Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 05, 2011

@Nabuqudurizhur – i had a similar experience in HS. Teacher had never seen fictional creative writing piece from me before that assignment and accuses me of plagiarizing my work from various other writers whom he couldn’t identify.

I never had an assignment that simply asked for my opinion. I’ve had plenty that asked me for my opinion, and then called for me to justify it.

In my experience – personal and anecdotal from friends – one of the absolute WORST things a teacher can do to a student is falsely accuse them of plagiarism. It says to the student, “you’re not good enough to have done this yourself.”

“I think you were sharing notes with Kirsten” is pretty much the same thing.

On a slightly different topic, why is sharing notes and working together discouraged? Is there any situation in the real world where you can’t cooperate with other people working on the same task as you?

I once had a student who turned in a paper I was pretty sure she did not write. When I googled a line, the whole article came up from a Saskastuan (sp) daily paper in 1980. Some times plagiarism is just plagiarism.

and on the other note, teachers are trying to over come the solitude of the classroom, but some find it hard to grade “cooperation.”

I was going to take a masters level course and use the same paper that I’d used in a previous masters level class……………. Didn’t get registered in time!

Many Middle and High school projects are done in groups or with partners. It takes a certain maturity level on the part of the students, and not only good behavior, but an honest effort…so students in some school environments can’t handle it….

In 11th grade we had to write a short story. I got an A on mine for originality, but I didn’t think I had written it very well. It had a good plot, but the characters were quite shallow, and there was almost no dialog (it would have been better without any dialog, as though it was a journal). A classmate with a different teacher got an F on his story because of poor grammar and misspelled words. He was extremely upset. I read the story and it was wonderful. He had written the dialog in Bronx street dialect which he had captured superbly. The teacher had flunked him because of the character’s butchering of “proper” English! Talk about missing the point! Wow! Any writer will tell you that capturing dialect and keeping it readable is one of the most difficult things to achieve. This student had done it better than many established professional authors. He deserved high praise rather than condemnation. I know that many teachers agonize especially over low grades. I was blessed with good, dedicated teachers (with a couple of exceptions) and was a good student as a result. Sadly, some teachers don’t think when they assign a very low (or high) grade, and their students suffer.

wwh85cp: At least he admitted the spelling was questionable, but I would have checked an atlas. I just spent 15 minutes finding the spelling of the weasel family.

@ hippogriff….If you’re a teacher, you get ‘A’ for that lesson. Not easy to teach an old codger new habits. Congrats. P.S. I just googled weasel. Learned two things.

sadly, today far too many teachers are stuck doing no more that “teaching to the test,” as standardized testing has replaced actual achievement. I can’t remember any of my nephews or nieces even talking about a creative writing assignment in the last 12-14years.

Konabill: I have taught some non-credit college courses, but lack the “magic piece of paper” (teacher’s certificate) to teach public school. According to the 1957 Connant Report on Secondary Education, Einstein had the same lack of qualification to teach high school algebra. At 78, even colleges don’t want me.

I never had a theological problem with evolution either; my father was clergy with three fossil discoveries to his credit. Practically his last words were about getting his nature column into the local paper before deadline. My biology is both academic and field tutoring from childhood.

Back in AmLit in college I used to answer all the essays in the style of the writers we were studying….. with a bit of an edge, attitude, and a sense of humor. Song of Myself (Whitman) took on a whole new meaning. Aced the course anyway. :-)

I had an algebra teacher in high school whose homework I almost never did. He told me there was no way I could pass and I should just drop the class and take an incomplete to try and salvage my GPA. Came time for finals, he told the class “Whatever you get on the test, you won’t get lower than that as a final grade”. Got a B on the test; I loved imagining how it must have galled him to write that grade!