Promoted to the Fresh Air

Several years and several careers ago, I worked for a Swiss textile manufacturing company. They brought management over from Switzerland and they immediately started having dual citizenship babies and trying to fit in to the rural South Carolina community by using—incorrectly, all the local idioms. Being a textile manufacturing company, the lay-offs started soon enough. My boss, Dukar Kaiser, whose 3-year-old son learned English watching Cheech and Chong movies (even had the accents right) called the layoffs “being promoted to the fresh air.” I always remember that around this point every semester.

We’ve moved past the “we’ve all hit the wall” stage and entered the panic stage of the semester. Not me, I’m good to go. It’s the students. One of the classes I teach is…let’s call it unique. Suffice it to say that it is not an honors class. Several of the students are slightly less than motivated, which means their attendance isn’t great. So, now that we’ve reached panic stage, I’ve heard from students this week I’ve not seen or heard from in months.

Yesterday, I got an email from one of those students I’ve not seen in months asking if I could discuss the details of what I mean when I commented “revise for clarity using the methods we discussed in class” and “what’s this T-I-C method of developing paragraphs you talking about?” on his draft.

Well, that one was easy. I responded: “the answers to both of those questions are a bit too involved to cover in an email or an office visit. It has been a few weeks since we’ve covered those topics, though. What I suggest you do is go over your notes from the fourth, fifth, and sixth weeks of class. That’s when I explained these concepts in detail (as noted on the syllabus). We also worked through numerous examples on the board.” On to the next paper.

I start reading the next one. Something’s not right. I check the student’s name. Ah, yes. Haven’t seen this one since early October, either. I check back to two short assignments the student did turn in during those brief appearances. One of them was unreadable and I’d written three times as many suggestions as the original content. The other short piece was flawless and obviously plagiarized. I didn’t bother looking it up, just told the student it was plagiarized, rewrite and resubmit, and I’d consider it an honest mistake.

Crickets. Until now—panic time. I return to the paper and read another sentence or two, then stop. A quick Google search took me directly to the Wikipedia entry. This student had copied every single word from the Wikipedia article. Every. Word. Student was so damn lazy, they even included the book’s publisher and publication information from the site. The student did have the wherewithal to remove all the hyperlinks from the Wikipedia article before submitting it to me, changed the font, removed the pictures, and the sidebars, all of which only pissed me off that much more.

I sent the revised, formal “the Honor Council will be in touch” email, but my first draft read: Dear Student, I read your paper, which also appeared word for word on Wikipedia. Unless you wrote the original Wiki article, then, as my old boss, Dukar Kaiser, used to say: you’re being promoted to the fresh air.”

Geez. How do they get out of high school? Some days…

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