Note: This was written Friday evening, but I apparently hit the "save" button instead of the "publish" button. That's what I get for blogging at midnight.
I was dragging all day. I slept well after our win, but my body physically hurts. I hope not getting sick. Today was a red day, so it meant all new lessons to my English 12 classes. We also had a pep session today, so we were on our early release schedule, meaning the classes were roughly 5 minutes shorter. I say roughly because our new bell system continues to be daily attacked by gremlins and today, it didn't work at all. Admin had to come over the intercom to announce the release of classes and the start of classes, but even the intercom's functionality was sporadic at best. I believe an email was sent to release 1st period class, which I found ironic because if any of us were at our desks when the bell rang for the end of class, well, lets just say that would be frowned upon.
English class today was about the riveting topics of plagiarism, citing, and in-text citations. I showed a Ted Ed video called "The Perils of Plagiarism", which the students really seemed to enjoy. It discussed a few types of plagiarism they didn't know existed, and they were more than a little surprised to learn that our English word "plagiarism" comes from the Latin word "plagiarus", which means "kidnapper". In every single class a student asked me if a person could go to jail for plagiarism. Guess the association with kidnapping really stuck! Anyway, since a person can't go to the big house for kidnapping words, I showed them some real world examples of plagiarism. The ones that I believe had the biggest impact were the examples in music where musicians have copied others and had to play large settlement fees. We also discussed how using someone else's ideas without giving them credit (intellectual property) is also a form of plagiarism. To my slight disbelieve, very few of my students have seen the movie The Social Network. I used this as an example of plagiarism of the mind, but since maybe 10 students out of 60 had seen it, it took more time to explain the issue of intellectual property and what happened with Facebook than I had anticipated. (On a side note, I don't think the majority of high school students have seen three really good movies in their entire lives. This saddens me.) We then moved on to how to do a proper in-text citation. This was also a new concept to the all but about 10 of them. As sophomore's they do a research project, but only two of the sophomore teachers require them to do in-text citations. This needs to be remedied! Students should at least know what an in-text citation is before they are seniors in high school. Anyway, I discussed why it do it, how to do it, and then showed them examples of it (thank you Google). Lastly, I took them to the OWL site at Purdue. I told them this was by far the best site online that deals with everything they needed to know about the writing process. I almost threw up because I used the words "awesome" and "Purdue" in the same sentence though. I also gave them a handout of how to specifically do in-text citations in the event that feel too lazy to type OWL into a search engine. I did all of this to give them zero excuses when it comes time for the rubber to meet the road.
Grading may be the death of me. Its 11:30 on a Friday night, and I've been grading since 9:15. I was actually excited it was Friday so I could stay up late to grade. I have issues, serious issues. It will get better because I tend to front load my writing classes so I can make sure they are getting the concepts before they write their first papers. Then, I will have cluster gradings, but they will be big clusters. There is light ahead as the Labor Day weekend approaches. If I can get to it, maybe, just maybe, I will keep some sanity.
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