Some would probably say it's just a fact of life. Man is a competitive beast who will seize any opportunity to get ahead.
The recent Long Island SAT cheating scheme and the Adam Wheeler incident certainly don't do much to contradict that perspective. We've entered an era where passing off others' work as your own is becoming easier and more prevalent than ever. (I've decided that the bards of yore ripping off their rivals' poetry doesn't count.) Blame technology or apathy or Wikipedia or No Child Left Behind or the corporatization of education or whatever bugbear suits you this week.
A lot has been written--and a lot of polls have been taken--on plagiarism, slipping standards, and academic fraud. I've offered some of my own views in the past, on those first two issues; now I'm going to tackle that remaining one. Instead of yammering on about the Unfortunate State of Society, as I think 94% of the Internet is already devoted to such rants, I'll just describe my own brush with scholastic flimflam.
Here's the set-up. Like many of my peers, I supplement my income by tutoring. Mainly high-schoolers, since I live in a hyper-competitive region for college applications, but also the odd university senior who wants help with the GREs. Parents are usually charmed by my credentials and courteous demeanor; my students are generally soft-spoken and compliant. It's decent money for easy work.
But there's always an exception. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a masters' student from my own institution who wanted me to write her Ph.D. applications. This young woman--with whom I've never had any contact whatsoever--sent me an email listing the application requirements, along with a brief summary of her career plans. The sign-off line was, and I quote, "'Please let me know if you are willing to write a Personal [sic] statement for me."
This seriously pissed me off.
I know how hard it is to get into grad school, and how intimidating a process it can be. It's a high-stakes enterprise, subject to others' arbitrary whims, and so the few things an applicant can control assume exaggerated emotional importance. It's not like I don't understand the pressure she's feeling.
But goddamnit. I worked my ass off senior year. November and December 2006 were, without a doubt, the most stressful months of my life. I basically lived off of falafel, Tylenol, and the kind of hipster-drip-coffee that's omnipresent in the East Village. After graduation, I slept fifteen hours a day for three weeks just to make up the deficit.
So when I encountered this distressingly blasé request to hoodwink multiple admissions committees, I felt both personally affronted and outraged on behalf of all honest students everywhere.
What's a girl to do? I seriously considered contacting someone in university administration since, as I said, she's enrolled at my own school. She's also in a department where I've taken several classes, and I undoubtedly know some of the professors who'd be writing her recommendation letters. But that had the ring of self-righteous judgment about it, so I chickened out. I wish I hadn't.
Then I thought about threatening to contact them, giving her a chance to repent and Do The Right Thing. She might've bought it: after all, she'd artlessly volunteered her full name, college affiliation, and intentions. Again, I backed off, in the grand tradition of Anglo-Saxon conflict-avoidance.
Ultimately, I responded with a curt, "No, I wouldn't be willing to do that." I never heard from her again, unsurprisingly, and it's likely far too late to take any action now.
There's certainly more I could have done, but I don't think I was morally required to do anything. Yes, there's that Edmund Burke quote about how evil triumphs when good men do nothing... but Burke can seriously STFU, in this case. I expressed my displeasure and decided not to involve myself further. And I don't think I was wrong to do so--even if I wish I'd been a little more proactive, it would've only been for my own satisfaction.
This one underhanded request is surely a tiny drop in a startlingly vast bucket. If I've gotten a single request from this one person, then there could be dozens planning to cheat their way into graduate programs, just at my school alone. Who knows how many more there are in my city, or how many in my field, or how many are sitting near me in the research library where I'm writing this.
I do wonder what will become of my aspiring charlatan. I'm sure I wasn't the only tutor she contacted, and it's absolutely possible that she managed to hire a ghostwriter. Maybe in a few months I'll Google her name and see if she's listed as a Ph.D. candidate anywhere. And if I do, I will revel in my wholly justified anger.
Looking forward to it.
Dec 2, 2011
Nov 1, 2011
Aphorize This
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
(And by "say," I mean "backdoor brag.")
I'm a summa cum laude and ΦΒΚ graduate of a major university. I was first in my class, earning straight A's while holding competitive internships. I received a highly sought-after doctoral fellowship.
And I'm lucky to have just been offered an entry-level clerical temp job.How many aphorisms are there about making your own opportunities? Carpe diem. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Be the change you want to see in the world. Protestant work-ethic. The self-made man. God helps those who help themselves. Yes we can. Seize the day. Those are all still true today, more or less... but it takes more effort than it did a generation ago. Only 74% of Americans in my age bracket are working. Making your own opportunities is only possible to a point; those openings are being choked off by corporate irresponsibility, voter apathy, polarization, congressional dumbassery, lax educational standards, you pick 'em.
I'm not trying to shirk any responsibility, here--I could've applied myself in more lucrative subjects as a teenager. But it's not my fault that the banking industry destroyed my generation's economic future.
There's nothing like unemployment to turn a young person political. I've considered myself to be socially conscious for years, ever since I took a seminar on sexuality and public life as a sophomore; but until recently, I've been content to stay ensconced in academe's ivory tower, comfortable with First Amendment theorizing. It let me feel like I was "getting involved," but without getting my hands dirty. My righteous indignation at Bush's reelection was thoroughly expressed in a strongly-worded writing assignment.
Like I said above, I know I'm lucky to have the job I've just taken. But I know that there are more substantial, yet still sensibly achievable, things I want to do with my energy and my career. I can only hope that I get the chance to do them.
Now I find myself volunteering my research skills to support Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston. I'm assisting a local TEDx conference, sponsoring speakers dedicated to helping communities thrive. These are ways I can contribute, using my training to benefit causes that might actually impact lives--including my own--for the better. That description makes the enterprise sound much grander than it actually is, but I do feel that most real change comes through lots of people making reasonable contributions (and a few more heroic people making much larger sacrifices). But I'm up for a challenge, something that will require passionate dedication, and I haven't found a way to make that happen yet.
I'm happy to work hard, as I think my credentials show, but the fight to fulfill my ambitions is going to leave me battered and bruised--and there's no guarantee I'll win.
(And by "say," I mean "backdoor brag.")
I'm a summa cum laude and ΦΒΚ graduate of a major university. I was first in my class, earning straight A's while holding competitive internships. I received a highly sought-after doctoral fellowship.
And I'm lucky to have just been offered an entry-level clerical temp job.How many aphorisms are there about making your own opportunities? Carpe diem. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Be the change you want to see in the world. Protestant work-ethic. The self-made man. God helps those who help themselves. Yes we can. Seize the day. Those are all still true today, more or less... but it takes more effort than it did a generation ago. Only 74% of Americans in my age bracket are working. Making your own opportunities is only possible to a point; those openings are being choked off by corporate irresponsibility, voter apathy, polarization, congressional dumbassery, lax educational standards, you pick 'em.
I'm not trying to shirk any responsibility, here--I could've applied myself in more lucrative subjects as a teenager. But it's not my fault that the banking industry destroyed my generation's economic future.
There's nothing like unemployment to turn a young person political. I've considered myself to be socially conscious for years, ever since I took a seminar on sexuality and public life as a sophomore; but until recently, I've been content to stay ensconced in academe's ivory tower, comfortable with First Amendment theorizing. It let me feel like I was "getting involved," but without getting my hands dirty. My righteous indignation at Bush's reelection was thoroughly expressed in a strongly-worded writing assignment.
