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| Honey! We have so much homework to do! |
"You can't do that. She didn't do anything wrong," the mother informed me, enraged.
"But she did. I was able to find entire paragraphs lifted off of web sites," I stammered.
"No, I mean she didn't do it. I did. I wrote her paper."
I don't remember what I said in response, but I'm fairly confident I had to take a moment to digest what I had just heard. And what would I do, anyway? Suspend the mother? Keep her in for lunch detention and make her write "I will not write my daughter's papers using articles plagiarized from the Internet" one hundred times on the board? In all fairness, the mother submitted a defense: her daughter had been stressed out, and she did not want her to get sick or overwhelmed.
In the end, my student received a zero and I made sure she re-wrote the paper. Herself. Sure, I didn't have the authority to discipline the student's mother, but I have done so many times in my dreams.
MORE.
A few scrolls down in the comments at the Atlantic, things devolve into the usual "profs-are-leaching-off-naive-kids-teaching-useless-stuff" argument. Then there's this gem of a comment:
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, I'm a university student. Professors don't say things like 'Follow your Dreams' Stupid parents do. Professors say things like "Turn off your phone and pay attention, you're paying for this class"
Every now and then, there's one who gets it!
Reminds me of one of my favourite Pratchett quotes:
Delete“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
This explains why my students always have such stunned expressions on their faces. They can't imagine they're faced with an adult who isn't looking to hold their hands.
ReplyDeleteWhich leads me into my argument that if you don't want to hold my hand then stop taking attendance or giving a shit when I would google my name during class.
Delete(I don't mean "my" as in me, but as the first person perspective of an argument).
Isn't that an excluded middle fallacy? Wanting to teach effectively isn't the same as wanting to hold hands. Often, I think there's much to be said for the sink-or-swim approach, particularly since intensive hand-holding clearly isn't working.
DeleteAgain, scrolling down the replies in The Atlantic article, someone was musing about the "I pay your salary" student (or parent) claim. So, I took my salary and divided it by population of my state: each New Mexicanstanian pays $0.007 of my salary. The next time a student says that I'm going to give him a penny and ask for my change.
ReplyDeletethere is some bozo calling himself urbanredneck or some such who seems to think we get paid more if we get more students in our classes!
DeleteThe first time a student said that he was not at fault because someone else wrote it for them, I almost peed myself laughing. I pointed to the spot on the form where the student can list the reasons why they disagree with the charge. He wrote it there. A few weeks later he disappeared from the class list.
ReplyDeleteRe: the "I pay your salary argument"
ReplyDeleteI just found this old comic from PartiallyClips:
http://partiallyclips.com/2004/12/12/economics-class/
And since it's in the form of a comic, the students might read it...
Yes, I get some of those stunned looks, too. But fail they do, and by the end of the term, most can figure it out, readjust, and get some mojo. We don't help them by passing them along like we're glorified middle school teachers.
ReplyDeleteThere's always a moment in every freshman class when students realize I'm not their mommy.
ReplyDeleteIt's a nice moment.
I fail them all the time. And it's ALWAYS the first time.
ReplyDeleteGrading the first quiz of the semester right now... Many, many scores in the 5-20% range just by asking them to identify things they were told they would need to be able to identify.
ReplyDelete