Cheating students

[Tom Bomb]

First: a wee pome,

The Brick
​

Count all the grains in this here brick,

Said my flailing teacher, dopey prick.

That suited me. And here I'm confessing,

There was more of interest in that humble brick,

Than there was in his entire lesson.
​

Now, the rant: wonderful reading, your thread, OP. It's a thrill, honestly. Life affirming All the spirit here really is amply rewarding. I agree with the majority — you are one fine teacher. I'm an educationist, so riddled with trivia, good and bad, battered with a background, along these lines. And, with a smattering of firmer, more directed thoughts flowing on from all the unsightly mess that beleaguers education and life as we know it, acknowledged sharply within these pages, and beyond.

From what I can tell, there's only one surefire course of action: Revolution We're all evidently flogging a dead course. It's groundhog day for dunces. Education has let us down.

I don't know … find yourself a Invalid Link Removed maybe, and get amongst it — or start one. You have a rich life ahead of you, as a teacher or in pizza delivery. Thank you for your service. If only there were more like you. I love pizza.

PS: I cheated. Handed in one of my sister's paintings as my major work, for a final assessment. It was a lovely painting. I was desperate. And, I got through, unscathed, to the next level — life on the outside

I mean, if a Campbell's Soup can on canvas can fetch a tidy sum for a copy cat, as a work of art, then my little familial faux pah shouldn't warrant a second thought. Busting me would've been the major crime

PPS:

you cant do humiliation nowadays

Shame

 

[Pilgrim]

If you have the rest of your life, take on Arnold Toynbee. I'm just starting on volume 8 of the unabridged version of Study of History. It is over 700 pages of Oxford Don-ese. It's also not the longest volume, but a decent margin. There are eleven volumes. I'm already several years in.

If you are at all intelligent, you won't take this advice.

No problem, I'm currently reading SF by Spider Robinson, and am halfway through A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur"s Court by Mark Twain.

 

[Gaolee]

No problem, I'm currently reading SF by Spider Robinson, and am halfway through A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur"s Court by Mark Twain.

A Conecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a great book. Mark Twain ran out of steam a little at the end, but it is still a great read. I have not read that since I was a kid. Maybe that needs to come after Toynbee and before diving into the next endless tome.

 

[blastoff99]

I was a pretty smart kid and a good writer, but Eng Lit was nearly my undoing, and I think I had five semesters of it. Wuthering Heights made my head hurt too bad to continue somewhere on page 5. I promptly forgot about the book (and the corresponding 15-page report) until the night before the due date. You can imagine how this turned out. (Spoiler: it was my one and only academic all-nighter, and I shoulda just not bothered and taken the zero at that point.)

Same teacher (spring semester) had us write some sort of poem a la Coleridge, and I made an apostrophe error. She circled it, and wrote 'You know better' in big red pen, right next to the F. Well yes I did know better, but ouch. Credit where due: Thanks to Phyllis Teshera, I haven't made an its/it's error since, and that was in about 1985. Every time I write either of those, I wince and check thrice.

This teacher also wrote a comment on my permanent transcript. This is not the comment that goes along with a report card - this is the short one-liner that teachers reserve for something really serious (good or bad). It sticks FOREVER. Colleges will see it. All the comments available were canned - she couldn't write her own. (I hesitate to think what she would have come up with in 35 characters.) So she selected 'Too many non-suited days.' I didn't notice this until someone in the admissions department of my first-choice college called me up and said 'We have no idea what this means. Would you like to explain it?' I had enough presence of mind to say 'I have no clue either - let me get back to you.' The counseling office peeps said it was a comment that was intended for use by the Phys Ed department....

Sigh.

@Chicory Blue , see what kind of impact you can have on impressionable students?!?!??! Seriously, you have my mad respect for doing this, and I think your solution to the current crap is spot on. Keep us posted, and hopefully you'll feel tip-top soon.

 

[edro]

Step #1. Read board policy.
Step #2. Refer to step #1.

