Comment Re:The teachers should... (Score 3, Interesting) 506
BUT, with 150+ students it is difficult, at best. You don't seem to understand the amount of time it takes just to have that that many students writing papers at the same time, the amount of time it takes just to run a simple Google search on suspicious phrases in papers, the amount of time it takes to document the source(s) of plagiarized papers, nor the amount of time it takes to then conference with parents.
Parents, incidentally, who come in one of three basic varieties when their child is accused of cheating:
1-"Not my son/daughter, I don't care what you found."
2-"Well, son/daughter, you screwed up...just like always."
and the rare, but so prized
3-"I don't see what the big deal is, everyone does it to some degree...can't you reward his/her resourcefulness...or were you just trying to trap my kid? You know, I have a lawyer on speed dial..."
Needless to say, that if I dedicate as much time as I should to trying to catch just the most blatant instances of plagiarism, I would have little time to actually finish reading essays, let alone grade them, write lesson plans, attend special education meetings that take no small amount of time, attend school functions/meetings/professional development (unpaid continuing education required by district, state and increasingly, the NCLB act), prepare students for the multitude of standardized tests (not to mention benchmarks and other assessments) designed indeed to Leave No Child Untested a few days of the year, or spend one of the 10-12 hours each day in some way dedicated to teaching (most often 6 but increasingly 7 days a week during the school year), watch politicians say that I don't do enough with the resources I have while watching my pay, retirement, and benefits dwindle compared to other professionals, let alone spend time with my own family.
Yes, "kids are getting more sly about things," as you so succinctly put it. And keeping up with them is the point behind sites like turnitin.com. However, individual teachers, schools or districts must pay for the service.
Currently in Texas, the State Attorney General is arguing against a case brought by an alliance of school districts which challenges state education funding is inadequate due to a seemingly unending and unfunded bevy of state mandates to increase teacher and district accountability and thereby the current property tax model for funding education constitutes what is essentially a state income tax, which is unconstitutional in Texas. His argument yesterday was that districts don't make good use of the funds that they have, choosing instead to spend them on activities and curricula that are not mandated by the state, things like fine arts programs and sports.
In the current financial climate of education, it is sometimes difficult to have books for every student, pay teachers competitive salaries, or especially to find the $3,000-5,000 to subscribe to a service like turnitin.com. I certainly can't afford to pay for an individual subscription, nor can most public schools or districts.
I would love to "keep up" with all those "sly" students, but I would love it more if parents stopped downloading MP3's and saying it does no harm, it's just music, or sneaking drinks and snacks into theatres, or fibbing on their taxes, or any of a million ways and increasing multitude are teaching poor character to their children.
Getting caught cheating should be, after all, a lesson about morals.
Yet, I see every day students that see their parents and other adults willing to sacrifice every value in efforts to get their presumed "just desserts." Many of my students (high school sophomores and seniors) think that the only bad cheating happens when someone gets caught. The ideals of honor and integrity are becoming, if not rare, then so abstract (as a result of an increasingly diverse number of bad models read Enron, NY Times, "doping" athletes, etc.) as to be meaningless.
Me, I'll continue to wish that every parent I call about misbehavior, good accomplishments, failures, successes, cheating, or honesty could see the phone call as a character development issue instead of an opportunity to defend their child beyond logic, believe that their child is already the worst human being in existence, or to challenge the teacher as being discriminatory or unrealistic.
If more parents understood parenting to be teaching (and teaching to be parenting), many of those "sly" kids would grow up knowing the importance of honor and integrity rather than learning to bow to the pressures to "get ahead."
But, hey, I am just a dedicated teacher who believes in holding students to high expectations, in class and out...what do I know?
