2 posts tagged “teaching”

The first time it happened, I was very hurt.  It was personal.  I was a kind, patient, funny, young teacher.  Why would anyone want to or need to cheat in my class??  Hadn't I explained the material clearly?  Didn't the student love me? Was I too boring?  Uninspiring? And then it happened a second, third, twentieth, and hundredth time and it's still happening!!!! 

Over the years, the hurt has faded and was, for a time, replaced with a zeal about catching cheaters.  When I suspected cheating, the adrenalin set in and I dug through the material until it I proved it.  My colleagues would call me with their cheaters and I went after them, too.  I was a bounty hunter in my little classroom world.

Now that zeal is gone and I am just annoyed when I know I am grading stuff that is unoriginal to the student. But I will admit, no matter how many hours it takes to prove cheating, catching the cheater is much better than knowing it without being able to prove it.  Here are a few of my favorites.

CHEAP CHEATS

1. He came to class on test day with words over the entire surfaces of both hands and up his wrists.  Were they lyrics?  A love letter?  A confession?  I had to know before the test but I couldn't force him to show me his palms. So I asked him to help me carry some things.  Bless his heart, he trustingly reached palms up to accept a stack of books from me.  It couldn't be!  The words on his palms and wrists were my words, the words on the test, the words he was supposed to memorize.  It's a nervous thing confronting a cheater, so I casually suggested he visit the restroom and wash his hands before we began the test.  His response? 

 Why would I want to wash my hands now?  It took me a long time to get all this stuff on here!

2. The test wasn't going so well for her.  Other students had finished and left long before, and yet she still came up to me and asked that I explain each and every item.  After each explanation, she would tell me she still didn't understand the question.  Finally, in exasperation, she told me that I shouldn't feel guilty about being such a bad explainer.  She would just go call her boyfriend (who had already left class) and he would help her.

PESKY PLAGIARIZERS

 1.  The paper was on a national park he had visited, and the material was directly from the park's website - complete with photos.  But he did have a conscience, and he had listened to my sermons about the perils of plagiarism. He  dutifully crossed out the name of the park each time it appeared in the body and handwrote the name of a different park.  VOILE!  No more plagiarism.

2.  The first essay was so obviously plagiarized that I had to look up the meanings of the words.  My first internet search of the essay provided an instantaneous hit and the writer was caught.  But he cried and I felt really sad because he said he didn't know he couldn't use other people's essays.  So, Dr. Caution, the soft coward, gave him a second chance.  When that essay was submitted, it, too, came up in the first internet search.  I confronted and he confessed.  As he left class, he did want me to know that he thought I was the smartest person on earth.  According to him, no one else would EVER have thought to check that second essay. 

3.  It was late and I needed to get through the pile of essays in front of me.  I picked up yet another and realized I had read this essay just the week before, but it had been in a national magazine.  I hunted down the original source, got my supervisor's blessing and confronted the student.  Her response was that there was no way she could be guilty of plagiarism.  After all, she had hired someone else to write the paper and that person was guilty, not her. 

Do you have any examples to add to the cheating files??  Let me know. 

A hundred years ago, I joined the most noble of professions.  I became a teacher.  Although I doubted that I would ever be equal to the needs of my students, I dreamed of awakening them to the beauty and complexity of literature.    They would compose, read, critique and we would all have conversations with five-syllable words.  

In fact, teaching has been so much greater than I might have imagined.  I've watched as students may not have fallen in love with literature and grammar, but did discover that they didn't have to detest it.  I've read as they share their lives and articulate their dreams and traumas.  I love what I do for work.

And so, off we go to the local college where I have a little job teaching composition classes.

Several years ago, I was nine months pregnant, highly immobile and teaching a late evening class. In that class were two students seriously in love.  They always sat in a darkened corner of the room where the overhead light never seemed to work.  She sat in front of him.  While the class engaged in the search for verbs, subjects, and prepositional phrases, they engaged in foreplay.  For a few sessions, it was simply an apparent delight in her strawberry gold hair which cascaded over his books.  Then, he couldn't resist; he began to spend class finger-combing her tresses.  Then the face caresses began.  And then there was the fateful night.  The hair, the face weren't enough, and she arched her back to recline uncomfortably on his desk.  Nobody was paying attention to the grammar and several were staring in shock as the love-couple safely reached second base.  All this during prepositional phrase night!

It would seem that I have YET ANOTHER love-couple this term.  I really don't get this hormonal rush during English.  Why not biology or health? This couple sits side by side: desks a solid 18 inches apart, but love is love.  The first few nights of class, she would simply reach across the aisle and rub his arm. Then she passionately began to rub his face and neck.  Then one night, she would not be limited. I will admit that I did admire how far her arm had to reach to touch him.  But, really, enough is enough and I was there to ensure that students got an appropriate education and I determined to end the PDA in my class.  But then, the most unexpected, most rewarding  response came not from me, but from the boyfriend.

Even as she worked diligently to convey her love, he responded.  It was not a loving gaze nor a tender caress.  It wasn't a look of longing nor a whispered affection.  It was loud and prolonged.  It was audible to everyone in the lecture room.  It was honest, purely physical, and completely unrestrained. 

It was a SNORE. 

Love may make the world go round, but it is evidently very tired, too.