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I'm amazed at the number of kids who simply copy things off the net, with the labels still there, and expect me not to notice it was written by some professional hack writer instead of an ESL student.
True!
They all do this! Not just the ESL students, everyone.
Ed was talking to a French journalist this week who told him kids in France do the same thing. They think writing means downloading from the internet. The less sophisticated kids cut and paste things whole; the more sophisticated kids cut and paste individual sentences, piecing them together as they go along.
It's as if the basic unit of composition is no longer words but sentences, and you look up the sentences you need on the internet not in the dictionary.
2 comments:
A zillion years ago when my son was in first grade and computers were still a novelty, he decided to write his spelling words on the computer. The little twerp was using copy and paste to write them the required ten times. When I made him stop, he told me "but my teacher said it was okay". As I said, computers were new and she did not know how he was using it.
Kids have always cheated. We just have to be smarter than them to stop them in their tracks.
I once had a 9th grade student who turned in an essay on Greek mythology that was totally plagiarized. When confronted with the computer screen shots of the essay's genesis, he denied it up one side and down the other.
Finally, he broke down, blurting out, "But I didn't even write the essay -- my MOM did!" I spoke that night with the mom, who freely admitted ghost-writing her son's essay. She claimed not to know that cut-and-pasting huge swaths of someone else's writing was wrong. Where to begin?!?
(This happened at a GREAT public high school north of Chicago...)
Cheryl
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