 

[Chicory Blue]

Back on my feet today. Finally got the satisfaction of chewing my students out directly. Didn’t have to embarrass anybody: they did it to themselves.

Several kids confronted me today regarding their assignment- apparently the principal had talked to a few of them, then realized he had better things to do than discipline 15 students at once, so he left it to me to pass judgment, which meant a few genuinely did not yet know they had been caught. The few that knew the score were meek and apologetic, but those left in the dark were straight-up confrontational, interrupting my instructions for the day to demand- in front of their peers- why I had given them a zero for the sonnet they had worked so diligently on.

I wish I could share every single exchange with you. Watching pious fury deflate into blushing silence among murmuring snickers is a special kind of beauty, but before you think me too petty, please understand- two students genuinely fought tooth and nail to defend their handiwork before I got to reveal that Robert Frost had beaten them to the punch, and even those weren’t the most baffling exchanges I had all day.

No, that honor goes to this little jewel.

Student: Ok, I know this is late, but I had my brother help me with it. He’s in college so he’s really smart, so if you recognize any part of it, it probably came from a famous sonnet, but I put my own spin on it and wrote most of it myself.

Me: *reads*

Student: What do you think?

Me: ...

Student: What’s wrong?

Me: ... This is Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.”

Student: Oh.

*pregnant beat*

Student: So... should I redo it?


I’m not gonna make it to five years, y’all.

--^@

 

[TOOL460002]

Can I vent?

I'm grading my high school students' unit projects today- They had four days to write me a Shakespearean sonnet, tailored to a few specifications including labeling instances of imagery and figurative language.

Now, I'm used to catching cheaters. Every project has one or two knuckleheads who copy and paste an essay directly from online, and it isn't hard to spot the signs, but I'm not even a third of the way through my class roster and I've already caught 11 kids who just genuinely could not be bothered to do the work.

The more clever cheaters ripped their sonnets from a website for teens to post poetry on, so at least it comes close to resembling their actual skill level. One submitted me an honest to goodness Robert Frost poem, and I feel like I should be taking something for my blood pressure right now.

However, the bigger half of these little turdgoblins employed an online app that generates Shakespearean sonnets like a Mad Lib. You just enter your favorite animal and a few descriptive words, and it spits out a sonnet- always the same sonnet for the most part, mind you, which is how I ended up catching them.

I understand a lot of you are or have been teachers, that most of you have had children, and that nearly all of you have at some point in your lives been a high school student. Meanwhile, I've only been at this game for about a year and a half now, am not yet old enough to be my students' mother, and am presently stuck in a decidedly rural area where seniors writing essays need to be reminded that the past tense of "see" is "saw," not "seen" or "seent," so I don't know if I should be as surprised or hurt by this as I am, but so far this is the worst instance of mass-scale don't-give-a-damn I've encountered among my students, and I'm just kind of reeling right now.

I've still got four more class periods to grade before I'm done, and if this pattern keeps up, I'm about to have to send around thirty students to the principal's office tomorrow, out of a roster of about 120.

I know they're teenagers. I know they don't care about poetry, and that they aren't going to make an honest effort at something that isn't important to them. I know that as a teacher it's on me to make the material more engaging and appealing and to help them understand why it's relevant. I get that, I really do, and god but I've been trying to show them how personal and powerful a tool for self-expression it can be, but what kills me isn't that they don't care.

It's that they think I'm so stupid that I'd let them pass an entire unit project when all of their friends' poems are literally identical except for the nouns. It's that the next generation of my country is genuinely dull enough to think they can get away with that.

I'm hurt and I'm scared and I'm so, so tired and I still have so many papers left to grade.

Just had to take a break from the pen for a moment to say that.
Thanks for hearing me.

--^@

So these kids can't properly conjugate verbs and you're surprised that they don't find sonnets valuable?

 

[MattZilla]

Daft friggin punk?! I laughed long and loud.

