She talks to wolves...

Today's summer school session marked the last of the grammar-oriented classes. In the last two and a half weeks, we've gone over the topics contained within Chapters 1-11 of English Grammar for Dummies. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, a schoolteacher using that book: however, the information is organized and presented in a manner that's pretty consistently understandable by my students. Also, it was a book they could easily buy at the bookstore; I didn't really have time to order proper grammar books through my school.

However, despite my repeated warnings to my students to do their readings outside of class and review their notes, their grades have been declining. I'm getting tired of sounding like a broken record each session, telling them again and again that they must read the chapters, that I tell them which sections to focus on just in case they don't read the entire chapters, that the quizzes they're taking each session are all part of their final grade, and that they're kind of screwed if they don't pass Summer School.

One thing that continues to annoy me, no matter how many times I encounter it, is that the students won't just think. Many times, the answer to a question on their quizzes is evident if they'd just take the time to think. Today, none of them could remember what an antecedent is. So I told them that the antecedent is the word that a pronoun replaces, basically. (They were asked to identify the antecedent for the underlined pronoun.) Not one of them could identify the antecedents correctly. Yet later, when I read the question and pointed at the underlined pronoun and said, "Alright, so who is she?" a lightbulb went off over their heads.

Anyway, under the cut you can see the quizzes I've given them so far. All the material that the quizzes cover was either in their notes, in specific sections I told them to pay close attention to, or in the grey boxes that run rampant through English Grammar for Dummies.

( Quizzes! Test your grammatical knowledge here! )

I know we've been over this and over this, but I want to fully realize for you the ludicrousness of the paper Little Plagiarist Pants #2 turned in to me. And why I shake my head in disbelief that she's calling me and weeping now. Especially ironic phrases in the paper have been bolded. (All mistakes are hers unless I made a typo. But, really, all mistakes are probably hers.)

Little Miss Plagiarist Pants
English 12
May 22, 2007

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is strictly speaking or stealing someone words, ideas & creative works. After I learn that it's a crime I was told to do this paper on plagiarism. So I look on the internet if reference under Plagiarism Stopper A Teacher Guide it states that plagiarism is a rapidly growing problem in many venues today. Because it is so easy to locate information using the Internet, student have given in to the temptation to take material and use them fir their own. This needs to be addressed by all who are in the education field by teaching the observance of proper citation and copyright compliance and by making sure our students know that stealing someone else's work is wrong. This site may help you in your efforts toward these goals. Please feel free to suggest additional site or information and recommendations for redesign. I also look under OWL online writing Lab its said: Whether international or, as is more often the case, inadvertent, the results is that is that some or all of your own. It's like lip-synching to someone else's voice and accepting the applause and rewards for yourself. Incidentally, plagiarism also includes informal published material such as the re-use of the same paper for more than one course or "buying" a paper from another student. If it feels like cheating or an easy way-out, and the moral and intellectual consequences don't sound alarm bells, stop and think of the serious punitive repercussions you could incur. Because it is intellectual theft, plagiarism is considered by all post-secondary institutions as an academic crime with punishment anywhere from an F on that particular paper to dismissal from the course to expulsion from the college or university. If that scares you, it shouldn't because there is no reason it has to happen to you. Avoid plagiarism by following and understanding standard documentation formats, learning how to note-take effectively, and properly incorporating sources direct quotations or paraphrases within your own insights so that it is clear where and supplement your own discussion. Your research paper won't be some cheap throw-together of unoriginal thoughts. You suppose to rewrite in your own words a least if you get a reference from the internet. I under MLA-Style its said: The penalty for plagiarism is usually the teachers teaching or the course involving. Some of high schools and colleges failure the paper and you fail the course and you get expulsion from school. The rules about plagiarism is really no excuse, and its really bad violation.
Plagiarism is not violation but it also violate the ethics. Students who plagiarize have cheated themselves out high school will be response for their academic achievement in life. Instructors and teachers aware students about plagiarism. Its important to recognize this definition is very important. Plagiarism has been around for many years, the invention of the internet has made for plagiarism even more of a challenge @ Plagiarism.org. 90 percent of student made plagiarizing on all their written assignments and they use the internet has made plagiarism most on the course they have taken. I also discussed @ plagiarism.org, its said: Plagiarism known as a dishonesty in colleges. Students were getting expulsion, and once you get expel from college you will not be able attend to another college as was said at the school by the principal. Some schools expect the fact you copy and paste someone's information that they wrote. English teachers give us a website page to look up the summary or information about the work. A major concern was the key to avoid plagiarizing people's information. Plagiarism prevention issues of immense sensitivity and importance to people in all areas of education. They are also of great concernto middle and high school teachers and administrators, and faculty and administrators in colleges and universities. Librarians have also embraced the issue of plagiarism and realized the importance of linking it to the proper documentation of sources to teach users about the importance of knowing about fair use, plagiarism, and documentation. Plagiarism is also moral. The resource from internet is to educate students on different information on what they looking for. Plagiarizing by copying and paste information on paper could get you in a lot of trouble. College the professors detect plagiarism and if it was problem they had it under control. One way a student can plagiarize is to copy something directly from another persons work. A sutdent might also say something and assume that it is not plagiarizing. It is plagiarism if only small changes were made to the source copy and the students work. Another way that students plagiarize is to put together different pieces of work turn it in as their final piece of work. The pressure the students have to deal with by doing research papers and Essays they use the information from the internet. High school students when they were told do assignment in class dealing with internet using they plagiarized they information on poster board or book report way. There many problems in colleges & high school dealing with plagiarizing information, some teachers & professors plagiarized false documents. Personally I never a teacher talk about Plagiarism I in school until I came here, because English 12 we copy and paste information and present the information in front of the class. I think plagiarism should be blame on students who never no plagiarism. Some students don't know when they plagiarism, because you can change of up the information or you can use a paragraph and then you can use your own information. Students who do not understand the meaning up plagiarism they should get a clearing understanding of the copying someone's work or the use of your working.


