Cheaters galore

March 19, 2010 by Jess in classroom behavior, Cultural categories, Social Issues, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It never fails to happen. It also never fails to make me mad. I have, once again, caught a student plagiarizing. This happens so frequently (comprising anywhere from 5-15% of my students each semester) that maybe I should be over it, but I get furious every time. What is wrong with our society that so many of our young people don’t give a damn about cheating? And why is it that so few teachers care?

I remember when I was in college at New Mexico State University, a student turned in a plagiarized paper to one of my English classes. He disappeared from that class with an F and there was a rumor that he might be expelled. I was amazed more than shocked. Who in the world would even have the idea of turning in someone else’s work as their own? The concept had never occurred to me. I didn’t know it was even possible to do such a thing. Once I realized it was possible, I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to do that. I liked writing. I liked learning things.

But I was also naive about plagiarism in other ways. A fellow student in one of my classes, an older gentleman in his thirties, told me he’d had a great idea for a paper until he went to the library and found out that somebody had already written that argument. “I had to toss that paper,” he said, “because turning it in would be plagiarism.” I assumed that if the idea was original to you–meaning, nobody had suggested the idea, and you hadn’t read it elsewhere first–you could write about it. Maybe part of the problem was that I didn’t spend much time in the library as an undergraduate.

As a teacher, I see egregious versions of plagiarism every single semester. Usually, the students have simply bought one of those free essays online, all too easy for me to find. Also frequent, but less common, a student will cut and paste sentences from several different sources, cobbling together a paper of sorts. I usually have my students write an honesty pledge but it doesn’t stop them. Once, my students signed an honesty pledge that included a sentence reminding them that “cutting and pasting” sentences from other sources without proper attribution was plagiarism. An older student, in his forties, turned in a paper that I found word for word on the internet.

“But I didn’t cut and paste,” he protested. “I printed it out and then re-typed it!!!”

I was dumbfounded. “And you really can’t see that typing somebody else’s essay and turning it in as your own is cheating, just as if you’d cut and pasted it into a document?” I asked. Several times, I admit. I was really shocked that he couldn’t see the difference.

“No,” he kept saying, and finally, “You’re making me feel really dumb.”

“I don’t think you belong in a college level writing class yet,” I said, and directed him to drop the class and enroll in a remedial writing class.

I still don’t understand why so many students cheat. But the truth is, they get away with it a lot. I still care, and I still do what I can, but there is nowhere I have taught–including Stanford–that makes it simple and easy to deal adequately with a clear case of plagiarism. Most community colleges limit what punishments you can mete out. Most of them allow you to flunk that paper or assignment, but you cannot flunk the student for the entire class. And expelling a student? Forget about it!

The most demoralizing experience I had as a professor was how one community college dealt with a case of plagiarism I discovered late in the semester a few years ago. The student in question–female and Asian (an important fact, as you’ll see in a minute)–had completely and totally plagiarized her research paper, which was worth 50% of the class grade. There was no question about the fact that she had plagiarized it. I was so mad that I went back and checked her other assignments and sure enough, she’d plagiarized every single assignment she’d turned in, all semester long.

When I informed her that I would be failing her and recommending that she be expelled (this was still an option at that point), she accused me of being racist and sexist. “I’ve had problems with other professors who don’t like that I’m female or Asian,” she said. She demanded that, in order to prove that I was fair-minded, I must go back and check all the other assignments turned in by every other student.

“None of them plagiarized their research paper,” I told her, “so no, I’m not going to do that.”

She decided to protest the findings. Regardless of the fact that the case of plagiarism was clear and uncontestable, a student has the right to a hearing by a board consisting of students, professors, and administrators. I believe students absolutely have the right to appeal, but I couldn’t believe what happened in this particular case. She demanded the restitution of an A grade and, while the board didn’t go quite that far (they couldn’t, because the evidence of her plagiarism was so overwhelming), they did decide to give her a W. She faced absolutely no repercussions for her clear and flagrant disregard for academic honesty.

For those of us who are adjunct professors anywhere, our employment is tenuous enough that I understand why so many of us choose not to rock the boat and why so many of us just ignore plagiarism when it’s staring us in the face. When the administration doesn’t care, and the penalty for cheating is laughable, and we need to both retain students and not fail very many students, why should we do anything at all?