Like I said above, I know I'm lucky to have the job I've just taken. But I know that there are more substantial, yet still sensibly achievable, things I want to do with my energy and my career. I can only hope that I get the chance to do them.
Now I find myself volunteering my research skills to support Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston. I'm assisting a local TEDx conference, sponsoring speakers dedicated to helping communities thrive. These are ways I can contribute, using my training to benefit causes that might actually impact lives--including my own--for the better. That description makes the enterprise sound much grander than it actually is, but I do feel that most real change comes through lots of people making reasonable contributions (and a few more heroic people making much larger sacrifices). But I'm up for a challenge, something that will require passionate dedication, and I haven't found a way to make that happen yet.
I'm happy to work hard, as I think my credentials show, but the fight to fulfill my ambitions is going to leave me battered and bruised--and there's no guarantee I'll win.
Oct 7, 2011
Kaffeeklatsch, anyone?
A good friend's mother once asked me how I cope with the loss of a religious community. At the time--and please bear in mind, the time was my senior year of high school--I didn't think it a silly question, but I did sort of dismiss it. I had plenty of friends, I told her. I see people at school all day long, and then I see them again during softball practice or play rehearsal or weekend parties.
Now that I'm done with my coursework, I kind of see what she was getting at. School, or at least the classtime part of school, is likely over for me... and I miss it deeply. I'm not really built for the "independent research" thing, and I never have been; without the prospect of seeing a group of my peers every week to discuss a common intellectual interest, I'm left woefully unmotivated. Sure, there are dissertation meet-ups and the like, but those just aren't the same. My brain's procrastination center (which I'm pretty sure constitutes roughly 75% of my frontal lobe's grey matter) would still know I was there voluntarily, with no real consequences for failure.
As a would-be scholar of religion, I absolutely recognize that groups of like-minded people can lift individuals out of despondency. Or that a person might draw comfort from the beliefs his group stands for. It doesn't take a lot of probing to see this dynamic in action; for instance, when his young son died of cancer a few years back, my previously-lukewarm uncle threw himself into Mormonism with an understandable enthusiasm. So yeah, I get it. People need people.
Religious studies folks love to talk about communities, brotherhoods, sodalities, wholes-being-more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts. Getting caught up in a transcendent togetherness. Never having been much a one for organized ritual or spirituality, historically I've found plenty of proxies to achieve that feeling: academic seminars, theater productions, sports. But for the last few years, I've succumbed to that obliging malaise of the white urban twentysomething: ennui. Weltschmerz.
Without school, without employment, without softball or Waiting for Lefty, I'm just leading an atomistic life, floating from each one-on-one rendezvous to the next. Yesterday, I met up with a former fellow-student for coffee. I'm having drinks with another in an hour. These little tête-à-têtes, these little individual bitch-sessions, get me through the week--but these don't make a community. They can't stave off the anomie. I've got friends, sure. And they're wonderful... but they don't lend definition to my identity in the same way.
I'm not looking to join a new church. I did play softball last season, but it didn't stick. I've started doing a little volunteer work, but that's mostly just phone calls and emails I do from home. I tutor high school students, which is just more one-on-one time. I'm reluctant to start playing another sport without decent health insurance. I've thought about going back to school, to a different program, but that just sounds like I'd be digging myself into deeper debt without much professional payoff.
I've got an amazing boyfriend, a thoroughly terrific (though thousands of miles distant) family, and great friends. But without something bigger to participate in, to work toward, the self wilts.
Now that I'm done with my coursework, I kind of see what she was getting at. School, or at least the classtime part of school, is likely over for me... and I miss it deeply. I'm not really built for the "independent research" thing, and I never have been; without the prospect of seeing a group of my peers every week to discuss a common intellectual interest, I'm left woefully unmotivated. Sure, there are dissertation meet-ups and the like, but those just aren't the same. My brain's procrastination center (which I'm pretty sure constitutes roughly 75% of my frontal lobe's grey matter) would still know I was there voluntarily, with no real consequences for failure.
As a would-be scholar of religion, I absolutely recognize that groups of like-minded people can lift individuals out of despondency. Or that a person might draw comfort from the beliefs his group stands for. It doesn't take a lot of probing to see this dynamic in action; for instance, when his young son died of cancer a few years back, my previously-lukewarm uncle threw himself into Mormonism with an understandable enthusiasm. So yeah, I get it. People need people.
Religious studies folks love to talk about communities, brotherhoods, sodalities, wholes-being-more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts. Getting caught up in a transcendent togetherness. Never having been much a one for organized ritual or spirituality, historically I've found plenty of proxies to achieve that feeling: academic seminars, theater productions, sports. But for the last few years, I've succumbed to that obliging malaise of the white urban twentysomething: ennui. Weltschmerz.
Without school, without employment, without softball or Waiting for Lefty, I'm just leading an atomistic life, floating from each one-on-one rendezvous to the next. Yesterday, I met up with a former fellow-student for coffee. I'm having drinks with another in an hour. These little tête-à-têtes, these little individual bitch-sessions, get me through the week--but these don't make a community. They can't stave off the anomie. I've got friends, sure. And they're wonderful... but they don't lend definition to my identity in the same way.
I'm not looking to join a new church. I did play softball last season, but it didn't stick. I've started doing a little volunteer work, but that's mostly just phone calls and emails I do from home. I tutor high school students, which is just more one-on-one time. I'm reluctant to start playing another sport without decent health insurance. I've thought about going back to school, to a different program, but that just sounds like I'd be digging myself into deeper debt without much professional payoff.
I've got an amazing boyfriend, a thoroughly terrific (though thousands of miles distant) family, and great friends. But without something bigger to participate in, to work toward, the self wilts.
Oct 6, 2011
Particles of Faith
Used to be, I'd tell people I was embarrassed. That it was personal information and only I should have control over who knew. I'd pretend to be politely annoyed when someone else spilled the beans. But the truth is... I take pride in it. It's a big part of what makes me unique, an intriguing element of my past and my family. Without it, I'm just another middle-class white girl from the suburbs. It piques others' interest and lends me a magnetism I might otherwise lack.
I'm an ex-Mormon.
Dad comes from a long, long line of Latter-day Saints. We're talking way back, to the early nineteenth century, not too long after the church itself was founded. He met my mom, the daughter of converts, when they were missionaries in France and Belgium; they got married in the Los Angeles temple a couple of years later. They had some kids, including yours truly. And then things got complicated in the mid-Nineties and we stopped being Mormon.
The reasons are manifold and took many years to develop, and they're a story for another time. Suffice it to say, my family could no longer pretend that our social values were compatible with church doctrine or the community atmosphere. Being a mere pre-teen at the time, I wasn't privy to all the nuances of the process; all I knew was that I could sleep in on Sundays from that point on.
Okay, that's not quite fair. It was a big deal to me at the time, at least on some levels: I had never been especially devout, but for the most part, I thought church was okay. I had friends there, and I liked my Sunday school teachers; most of my memories are of benign boredom. The women wore pumps and floral dresses that neatly straddled the tasteful/tacky line, while the men had perfectly shined wingtips and dark ties. It was safe and familiar and I knew all the songs. ("We'll sing, and we'll shout, with the aaaarmies of heeeaveeen...!") But I could tell when my parents' attitude started changing--it was gradual, but tangible. Things started to feel a little bit uncomfortable and itchy, kind of like the wool stockings I had to wear. And mom started sporting pantsuits.