There you have the two glorious typed pages of her punishment report explaining what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, why it's bad, and why she'll never do it again. Remember that the report was supposed to be four pages long: when I talked to her on the phone yesterday, she sobbed that she had turned in four pages and the evil Office Lady had lost them. Considering the second page ends more than a finger's length above the bottom of the page, however, I seriously doubt that allegation.

I suppose I could give her a few points for trying (kinda. sorta) to parenthetically cite her sources. Except, if she'd actually READ what she was copy-pasting and butcheringre-typing, she might have learned that what she did still counts as plagiarism. Also, what she did barely counts as being written in the English language at some points. (Notice there are no paragraphs in her paper. She says that she was never taught how to make paragraphs in public school.)

Below the cut, you will find my notes searching out her sources. I got a bit lazy toward the latter half of her paper, when the sentences became so incoherent that I had trouble pulling useful search phrases out of them.

( My notes on her sources... )

There are only two weeks left of school here at the Crossroads. As such, I'm struggling to find things to fill my students' time. It's not that I don't still have a lot to teach them: I do. Oh, I do. It's more a matter of what's worth getting into this late in the game.

My seniors, for some reason unfathomable by mere teachers, are being allowed out a week early. They don't deserve such a break, but whatever. With their remaining week, I think I'll be giving them some parting tips on essay-writing and a lecture on how to take notes. If any of them actually make it into college, they're desperately going to need such a tutorial.

My eleventh graders are taking their tests on The Things They Carried on Tuesday. I think, after that, I'm going to assign a couple of short stories for discussion. They can ride out the last couple of days with surprise extra credit activities. The same goes for my tenth graders, except their focus will be on world literature rather than American literature. (And, of course, their test is on The Alchemist.)

My ninth graders get to write one last essay, though I've yet to decide the type. They also have a vocabulary test (maybe two!) to finish up. I really should devise some method with which they can earn extra credit as well. Hm.

Speaking of essays, my seniors turned in their crop of prose essays on Thursday. I just finished grading them tonight. Here's the list of stories they had to read:

"The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"Videotape" by Don DeLillo
"Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Indian Education" by Sherman Alexie
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin
"The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift

I wanted to see how much they'd learned over the year, in regards to critical analysis and essay-writing. So I didn't give them any structured guidance on this essay. I simply gave each of them a story and requested they write an essay analyzing the story. Of course, I made myself available for any questions they might have. They didn't really have many questions. They had a week to work on their essays, including some in-class writing time.

The essays were, of course, disappointing: so much dull, uninspired, and flat misunderstandings of the texts. But none were as disappointing as that of one of the newer girls, a thoughtful and quiet student whom I thought had the best chance of understanding the assignment and succeeding with her prose piece: "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift.

Please find the text of her essay enclosed beneath the cut:

( An essay concerning 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift... )

For the students in my class, the above essay sounds bloody brilliant. Too bad I immediately knew it wasn't her work and found it via Google but a quick search later (it's down there, trust me). Discovering this particular girl had plagiarized was quite a bitter pill to swallow.

