In Print

Check out the cover and my introduction to the 120-page collection of stories written, compiled, and edited by students in all of my English classes. I am proud of their work.

This is, in large part, what teaching is all about.

Introduction

Writers cannot exist without readers, so thank you for picking up this book. If you came here looking for one story in particular, read it. Then read the rest.

This collection of autobiographical vignettes was written, edited, and produced by students in my ninth grade English classes. I asked them to write about something that fundamentally changed them. Most of them have been used to writing superficially about their lives: where they were born, what they like to do, and where they want to go. Few have been asked to write about something that makes them what they are.

For many, it was difficult to understand what I was asking them to accomplish. Children are not used to having their voices heard in any meaningful way and, especially at this age, are uncomfortable telling truths that might expose an emotional weakness.

Reading some of these vignettes, it’s hard to believe they were written by children. Although the construction of many of the stories reveals their inexperience as writers, the spirit articulated by their sometimes clumsy words reveals unexpected wisdom: I believe it is unexpected not because it is unusual, but because we are not used to looking for it. Listen to the voices of these growing young adults. What they have to say speaks to a common human experience they are just now beginning to understand.

Remember too, these young voices are becoming stronger and are the shout of tomorrow’s majority. They will speak for us in the coming generation: they will teach their children and they will use their voices to affect families, neighborhoods, communities, and perhaps the world. I have called them children, but this collection shows how these young writers are on the cusp of adulthood and some, sadly, have already suffered a too early loss of childhood.

Here are stories of triumph, of joy, of pain, of sadness, of betrayal, and of a certain sad understanding. They will make you smile and chuckle and cheer. Some will make you cry. Some will haunt you.

K. Rice
S______ High School
May 2007

Plagiarists to the Left of Us, Plagiarists to the Right

Thank you for sharing your outrage, Gentle Readers. It is good to know I am not alone in applying direct pressure to hemorrhaging academic integrity. Our high school will also expel students for cheating although I only know of one case. A freshman was expelled for stealing his English teacher's semester exam and posting in for sale on-line. Standard cases of plagiarism like mine are common and I suspect often go unnoticed in the rush of hundreds of pieces of writing. When caught, a student can be punished in a variety of ways including expulsion but our administration has their hands full dealing with more serious issues of student safety and non-academic criminal behavior. Even next year, I will probably not give a failing grade for an entire semester for a first-time plagiarist but will almost certainly do it for a second offense.

Which brings me to the latest: more victims fell this week. I found this last batch of plagiarism particularly galling. The assignment was simple: select five poem forms from a list of twenty and write one poem for each of the poem forms selected. Bind your poems creatively. Turn them in for an easy 100 points.

I received many excellent entries. One student wrote a poem, word by word, on seashells and put them in small wooden box. The reader puts them together to form a poem. Was it her original poem or is it your own creation or, more likely, a blending of the two? Another wrote her poems on 12" x 12" floor tiles and bound them together into a book that weighed at least 20 pounds. Others made poem cubes and posters and fold out books. Almost all collections were colorful and original. The poetry was honest and heartfelt and filled to overflowing with overwrought emotions written in the self-absorbed style one would expect of high school freshmen. They were, for the most part, lovely to read. Some were too lovely.

I have yet to understand why my students think I cannot recognize various levels of writing skill at a glance. Do they think I am an English teacher who doesn't read or write? My previous plagiarists and their classmates all look at me with amazement as if I have some magic power to see into their minds and "sense" what they've been up to on paper. Almost every class asks me if I "check every paper on-line" as if all writing is equal and the only way I could possibly detect an evildoer is by cranking through Google searches on every single piece of student writing. This week's plagiarists may also be flummoxed as to how I detected them.

To be honest, I caught only two of this week's three plagiarists. My sexy research assistant nailed the last one. I knew this particular student's work was plagiarized: city-bred freshmen don't use lines like "the air resounds with voices piercing Autumn's still" or "the woodlands stand aglow in colors rarely seen." However, she had hand-written each poem and I couldn't get any hits no matter how many combinations I tried. The poems were mediocre, amateur poet stuff, but they still outstripped anything my students could produce. They key, it turned out, was that she had transcribed rather sloppily, omitting enough words here and there to thwart my hurried search. A deeper and more patient search teased out the sources and I gleefully zeroed out her work.

As mentioned earlier, I was particularly miffed by students plagiarizing on an assignment that was designed to be easy, fun, and a gimme"A" to anyone who wrote original poetry and stuck it in a binder. I made it clear I wasn't grading anyone on the quality of their poem, only that they had researched at least five poem types and gave writing each of them an honest shot. They could write five short and crappy poems in less than an half an hour, print them and past them on construction paper with a few crudely drawn illustrations and still get and "A:" pump out a Haiku, Tanka, Cinquain, Free Verse, and Couplet and your done for the semester.