Something was definitely different.
Even back then, at the age of almost-twelve, my parents trusted me enough to make up my own mind. They made it perfectly clear that I could always go to church--they'd drive me, they'd make sure I saw my Mormon friends, they'd get me to after-church activities if I wanted to go. If I wanted to go. This was the first major life decision they had put in my hands, and I could tell it was a doozy. But it wasn't a hard choice: it meant that my weekends were suddenly freer and fuller than they had ever been before. I could go to Saturday-night sleepovers without complication; Sundays could be used to get homework or important television watching done; nobody got me up at ungodly* hours to brush my hair and find my mary-janes. It's hard for me to imagine many ordinary pre-teens picking any other option.
In some ways, giving me such autonomy saved my mom and dad a lot of grief. Although we lived in a moderately liberal town outside notoriously enlightened Boston, it was home to a truly significant LDS minority, and my folks took a great deal of flak. A few local kids said mean things to us--and their parents said things that were much, much worse. But whenever concerned Mormon matrons would call the house, asking me and my older sister (in hushed yet pained tones) if our wicked mother wouldn't let us go to church, we could honestly say that such wasn't the case. No, we don't need a ride. Thanks anyway. Buh-bye.
My parents lost a lot of friends during that time. Their consciences may have been clear, and a moral burden lifted from their shoulders, but I don't think their lives were particularly happy until we moved far away a few years later. And I can't thank them enough for that emotional sacrifice: I might've made a contented Mormon--though I doubt it--yet I don't think we all would have. Some of us would have rebelled later, on our own, and without the same support system. Such dramatic changes could tear a family apart, and we're so lucky that it made us that much closer. (I can't say the same for my extended relatives, but that's another matter.) We went through this huge ordeal together and came out stronger for it.
In what my folks consider an ironic postscript to the whole affair, I decided to double major in religious studies during my sophomore year of college. Erin? The totally un-spiritual, decidedly not-interested-in-belief daughter? The one who only went to church to play with her friends and eat Cheerios under the pews? Yup. And now I'm pursuing my Ph.D. in religion, too. Go figure.
*Pun intended?
I'm an ex-Mormon.
Dad comes from a long, long line of Latter-day Saints. We're talking way back, to the early nineteenth century, not too long after the church itself was founded. He met my mom, the daughter of converts, when they were missionaries in France and Belgium; they got married in the Los Angeles temple a couple of years later. They had some kids, including yours truly. And then things got complicated in the mid-Nineties and we stopped being Mormon.
The reasons are manifold and took many years to develop, and they're a story for another time. Suffice it to say, my family could no longer pretend that our social values were compatible with church doctrine or the community atmosphere. Being a mere pre-teen at the time, I wasn't privy to all the nuances of the process; all I knew was that I could sleep in on Sundays from that point on.
Okay, that's not quite fair. It was a big deal to me at the time, at least on some levels: I had never been especially devout, but for the most part, I thought church was okay. I had friends there, and I liked my Sunday school teachers; most of my memories are of benign boredom. The women wore pumps and floral dresses that neatly straddled the tasteful/tacky line, while the men had perfectly shined wingtips and dark ties. It was safe and familiar and I knew all the songs. ("We'll sing, and we'll shout, with the aaaarmies of heeeaveeen...!") But I could tell when my parents' attitude started changing--it was gradual, but tangible. Things started to feel a little bit uncomfortable and itchy, kind of like the wool stockings I had to wear. And mom started sporting pantsuits.
Something was definitely different.
Even back then, at the age of almost-twelve, my parents trusted me enough to make up my own mind. They made it perfectly clear that I could always go to church--they'd drive me, they'd make sure I saw my Mormon friends, they'd get me to after-church activities if I wanted to go. If I wanted to go. This was the first major life decision they had put in my hands, and I could tell it was a doozy. But it wasn't a hard choice: it meant that my weekends were suddenly freer and fuller than they had ever been before. I could go to Saturday-night sleepovers without complication; Sundays could be used to get homework or important television watching done; nobody got me up at ungodly* hours to brush my hair and find my mary-janes. It's hard for me to imagine many ordinary pre-teens picking any other option.
In some ways, giving me such autonomy saved my mom and dad a lot of grief. Although we lived in a moderately liberal town outside notoriously enlightened Boston, it was home to a truly significant LDS minority, and my folks took a great deal of flak. A few local kids said mean things to us--and their parents said things that were much, much worse. But whenever concerned Mormon matrons would call the house, asking me and my older sister (in hushed yet pained tones) if our wicked mother wouldn't let us go to church, we could honestly say that such wasn't the case. No, we don't need a ride. Thanks anyway. Buh-bye.
My parents lost a lot of friends during that time. Their consciences may have been clear, and a moral burden lifted from their shoulders, but I don't think their lives were particularly happy until we moved far away a few years later. And I can't thank them enough for that emotional sacrifice: I might've made a contented Mormon--though I doubt it--yet I don't think we all would have. Some of us would have rebelled later, on our own, and without the same support system. Such dramatic changes could tear a family apart, and we're so lucky that it made us that much closer. (I can't say the same for my extended relatives, but that's another matter.) We went through this huge ordeal together and came out stronger for it.
In what my folks consider an ironic postscript to the whole affair, I decided to double major in religious studies during my sophomore year of college. Erin? The totally un-spiritual, decidedly not-interested-in-belief daughter? The one who only went to church to play with her friends and eat Cheerios under the pews? Yup. And now I'm pursuing my Ph.D. in religion, too. Go figure.
*Pun intended?
Oct 5, 2011
Taken for Granted, Taking for Granted
I've got a job interview tomorrow. It's my seventh since the end of the spring semester. And, if you'll permit me a moment to check... according to my trusty records, I've sent out roughly 95 applications in the last four months.
I'm not sure how I feel about this situation.
Okay, that's a little white lie. I'm glossing it over a bit. Of course I feel like crap, like everyone else in this situation. At least I've sort of got the cover of (sort of*) being in grad school; I'm expected to be chronically poor, and hey, at least I've got plenty of practice living the shabby chic lifestyle of the perpetual student. Right? Right?
The problem is, not only am I broke, but I'm feeling pretty downright worthless. Job-hunting is incredibly ego-bruising, as any non-nepotist can attest. But a small, sour part of myself has discovered a unique depth to this worthlessness: I feel a little like a hypocrite.
I've written plenty--and by written, I suppose I mean complained--about my undergraduates' perceived sense of entitlement. They worked hard in high school, they stayed up all night on this assignment, they've never missed a class... so they deserve an A, no? Well, it's hard for me not to see certain parallels between that attitude and my own during these past few months.
I worked f**cking hard in college. I graduated first in my class. I gave a speech and got a plaque and had the dean say nice things about me in front of hundreds of people. And then I got over it when all that work didn't get me into the graduate programs I wanted; I got in somewhere--not even a bad somewhere--and that was enough. And they paid me to go there.
On top of that, I managed to squeeze in a few awesome internships during my last two years as an undergrad. I've worked summers and I've worked part-time and I know more than one database management program. FileMaker Pro! Raiser's Edge! Access! Yes!