A girl I dated for a while taught hs English in city schools. Her thing that she figured out on her own was to be hard af for the first two or three weeks. Even with the common core weirdness, the kids mostly policed themselves. There were tough kids with shhhhoddy parents. There was a bunch of them who were at a third grade reading level when they got to her. She did a lot of yoga to keep her head on straight.

 

[Chicory Blue]

So these kids can't properly conjugate verbs and you're surprised that they don't find sonnets valuable?

Oh, no, I totally get why they don’t care. It’s how little effort they even put into cheating that stings me.

One of the kids who got caught cheating is literally only even in my class because he got held back last year...

... for cheating.

... in my class.

Homeboy knows I know how to Google stuff. You’d think if he learned one thing in my class, it’d at least have been not to try the exact same thing a second time. Last year I discovered he had cheated on his research paper by copying and pasting his entire essay into the search bar. In quotation marks.

That’s the part that hurts.

--^@

 

[Winslow]

If they're trying to pull that crap, I won't mind mixing genres here...

 

[Chicory Blue]

Daft friggin punk?! I laughed long and loud.

A girl I dated for a while taught hs English in city schools. Her thing that she figured out on her own was to be hard af for the first two or three weeks. Even with the common core weirdness, the kids mostly policed themselves. There were tough kids with shhhhoddy parents. There was a bunch of them who were at a third grade reading level when they got to her. She did a lot of yoga to keep her head on straight.

One of our teachers does a free yoga class for us once a week.

It saved me.

--^@

 

[Trouztrouz]

BOY there are a lot of literature fans here on talkbass. To be honest I'm with the students here. I'd have loved to have an app to do that poetry homework for me. In HS I had zero patience for the subjects that didn't interest me, which was basically all of the humanities. It was emotionally agonizing to spend one second more than necessary.

In college I got to take the classes I wanted and that was muuuuuuch better.

 

[Oddly]

Get Lucky
Daft Punk
'Like the legend of the phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planet spinning (uh)
The force of love beginning
We've come too far to give up who we are
So let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars
She's up all night 'til the sun
I'm up all night to get some
She's up all night for good fun
I'm up all night to get lucky
We're up all night 'til the sun
We're up all night to get some
We're up all night for good fun
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
The present has no ribbon
Your gift keeps on giving,
What is this I'm feeling?
If you wanna leave I'm with it (ah)
We've come too far to give up who we are
So let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars
She's up all night 'til the sun
I'm up all night to get some
She's up all night for good fun
I'm up all night to get lucky
We're up all night 'til the sun
We're up all night to get some
We're up all night for good fun
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We've come too far to give up who we are
So let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars
She's up all night 'til the sun
I'm up all night to get some
She's up all night for good fun
I'm up all night to get lucky
We're up all night 'til the sun
We're up all night to get some
We're up all night for good fun
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky
We're up all night to get lucky'


I'd give that a solid B+.
I'd certainly prefer to read that than one of Billy's efforts.

 

[MattZilla]

There aren't many careers in which you're fighting a good fight.

 

[Funky Ghost]

Can I vent?

I'm grading my high school students' unit projects today- They had four days to write me a Shakespearean sonnet, tailored to a few specifications including labeling instances of imagery and figurative language.

Now, I'm used to catching cheaters. Every project has one or two knuckleheads who copy and paste an essay directly from online, and it isn't hard to spot the signs, but I'm not even a third of the way through my class roster and I've already caught 11 kids who just genuinely could not be bothered to do the work.

The more clever cheaters ripped their sonnets from a website for teens to post poetry on, so at least it comes close to resembling their actual skill level. One submitted me an honest to goodness Robert Frost poem, and I feel like I should be taking something for my blood pressure right now.

However, the bigger half of these little turdgoblins employed an online app that generates Shakespearean sonnets like a Mad Lib. You just enter your favorite animal and a few descriptive words, and it spits out a sonnet- always the same sonnet for the most part, mind you, which is how I ended up catching them.

