Sourced


Peace Corps / Monday, April 18th, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve been in high school, so I can’t say for certain that I remember things about it clearly. But here is what I remember:

My friends and I were creative.

In art class, we were creative. In English class, we were creative. In photography class, we were creative. In band class, we were creative. We were creative because it was more fun than naming facts all the time.

In French class, we often had to write papers using new vocabulary words. I found that the easiest was to do this was to write a story that some how involved “post office” vocabulary or “fruits and vegetables” vocabulary. More often than not, these stories were outrageously ridiculous and nine times out of ten one of my classmates died at the end. It was more fun to make stuff up than to write an essay about what you can do at a post office or to describe fruits and vegetables.

It made learning fun and it gave me a way to express myself. I fulfilled the teacher’s requirements but I enjoyed it.

A common complaint that I hear amongst my friends is that the students have no creativity. When we sit in class and listen to students speak, we hear fifteen versions of exactly the same idea. It isn’t fun for me and I cannot fathom how that could be fun for the students. Fortunately, I usually only have to listen to this repetitive monotony and rarely do I have to read it (though I do enjoy reading students’ papers because it gives me a chance to really break down their grammar). Today was different.

Last Monday, I one of my 10th grade classes finished reading The Giver and I assigned them to write an essay on one of three topics. None of the topics asked them to summarize the book, but to think creatively about different ideas presented in the text. Nearly all of them did what I used to do and avoided answering the question until the end by giving a plot summary, I let it slide. But when it came to their own ideas, I was impressed with the variation.

But at the same time I was very, very disappointed. Two of seven papers I read were nearly flawless. Once being a student of the foreign languages myself, I know what flawless papers mean. It means that the paper was either written by a top student, translated online or worse, plagiarized. These students weren’t top students, unfortunately. Plus, there were words used that I assume to be beyond their vocabulary. Since there isn’t a good method for checking for translations, I immediately set out to check if these two papers were plagiarized.

I knew when I assigned the topics that plagiarism was a possibility. I took the three essay topics from SparkNotes.com, and tailored them to my students’ level. Part of me wonders if I unconsciously did this as a test to see if they would plagiarize. I knew it would be easy for them to find pre-written answers. At the same time, I knew it would be easy for me to find the same pre-written answers.

With hardly any searching at all, I found that one student took a sentence here and a sentence there from Wikipedia’s summary of the book to form her own summary. Plagiarism. The other girl did the same with a different site I couldn’t pin down, but I found nearly all of it on various websites.

My first thought was that it was insulting to have your students plagiarize. They are making the assumption that you won’t notice their sudden aptitude in English. They’re also making the assumption that you don”t know how to do the same searches online that they can do (actually it’s easier to find what they have already found).

My next reaction was to question Ukraine’s policy on plagiarism. I don’t know it, but I have a feeling it’s a little more lenient than in America. I started to wonder if I should do anything at all about it.

Then I realized that I had to give grades to these students. One grade for content and one grade for grammar and spelling. I wanted to fail them completely, but in Ukraine you can’t fail (that’s a story for another day). Also, if I looked at the parts of their essays that were original thought, the grammar wasn’t failing grammar. And the fact that they made an effort for original thought, I suppose I could give a grade for that. They each received very, very low grades for content and average grades for grammar and spelling.

After the whole ordeal, it makes me wonder why these students don’t have the same desire for creativity that I had at their age. They don’t want to make their own learning fun. They don’t want to learn, it appears.

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