When I was in high school long ago, we students were given
"worksheets" (not "study guides"), and we were told by our
teachers to do them independently, and most of us, honest as we were (also
lacking a computer connected to the Internet, and, let's face it, perhaps
lacking initiative required to cheat effectively), simply read the books and did
our work.
But those study guides were, and still are, blunt
instruments. They didn't serve us well. They didn't foster the skill of close
reading, and they still don't. Their intent is good, and the questions in them
are legitimate. They are necessary and useful, but used to excess, they kill
reading skills instead of building them. The questions disrupt the flow of
narrative. You can't read Humpty-Dumpty and keep track of it
while doing one of those!
So did close reading die in me? Of course it did. I never
learned how to read well from my high school English teachers. Oh, they helped
me appreciate literature, yes. But not
one of them helped me to encounter it and
appreciate it for myself. It was
a college instructor who helped me by demonstrating it every day and forcing me
to encounter language in an entirely different, more natural manner. He did
lectures on the great works, just like all the other profs, but he had a
special ability to refer to critical details and developments by formulating
questions instead of declarative statements. He would force us to
read and then ask us what we thought. We'd kick it around a while, and then he'd
show us the author's intent. He'd show us by combining our answers to previous
questions (and his) with the current, critical interpretive issues in question,
and we'd all see where the author was "really going."
(Yes, you can use my study guides to do that too. That's
where they come from, from that Professor. Go ahead!)
Our kids today don't read; they cheat. In school, their
primary interest is one another. Their
minds and bodies are so full of sexual energy (let's be frank about it - that's
exactly what it is) that they can't concentrate. Walk into any classroom of
students, grades 6 through 12, and you'll find yourself wading in sex! That's
what's on their minds, not learning! They'll find out where authors are
"really going" all right; they'll find out by searching the Internet
later at home.
We have a generation of teachers today who are great at
fooling themselves. Too many of them have chosen to believe that all of their
students will follow instructions, do their work, and turn it in, exactly as
they themselves did in the past. If kids do cheat, well, "They're cheating
themselves. They'll just have to live with it, and I tell them so!"
That used to be known as a "copout." Still a
pretty damn good term to apply, I think. Teachers who offer that little
statement have chosen not to care. They do not teach essential reading and
interpretive skills.
I dare you to have a frank discussion with your class.
You'll discover that most of them don't read anymore. Their ability to find
answers to your probing questions without doing the work of reading the
literature can only be exceeded by the greatest criminal minds of history. The
Internet not only provides what they need to cut and paste; it has also taught
them the art of conspiracy in the form of networking and collaboration. At the
very least, their ability to divvy up work, "research" answers, and
report back to one another about their findings is astounding.
We're mostly teaching kids to be great cheaters, or, if you
prefer a euphemism, great "researchers" as they exercise the fine art
of cutting corners.
I've always been a skeptical old bastard, and I'm
conservative, not too extremely conservative, just a little conservative, but
deeply so, and mistrustful, way down inside my soul. I have to be shown, in a
court of law, that kids aren't cheating. Until that moment, I simply assume
that they are doing so.
Yeah, it's a pretty nasty attitude, I know. Here's how I
lost the vestiges of my trust:
When I began teaching AP kids back around 2000, I reasoned,
they must want to learn! There can't be too many cheaters in a roomful of AP
kids! They want to do this! So I followed the lead of former AP teachers and
did what they told me. I copied their styles and substance. I assigned a
popular novel, 1984, by George Orwell,
as a summer reading project. The bulk of my students' summer work was reading
that novel and writing interpretive essays in response to my (very traditional)
questions about it. During that summer, I traveled to Michigan and met in a
session designed to "train" high school teachers in the art of
delivering Advanced Placement English Composition. I received confirmation that
my method of using questions provided by past veteran AP teachers was
nothing short of exemplary.
On the first day of school in the fall, I got many
suspiciously similar written responses from the kids. Being a skeptical old
bastard, I began Googling quotes from their work. I came up with a rough
estimate on the percentage of plagiarized essays. I confirmed at least some
plagiarism in about 70% of the work handed in. I suspected far more. Later, I
followed up by giving my students reading quizzes and forcing them to do close
reading study guides. The results there indicated that almost none of them had
actually read the novel.
We're teaching our high school students, even our AP kids,
how to escape reading!
I'm convinced a significant portion of our students purchase
essays regularly, and being a skeptical old bastard, I believe some
sophisticated computer programmers have designed robots that plagiarize and
sell such essays by accessing obscure sources on the Internet.
I'm not absolutely sure how the robots work, but here is the
impression I'm getting: The individual hired to provide an essay finds one on
the Internet that fits the bill exactly. (That is not as hard as you might
think.) Then his robot (which, for purposes of narrative, we will call
"Gigolo" here) searches for all essays about the topic containing some of the key words and the substance of a given
passage, say, fifteen words out of this particular essay, that fits the exact
needs of the client. When it finds a source, it conducts a Google search to see
where it leads. If it leads back to the same document, that exact phrase is not
used, but if it leads nowhere specifically, the exact phrase is incorporated
into the product for the client, and what do you end up with? You end up with a
plagiarized essay paraphrased.
The key part of clever plagiarism, however, is finding
obscure sources. Have you ever Googled a suspicious phrase from a student essay
and ended up with three or four hits? Then you go to one of these websites, and
you discover that it requires certain credentials to become eligible to use it.
Perhaps it is a collection of graduate papers at The Ohio State University, or all of the language arts
doctoral theses at Stanford. But you ain't gettin' in there! Entry to those
websites is privileged! Yes, sir. And guess who has privileges? That's right; a
certain computer robot named Gigolo. Gigolo has privileged rights to enter
many, many, many collections of papers at colleges and universities all over
this country.
So when you conduct a Google search, you find obscure
references to the sources, but you don't find the sources or the plagiarized
passages themselves. And when Turnitin.com gets a hold of the essay, it
confirms plagiarism, but it can only track it to other plagiarized papers from
high schools in Knoxville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Norman,
Oklahoma; Schenectady, New York; Eugene, Oregon; and dozens of other places
around the country.
Well, that's my theory, anyway.
But when a student protests that the plagiarism pointed out
by Turnitin.com is only coincidental, and that these dozens of identical
passages found in other essays mean nothing, what do you do?
Well, here's what I do: I tell my kids that they can have up
to 15% on their Turnitin.com plagiarism scores, and I won't penalize them. (I
know that's inviting sucker punches from them, but I don't care. I'll take a
few blows to get education done.) Then I show the 0% "Similarity
Scores" Turnitin.com offers for (perhaps only "the few") students in my
class who I'm convinced actually did their own work. And I give all my students
one extra credit point for each point
they score below 15%, up to 15 points. Next, I invite the students with
unacceptable scores to go through their essays and reword those passages that
they've plagiarized, giving them a little additional exercise in reiteration, a
skill they badly need. (When I confirm expert sources, I require extra
citations also.) I tell them to re-submit their essays as many times as they
want, until they get their scores back down to 15% or below.
Next time they write, they're a whole lot more careful about
"cutting corners."
And when they read, well, I can't control what they do
outside of class, but I sure as heck can control what they do with their class
time! In class, I FORCE MY STUDENTS TO READ.
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