With the student I just discovered plagiarizing, I gave him a zero for the assignment. I told him he cannot revise the essay and turn it back in again. Like my other students who cheat, he signed an honesty pledge at the beginning of the semester, promising not to plagiarize. Will he flunk the class? It all depends on how he does with the rest of his assignments. The essay is worth 10% of his grade. If he averages a B- for the other assignments he turns in, he’ll be fine.

Makes me mad. But there’s very little I can do about it.

The San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair

March 16, 2010 by Jess in Bay Area, Books & News, Social Issues, writing | Leave a comment

On Saturday, I had a table at San Francisco’s Anarchist Book Fair. I split the table with Corbin Lewars, whose new book, Creating a Life: The Memoir of a Mom and Writer in the Making, just came out with Catalyst Book Press (my small press).

We’d gone to an anarchist parents gathering on Thursday, where Corbin read from both the book and her zine, Reality Mom. One person had bought a copy of her zine, and several other copies had disappeared without being paid for. So I expected the day to be a wash. I figured the books would be too expensive and on topics that wouldn’t interest anybody. Besides, anarchists don’t have money, I told Corbin. They live in squats and pass out flyers that say things like, “If you’re not stealing from your boss, you’re letting your boss steal from you.”

But I was surprised. I sold out of all the copies of The Confessional that I had brought. “I think you found your audience,” Corbin told me as copy after copy disappeared from my table.

This has really never happened before, except when the book first came out and I had a book signing in my home town.

And we sold quite a few copies of both Creating a Life and Labor Pains and Birth Stories. There are a lot of midwives and doulas who are either anarchists or sympathetic, apparently.

What I find interesting about anarchists is how their philosophy of rugged individualism clashes with the very clear “code” dress that they all wear. Lots of black, lots of chains, lots of partially shaved heads, lots of tattoos, and, of course, the ubiquitous political statements that almost always included the word “fuck” somewhere on their clothes…..For example, I saw several people wearing a small pin that read, “Fuck hate.”

I spoke briefly with an anarchist parent who said that her daughter’s struggle is so different than hers. “I was always trying to stand out, to be an individual,” she said. “But X is always trying to fit in.”

I didn’t say it, but surrounded by anarchists, nobody stood out. It’s not being an individual if you’re adhering to some code….even an anarchist code.

Really? I mean, REALLY?

March 15, 2010 by Jess in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

This was posted as a militant Christian’s facebook profile. In his “about me” section, he wrote, “I don’t wait for revival. I AM revival.”

Books I Read as a Child that I’d Love to Re-Read

March 10, 2010 by Jess in Books & News, Children's, children's literature, writing | Leave a comment

When I was ten, we visited De Smet, South Dakota, one of the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up. I visited recently, and they’ve created a really cheesy visitor’s center there with all kinds of activities and farm equipment that are not historically accurate. But in the 1980s, during my first visit, all you could see was the Surveyor’s House from By the Shores of Silver Lake, the property with the 5 trees that Pa planted, and the house Pa built in town many years later. There was lots of “scope for imagination” (as Anne of Green Gables fame always used to say) and I came back from that trip and told my mother, “I’m going to be a writer when I grow up.” I didn’t have much money to buy a souvenir; all I could afford was a short slip of paper that included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s signature. I treasured that photocopied signature for many, many years, as a tangible connection to this writer I admired so much and whose life I envied. (Her life seemed so much more interesting than the tumbleweeds, dirt, dust, and broken-down trucks littering front yards in El Paso, Texas.)

A few years ago, I took a trip to Prince Edward Island to visit Anne’s land. Boy, was I ever disappointed. Maybe I expected to be transported back a century, to the time when L.M. Montgomery wrote about. But mostly, I was bored by the flat farmland; I was shocked that it took about an hour to traverse the island by car and then what was left to do?; and, most of all, I was disappointed by the clap-trap tourist stuff that has invaded that island and turned it into a mecca of cheap souvenirs and crappy Anne-related paraphernalia.

