What's happening to high school?
Okay, friends o' the blogosphere, I need a little input. Turns out I'm getting a whole bunch of hits on my Picture of Dorian Grey post. Turns out a whole bunch of them are coming from domains with names like www.prepschooloruniversity.edu. Turns out I got an angry email from a teacher letting me know in no uncertain terms that his students are copying pieces of my post and turning it in as their own work. "You are the kind of person that makes cheating easy," he says. "Someone who cares about literature as much as you seem to should make an effort to chastise cheaters, not help them."I take your point, Mr. Jackson. But I enjoy literature myself, and as much as I want to live in a world where high school students think about the things that they read, I also want to live in a world where non-students think and talk about what they read. Moreover, I think through ideas by developing them as I write; I'm not one of those people who outlines an essay before writing it. (If I could do THAT, then why would I need to write the darned thing? For me, being forced to put my ideas down on paper (or computer screens, as the case may be) helps me to clarify my thoughts and, indeed, leads me to new thoughts. Once I've figured out what it is that I have to say about something (by writing out my thoughts on the topic), I can go back and add the stupid introductory bit that essentially says, "What I will show in this paper is X." I don't know what X is until I've written it. That's why having a blog suits me so well: it allows me to think through interesting bits of my life.)
I might also point out that my one or two eminently stealable posts aren't even drops in the bucket when it comes to the lucrative and enormous industry of internet plagiarizing.
Still, I do feel bad, and I do suspect that not all teachers are nearly as proactive, or as computer-literate, as the annoyed Mr. Jackson. So here's the dilemma, blogophiles. Do I take down my posts on books? Do I refrain from writing them in the first place? Do I keep them up just because I happen to like posting them? Does it really matter anyhow? And if you're here looking for one of those posts in the first place, it might even be interesting to consider why that's okay, and under what academic circumstances stealing my ideas could be justified. Is there anything to the whatever-it-takes-to-get-ahead mentality that could make me feel better about aiding and abetting those who stand by it?
I'd love it if visitors to this blog would take a second to offer their thoughts on this post in particular.
posted by Skay @ 1:28 AM
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