And yet here I am, about to go into yet another round of interviews. Still unemployed. Didn't I do everything right? Didn't I go to a top-tier university, and then grad school, and didn't I find the time to get plenty of office admin experience? Don't I have nice references from impressive-sounding people? So... where's my nice job offer?
I know the economy's in the toilet. I don't live under a rock. It's not like I'm expecting all my dreams to come true--even if Prince Harry is currently single. But damn, son. I've been turned down for minimum-wage jobs. I've been strung along for weeks by prospective employers who'd been too chicken to give me straight answers. I've gone in for meetings, gotten the good vibe, and never heard back. I've ritually scanned the postings and absorbed countless tidbits of Internet wisdom. I've borrowed money from my non-millionaire parents and let my non-royal boyfriend pay most of the rent.
So, yeah, I've been battling this entitlement issue from an angle I hadn't anticipated when I wrapped up my teaching gig in May. Back then, whatever sins my students were committing, surely I was innocent. Surely I knew better. Surely I was still destined for greatness, thanks to my elbow grease and naturally effervescent wit.
Sigh.
* I've taken a leave of absence from my program, because... yeah.
I'm not sure how I feel about this situation.
Okay, that's a little white lie. I'm glossing it over a bit. Of course I feel like crap, like everyone else in this situation. At least I've sort of got the cover of (sort of*) being in grad school; I'm expected to be chronically poor, and hey, at least I've got plenty of practice living the shabby chic lifestyle of the perpetual student. Right? Right?
The problem is, not only am I broke, but I'm feeling pretty downright worthless. Job-hunting is incredibly ego-bruising, as any non-nepotist can attest. But a small, sour part of myself has discovered a unique depth to this worthlessness: I feel a little like a hypocrite.
I've written plenty--and by written, I suppose I mean complained--about my undergraduates' perceived sense of entitlement. They worked hard in high school, they stayed up all night on this assignment, they've never missed a class... so they deserve an A, no? Well, it's hard for me not to see certain parallels between that attitude and my own during these past few months.
I worked f**cking hard in college. I graduated first in my class. I gave a speech and got a plaque and had the dean say nice things about me in front of hundreds of people. And then I got over it when all that work didn't get me into the graduate programs I wanted; I got in somewhere--not even a bad somewhere--and that was enough. And they paid me to go there.
On top of that, I managed to squeeze in a few awesome internships during my last two years as an undergrad. I've worked summers and I've worked part-time and I know more than one database management program. FileMaker Pro! Raiser's Edge! Access! Yes!
And yet here I am, about to go into yet another round of interviews. Still unemployed. Didn't I do everything right? Didn't I go to a top-tier university, and then grad school, and didn't I find the time to get plenty of office admin experience? Don't I have nice references from impressive-sounding people? So... where's my nice job offer?
I know the economy's in the toilet. I don't live under a rock. It's not like I'm expecting all my dreams to come true--even if Prince Harry is currently single. But damn, son. I've been turned down for minimum-wage jobs. I've been strung along for weeks by prospective employers who'd been too chicken to give me straight answers. I've gone in for meetings, gotten the good vibe, and never heard back. I've ritually scanned the postings and absorbed countless tidbits of Internet wisdom. I've borrowed money from my non-millionaire parents and let my non-royal boyfriend pay most of the rent.
So, yeah, I've been battling this entitlement issue from an angle I hadn't anticipated when I wrapped up my teaching gig in May. Back then, whatever sins my students were committing, surely I was innocent. Surely I knew better. Surely I was still destined for greatness, thanks to my elbow grease and naturally effervescent wit.
Sigh.
* I've taken a leave of absence from my program, because... yeah.
May 18, 2011
Stuck in the Middle
Oh joy, student evaluations are in!!1! Time for me to find a comfortable chair, get a glass of wine, and settle in for an evening of honest reflection and thoughtful critique. Right? Right?
I'm smirking so hard right now that I might need elective surgery to have my snicker gland removed. That probably reflects a major personality failing on my part, but at this point, it's difficult for me to take many of the comments seriously. Much has been written on the relative worthlessness of most student evaluation models, so I won't belabor those views here. But I will say that this feedback mechanism doesn't do much for the graduate TA population.
That's not to say that there isn't anything to learn from these evaluations. Far from it. Many (if not most) students have a legitimate perspective on how the course could be improved, but it gets crowded out by more pressing concerns. We distribute this paperwork in the last week of class, when everyone's so stressed out that they just want to complete the form as fast as possible, get the f**k out of the classroom, and grab more coffee before working on something more important. Moreover, until this moment, few instructors have asked their pupils to think critically about the class's structure or its role in developing a skill set. Should we be surprised when the only note on the comment card is a chicken-scratched "too much reading"?
As a TA, my pedagogical world is not as wrapped up in these evaluations. The critics who matter most--or at least have the most direct influence on my academic life--are still the professors. Especially in courses with no discussion sections or labs, a majority of students may never have any direct contact with me, other than blast emails to the entire class or comments on their assignments (which may go unread more often than not). But this past semester, even though I ran lecture for two weeks while the good doctor was out of town, a disappointing number of students still left the "rate your teaching assistant here" section completely blank. At best, I was a benignly negligent presence in the back of the room; at worst, I was a powerless stooge, not to be taken seriously.
Actually, at worst, I was seen by a few as a detriment to the whole experience. I've been a TA long enough to know not to take it personally, and to not let it bruise my self-esteem too much. As this class's prof--a genuinely good guy, who supports his underlings--said to me today, this is just student entitlement run amok. (Are you sensing a theme from my last post? Hmm.) They don't like the grade they've earned, so they blame the teacher. In a semester where a dozen participants were caught plagiarizing, I shouldn't be surprised that a couple of bad eggs lashed out by filling in the "1" bubble for every category on the Scantron.
There have been classes (nay, entire years) when I've been profoundly unsure of my performance. There have been faculty members who have totally undermined us teaching assistants in front of the entire student body. There was one girl whose only feedback was to write the word "MESS" in that "rate your TA" box. There have been kids who've gone over my head and complained to the professor about me. This is just what happens sometimes, especially if you throw high parental expectations, professional school aspirations, and teenage hormones into the mix. And we're told by more experienced instructors not to take these reactions to heart. Some professors will just be clueless about the way they're treating you, and the students are too wrapped up in their adolescent narcissism to see you as a human being. So we all learn to simply dismiss their negative statements.
This is definitely not a healthy approach, for anyone. The instructors are conditioned to reject pessimistic comments, since they so often stem from knee-jerk, emotional reactions to poor grades. The students rarely put the time into crafting a constructive response, given their other concerns; and at this point, it's too late for them to reap any benefits from such reflection. (And doesn't it make more sense to have mid- and end-of-semester evaluations? We have to alert the dean's office if any kid is failing the course by midterms--so shouldn't we be alerted if the course itself is failing?) For the TA--given the dearth of any feedback about his role--the evaluations only hold an anthropological interest. It's a study in power dynamics, anonymity, and futility.
There has to be a better way--and this hypothetical "better way" should include a process for soliciting my opinions. Do I have criticisms of this course? Naturally. But as a liaison between the undergrads and the faculty, it's not always clear to whom I should express them. Do I agree with the guy who comes in to complain that the lectures are unstructured? Do I sympathize with the teacher's dismay over the test scores? It's both, more often than not. I see myself as an advocate for both the students and the professor, talking up each side to the other. I don't "have" a side. I'm a double-agent without an agenda, other than to get through another semester without screwing anything up... and maybe get a few nice evaluation comments for my teaching portfolio.
