In my first year of teaching English 2 Honors back at PeeVee, I used to be much tougher than I am now. A example of this is Cultural Literacy. Today, I have a series of hand-out assignments--a series I created for all four grade levels--that I use as mainly a note-taking exercise; students take notes on ten categorized CultLit items every week, then answer the questions on the worksheet. But in my hard-core years, I was much tougher.
Near the end of my first year, I had become enamored of E.D. Hirsch’s tome, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. I set out to incorporate this into my teaching, since I knew that some amount of cultural literacy was necessary, particularly in the upcoming Honors class, if the students were going to "get" the reading and lecture materials. Thus, every week I would put forth a list of fifteen items (most completely unrelated to each other), and the students would have to go out, do research, and write a thoughtful paragraph about each item. If the item was a historical event or personage, then I wanted facts. If it was a mythological story, I wanted a recounting. If it was a saying or an idiom, I wanted a definition and a discussion of its usage.
Looking back on it, it was a pretty demanding exercise. And as demanding as it was on the students, it was just as hard on me. I had to read the stuff. Thirty-six students. The assignments, if done well (and these were Honors students, so they were almost all done well), would be at least seven to eight pages in length. Two hundred and fifty pages a week. Eighteen weeks per semester. Two semesters. Nine thousand pages of CultLit that year. This explains the worksheets that followed, I suppose.
It may also explain but not excuse the following. At some point in December (as I recall it), one of the CultLit items was the term "PLAGIARISM." Simple enough. Some one had looked it up and copied down the definition as follows: "The act of taking another’s ideas or words and using them as your own." Fine enough. The only problem was that this person’s handwriting was sloppy and what was clear to this person as a "c" looked like an "r" to his "study-mates." Each one of them (and there were three) copied what they saw, without thinking it out. Thus, I read three papers that called plagiarism "the ART of taking another’s ideas or words and using them as your own."
I went ballistic. In my first two years of teaching, I had never had yet to deal with this level of plagiarism. Without naming names, without even looking at the offending students, I came down hard. I put my disappointment and anger in the harshest possible (yet for me relatively un-profane) terms. I wrote their "definition" on the board. ART? I said I didn’t think so. It was more like trash. And I tore up the offending papers, proclaiming to the class that the offenders would not get credit.
And I was somewhat effective. One of the three copiers (one whose work I had suspected on an earlier assignment, and one who constantly complained about the workload) dropped the class. One of the copiers and the original copyee came to apologize the next day. And all without naming names or publicly humiliating them.
But, of course, one stayed silent. Festering.
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