Sunday, September 07, 2003
 

I strongly suspect that one of my student's response papers was plagiarized, but if it came from the internet, I can't find the source. The formatting does look like a cut-and-paste job, though. If it came from a book, I'm unlikely to find it. And if I can't find it, I can't prove it. Bleah. Who would go to the trouble to plagarize a two-page response paper? It's only worth something like 3 or 4 percent of the final grade. Bleah again. I don't think I'm being paranoid; there's an odd diversity to the sentences (some that just don't match the others), and I seriously doubt that the student knows what some of the words used in the response mean. It's probably not worth my time and trouble to pursue this any farther; if this student does it on a major paper, though, I'll be duty-bound to track down a source. At least I'll be able to compare the response to the paper, though.

By and large, they aren't great papers. I haven't put grades on any of them yet and thus won't have them returned tomorrow, so the students will just have to deal. I'll have to go through them again to decide exactly what "average" is. I have a feeling that depression will ensue.

I'm reading William Dean Howells and, oddly, I like the novel very much. I think that qualifies me as strange. I also think it's funny, which probably takes me up to the next level of freakiness. Ah, my dull 'n' drear life.

Up tomorrow in the class I teach: Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus. We'll see how that goes over. Given their inability to recognize that all of the Jewish people in Candide were stereotyped as lecherous cheats, I'm a little concerned about how they're going to respond to a novel of Jewish identity. A professor here was telling me about a student from this university that he taught during a foreign study trip in London who, when reading a nonfiction work about the history of Jewish people London, asked why on earth she should be asked to read about Jews while in England. The same student also complained of feeling "lost in a sea of dark faces" while walking through one of the more multicultural sections of London. Charming, perfectly charming. Eeesh. If something like that is said in my class, I'll probably start doing The Exorcist head-spinning thing. My own tolerance levels simply do not extend to willfully ignorant persons.

I think I'm grouchy. Gee, whatta surprise!

Elvisette philosophized at 9:17 PM