Elf from Elmira sends this in:I just had a senior student turn in an essay on foot fetishism. It's soft-core porn, really, talking about what a foot fetishist likes, the tickling, the rubbing, the sucking. It's just an endless series of paragraphs that sort of documents how and why foot fetishists get their jollies.
The assignment sort of fits the assignment (which was for a research paper on unusual phenomena), but just touching the paper makes me feel so icky. (I'm a 26 year old woman; the student is a 22 year old man. He has a backwards baseball cap still, which I thought died out.)
The one part of the essay that I'll share is a simple box in the middle of page 4. It looks like this:
Notable foot fetishists:
| Ted Bundy | Casanova | Elvis Presley |
| Andy Warhol | Goethe | Thomas Hardy |
There's no note about the table. But somehow it creeps me out about as much as the topic just for its randomness.
Q: What do you get creeped out about in your students and the things they turn in? Do you ever just NOT read the shit and give it a B? That, I confess, is mostly what I want to do here.
One strategy I've seen employed is to write about some ultra controversial topic in the hopes that a prof can't give it less than a B without looking biased against the viewpoint taken. Maybe we're witnessing the next evolution of this strategy. Let's stand back from a distance and watch!
ReplyDeleteWait...take that back...maybe been done before with this 2 girls 1 cup essay: http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee107/wakka2nice/1193684173508ib6.jpg
Delete50/50 shot it's fake but still funny as hell.
This is one reason I prefer the hard sciences.
ReplyDelete(Mmmm.. Hard. Science.)
Excuse me for a moment.
I have made the mistake of discussing social media penetration after a discussion of porn as a technology driver.
DeleteOne piece of advice that I got at a session on teaching creative writing, is to focus on the micro, rather than the macro. Don't think about the topic as a whole: go back to your rubric and check to see whether the student met the requirements for the paper. In your case, check for: Legitimate primary and secondary sources? Essay structured properly (intro, thesis, through-line for the paragraphs, conclusion)? Because if the person was hoping to make you uncomfortable so that you wouldn't pay attention to whether or not it meets the requirements (or whether or not it's been plagiarized--if I were you, I'd run a string search in Google on some of the more "particular" phrasings)--that person has partially succeeded. And that kind of shit needs to be stopped, forthwith.
ReplyDeletePS. This is also why I hand my students a broad range of topics to choose from (and narrow down) for their research papers, and they have to check with me first if they want to deviate (har har) from the list. A foot fetish does not sound like it meets the criteria for a phenomenon.
A quick google search of "Andy Warhol foot fetish" pulled up, you guessed it: WIKIPEDIA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_fetishism and unsurprisingly, the other folks in the table you have above ALSO appear on the list of "Notable foot fetishists from the past".
Have fun burning this fucker right down to the ground.
BurntChrome beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteGrade it closely according to the standards of the assignment and check it for plagiarism. Document your discomfort, somehow, though. Notify your supervisor if you work in a place where such notification is welcome and serves as documentation rather than discipline for this student's opinions. (Unless he plagiarized. Then nail him if you can.)
Let us know how it turns out.
Good grief. I've had essays like this and you just have to give it a grade on how it meets the assignment. Just ignore the ickiness.
ReplyDeleteIn my Speech and Communication classes I use the caveat: "Don't choose a topic that would embarrass your Mom or grandmother."
ReplyDeleteSo far, so good.
One of my students wants to do his term paper on a famous Presidential assassin because he's "long admired him." ewww
ReplyDeleteSawyer -- (With your permission) I am stealing your caveat and using it for my Public Speaking classes next term!
ReplyDeleteMost certainly. I "borrowed" it (with permission) myself.
DeleteI had a student write an essay on why mass sterilization should happen in specific African nations. At the beginning of the essay I thought it was going to be a Swift style of satire. What it turned into was pages of researched methodology of sterilization.
ReplyDeleteGosh darn it all ... they forgot to properly cite the research. At my uni that's an automatic F without any comments needed on content.
Following up on BurntChrome...
ReplyDeleteI long ago realized you need to add a clause to the assignment/syllabus that ALL topics must be approved. I cannot tell you how many students try to "switch" topics half-way through a semester's worth of scaffolding, hand in something they did for another class (which of course they claim they threw together in a weekend after spending a semester "not finding anything at the library"), and try to get credit for it.
This is one paper I would both love and hate to conference on.
ReplyDeleteIn intro to env science classes, for a short-essay assignment, it got tiring real quick to hear students come up with "I want to write about the environmental benefits of legalizing marijuana!" Each and every one of them thought they were being original and wry in their choice of essay topic. Some prodding would always reveal that their intended sole source of information would be The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Luckily for me, 100% of the time the student fit the stoner-slacker profile and either dropped the class before it was due, didn't hand in the assignment, or handed in such a totally incoherent piece of garbage, well below the required word length and not citing a single peer-reviewed journal article, that I had no problem with giving them a 0.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question: yes, I get these! Some student (usually, it's a guy) always wants to write about his prowess as a lover and ends up providing way more details about his 'technique' than I or even his SI ever wanted to know. The ones that I find worse to grade than those are the occasional Oedipal/Electra essay or pedophile topic or white supremacist/racist essays where students claim they're "just reporting on the facts" but the bias is very obvious. These students also attempt to 'joke' about how 'they' are taking over the country or 'they' are taking our jobs, or 'they' need to go back to where they came from. Right about then, I remind them about AUDIENCE, AUDIENCE, AUDIENCE.
ReplyDeleteSince I conference with students on papers (sometimes the conference is a pre-writing conference, sometimes it's to review their drafts, and sometimes to simply hit the highlights of how they're doing as they're writing), I get to screen most essays. Of course, there's the last-minute-changed-my-topic-because-there's-nothing-out-there-on-the-topic-you-approved that ends up a disaster. It's never a B, though. I'd give it lower than a B simply for being unaware of audience.
Now to go shower away the ick factor.
ReplyDeleteI'm another 26-year-old female teacher of 22-year-olds and have empathy without answers. My current instinct, right or wrong, is not to flinch so long as the paper suffices as such. I do so to disengage from what I perceive - again, right or wrong - as the authors' misguided assertions of power. I don't want to affirm or refute, only to help them cultivate the type of intellectual power or competency my role offers. As The Contemplative Cynic explained, many uncomfortable arguments fail to hold water anyhow. Will this issue dissipate as we age?
ReplyDeleteIf it about the "how," then it might just be pornography. But if it really is about the "why" there might be some real research in it. Depends. If it is all descriptive, then the student's just "getting his jollies" as we used to say. If it includes real research on where fetishes really come from - good!
ReplyDeleteI had a student turn in a paper once on cutting. The assignment was for a research paper, but they did a lot of description. They also included photos.
ReplyDelete