Amazing!

I know we've discussed this before, but WHY do students plagiarize? Well, I guess I know why, but why do they plagiarize so stupidly? Do they really believe I am that dumb (don't answer that)?

Every semester, I discuss plagiarism with my students. I give them handouts explaining what plagiarism is, I lecture them on it, I put "Don't Plagiarize!" on the assignment instructions. I do this when I hand out the assignments and in short little mini-lectures as the due date draws near. I even tell them the stories of my dumbest plagiarism cases: "Can you believe a student in a past class cut-and-pasted the Wikipedia article and thought I wouldn't notice??" We all laugh together over how dumb that was, and they agree they would never, ever do anything like that.

And then they do.

This semester I caught three. Three wiki papers. Of course it was easier than usual because they all used the same article. As usual, confusion and denial: "I didn't realize it! I made a mistake! I forgot to put the quotes in! Oops!"And then, my favorite: "This is impossible! I didn't even look at the internet! I've never even seen that article, ever!"

Yes, fellow Miserians, it is an end-of-the-semester miracle. MAGIC INTERNET RAYS traveled through the air and into my student's brain, causing him to reproduce, WORD-FOR-WORD, the wikipedia article on his topic. That's the only plausible explanation. Maybe we should alert the press. Or one of those cable shows that investigate amazing supernatural phenomena.

Meanwhile, I'm going to put tinfoil hats on next semester's syllabus, because otherwise this could become an epidemic.

Ah, now you tell me!

Too good not to share, from a recent student essay:

"Sweet Sixteen usually brings with it a great big panty and some experience."

Wombat of the Copier Sends Out Some Email!

TO: happynapper@jerkoff.net
From: wombat@xxxxxxxx.edu

Date: Thur, 17 May 2012 21:40:36 -0600

Dear Happy Napper

Do you see the words above, starting with "Dear"? That's called a "salutation" and using one makes you sound like less of a useless, entitled douchebag.

Do you see the words outside of the message box in the upper right and corner, starting with "sent"? That's called a time stamp and you can't forget that because the system puts it there for you. It let's me know that your e-mail regarding "difficulty" submitting your take home test was sent 39 hours after the test was due. So even if what followed had been otherwise valid, your problem arose after you already missed the deadline i.e. your excuse is irrelavent.

Now let's try a mental experiment. Close your eyes. Visualize the science building. Imagine you are walking down the one short corridor of chemistry offices. How many doors do you see? Is your mind's eye not up to this? I'll give you the answer: Five. There are five of us. Now, try one more visualization. Picture the doors. Picture them. Picture the two covered in pictures of African American children. I know you took Biology for Non Majors and got a B, I can see your transcript. Can those be my children? What about the Korean babies? Think they belong to me? There are only two doors left. See the little rectangular plaque that slides in and out of a plastic sheild? See the one that says Professor Notwombatofthecopier? See the one that says Wombatofthecopier-Visiting-Instructor? Can you guess which one is mine?

Now I need you to look for more words, they are below this message, below yours, even lower in the original e-mail I sent you in February, the one you dug up to "reply" to in order to contact me. See starting with "Room" ending in "1776"? That's my room number and I gave it to you in February when you used "I can't remember your office number" as your excuse for not turning in your lab report. It let's me know that your current claim of forgetting my room number is absolute bullshit.

But wait, there's more I want to share with you! You know what else is a clue that you know where my office is? When I went in on Tuesday to get all of the last minute crap people shoved under my door Monday night when it was all due, I found some of your shitty D+ quality work. If you knew where it was Monday afternoon and forgot already by Monday night, then hopefully you already forgot you sent me this asinine message.

Have a nice life, loser.

Love,
Wombat

PS Fuck You

Ex-adjunct says she was fired for views. From Lohud.Com

A former adjunct professor is suing Westchester Community College after, she said, the school fired her after she revealed her support for Arizona’s controversial 2010 immigration law in class, among other opinions.

A lawyer for Carol Leitner, 68, describes a suffocating atmosphere of political correctness at the school in the lawsuit, saying that policies for faculty outlined in the student handbook “impose a degree of academic censorship that is unheard of at a public college.”

The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in White Plains.

FULL ARTICLE.

we're all tea-partied when this kid makes it to university

So remember that scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic Back to School where he gets Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper on Kurt Vonnegut?

Well, some dumbass up here in Canadia tried to do pretty much that that with a Sean Dixon book assigned for a grade 11 class.  First, they contacted a reviewer they found on the internet.  The reviewer tweeted about it. The author saw the tweet...and the rest is a hella awesome blog post, titled "The kid who was supposed to read my book".  The Globe and Mail has now picked up the story, ensuring that an appropriate amount of ridicule will ensue.

While I encourage you to read the whole blog entry, I ask you: who among us hasn't wanted to smack the Flakey McFlakersons who keep asking us to do the work for them just like this?

"All you have to do is use your powers—the same powers you use to seek help from half of the internet including the author of the fucking book! All you have to do is use those powers to interpret the exercise you've been given in a way that makes you able to do it!"

