Love In the Ruins: Teaching Writing In America in 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 6:07AM | by Otter Grading diagnostic essays the other night I managed to bag a plagiarist. Well, it was more interesting than that, really... it was a plagiarist who had plagiarized a paper on plagiarism.
There's a kind of breathtaking insouciance in the student's work. If you're going to rip off somebody's words, it should be a sentence like, "A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing." And it should be from a site dedicated to helping you avoid plagiarism.
Well, no matter.
You can't keep this stuff to yourself of course, and when I told a colleague she asked, "Are you sure there wasn't..?"
A twinkle in the eye?
No, no twinkle.
There's no real point to haranguing the student. There's a tremendous disbelief in originality these days. Pretty much anything my students can think of has been (they feel) blogged, googled, and wiki'd. And this results in a growing sense that the name of the game is just to play the game. There is no particular point to it. If the professor wants to know about plagiarism, we shall inform the poor bastard. But really, the poor idiot should just get a smart phone with a good Wiki app.
Not that plagiarism is new or anything. But intellectual theft is not now a daring climb over the garden wall to filch an apple It's more like picking up the apples off the ground that have been hurled at one incessantly since birth. The fruit of the tree of knowledge cometh cheaply, and if there's a reason to grow the thing laboriously oneself, nobody told today's college students.
So I failed the paper, but not with a zero as the college demands. The quality of mercy is not, after all, strained. Technically, in a diagnostic, I haven't taught the meaning and avoidance of plagiarism. But if a student can persuade herself that that's an excuse to freeload from the web, she has another thing coming.
Not that I think it will matter. Avoiding the labor of learning is the new black. It goes with anything. The difference between doing it now and doing it thirty years ago is, of course, that you really can do quite well without learning anything now.
I should cite Wodehouse as my source for the gag about the twinkle in the eye, and Genesis for the fruit-of-knowledge, and Augustine for filching fruit. The thing about the quality of mercy not being strained is of course my own.
Reader Comments (1)
In his essay on fairy stories, in a section about the torturous punishments the villains received, Tolkien said something to the effect of, "Adults, being guilty, prefer mercy. Children, being innocent, prefer justice."