tales from the front, part 2

from pissed off teacher --

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.

The middle school's Civil War Museum exhibit last spring put the kids' papers on display. Ed looked at every paper & saw a huge amount of internet text. Same thing the year before at the Jason Project exhibit. Many papers included downloaded text. A couple of papers were the same paper.

Of course most people didn't notice because they were looking at the crafts projects, not the papers.

Crafts projects are to a middle school what misdirection is to a magician.

Possibly.

tales from the front

from Cheryl T in Singapore:

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...)

My favorite cheating story happened at Iowa, where I was teaching the freshman rhetoric course. One of my students plagiarized her entire essay, word for word, from the textbook. She denied having done so and then, when I opened up the textbook and did a side-by-side comparison, said, "I remembered."

Of course, now that I have two autistic kids, it strikes me that she could have remembered....

Perhaps some parents could use some "home enjoyment"

We began long division last week, with remainders. It's 3 exercises in the Primary Math 3A workbook with plenty of teacher-made worksheets for home enjoyment. One student came in with his worksheet filled with decimal points. The whole group worked remainder problems together on whiteboards and in their workbooks.

The next day the same kid didn't have his work at all. He told his mom he wasn't doing it at all. That afternoon, I thought I'd give mom a heads up about the "OOPS-I wasn't prepared for class" form in his planner and pointed out that he had done the previous night's work all wrong with decimals, and I thought he might just be overwhelmed and needing some extra help.

"No," she replied. "I helped him with his homework. I thought there were decimals in there somewhere."

cruelty + no imagination = NYC principal

I found this story so ridiculous on the face of it I couldn't think of anything to say about it. How on earth does a principal tell a special education student (or any student) that he doesn't "have the brains" to accomplish something?" But my friend Schoolgal, who's actually endured experienced spelling bees, had this to say:

Why was it only one class participated in the bee? Usually the whole 5th grade does it in class and then we send 2 winners to compete in the grade contest (usually held in the auditorium).

Principals usually select a teacher to be in charge. The teacher then informs the grade to hold a spelling bee in class. Then their 2 top spellers compete in a grade competition usually held in the auditorium. In this case, this was not done at first. Only one teacher (the special ed teacher) did it, and that's when the principal realized she did not follow the procedure and held a grade contest.

By telling the first child he was not good enough I think she scared off the first and second place winners who backed out of the regional competition. I believe the child in question came in 3rd. (given that there were probably only 4 classes competing).

This principal was more about her image than anything else. The next level was the region, and many children would be eliminated on the first round, not just her school.

If this principal had any savvy, she would have gotten a coach for this kid and made a big fuss over the fact that this child is special ed--a missed opportunity to be proud of the achievement!

Instead she berated the kid and now denies the conversation took place.

I was very impressed with these comments. As cruel as I thought the principal had been, she turns out to have been blessed with a complete lack of foresight as well. No wonder she moved up so high in a system where people needed to ask permission before dialing 911.