I'm smirking so hard right now that I might need elective surgery to have my snicker gland removed. That probably reflects a major personality failing on my part, but at this point, it's difficult for me to take many of the comments seriously. Much has been written on the relative worthlessness of most student evaluation models, so I won't belabor those views here. But I will say that this feedback mechanism doesn't do much for the graduate TA population.
That's not to say that there isn't anything to learn from these evaluations. Far from it. Many (if not most) students have a legitimate perspective on how the course could be improved, but it gets crowded out by more pressing concerns. We distribute this paperwork in the last week of class, when everyone's so stressed out that they just want to complete the form as fast as possible, get the f**k out of the classroom, and grab more coffee before working on something more important. Moreover, until this moment, few instructors have asked their pupils to think critically about the class's structure or its role in developing a skill set. Should we be surprised when the only note on the comment card is a chicken-scratched "too much reading"?
As a TA, my pedagogical world is not as wrapped up in these evaluations. The critics who matter most--or at least have the most direct influence on my academic life--are still the professors. Especially in courses with no discussion sections or labs, a majority of students may never have any direct contact with me, other than blast emails to the entire class or comments on their assignments (which may go unread more often than not). But this past semester, even though I ran lecture for two weeks while the good doctor was out of town, a disappointing number of students still left the "rate your teaching assistant here" section completely blank. At best, I was a benignly negligent presence in the back of the room; at worst, I was a powerless stooge, not to be taken seriously.
Actually, at worst, I was seen by a few as a detriment to the whole experience. I've been a TA long enough to know not to take it personally, and to not let it bruise my self-esteem too much. As this class's prof--a genuinely good guy, who supports his underlings--said to me today, this is just student entitlement run amok. (Are you sensing a theme from my last post? Hmm.) They don't like the grade they've earned, so they blame the teacher. In a semester where a dozen participants were caught plagiarizing, I shouldn't be surprised that a couple of bad eggs lashed out by filling in the "1" bubble for every category on the Scantron.
There have been classes (nay, entire years) when I've been profoundly unsure of my performance. There have been faculty members who have totally undermined us teaching assistants in front of the entire student body. There was one girl whose only feedback was to write the word "MESS" in that "rate your TA" box. There have been kids who've gone over my head and complained to the professor about me. This is just what happens sometimes, especially if you throw high parental expectations, professional school aspirations, and teenage hormones into the mix. And we're told by more experienced instructors not to take these reactions to heart. Some professors will just be clueless about the way they're treating you, and the students are too wrapped up in their adolescent narcissism to see you as a human being. So we all learn to simply dismiss their negative statements.
This is definitely not a healthy approach, for anyone. The instructors are conditioned to reject pessimistic comments, since they so often stem from knee-jerk, emotional reactions to poor grades. The students rarely put the time into crafting a constructive response, given their other concerns; and at this point, it's too late for them to reap any benefits from such reflection. (And doesn't it make more sense to have mid- and end-of-semester evaluations? We have to alert the dean's office if any kid is failing the course by midterms--so shouldn't we be alerted if the course itself is failing?) For the TA--given the dearth of any feedback about his role--the evaluations only hold an anthropological interest. It's a study in power dynamics, anonymity, and futility.
There has to be a better way--and this hypothetical "better way" should include a process for soliciting my opinions. Do I have criticisms of this course? Naturally. But as a liaison between the undergrads and the faculty, it's not always clear to whom I should express them. Do I agree with the guy who comes in to complain that the lectures are unstructured? Do I sympathize with the teacher's dismay over the test scores? It's both, more often than not. I see myself as an advocate for both the students and the professor, talking up each side to the other. I don't "have" a side. I'm a double-agent without an agenda, other than to get through another semester without screwing anything up... and maybe get a few nice evaluation comments for my teaching portfolio.
May 9, 2011
Better Living Through Self-Assessment
Another semester has just wrapped up, with the usual giant, uncelebrated push to get everything done. It's the time for mutual assessment: I slap a number on each student's performance, and they fill out course evaluation sheets. It's a woefully unproductive system for pretty much everyone involved. But now that the final grades are in, I've had a moment to consider what advice I'd give these kids as they go forward in their academic lives.
Here's what my comment card would say:
... About School in General:
So, again, why don't I tell my students what I think they should do (or what they should avoid)? Part of it, I'm sure, is that I don't feel like an expert. My life is just as much of a mess, and just as self-defeating as any. Plus, I don't want to come off as a bitchy know-it-all. I spent too many of my middle school years with that reputation. Coupled with the fact that I'm only a few years older than most of my students, these factors do not contribute to my status as a wise sage for emulation. Yet, in actuality, I do wish some of them would model that insecurity, just a bit: looking back over my list of gripes, most of them stem from the strong sense of entitlement exhibited by many students. It's not that I want to quash confidence or self-reliance--quite the contrary--but maybe those qualities should be earned through a little humility.
Now I'm going to go to the gym, until I've earned that pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer. Coincidence?
Here's what my comment card would say:
... About School in General:
- There's a big difference between being the teacher's pet and being a grade-grubber. The former can be a really good thing, for the student's performance in the class and for the teacher's sanity--hey, at least there's one kid who cares about what's going on. The latter just pisses us off.
- It's so easy to be the positive kind of teacher's pet. Come to office hours--just once, even--and for God's sake, raise your hand when the professor asks a question. This lack of responsiveness from a classroom has never made any sense to me: why are you or your parents paying fifty thousand dollars a year, if you're not going to participate in your education? Why wouldn't you want to get credit for having an answer? (I've rarely known an instructor to subtract points for an incorrect guess; he's just happy someone spoke up at all.) Silence can be really demoralizing for the teacher, and detracts from the overall quality of the course.
- If you are going to complain about your grade on any given assignment, there are ways to do it that could actually score you points with your professor, rather than making you seem like a self-centered, entitled harpy. Above all, do not go in there with the expectation that your grade will get changed, unless it's attributable to a simple math error. Instead, ask for more detailed feedback about your submission, and for suggestions on how to improve your performance on the next assignment. Give your instructor advance notice that you'd like to meet with her, and bring the original copy with her comments. You'll have a much more productive conversation if you don't ambush her.
- Accusations of unfairness drive me absolutely insane. I'm sure there really are teachers out there with a grudge against particular students, but those are surely the exceptions. Especially with essays, I get a lot of complaints along the lines of "I stayed up all night writing this/I worked really hard/so I deserve an A!" I'm sorry, but at the college level, the "volume" of effort just doesn't factor into a submission's grade--at least, not as much as it does at the high school level. As college instructors, under most circumstances, we can only gauge the quality of the final product; high school teachers tend to reward effort more, since they're so refreshed to see any real engagement with the material, even if the conclusions aren't particularly insightful. Do I care that you worked on this paper for hours on end? Yes. Does that automatically mean I should boost your score? No--not unless it paid off with some thoughtful, well-argued writing. (Sometimes I ask these complainants if I should lower the grade of naturally talented writers who manage to dash off an excellent essay in half the time.)
- Read the feedback on your papers. Read the feedback on your papers. Read the feedback on your papers! If I see the same sorts of errors on all of your submissions over the course of a semester, your grade is never going to improve. It may, in fact, get worse.