I understand a lot of you are or have been teachers, that most of you have had children, and that nearly all of you have at some point in your lives been a high school student. Meanwhile, I've only been at this game for about a year and a half now, am not yet old enough to be my students' mother, and am presently stuck in a decidedly rural area where seniors writing essays need to be reminded that the past tense of "see" is "saw," not "seen" or "seent," so I don't know if I should be as surprised or hurt by this as I am, but so far this is the worst instance of mass-scale don't-give-a-damn I've encountered among my students, and I'm just kind of reeling right now.

I've still got four more class periods to grade before I'm done, and if this pattern keeps up, I'm about to have to send around thirty students to the principal's office tomorrow, out of a roster of about 120.

I know they're teenagers. I know they don't care about poetry, and that they aren't going to make an honest effort at something that isn't important to them. I know that as a teacher it's on me to make the material more engaging and appealing and to help them understand why it's relevant. I get that, I really do, and god but I've been trying to show them how personal and powerful a tool for self-expression it can be, but what kills me isn't that they don't care.

It's that they think I'm so stupid that I'd let them pass an entire unit project when all of their friends' poems are literally identical except for the nouns. It's that the next generation of my country is genuinely dull enough to think they can get away with that.

I'm hurt and I'm scared and I'm so, so tired and I still have so many papers left to grade.

Just had to take a break from the pen for a moment to say that.
Thanks for hearing me.

--^@

Have fun with it. Take all of the ones that are the same, take the names off and hold one up for the class and ask who's work it is. Soooo start off baiting the lil monsters by saying you have one that you enjoyed a lot. That way they are incentivized to claim it. Then watch the blood bath as all the cheaters try to claim it all the while knowing they are all right.

Then let them know.


That would be YouTube worthy.

 

[TOOL460002]

Oh, no, I totally get why they don’t care. It’s how little effort they even put into cheating that stings me.

One of the kids who got caught cheating is literally only even in my class because he got held back last year...

... for cheating.

... in my class.

Homeboy knows I know how to Google stuff. You’d think if he learned one thing in my class, it’d at least have been not to try the exact same thing a second time. Last year I discovered he had cheated on his research paper by copying and pasting his entire essay into the search bar. In quotation marks.

That’s the part that hurts.

--^@

True. At least cheat well. Shows you have a skill at something.

A family member taught at a continuation school, so I've definitely heard similar stories of absolutely absurd student behavior and lack of attention. You're doing a good thing and I hope you don't burn out too soon man!

 

[yodedude2]

Student: So... should I redo it?

--^@

It is not possible for you to redo it as you have not yet done it. let's have you start by doing it once, properly, and we'll go from there.

 

[fdeck]

I’m not gonna make it to five years, y’all.

Sure you will. Sounds like you handled the matter pretty well.

I have multiple relatives and good friends who are active or retired teachers at both the K-12 and college level. I think the ones who survive figure out how to not take it personally. If you treat it as a moral battle, you'll burn yourself out in no time. The teachers who are successful apply discipline consistently and simply assume that kids sometimes screw up and need to be set straight. Yes, it's possible for decent people to do stupid things.

 

[Downunderwonder]

True. At least cheat well. Shows you have a skill at something.

A family member taught at a continuation school, so I've definitely heard similar stories of absolutely absurd student behavior and lack of attention. You're doing a good thing and I hope you don't burn out too soon man!

You missed the chick in Chicory Blue.

 

[delta7fred]

Shortcuts. They’re all the rage.

Yes, if they can do it on their phone then it is easier than thinking.

(I'm not a teacher but almost became one) I would grade them 100% for cunning, guile, ingenuity, and laziness and 0% for effort, literary appreciation, etc, etc.

TBH when I was that age I would have done the same if the technology had been available (1960's so it was decades away). We dispatched 2 french teachers with stress trying to teach French to a bunch of country hicks.

@Chicory Blue make sure you don't go the same way.