And, by the way, L.M. Montgomery never once mentioned the ginormous mosquitoes everywhere, not in any of her books, all of which I have read.

The mystery is sort of gone once you visit a place and realize it’s nothing like what you read about in the books.

And yet….I still want to go to those places. The magic of the places I read about as a kid filled me with such longing.

What are the children’s books I’d love to be able to go back and read for the very first time again, to feel that mysterious urgent heartbeat against my ridge cage as I read, devouring buttered Saltines, licking the butter and salt off my fingers and losing myself in another time and place?

There are too many to name but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts. Here are a few on my list:

Stuart Little by E.B. White

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare

A review of mine on Feminist Review

March 8, 2010 by Jess in religion, writing | Leave a comment

Feminist Review has published my review of Jennifer Baichwal’s film, Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life, and Chance. Feel free to check it out.

History and God’s Miracles

March 4, 2010 by Jess in Africa, America, children's literature, Christianity, Cultural categories, history, race, religion | 3 Comments

Because I’ve been reading a lot of biographical picture books lately, and because I’m working on one of my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between history and our personal identities.

In January, I had a conversation with a gentleman who was reading a book called “God’s Miracles.” It was a collection of stories that revealed moments of American history when, according to the book, God performed a miracle that allowed the new nation to thrive. The story he presented during our conversation was how the people of Jamestown were literally getting into their boats to leave when ships from England arrived, “saving” them and “saving” Jamestown.

The idea that America’s destiny was maneuvered, manipulated, aided, and abetted by the Powerful Most High is always one that disturbs me. Was it a “miracle” from God that Jamestown survived….only for the obliteration of the Native American peoples in that area to occur? Ascribing God’s hand into the American Story gives a lot of people a sense of destiny, a belief that the American Way is God’s Way, but the flip side of that is the question: Was it therefore the destiny of the Native American peoples to be killed, herded onto reservations, and left to rot—all the way up to the present day? Is that, too, God’s Way?

As a historian, I’m aware that most of history is made up of questions, not answers; it is made up of perspectives, not facts. Those of us who are white and grow up in America see our founding fathers as heroes; that is our perspective because they built a society for us that enables and encourages us to succeed. But this perspective holds very little moral authority for me when I see how they built the country at the expense of so many people’s lives.

History ends up being very similar to religion. Like our religious heroes, our historical heroes give us a shared sense of destiny with people who have very little in common with us. We can all wave our flag of patriotism because “we” are Americans.

An American friend of mine, an African historian who lives in South Africa, recently told me, “Everybody recognizes South Africa’s history as a racist history. We don’t tell the American history as a racist history because whites are the majority people.” He’s right. Yet the story of America is a racist story—from the arrival of the Pilgrims, to slavery, to the notion of Manifest Destiny, to our attempts to colonize the Philippines, to our ongoing refusal to grant Puerto Ricans full citizenship (what’s up with that? They’re “American citizens” who can’t vote? Wait…WHAT?), to our recent building of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s true that racism is only part of the American story—but it’s an enormous part, something we fail to see because we try so hard to build pride in our young folks. We teach “propaganda” and call it history, not even realizing that our unconscious goal is to instill patriotism, and we do so by telling lies.

How to balance all of this when writing a picture book for kids based on a historical figure? I’m not sure. I think it’s one reason why my first biographical picture book was about a relatively unknown dude—a blind artist, Mexican-American, who has a very rare form of blindness that he describes as a “constant LSD trip” and so he paints what he sees. That was a fun book to write, but it hasn’t sold yet. I’d like to write a biographical picture book about my father, not because he’s famous but because he’s a man I care about deeply. And I’m currently working on a biographical picture book about Nelson Mandela’s chef…the man who cooked meals for him the last 15 months he was in prison, when the apartheid government was negotiating with him and so he had a cushier life than the previous three decades he’d spent on Robben Island.

Am I contributing to South Africa’s ongoing myth-making by writing about one of their heroes at the moment he was released from prison? Perhaps. It’s not that I believe there are no heroes in history. It’s just that I believe our heroes lived messy lives, full of both courageous and horrific deeds, and we’re better off telling the truth, rather than trying vainly to instill pride in a false vision of what America is, who we are, and what our purpose is in the world.