Better news next post. I swear.

Mad Plagiarism Skills

I have been grading research papers for eternity. This task is made Sisyphean by the failure of many students to turn in their papers on time and by my weakness in allowing them to do so. In the week since the "final" due date, I have received a dozen papers, one of which sported an 8 1/2 x 11 cover note written in bold blue letters on pink paper, to whit:

"I'm sorry this is late, I was absent Fri. Please understand that i [sic] did take this assingment [sic] very seriously, and work [sic] on it and my reasearch [sic] very hard."

The paper and its accompanying Sharpie commercial came from one of my English I Honors students who manages to miss many of my classes and barely does any work in or out of class. If I may indulge you with her opening paragraph:

As the Internet enters its second decade as a mass medium, it's worth looking back at one of the old saws that was bandied around the covered-wagon days, when California sages made gnomic pronouncements about the future and the rest of the repeated them at dinner parties. "The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." These are the words of John Gilmore, radical libertarian, Sun Microsystems employee number five and bona-fide west-coast guru-gazillionaire, and for much of the last 10 years they've been repeated as part pf the founding story of the Internet, along with a gloss about the net's inception as a military communications network designed to withstand partial destruction by nuclear attack.

Now, I really wish I could take credit for bringing ninth graders up to this level of writing. Unfortunately, my students don't even know half the words used in this excerpt. Some are more educated than others but, as you may have already figured out by comparing the quality of these two writing samples, the student in question is not among them. I don't even use "gnomic." I only know what it means because I looked it up after I read it in this well "reasearched" paper. (For those interested, it refers to a general truth. In this case something that is taken for truth without criticism.)

Fortunately, the student's lack of good plagiarism skills and eagerness to get the paper in made it simple to locate its source: The Guardian UK.

This research paper assignment generated several instances of plagiarism. One student was relatively sophisticated and copied chunks from several different sources and then altered a few words in an attempt to defeat a simple Google search for exact phrase matches. She did not, however, alter the original enough to make finding it difficult especially given my wife's fondness for solving logic puzzles and and tracking things down (thanks babe, for the academic CSI action).

Another student copied and pasted an entire essay from essaydepot.com and several others stitched together staggering semblances of essays from multiple sources and made an effort to get them walking.

Still, the pink-noted wonder writer made me angry, really angry. I wasn't mad at any of the other plagiarists; they were just giving it a shot to see if they could slide one by. Their attempts lacked malice and deceit. So, in addition to giving her the goose-egg she deserved, I wrote the following note:

A____,
You have wasted my time and yours. I am insulted both that you would present this as your own work and attach a note asserting that you took "this assignment very seriously."
Mr. Rice

The rest of my students worked hard and produced papers thick with errors and rich with honesty, certainty, and a lovely naivete.

They passed.

Four Years plus BMT and a Wake-up

It is amazing to see the transformation wrought by a few years plus six weeks of basic military training.

I went to a fellow Chief's retirement ceremony a couple of weeks ago. As part of the ritual, the youngest airman in the unit, probably no more than 18 or 19 years old, passed a folded flag to a family member of the retiree. This young man performed his office well; he marched up the aisle with crisp movements wearing a crisp uniform. This young man was high school freshman only four years ago.

I am prone to nostalgia and so it should come as no surprise that I miss the Air Force. Seeing that young man and listening to the conversations of the other young people around me made me long for a time, less than a year ago, when I knew that I would get competence and decorum from everyone I met in the course of my daily business, regardless of age. The few who did not meet these expectations were unpleasant and jarring surprises.

Now I am in a business where roughly 20 percent of my students are working hard and routinely meet or exceed what most adults expect from a socialized human being. As for the rest, I must continually set expectations of competence and decorum and continually address those instances when they fail to meet them.

The members of that 80 percent seem to have a few puzzling misconceptions:

1. If I don't like it or want to do it, it is "stupid" and therefore completely unreasonable for anyone to expect me to think it valuable or worth considering.
   
   
2. The minimum effort required is the maximum effort I will put forth, if you're lucky.
   
   
3. If I am told I don't have to do something, it means I should still get credit for doing it. It does not mean I have the choice to do it and receive credit or not do it and fail.
   
   
4. It is unreasonable to expect me to read what I am given or to listen to directions or to remember what I am told.
   
   
5. It is reasonable for me to ignore other's expectations but unreasonable for anyone else to ignore mine.
   
   
6. It is unreasonable for anyone to expect me to apply the knowledge or skills I am expected to learn.
   
   
7. If I can figure out a way to cheat or manipulate, it is the same as having learned.

Luckily, these misconceptions will be washed out of their systems over the next few years as life's storm begins to sweep them out to sea.

It looks like I'll be stuck in the tidewaters for a while longer, scooping the little urchins off the rocks and back to the safety of the pools.