- If you get an A-, just shut up about it.
- Unless you're attending an explicitly religious college or seminary, you may be asked to leave some of your faith-based assumptions at the door. That doesn't mean you have to stop being a believer inside the classroom, but you'll get a lot more out of the experience if you situate your arguments within the academic context of the course. Learning a new perspective on the material--even if it doesn't totally jive with what you're used to hearing in worship services--might just add more depth to your convictions. Yes, I know this assumes the endorsement of a multicultural, quasi-secular, critical thinking stance; but that's what liberal arts educations are for, by and large. If you don't like it, at least you'll be more familiar with what many non-believers are thinking.
- Some religion professors will be more than happy to let you use personal interpretations, experiences, and anecdotes as evidence in certain kinds of assignments; others will not. When in doubt, look closely at the course syllabus and essay prompts--and then ask the instructor. Always make it clear that they are your own beliefs, and recognize that they may not apply to everyone.
- Avoid sweeping statements about what "Christians think" or what "Buddhists believe." No one can possibly know what all persons belonging to a faith feel about any given topic, even if it's something that seems totally fundamental. People are just too varied and unique and contradictory. If you're going to offer generalizations, acknowledge them as such--and provide some sort of evidence or justification. The more nuance, the better.
- I joined Facebook back when it was still "The Facebook." It only had twelve schools. It had fewer than a million members. I know how to use it--and many of your instructors will, too. Don't put anything on there that you wouldn't want me to see. This seems rather basic, but I can't tell you how many students are caught asking for extensions when they've been "sick" [read: partying].
- Teachers and students are engaged in a professional relationship, and everyone's interactions should reflect that. Some instructors are chummier than others--I definitely go out of my way to appear approachable and empathetic--but any time I'm speaking with a student, I'm doing so in my occupational capacity. I've gotten the habit of using appropriate language in all non-personal correspondence, and I wish others would learn to do the same. That means proper capitalization, spelling out full words and sentences, and a limit of one exclamation point per statement. I do think there's a time and place for the occasional expletive; some students need to be shocked now and again, and it can go a long way to establishing a good rapport.
So, again, why don't I tell my students what I think they should do (or what they should avoid)? Part of it, I'm sure, is that I don't feel like an expert. My life is just as much of a mess, and just as self-defeating as any. Plus, I don't want to come off as a bitchy know-it-all. I spent too many of my middle school years with that reputation. Coupled with the fact that I'm only a few years older than most of my students, these factors do not contribute to my status as a wise sage for emulation. Yet, in actuality, I do wish some of them would model that insecurity, just a bit: looking back over my list of gripes, most of them stem from the strong sense of entitlement exhibited by many students. It's not that I want to quash confidence or self-reliance--quite the contrary--but maybe those qualities should be earned through a little humility.
Now I'm going to go to the gym, until I've earned that pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer. Coincidence?
May 6, 2011
The Market-Driven Life
In an earlier post, I mentioned that few--if any--students take my classes because they're interested in the topic. Instead, they've signed up for it to satisfy a university requirement. This is probably a lament for many instructors of introductory courses outside the hard sciences (and, I daresay, for some within that field as well). Let's face it: 100-level humanities classes at big universities are generally not designed for anyone who actually plans to pursue that major.
I'm not saying they should be. At my undergraduate institution, they seemed specifically engineered to weed out students who weren't invested in the subject: unless you really wanted to be there, you were going to hate it. This had obvious benefits and drawbacks. It helped keep departments lean and elite, but it also meant there was a deep divide within the student body. Feedback must've seemed bipolar: many evaluations of professors would be vicious. "Oh my God, Prof. So-and-So is sooo mean, he never gives A's, there's so much reading, yadda yadda." Meanwhile, the kids who were interested sometimes hero-worshiped those instructors, since they treated us like real, thinking people. We got to learn a subject in depth, without catering to the lowest common denominator, which had never been the case for us before. So this kind of class design philosophy made for a palpable divisiveness, and drove most students to stay within our academic comfort zones.
The department I'm in now has taken a different tack, but I can't say that it's better. Our administrators have faced the reality that hardly anyone is going to pursue a bachelor's degree in such an unprofitable discipline as religion. At best, we're going to remain a boutique field, tempting the odd international relations sophomore to complete a minor. A devout School of Communications or Health Sciences student might dip into a class on the Bible, since she always meant to read it more. That's about it. And these demographics have a pronounced effect on our course syllabi.
I'm not really talking about the upper-level offerings that cater to our few dozen full-time undergrads (and are always cross-registered with graduate seminars, to pad the roster). Our faculty often come up with wonderful workshops on Maimonides or the Ramayana or women in Islam. Rather, the 70- to 200-person intro classes--the surveys of Eastern or Western religions, or scripture, or history--see the most impact on their design. They can't possibly gear the entire enterprise around the 1.3 students who might take another religion course, who might go on to use this information again in some other academic setting. So compromises are made.
I've seen how the sausage is made. The Ph.D. candidates in my department have to sing for their supper, earning our keep by teaching, as TA's or writing program instructors. One of our funding commitments is attendance at monthly pedagogical seminars; a different faculty member comes each time, to talk about how he or she conceptualizes each intro course. A recent seminar leader described the necessary balance between giving the students what he wants to give them (basic critical thinking tools) and giving them what they want (namely, memorizable facts about Christianity, with maybe a few juicy tidbits about Islam thrown in). In practice, this is what that balance looks like: accommodate their desires when there's no good reason not to, and only hammer home the one other thing that's most important to you. There just isn't time in a fifteen-week semester to do anything else effectively.
I'm not sure yet what that "one other thing" would be in my class, when I get to design my own syllabus in that long-off future. Too many scholarly issues are too important to me. I suppose it would be crafting thoughtful arguments... but would that leave enough time to give them the raw information to argue about? On the flip side, I know I have a tendency to get caught up in the details. (I think this is common among former English majors, who were told over and over again of the value in "close reading.") Would I spend too much classtime pointing out all the little nuances of Psalm 139 or Sura 9, rather than reminding them of the big picture? I just don't know yet.
In the meantime, we instructors are left to suss out what sorts of things the students want to know, and to present that material in an easily-digestible format. (If a little critical thinking comes up along the way, so much the better, but we don't expect it to happen often.) And these kids want to learn things, not abstracts: information that can be written on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation, with bullet points and vocabulary lists. They want to know things like:
A big part of me--the part that likes being mistaken for an authority, the part that likes having a few dozen trusting minds look up at me--wants to give them those facts. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that: critical thinking doesn't do much in a vacuum. But if "telling students the facts" is the main thing a class is designed for, then we're giving the unknowledgeable too much power in setting the agenda. Should students' desires be taken seriously? Yes. Undoubtedly. But higher education should aim beyond lists of dates and dictates, and should expect us to dedicate our scarce classtime to imparting knowledge that can't be easily learned from a PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, as I suggested in my last post, much of the time I can't trust that students will do the work. Reviewing old material has become the focus of most class meetings. This suits the philosophy of my department just fine: it's better that everyone masters the basics, rather than leaving some behind while a few flourish. And I guess I'm okay with it.