Another girl did it as well on her essay about "The Yellow Wallpaper." She copied from two different sites, though. She also tried to cover it up, albeit unsuccessfully. You see, her method of covering it up was to splinter the sentences, leaving out some words and joining together odd phrases. This rendered the latter half of her essay completely nonsensical. Really. For example:

"She feels her activity, freedom, and interesting of working and would help condition and reveals. Her description is mostly positive but disturbing elements such as rings and things but her bedroom walls are the bars on the windows.

The first few weeks of the summer pass, the author describe good & bad things about her & john She continues to long fore more stimulating of the company and her activities"

All lack of punctuation and the like are the student's. This brings the total counts of plagiarism for the year up to 6. And not one of them has gotten away with it. Honestly, when will they learn? How do they honestly think they're going to get away with this nonsense?

In addition to all of this, I have one student who's completely spazzing out on me. He hasn't bothered to do any of his work this quarter, so he's trying to catch up on all of it within the last two weeks. Unfortunately, his work suffers from a serious lack of quality or understanding.

Behold his essay analyzing Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"... actually, you know what, you might want to make yourself a drink first. I'll wait. You should possibly take a couple of painkillers. Just enough to dull the pain that will shortly begin throbbing behind your eyes. Got all that done? Good. Here you go:

The Lottery

A story about Shirley Jackson. This lottery was published in June 28, 1948 and issue in New York.

The lottery was mainly about Shirley Jackson and her family and Tessie her husband.

The lottery's democratic illusion is an ideological effect that prevent the villagers from crticizing the class structure of their society. The lottery also reinforces a village work ethio with distracts the villagers.

Shirley Jackson and her family went on to the lottery and didn't have to much fun there, so they were play and how the game go there is whoever get the black ball has to be stoned so therefore her husband had got the black stone and Shirley thought they tried to give him to black stone so she was made.

Shirley was very angry and she wanted them to do it over again so they did it over again and she had ended up with the Black then so she was stoned by the crowd and her family.

End "essay."

Yeah. He's not passing. Which is too bad, considering he apparently has some sport scholarship waiting on him that depends on him having good grades. My boss told me we really needed to make a push this quarter and try to get him the grades he needs to get his scholarship, but he's obviously not making an effort in my class. I've given him enough of a break by not penalizing him for turning in late work.

Also, yes, he blatantly plagiarized there in the middle from the essay I let them read in class. At least he had the sense to quit that rather quickly.

Wearisome! Wearisome.

These are next year's class proposals, in incredibly brief form. Yes, I'm now potentially branching into science. It's likely for the best. I would have turned these into college-like blurbs, but I had to keep the language relatively simple for the high school students and their parents. Trust me.

( Incredibly short class descriptions behind the cut... )


Yes, I know that I've listed 16 classes. At the most, I'll be teaching 8. I listed double that in the hopes that I'll actually manage to get 8 of those made. Because, if I don't, I don't get full pay. Yeah.

I'm not qualified to teach some of those courses, either. Well... not on a college level. I can teach them on a high school level, as many of those are really just varations on the high school English theme, with different specific focuses.

I'm turning in this proposal tomorrow, along with a proposal for some Adult Continuing Education Classes and some thoughts on what I can do for summer school. Wish me luck.

Well, best start hiding your books. The Firemen are on their way:

Publisher makes lite work of the classics. For those of you who don't click on the link, allow me to say that this publisher got the brilliant idea to publish "Compact Editions" of class works such as Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, etc. This means, essentially, that they're eliminating 40% of the books in order to make them more accessible.

Frankly, this is bullshit. As a writer, I am emphatically against other people deciding what does and does not belong in the final editions of my works. Note, however! I do recognize the value of editing, but not such mass butchery. If you don't want to read all of a book, skim. Don't permit someone to fix these books arbitrarily, cutting out entire subplots, chapters, etc., in the name of making something more "accessible." Some of the books on the publisher's list aren't even that complicated or inaccessible in the first place!

Argh. And no, I don't agree with abridged versions either.

Link found via this post on pegkerr's livejournal.


* * *

My best friend (crowley) provided this humorous link:
How To Use Analogies and Metaphors In Your Essay and Get National Fame.

I can't even choose which one is my favorite: there are too many horrible and equally amusing ones! I would really appreciate the creativity spent in coming up with these if they were intentional. The thought that they're unintentional would almost be too much to bear if I hadn't spent the last 8 months teaching high school English.

( The list, reproduced for you here... )

As we move into prose analysis in my senior class (not that they got poetry analysis or anything), I decided that they needed to read "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. My plan was to have them read the story first and answer some basic comprehension questions. After the initial reading, I would lecture on how to begin analyzing prose. Then they'd get to read the story again, answer some more detailed questions, and eventually write an essay.

