It's really harder to keep a handlke on plagiarism now that computers and publishing programs are everywhere.
Your ESL students are reading Melville and Poe? Wow.
No, unfortunately they're just plagiarizing Melville and Poe.
But I have taught Poe from time to time, actually. The language is rugged, but the messages are simple. The Cask of Amonillado, in particular, is thematically related to A Poison Tree by William Blake. Because NY requires students to cite 2 pieces of literature to support a common point, they're a good pair.
Moby Dick is not how you want to get started with ESL students, if you ask me. The girl who plagiarized told me that her tutor had advised her to do it. Can you imagine paying for that sort of advice?
The possibility that you may be talking about real kids only detracts slightly from the fact that this Blog is pretty darn funny!
haha hilarious
I teach ESL newcomers who are 14-20...and the cheating and copying is flagrant and so natural to them that I have to look over their shoulders as the writing is done.
I act like a forensic linguist sniffing over their work and when I catch one cheating, I put them in a room alone to re-do it.
Those guilty do the next few assignments that way until they have earned their way back.
I think I deter them a bit with all this, but I have to keep my guard up always. They don't give up trying!
Thank goodness I don't have to evaluate their excuse notes as well.
My buddy actually had a kid turn in London's "To Build A Fire" as for his Creative Writing final short story. Ack!
One girl in my class turned in Dickinson's "Success is counted sweetest" for a poetry assignment. Grr!
Don't you know as educators (and old people according to our students), we are extremely stupid! They think we have alzheimers so how can we remember stuff like that! Great post!
I teach in the sciences (undergrad level), and have learned the art of using Google to catch "suspicious" phrases in student papers.
To be fair, I select a "unique-ish" phrase or two from every paper (yes this takes a long time) and search on it. I haven't turned up huge numbers of plagiarized papers....but I did catch one guy at it twice. In two separate occasions when he took my class (he failed the first time, and come to think of it, he failed the second time too). Do they not think we remember things like that? I mean, I don't look old and crusty enough yet (I hope) for them to think some kind of senile dementia has set in...
Forget about the war on drugs or the war in Iraq. We teachers are fighting a serious war every single day in our classrooms. Okay, maybe I'm being dramatic, but we teachers take this topic very seriously! Have I told you lately? Keep fighting the good fight!
I had a girl do a paper on "Lord of the Flies" for one of my sophomore English classes, and then a boy in my other section of sophomore English turned in the SAME exact paper as part of his project. Guess they thought I wouldn't remember reading it from one class block to the next.
You think thats bad... here is what I had to go through this week.
Imagine you're teaching a bunch of kids who barely speak English how to pass the English Regents exam. What can you do? You break it down to bare bones, try very hard to get them to understand and respond directly, and ask for four-paragraph compositions that marginally get the job done. You write sample compositions, and explain how you wrote them.
You make them write until their hands bleed, you do drafts and more drafts, you read everything, and they rewrite everything. By the end of the semester, you think you've made progress.
Then two kids scan compositions you wrote, type their names on them, and fully expect a good grade. They don't expect you'll remember having written them yourself. They don't expect you to notice that they're responding to a different question and this answer no longer applies. They don't expect you to remember that the written notes they've been making have nothing to do with what they submitted.
Another kid hands you a summary of Moby Dick that's clearly plagiarized and has nothing to do with the question. You ask the kid what certain words mean, and the kid has no idea. You ask how the kid managed to use the words while not knowing what they meant, and the kid looks up at the sky.
Then a kid brings you a doctor's note, explaining he had a headache and couldn't come to school yesterday. It's from an obgyn, and it carries the signatures of three other teachers, who clearly haven't looked at it closely.
In high school, I was on the basketball team with Chris Johnson and Johnny Johnson, who were in separate sections of the same English class.
For one writing assignment, Johnny copied Chris's paper, crossed off "Chris," and wrote in "Johnny."
Needless to say, Johnny was suspended from the team the very next day.
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