I sat down to grade papers this evening and found a rash of plagiarism had broken out in my class. This hurts. As a teacher this is utter failure. I have failed these students. We’ve been studying Othello – a personal favorite — and their papers were taken from Cliff Notes, Spark Notes, 123HelpMe and assorted materials. Little of it was their own ideas or even ideas from scholarly journals. It was cheap, easy and fast. There is only 2 weeks left in the semester and I’m sitting here wondering why I do it. Why do I spend hours in the evening on lesson plans, grading papers and preparation only to have them ignore me for twelve weeks? This is the irony – they are so anxious to get their papers back that they have been nagging at me for a week. I promised them that I would have them back by tomorrow and yet now it all seems pointless. The amount of effort that I want to put into their papers is directly reflected in the amount of effort they put in to writing them. I can’t help but recall all the teachers I might have disappointed over the years and how I wish I could just go back and give them all hugs. I think I’ll just hug myself instead.
Well I told you so. Like you I love learning and I love intellectual interchange which I hoped to find as a college teacher. Like you I found that out of 30 students two are interested and the rest just want to get the credit and have no real interest in the material. As a Senior level consultant and executive the pay I receive as a teacher doesn’t even buy lunch. You can go back to work as I did and make more in an hour than they pay you for the semester. I know you love teaching and that you are good at it, but don’t expect so much from your students.
Dad