Adventures of a Teacher in Transition

Just went through two poetry anthologies I had put off to the side to be checked for plagiarism. And every single poem in their anthologies were plagiarized.

Every. Single. Poem.

I wish I were joking. 

This isn’t just some little assignment - this is 150 points, the culminating assignment for the poetry unit. This is huge. I’m imagining there will need to be some disciplinary action - detentions at the very least. I’ll be talking to Scott tomorrow about what he would do when someone plagiarizes their entire assignment for something this large. 

But I talked to the plagiarizer. 

He admitted almost right off the bat that he had copied it word for word from online when I showed him the paper and asked if he knew why it was a zero.

I won’t be giving him an opportunity to make it up. It’s just a zero. But I didn’t write him up or give him a detention. Not today, anyway. I told him that he’s lucky it’s just a little 15 point assignment and not a big paper or anything, otherwise I would have given him a detention.

He told me that it was because he was too busy, but I gave them at least 20 minutes in class to work on them and he did nothing. So I don’t feel bad for having no remorse about giving him a 0. He cheated. I caught him. End of story.

And all my classes will be getting a “plagiarizing is bad” speech next Tuesday when we cover MLA citations. How fun.

Last week, I assigned my freshmen a “Haiku Calendar” where they had to write a single haiku for each month of the year. It’s really not a lot to write, if you remember a haiku is only 3 lines long. 

Well I’ve been working on grading them since I got them yesterday. Today, I read one and was sort of immediately suspect about it since some of the haikus contained words that I honestly do not know the definition of. If I - a voracious reader with a rather large vocabulary - don’t know these words, then chances are a freshman doesn’t.

So I came home tonight and Googled the first haiku, word for word. And what did I find in the amount of time it took to load the search page? EVERY. SINGLE. HAIKU. ON. G’S. PAGE.

G not only just plagiarized one haiku, G plagiarized every single haiku G turned in. I am not prepared to deal with plagiarism, at least not yet. Tomorrow, I will be having a talk with my CT about what he recommends I do, but I’m leaning toward a 0 for sure on the assignment, probable detention and possible letting the principal/dean know. But I want to talk with Scott first, although he’ll probably let me do whatever I think is best.

Welcome to the real world of teaching, I suppose.