Sadly, I haven't gotten through phase one of this plan yet. You see, they read the story yesterday. It took them all period to read the six pages (we didn't have books, so I printed them each a copy). Once they'd finished reading it, they didn't really understand what had happened. So I had to take today to discuss it, as well as to go ahead and explain terms like foreshadow and scapegoat. To highschool seniors.

(Note: As I have a terrible cold or sinus infection of INSERT-ILLNESS-HERE at the moment, I didn't mind so much not having to stand up and talk for 40 minutes today. Over them. With lots of yelling.)

Allow me to share with you the first reaction the story got from Queen of the Jungle (one of the first to finish reading):

QotJ: "Why'd we have to read this?! We Christian!"
Me: "... ... Christians used to stone people all the time back in the 'day.'"
QotJ: "I know! ... It's not appropriate for [Crossroads]."

A little later:

QotJ again: "Why'd that lady say it wasn't fair?"
Me: "That's one of the points of the story: illuminating hypocrisy. Violence is all fine and dandy as long as it doesn't happen to you. Then it does and you're all, 'Oh bleep no, this bleep's gotta stop!'"

I didn't actually say that last part so succinctly. However, I do actually say bleep in class because it amuses them and keeps their attention.

Today, SnoopWannabeTupac asked me if these lotteries had ever really happened. Then he and JumpyPuppy and a few others wanted to know the origin and perpetuation of stoning.

Did you know that "The Lottery" is banned in South Africa? Or that a lot of people cancelled their subscription to The New Yorker because they published the short story? Or that one recurrent thread in the countless confused, angry, or curious letters that Shirley Jackson received was the question on where people could go to see one of these lotteries?

From the Wiki article:

"In The Magic of Shirley Jackson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote about her reaction to the banning of the story in the Union of South Africa: 'She felt that they at least understood.' In 1984, The Lottery was included among the 30 most-often banned books in American schools and libraries, as listed by Playboy (January, 1984). The books were arranged by frequency of censorship with the most-banned first, the least-banned last. At that time, The Lottery ranked #17, between Black Like Me and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

As I grade the first quizzes from my 11th grade class, the following sentiment creeps to mind:

"O, America, I weep for you!"

Please, dear readers, allow me to share with you exactly what this first quiz entailed: on the second day of classes, we continued to talk about American folklore. I proceeded in somewhat of a lecture/Q&A format, telling them stories about different American folk heroes and letting them talk back and forth about them. I also told them at the beginning of class that there'd be a quiz at the end. We talked for about 25 minutes on the various folktales, then I gave them a quiz composed thusly:

American Folklore Quiz #1

Name: _______________________________________________________________

Please correctly identify the following by putting the appropriate letter in the blank before the correct number.

A. Paul Bunyan
B. Davy Crockett
C. Jersey Devil
D. Pecos Bill
E. Johnny Appleseed
F. Slue-Foot Sue
G. John Henry
H. Mike Fink
I. Emperor Norton I
J. Casey Jones

___ 1. I’ve been described as “half horse and half alligator.”
___ 2. In the War of 1812, I walked the forest and warned settlers of impending attacks.
___ 3. I had to be shot after my wedding due to a “wardrobe malfunction.”
___ 4. I ruled America from 1859 to 1880, during which I abolished the Democratic and Republican parties.
___ 5. I once jump-started the frozen sun and, later, married Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind.
___ 6. I wielded a 14-pound hammer and no one could match how fast I could go.
___ 7. I was born a normal child, but my demonic nature soon emerged.
___ 8. I failed as a train-driver, going too fast and fatally crashing into fame.
___ 9. I dug Lake Michigan as a watering hole and had a friend as big as me.
___ 10. My favorite companion was Widow-maker, though he cost me my bride.

Summarize one of the stories we discussed in class either today or yesterday. Use the back of this page as necessary.

Everything on this quiz, we talked about in class just before I gave it to them. Each of the matching questions counted as 9 points each and the summary counted as 10 points.

Do you think anyone got a perfect score?

... ... ... I admit, I kinda expected someone would. Here are the scores I actually got, though:

82, 56, 64, 64, 73, 64, 82, 86, 41

Yes. Most of the summaries were alright, though most had several grammatical errors. And then a couple of them looked like this:

"Johnt apple sead he plants apple seads and told on the indians attark"

and

"Davy Crockett was afruteir man and he killed a bear and sow tthe son was frozin so he beted it with the bear and then he kick start it took some of it's shine with him."

To be fair, I think the first child may be one of my special needs students and I just haven't gotten the memo yet. And I was aware that the second child spelled on about a 4th grade level, but not about how atrocious his grammar is.

But, dude, 11th graders. As Jamelle says, this makes the baby Jesus cry.