I can't help myself. I wish more young people were interested in becoming well-rounded, informed citizens. If they were, my job would be so much easier--they'd ask better questions and do the reading and bring new ideas to the table. Maybe they are interested, and I just don't see it; or maybe I'm expecting too much of eighteen-year-olds, who probably also have jobs or internships or hours of labwork each week. I don't know. I just see a lamentable, perhaps dangerous lack of deep curiosity about subjects outside their more lucrative majors.
Part of my role in the university is to help mold these kids into the kinds of thinkers I hope they'll become. But if our classes kowtow to what those teenagers want, rather than what we want for them, then what is the likelihood of that happening?
I'm not saying they should be. At my undergraduate institution, they seemed specifically engineered to weed out students who weren't invested in the subject: unless you really wanted to be there, you were going to hate it. This had obvious benefits and drawbacks. It helped keep departments lean and elite, but it also meant there was a deep divide within the student body. Feedback must've seemed bipolar: many evaluations of professors would be vicious. "Oh my God, Prof. So-and-So is sooo mean, he never gives A's, there's so much reading, yadda yadda." Meanwhile, the kids who were interested sometimes hero-worshiped those instructors, since they treated us like real, thinking people. We got to learn a subject in depth, without catering to the lowest common denominator, which had never been the case for us before. So this kind of class design philosophy made for a palpable divisiveness, and drove most students to stay within our academic comfort zones.
The department I'm in now has taken a different tack, but I can't say that it's better. Our administrators have faced the reality that hardly anyone is going to pursue a bachelor's degree in such an unprofitable discipline as religion. At best, we're going to remain a boutique field, tempting the odd international relations sophomore to complete a minor. A devout School of Communications or Health Sciences student might dip into a class on the Bible, since she always meant to read it more. That's about it. And these demographics have a pronounced effect on our course syllabi.
I'm not really talking about the upper-level offerings that cater to our few dozen full-time undergrads (and are always cross-registered with graduate seminars, to pad the roster). Our faculty often come up with wonderful workshops on Maimonides or the Ramayana or women in Islam. Rather, the 70- to 200-person intro classes--the surveys of Eastern or Western religions, or scripture, or history--see the most impact on their design. They can't possibly gear the entire enterprise around the 1.3 students who might take another religion course, who might go on to use this information again in some other academic setting. So compromises are made.
I've seen how the sausage is made. The Ph.D. candidates in my department have to sing for their supper, earning our keep by teaching, as TA's or writing program instructors. One of our funding commitments is attendance at monthly pedagogical seminars; a different faculty member comes each time, to talk about how he or she conceptualizes each intro course. A recent seminar leader described the necessary balance between giving the students what he wants to give them (basic critical thinking tools) and giving them what they want (namely, memorizable facts about Christianity, with maybe a few juicy tidbits about Islam thrown in). In practice, this is what that balance looks like: accommodate their desires when there's no good reason not to, and only hammer home the one other thing that's most important to you. There just isn't time in a fifteen-week semester to do anything else effectively.
I'm not sure yet what that "one other thing" would be in my class, when I get to design my own syllabus in that long-off future. Too many scholarly issues are too important to me. I suppose it would be crafting thoughtful arguments... but would that leave enough time to give them the raw information to argue about? On the flip side, I know I have a tendency to get caught up in the details. (I think this is common among former English majors, who were told over and over again of the value in "close reading.") Would I spend too much classtime pointing out all the little nuances of Psalm 139 or Sura 9, rather than reminding them of the big picture? I just don't know yet.
In the meantime, we instructors are left to suss out what sorts of things the students want to know, and to present that material in an easily-digestible format. (If a little critical thinking comes up along the way, so much the better, but we don't expect it to happen often.) And these kids want to learn things, not abstracts: information that can be written on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation, with bullet points and vocabulary lists. They want to know things like:
- What religion are Chinese people?
- Who wrote the Bible?
- What do Muslims think about America?
- If Jesus was a real person, then why don't Jews believe in him?
- Are Mormons Christians?
- Who's the Buddha?
- Scientology's a cult, right?
A big part of me--the part that likes being mistaken for an authority, the part that likes having a few dozen trusting minds look up at me--wants to give them those facts. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that: critical thinking doesn't do much in a vacuum. But if "telling students the facts" is the main thing a class is designed for, then we're giving the unknowledgeable too much power in setting the agenda. Should students' desires be taken seriously? Yes. Undoubtedly. But higher education should aim beyond lists of dates and dictates, and should expect us to dedicate our scarce classtime to imparting knowledge that can't be easily learned from a PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, as I suggested in my last post, much of the time I can't trust that students will do the work. Reviewing old material has become the focus of most class meetings. This suits the philosophy of my department just fine: it's better that everyone masters the basics, rather than leaving some behind while a few flourish. And I guess I'm okay with it.
I can't help myself. I wish more young people were interested in becoming well-rounded, informed citizens. If they were, my job would be so much easier--they'd ask better questions and do the reading and bring new ideas to the table. Maybe they are interested, and I just don't see it; or maybe I'm expecting too much of eighteen-year-olds, who probably also have jobs or internships or hours of labwork each week. I don't know. I just see a lamentable, perhaps dangerous lack of deep curiosity about subjects outside their more lucrative majors.
Part of my role in the university is to help mold these kids into the kinds of thinkers I hope they'll become. But if our classes kowtow to what those teenagers want, rather than what we want for them, then what is the likelihood of that happening?
May 5, 2011
The Case of the Unwitting Plagiarist
The last ten days have really done a number on my outlook for the future. Not my own personal prospects--those are always in doubt--but the way things are going for today's students. In a nutshell: they're going nowhere, fast.
No big surprise there. My expectations for their performance have diminished with every passing semester. I may see improvement in my own approaches, mostly forged by mistakes I've made or by observing other TA's, but my standards seem to crumble a bit more with every fresh round of assignments. More and more A's are going to work that only cover the most basic essentials, while C's and D's plumb increasingly profound depths of underachievement. Total failure is reserved for those special occasions when nothing is submitted.
I was told this would happen: my advisor warned me, the first time I taught for him. Advanced grad students nodded at me with solemn, knowing faces when I expressed my doubts. The school administration announced it during my one (one!) day of instructional training. "Oh yeah," all these voices said. "You'll be appalled. This is supposed to be a good school, but these kids don't know anything, and most of them don't care."
After three years as a TA for a major university in Massachusetts, I've accumulated a lot of depressing stories to illustrate this phenomenon. I'm sure I'll get around to sharing many of them. But for now, for today, I just need to say something about what's been going on among my students in the last week and a half. It's the Great Big Bête Noir of professional educators: plagiarism. I've seen it before. It's nothing new. Any teacher worth his salt will tell you that it's an Important-capital-I Issue, it's ruining higher ed in this country, it's a damn shame. But few, I'd venture, have experienced it on such a massive, flagrant scale as I have recently.
I'm not going to go into particulars right now--these students have a right to some privacy. But it speaks to a deeply problematic trend, to my mind, that nearly a dozen teens thought it perfectly acceptable to pass off others' work as their own. Either in whole or in significant part, almost a fifth of my students copied information directly from various websites for our last assignment, without citation. It got to the point where the professor in charge felt the need to make several announcements to the entire class about it. There were a lot of glum expressions and hunched bodies.
