Plagiarism burns

Like most people, I entered education as a student. I was thrilled to learn things that tickled my brain and I was not so thrilled when I could not connect with the material. I paid attention to my teachers and noticed that I did better when I connected with the instructor. In time I was exposed to speaking in public and the thrill of holding an audience spellbound made me seek teaching as a profession. I used to think that education was about teaching. If the teacher were good enough; anyone could learn.

I’ve been a professor for twenty years now and my view of the education process has modified. Perhaps the greatest influence was a trip to the School of the Future in the Netherlands; there they talked about “learners.” This change in vocabulary helped me focus my role in education on its central component: learning. I design and evaluate student work in terms of the learning displayed. I care less about my performance because learning is not about teaching, its about acquiring and applying knowledge. I evaluate student work in terms of the learning it represents. Generally, my job is pretty easy. A student writes about what he or she has learned, and then I assign credit for their display of learning.

Part of that learning assessment is being able to identify what a student does not know in order to help them fill that knowledge gap. My job when grading journals is to assess learning, not writing. I want to know how the concepts we discuss in class crisscross students’ brains as they connect with the socio-communicative reality we all share.

Not every student, however, is thrilled with the topics I teach; not every student appreciates the difference between a degree and an education; not every student is motivated to learn. So, I pay attention to the parts of the process I can impact. I form relationships with students outside of the classroom; I use immediacy behaviors in the classroom, dance at each end of the novelty-predictablity dialectic central to engaging the adolescent brain, and I allow students to control their own learning process as much as possible.

In the past five days, I have encountered four examples of what I consider egregious breeches of the learning contract called the syllabus in which students are advised to do their own work. My standard line is that I’m paid to grade my students’ learning, not that of someone else. To purposely represent someone else’s learning as one’s own is to lie. And in academia, it is akin to stealing.

I know, its so easy. Everybody does it. Nobody really cares. Its easy to do a lot of things that are unethical with that rationale. A person can make a fortune on medicine at the expense of those who need it; a leader can stash money in the islands; the work and land of others can be stolen with no thought to those affected; people become inured to injustice. At what point do we we recoil in horror? When the theft is visible?

I resent being asked to grade the work of someone not enrolled in my class. I resent the corruption of the learning process. I resent having to rethink my opinion of students. I resent questioning the value of long standing assignments. I resent that the stink of corruption in our society has infected the papers I grade. Finally, I resent that will be admonished not to be such a drama queen about the situation. It happens.

Then again, maybe the response is part of the learning. There I go again, teaching like I give a rat’s ass.