Creeping Plagiarism

Today I wanted to find some very simple literary criticism to have my composition 102 students read, after they had shared their own views on James Joyce’s short story, “Araby.”

The literary criticism databases only provided stuff that was a little to complicated for them. So, I googled “araby” and what did I get? Not information about the story or the author, but hundreds of pages offering  pre-written essays for sale!!!

God dammit! Mother F!@#$R

Aparantly the availability of pre-written essays has really gone through the roof since the last time I checked. I mean, I literally couldn’t find what I wanted because of all the “cheat.com” sites that were spamming my search.

I have to believe that this is due, in part, to No Child Left Behind. A generation of students has gone through a primary and secondary school system that has taught them how to “pass the test.” The problem is they don’t have any idea how to form a coherent argument (not unlike the head of the administration who came up with “no child”)

When I read what some of my students have written, my heart just f**king breaks. They clearly have intelligent thoughts and passionate feelings about their subjects, but they don’t know how to express them. It’s like watching a stroke victim (or Brian Wilson) try and tell you what they’re thinking.

I suppose the counterpoint to my complaint would be this: “Well, Fouts, that’s your job. Teach them how to express themselves using standard written English.  Teach them the available means of persuasion for any given situation. Teach them how to use the library, how to think critically, how to organize an argument, cite sources, create a bibliography, and also to put their names on every page. You have two months—-GO!”

The

During my community college class today, I was talking with one of my students after class. This student is concerned about issues of grammar arising from his/her learning English as a second language.

I seriously pity anybody who has to learn English as an adult. English doesn’t really make sense.

Last class, my student was concerned about when to use “a” and “an”. So, today, I had a little after-class session for anybody who wanted to stay. I went over the difference. Turns out that what she doesn’t understand is when to use “a” or “an” and “the”.

I tried to explain the definite article and another student came up with a perfect example: you might go shopping for “a” sweater, but eventually, while you are at the store, you find “the” sweater that you want. But my student still had problems with it. I think she is going to make it because her diagnostic essay was at the same writing level as everybody else’s but I wish I could explain it better.

After class, I stopped by my favorite microbrewery, Lunar Brewing, to drown my sorrows. While I was there I read the “Great Lakes Brewing News,” and, since it was on my mind, I marked all the usages of the word “the” in one of the articles.

This article is short. It consists of nine short paragraphs, but it contains 27 usages of the word “the”. Thing is, out of those 27, only fifteen of them were absolutely necessary. The remaining twelve could have been switched with “a” or “an,” or left out altoghether.

I have decided that the definate article is a subversive little bastard the gets everywhere, like roaches, and that I don’t like it very much at all. Grrrrrr.

So it goes.