Cheaters, I can handle. They know they've done something wrong. They come to your office, polite and almost wordless. They're so grateful when you show them any mercy at all. (For administrative reasons, we decided to prosecute formally only the worst offenders.) Maybe it's cynical to feel as though this academic fraud is "normal," but at least it fits into my worldview: some people will always take the easy way out, even when the consequences for getting caught are dire. Some will always do what they can to get ahead. I can wrap my mind around that. We're trained to think that immoral behavoir works sometimes: evil corporations and corrupt politicians thrive right up until the dam breaks, while nice guys finish last. I can label those instances of outright plagiarism as straightforward, garden-variety deception. But no, the ones that trouble me most--the ones that settle in the pit of my stomach and tickle the part of my brain that worries about Society As a Whole--are those cases when a student doesn't think she did anything wrong.
Those are the students who were failed by their high school, and who are being failed by my university, to some degree. How does an eighteen-year-old get accepted to a competitive college without knowing the basic rules of attribution? How does he pass his freshman writing course? I fully acknowledge that there are some fuzzy lines--maybe you're not sure if the course textbook needs to be footnoted, or information from lecture. Or what if my roommate and I talk about the assignment, and so we happen to turn in very similar papers? These are legitimate questions, yet many students don't think to ask until it's too late and suspicions arise. But even these situations are not what trouble me, not really. It's when an indignant junior confronts me right after class to argue that "You never told me I needed to cite my sources!" or when a bewildered sophomore wonders why I'd want to know what she thinks, when other, smarter writers have said it so much better. Those are the times it takes all my self-control not to facepalm right in front of them, or not to grab them by the shoulders and shake them while screaming, "Demand your tuition back from the bursar! You're not getting a good enough education for forty grand!"
I'm probably part of the problem. After all, if we only report a few of the worst cases to the Dean, will the others think there are no real consequences for this behavior? Some of them may have even been caught before, but the other professors decided to be merciful too. Part of the issue, from my perspective, is that I'm "just the TA"--I don't design the assignments, or decide what gets covered in class about citation, or what the fallout from cheating will be. I'm just the one who discovers the offense and tells the professor; I'm just the messenger. To the student, I'm the bad guy who gave them an F. To the professor, I'm the bearer of bad tidings. It's an uncomfortable role.
Surely, you may be thinking, I must also have examples of students exceeding my expectations. If my standards are so low, then there have to be cases where someone went above and beyond. And yes, of course there have been engaged, thoughtful young men and women in my classrooms. I'd go so far as to say most of my students have probably been quite smart, or at least willing to work hard--just not in my class. As a humanities instructor in an ever-more market-driven world, the overwhelming majority of people who sign up are there to fill a requirement, and will never take another course outside their field again. They're here to cross that prerequisite off their list. To get an easy A. To take a class that won't strain their otherwise heavy workload. Maybe, maybe one will decide she liked it enough to register for another course in my department next semester--but only maybe. You can't count on it.
No big surprise there. My expectations for their performance have diminished with every passing semester. I may see improvement in my own approaches, mostly forged by mistakes I've made or by observing other TA's, but my standards seem to crumble a bit more with every fresh round of assignments. More and more A's are going to work that only cover the most basic essentials, while C's and D's plumb increasingly profound depths of underachievement. Total failure is reserved for those special occasions when nothing is submitted.
I was told this would happen: my advisor warned me, the first time I taught for him. Advanced grad students nodded at me with solemn, knowing faces when I expressed my doubts. The school administration announced it during my one (one!) day of instructional training. "Oh yeah," all these voices said. "You'll be appalled. This is supposed to be a good school, but these kids don't know anything, and most of them don't care."
After three years as a TA for a major university in Massachusetts, I've accumulated a lot of depressing stories to illustrate this phenomenon. I'm sure I'll get around to sharing many of them. But for now, for today, I just need to say something about what's been going on among my students in the last week and a half. It's the Great Big Bête Noir of professional educators: plagiarism. I've seen it before. It's nothing new. Any teacher worth his salt will tell you that it's an Important-capital-I Issue, it's ruining higher ed in this country, it's a damn shame. But few, I'd venture, have experienced it on such a massive, flagrant scale as I have recently.
I'm not going to go into particulars right now--these students have a right to some privacy. But it speaks to a deeply problematic trend, to my mind, that nearly a dozen teens thought it perfectly acceptable to pass off others' work as their own. Either in whole or in significant part, almost a fifth of my students copied information directly from various websites for our last assignment, without citation. It got to the point where the professor in charge felt the need to make several announcements to the entire class about it. There were a lot of glum expressions and hunched bodies.
Cheaters, I can handle. They know they've done something wrong. They come to your office, polite and almost wordless. They're so grateful when you show them any mercy at all. (For administrative reasons, we decided to prosecute formally only the worst offenders.) Maybe it's cynical to feel as though this academic fraud is "normal," but at least it fits into my worldview: some people will always take the easy way out, even when the consequences for getting caught are dire. Some will always do what they can to get ahead. I can wrap my mind around that. We're trained to think that immoral behavoir works sometimes: evil corporations and corrupt politicians thrive right up until the dam breaks, while nice guys finish last. I can label those instances of outright plagiarism as straightforward, garden-variety deception. But no, the ones that trouble me most--the ones that settle in the pit of my stomach and tickle the part of my brain that worries about Society As a Whole--are those cases when a student doesn't think she did anything wrong.
Those are the students who were failed by their high school, and who are being failed by my university, to some degree. How does an eighteen-year-old get accepted to a competitive college without knowing the basic rules of attribution? How does he pass his freshman writing course? I fully acknowledge that there are some fuzzy lines--maybe you're not sure if the course textbook needs to be footnoted, or information from lecture. Or what if my roommate and I talk about the assignment, and so we happen to turn in very similar papers? These are legitimate questions, yet many students don't think to ask until it's too late and suspicions arise. But even these situations are not what trouble me, not really. It's when an indignant junior confronts me right after class to argue that "You never told me I needed to cite my sources!" or when a bewildered sophomore wonders why I'd want to know what she thinks, when other, smarter writers have said it so much better. Those are the times it takes all my self-control not to facepalm right in front of them, or not to grab them by the shoulders and shake them while screaming, "Demand your tuition back from the bursar! You're not getting a good enough education for forty grand!"
I'm probably part of the problem. After all, if we only report a few of the worst cases to the Dean, will the others think there are no real consequences for this behavior? Some of them may have even been caught before, but the other professors decided to be merciful too. Part of the issue, from my perspective, is that I'm "just the TA"--I don't design the assignments, or decide what gets covered in class about citation, or what the fallout from cheating will be. I'm just the one who discovers the offense and tells the professor; I'm just the messenger. To the student, I'm the bad guy who gave them an F. To the professor, I'm the bearer of bad tidings. It's an uncomfortable role.
Surely, you may be thinking, I must also have examples of students exceeding my expectations. If my standards are so low, then there have to be cases where someone went above and beyond. And yes, of course there have been engaged, thoughtful young men and women in my classrooms. I'd go so far as to say most of my students have probably been quite smart, or at least willing to work hard--just not in my class. As a humanities instructor in an ever-more market-driven world, the overwhelming majority of people who sign up are there to fill a requirement, and will never take another course outside their field again. They're here to cross that prerequisite off their list. To get an easy A. To take a class that won't strain their otherwise heavy workload. Maybe, maybe one will decide she liked it enough to register for another course in my department next semester--but only maybe. You can't count on it.
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