Use your powers, indeed. Kudos, Mr. Dixon.

From ABC News. From Custodian to Graduate.

A Yugoslavian-born custodian at New York's Columbia University will be trading in his uniform for a cap and gown this weekend when hegraduates with honors after working on his degree for 12 years.

Gac Filipaj, 52, will graduate with a bachelor's degree in classics with honors from Columbia's School of General Studies.

"I'm proud and I'm extremely happy," Filipaj told ABC News.

It's been a long road for Filipaj who fled to the United States from war-torn Yugoslavia in 1992, leaving behind his parents and siblings on a family farm in Montenegro.

Today's Big Thirsty. Did you Get Any Pleasant Snowflake Surprises?

So at the ass-end of burning, smoking, twisted train wrecks of final papers, mysteriously-ill-on-the-final-exam-day students, and the cancellation of my summer class three days before it was due to start (though let's face it, rushing through material that compresses four and a half months of study into one month was bound to be a shitstorm, so fuck it) I did have a handful of bright spots, in the form of kind emails from students. But Miss N. Thrope, perhaps you are saying, you are mean! And curmudgeonly! And you hate 80% of your students, or rather 80% of their wretched, beyond vexing behaviors. True, true.

Yet, on occasion, I get the kind of email that warms the cockles of my black little heart. (And they were sent after final grades were in, which rules out total and shameless grade grubbing). An overseas student with severely inadequate English language skills thanked me for all my help this semester and said she felt her writing skills had greatly improved (this was after the poor girl barely scraped through with a passing grade; she literally had to re-write all of her papers at least four times, but dammit, she did it); an adult learner said our class kept them coming to school and convinced them not to drop out again; another student said they normally hate the subject I teach, but this semester they actually kind of liked it and felt that they really learned something.

Now, does this mitigate the days when I feel like Maybelle, ready to burn this teaching mother down? Does this alleviate the tenuous, will-I-have-a-job-next-semester, free floating anxiety of adjunctdom? Of course not. But I'm not too proud to say it does, at least a little, make the poison go down a bit sweeter.

Q: How about y'all? Any pleasant surprises from your snowflakes at the end of this semester?

The RYS Flashback Machine. Six Years Ago Today.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 2006

Quit

I cleaned out my office over the past two days. No more teaching. Today's the first day that I'm not a college professor. I've been teaching a dozen years, the last 6 at a medium sized state university in the northeast.

I tell my friends outside the academy that I just got tired of babysitting, and that's as close as I can come to explaining it to anyone.

When I was in college, it never occurred to me that I was there to be placated and entertained. I wasn't brought up in a time when every spelling bee contestant got a ribbon, and where every soccer team went home at the end of the year with a 4 foot high trophy. College was tough, and it was worth something.

But something happened - or so it seems - between the end of college and the end of grad school. As soon as I started teaching I was pressured in minor and major ways to ease the students through the big educational machine. Low student evaluations - always a result of tough classes or "honest" grading - resulted in ominous visits to the chair's office or the Dean's office.

And so I slacked off like my colleagues had done, became popular, and taught less and less. I won a teaching award 2 years ago. We have 350 faculty members and I was chosen professor of the year. I'm glad I didn't have to make a speech because I would have choked. I knew I wasn't a good teacher. I had become an entertaining facilitator and that was all. That I was good at that brings me nothing but unhappiness.

And so I got sicker and sicker of it. Sicker of the entitlement and the low expectations of everyone around me. My colleagues have drunk up the Kool-Aid and they look at me like I have two heads when I say I can't do it anymore.

I don't have a job, but thankfully my wife has worked a long time in the bio-tech world and I can probably have a year to figure out a new career. But it won't be teaching. At least not in a traditional college or university. Those places are now - by and large - jokes. So little is expected that drunk and horny students make the Dean's list, and we all smile and pat ourselves on the back for making it so.

I guess I shouldn't say "we" anymore. It's your problem now. I quit.

From the Globe and Mail.

Once again, La Belle Province puts the rest of the Canuckistan provinces to shame in terms of level and intensity of activism and protest. Student groups had declared a strike and a boycott of classes back in February to protest tuition increases, and recently other students have obtained court injunctions to break the strike, resulting in scenes such one the other day where a troop of police charged in and pepper sprayed their way through a picket line of protestors, allowing a group of students to then scurry into the building. Today the protesting students took this whole thing one step further, by invading the classes that had defied the strike:

Click for Article.

Montreal has seen protest marches, sometimes paralyzing major thoroughfares, for quite some time now. For the first time I'm seriously starting to wonder if the unpopular provincial government is going to fall because of all this unrest (has a US state gov't ever fallen due to widespread student protest, a la 1968 France?), or if the govt is also about to up the ante by bringing in the troops to restore order on campus. I'm also oscillating between annoyance and wonderment at the level of enthusiasm and activism that students have shown by keeping up these protests for months.

- Prof Poopiehead