doing the grading is making me want to gouge out my own eyes with a fork

[lolaraincoat]

Okay, not really. But what is it about 19-year-old boys that makes them selectively deaf to instructions of any sort? I said, when handing back the first batch of papers, I told them, I did, I said: where most of you went wrong was that you selected random sentences from the two books you were supposed to be comparing, ran them through a word processor's thesaurus function to avoid plagiarism, and dumped them on the pages until you had enough words. Don't do that!

So why did all the 19-year-old boys in my class who did that the first time do it again? The girls who did that on the first paper did not do it on this second paper. But the boys did exactly what they did before, but more so. If I told those boys not to chew glass, would they go chew glass? If so, do you think I should tell them not to chew glass?

I actually wrote this on one student's paper: Do not paraphrase. You do not understand what you are reading well enough to paraphrase it. Which is not very kind of me, but it's true and I'm tenured.

Comments

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

I think you should tell them to jump off of the Brooklyn Bridge. If they all did it at the same time it would be really spectacular.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

No, no, I would have to tell them NOT to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. And go into detail about why it's a very bad idea and how they should avoid, at all costs, jumping off that bridge. And especially if they have a history of jumping off bridges in the past, they should try never to jump off a bridge again. And then I should repeat the speech AT LEAST TWICE in class in different weeks.

That would get them jumping off the bridge, for sure.

But lo! I have the exact right icon!

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

oops, that´s what I meant.. that they should NOT jump off the BB

and changing the subject entirely ...

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, hell -- are you still around? I need to talk to you about Saturday.

[cordelia_v]

*nods*

Yes, that would work for sure. Perhaps you remember the post I did, about the time a bunch of 18 year olds from one of my classes decided it would be a neat experiment to find out what would happen if they all jumped up and down together in an elevator, on the count of three?

And yes, scariest part is that they are all allowed to vote.

I wonder who the patron saint of essay graders is?

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

How could I forget the elevator story?

The patron saint of we who mark essays might be Severus Snape, but the people who staff the writing centers at all our institutions are for certain sure avatars of the Buddha of compassion.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain, but the truth of the matter is that if somebody doesn't know the material well enough to paraphrase, they don't know it well enough to write an essay. I mean, yes...syntactically, the paper's going to end up looking better with quotes (because it means that at least *some* of the words on the page make sense), but...you know?

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. (My comment continues: If avoiding paraphrasing means that most of your paper is quotations, then you have much bigger problems with reading and writing. Have you been to the Writing Centre yet? This is a student who I had referred to the Writing Centre, as well as to our departmental workshops on How to Write a History Paper, much earlier in the year.)

The problem is that the student doesn't know that he doesn't understand what he's reading, and until he tries to write about it without using the copy-and-paraphrase technique, he will continue to believe that he understands it.

It wouldn't pain me so much were he not old enough to vote.

And that was a fine series of double negatives, but never mind, never mind ...

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Also? In addition to teaching lit, I also help run our Writing Center, so I get to see it coming and going. *g*

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

*bows to you, gratefully*

Without the writing centers, everything would be SO MUCH WORSE.

[mincot.livejournal.com]

"Why did the kids put jam on the cat? Raspberry jam, all over the cat? Why would the kids do something like THAT, when all that we said was, 'No'."

.............

I had a student tell me he was "a little worried about his paper." He should have been; it was a rehash and in part outright plagiarism of various human rights papers about Africa that did not address the stated question, which was a comparison of Pilcher and White. And this is a man older than I am. Sheesh.

Other students write entirely through quotes; I write the same sort of note on theirs. I would ban quotes entirely, but then the students just quote anyway and pass the material off as theirs.

When I was a student I wondered why I got As on my essays. Now I don't.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

When I was a student I wondered why I got As on my essays. Now I don't.

Words to live by.

[stillwell.livejournal.com]

It's so freaky when adults do that, too. I've had classmates in their 40's hand in shit like that. Some of them also didn't realize early on that teachers google sentences and sections to check for plagiarism.