, district-wide initiative - all English students will have a Writer’s Notebook. At today’s meeting we received suggestions for Writer’s Notebook content.
Content Ideas:
1) Have students write about their name. Where did it come from? How did they get it? What does it mean? (Er, I researched the origin of my name in a project I still remember...FROM 4TH GRADE.) If students do not know the origin of their name, have them write questions about their name to ask their parents later.
2) Provide students with a concrete noun at the end of a class lesson. Have them journal in such a way that they connect that concrete noun (in any way, shape, or form) to the daily lesson or reading. Some suggested nouns: firefly, popcorn, basket, chain, bicycle, river, gift...
Wait, wait, lemme check...
Yup. Still teaching high school.
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19 comments:
Well, if one's name is Chinese, it would probably be represented by characters, in which case there could be a good deal of philology involved.
High school students should be allowed a second chance on plagiarized work because sometimes they don’t mean it, and sometimes they do it by accident.
Years ago, when I was teaching freshman rhetoric at the University of Iowa, I had a student who plagiarized an essay from the book.
When I say "the book," I mean the book we were using in class.
I called her in for a conference, and told her she had copied her paper.
She said she hadn't.
I said, "You copied it from the book."
No I didn't.
I pulled out the book, opened it up to the essay she'd copied, and showed her word-for-word that her paper was identical TO THE BOOK.
She stared at me blankly, then said, "I must have remembered."
Of course, now that I've seen the kind of memory feats autistic people can pull off, I wonder.
Helen Keller was also the center of a huge plagiarism scandal -- awful.
She apparently did remember the essay she was accused of plagiarizing, which makes perfect sense since she would have had to develop her memory to "hold" texts to compensate for not being able to hold texts in print.
Which reminds me, Susan J, if you're around -- I know nothing about the history of Braille.
How much Braille text would Keller have had access to?
She was quite young at the time of the plagiarism scandal, as I recall.
connect a noun to the lesson
You should suggest Tex's Triplets exercise.
So why, exactly, can these students not be writing responses to literature in their writer's notebooks?
A class blog or wiki -- with the proviso that prose has to be grammatical & correctly spelled (no SLEETspeak, or whatever it is) would be far more valuable.
leetspeak
TEh INTeRn3T i5 THr3@+EN1N9 t0 Ch@n93 thE W4Y wE $p34k.
I'm going to repeat the first assignment given to Honors freshmen at the high school:
Write a paragraph comparing a character in a book (any book, apparently) to yourself.
Apart from the fact that this assignment IS NOT ABOUT ANALYZING AND/INTERPRETING LITERATURE, it's a lousy assignment for:
* boys
* shy kids
* secretly gay kids
* narcissistic kids who already spend way too much time thinking about themselves
Which pretty much covers the entire population.
Well, I'm just imagining someone with a name like Mr. Nipple having to write about the origin of their name . . .
On a more serious note than my previous comment . . .
Several years ago, I gave my college freshmen students the following assignment: choose a building on campus and then research and write a paper about the person for whom the building was named. They also had to do an oral presentation as well.
I had struck up a friendship with the university archivist, who had graciously agreed that she would assist the students with the research required for this project.
It turned out to be a great project; the students were not only learning about a person who at one time had been very important in the life of the university, they were learning about the history and traditions of the university as well.
Instructors at the university level wage a constant battle with students about the subject of plagiarism. It's frustrating when a student's response is, "Well, I didn't know . . ." This is particularly frustrating when it is fairly blatant.
Another form of academic misconduct at our university is turning in someone else's work (i.e., a fellow student) as your own.
During my first semester of teaching, I gave an extra credit assignment towards the end of the semester. As I was reading through the papers, I noticed that two of the papers seemed remarkably similar.
The last question asked for their personal thoughts about the class as a whole; their answers to that question were identical!
Incredibly, one of the students involved had the audacity to suggest that nowhere was it stated on the Syllabus that they couldn't work together on assignments, and in effect, where was the harm?
More T/K
I now have an explicit reference in my Syllabi about plagarism and academic misconduct, and I also spend a few minutes of class time discussing it at the beginning of each semester. It also ties in very nicely with a discussion of ethics.
One of the downsides of technology is that it makes it much easier for students to appropriate the work of another. Need some reference material about a corporation? Just copy and paste it from the company's website, without any reference or citation. Of course, that's plagarism, but hey, does the teacher really read these papers anyway? Answer: yes, I do, I read every word, as do my colleagues!
What I would prefer to happen at the high school level is that the students are given direct, explicit instruction, followed by lots and lots of opportunities for practice.
Well, this has once again turned into a rather long rant and I am reminded of Catherine's description of the way the British teach writing and the need to edit, edit, edit!
Well, I'm just imagining someone with a name like Mr. Nipple having to write about the origin of their name . . .
lolllll
"TEh INTeRn3T i5 THr3@+EN1N9 t0 Ch@n93 thE W4Y wE $p34k."
Well, there'll always be argot. Also, it's not supposed to be decipherable. After all, if you're talking about drugs and other suspect stuff, you'd probably not want outsiders to know. (Compare Pig Latin, originally used by Allied POWs to confuse the German guards.)
So I'd say "1337speak" is simply another form of internet verlan. Considering that it's considerably more labourious to type, I don't think it falls in the same class as normal cheatspeak.
(And also forgive me for my youthful impudence when I say, "1337speak is so five years ago." :p)
What is obnoxious is when people purpose type in it to show off, not realising the true origins of 1337speak (the hacker subculture).
"A class blog or wiki -- with the proviso that prose has to be grammatical & correctly spelled (no SLEETspeak, or whatever it is) would be far more valuable."
Mmm-hmm!
Compare Pig Latin, originally used by Allied POWs to confuse the German guards.
Good Lord.
I didn't know that!
Of course, I was educated by wolves.
The thing about a class blog or wiki is: at least you're writing for an audience.
Also, with blogs & wikis you can think out loud via writing -- which would be good, seeing as how writing is supposed to be thinking and all...
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