Thursday, December 12, 2019

Good, bad, ugly: semester in review

Piles of papers wait to be graded but I'm busy making plans to head off problems the next time I teach these classes. Note to self: Just because the Norton anthology changed its Hemingway selection, that doesn't mean I'm required to assign it, and nobody's going to care if I cross "Hills Like White Elephants" off the syllabus. Also, nobody does any meaningful revision after Thanksgiving, so make the research paper due earlier in the semester. Also, do more in-class writing in all classes, even if it means my feeble eyes will have to struggle through increasingly illegible handwriting. And find a way to fight that cheating problem.

What cheating problem? It's a new (to me) method of plagiarism for which I cannot imagine a solution: instead of reading the text, the student watches a bunch of YouTube videos about the text, cribs ideas from the videos, and inserts them into his paper, often verbatim, without citation. I'm not aware of any good way to detect this kind of plagiarism, and the only reason I caught it this semester is that a transcript of one of the videos exists online. When challenged, the student admitted that this is his "usual method" of writing papers, which suggests that I'd been duped all semester long up to that point, and probably his others profs have been duped as well. Short of watching every available YouTube video dealing with the texts in question, how am I supposed to prevent that kind of plagiarism?

But while I'm tearing out my hair over what went wrong this semester, maybe I should take a look at what went right. Adding Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard" to the American Lit syllabus: brilliant--even if some students found it daunting, it opened up a new world for the rest of us. Using my special named-chair budget to treat my students to cultural experiences, field trips, and food: outstanding--and much more fun than attending another academic conference. Trusting my Honors students to lead class discussions in directions I hadn't expected--scary but illuminating and definitely worth the effort.

What I really need this morning is a valid reason to postpone grading this pile of research papers. Hey, maybe I could watch some YouTube videos on grading papers! If my student can get away with it, why can't I?

 

No comments: