Literacy Now

A sixth-grader, playing FINAL FANTASY on his Xbox 360, knows it’s unfair if his best friend cheats. An eighth-grade girl feels violated if her younger sister steals her password and broadcasts personal information on Facebook. Yet, when it comes to cutting and pasting someone else’s words from the Internet, and using those words as their own, students don’t give it a second thought. In today’s viral environment, students fail to understand why lifting a paragraph—or an entire paper—is such a big deal. And the really bad news is: It’s not just happening in college and high school anymore.

“We have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t have an author,” says Teresa Fishman, the director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, South Carolina. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Plagiarism is nothing new. Dating from 1621, the Latin word “plagiarus” means “kidnapper, seducer, or plunderer.” In a sense, a student who plagiarizes is kidnapping the words and ideas of another. Experts cite various reasons why young students cheat, among them—cheating is easy; chances are they’ll never get caught; if they’re caught, the punishment is not severe. Most agree that plagiarism is a problem that won’t go away, but that doesn’t mean that teachers and schools aren’t fighting back.

White Station Middle School in Memphis, Tennessee, has developed a Plagiarism/Cheating Policy that is used school wide. In simple terms, the document explains plagiarism as:

Directly copying, paraphrasing without proper citation, using and failing to properly credit, recycling previously submitted work, and using artwork or pictures without proper citation.

The policy also states the consequences of plagiarism, which range from a meeting with the principal, guidance counselor, and parents to a 1-3 day home suspension and being barred from honor societies. Students and parents must not only read and sign individual “honor” statements, each must hand write the policy on page two of the document.

In 2009, a middle school technology class in Julian Charter School, in Southern California, created PowerPoint presentations on plagiarism using royalty-free graphics. Students added voiceover to their projects and uploaded them to the Web using Voicethread software. Students participating in the project also satisfied their National Educational Technology Standards.

The number of middle schools using digital plagiarism detectors, such as Turnitin , is on the rise. But budget-strapped school districts and overburdened teachers can ill afford such luxury. But as a teacher, there are things you can do:

• Don’t assume students understand what plagiarism is. Consider including a unit on plagiarism in your English/language arts class.
• Develop a plagiarism policy and honor code with student input. Establish clear guidelines and consequences.
• Go on the offensive. If you suspect a student of plagiarism, confront him or her. Teacher ambivalence is one reason why students cheat. “Why do the work if there’s a good chance I’ll never get caught?”
• Use search engines to check suspicious passages in a student’s work. Let students know upfront that you will be “sampling” their work.
• Know your students’ voices. If a marginal student suddenly waxes poetic in his or her book report, don’t let it go unchallenged.

From bootleg videos to illegal music download, students see the lines of ethics and honesty blur like those of a pencil with a pink eraser. The more we as educators create a climate of integrity, the better learners our students will be.

[NOTE: For a kid-friendly article on plagiarism, including an “An Anti-Plagiarism Checklist,” visit kidshealth.org.]

Michelle Y. Green is an award-winning children’s book author and an adjunct professor of English at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland.



THOR and the Thesis Statement

Pretend that you are going on a first date. You like the person and hope that the first date will lead to a positive long-term relationship. You spend hours getting ready, making sure that your clothes look good and that your hair is in place.

Your date knocks on the door and you open it. Before even saying hello, your date grabs you with both hands and attempts to thrust a tongue-jutting French kiss hard on your lips. You back off, aghast, as you realize that you do not know this person at all. You begin to wonder how you can opt out of this date and rid yourself of the maniacal French kisser.

The pressure of standards and accountability—initially at the state level, now with the Common Core—has turned some teachers into the academic equivalent of overly-aggressive, tongue-jutting, French kissers. Rather than try to interest students in a text by allowing them to “get to know” something about the topic and letting them “play around” with a new idea, they attack as if students are already interested and eager. Unfortunately, they are not.

A teacher’s interests, as well as a student’s interests, would be better served by romancing the topic. Recently, I worked with a teacher who wanted her students to read and analyze Edna St. Millay’s poem “Dirge without Music,” whose first verse is as follows:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Rather than jump immediately into teaching the poem or delving into a lecture on the characteristics of twentieth century poetry, she asked the class, “What happens to you when you die?”

After a few moments of silence, students began describing their conceptions of heaven and hell. One student in the classroom mentioned that three members of her family had technically “died,” and been brought back to life. She said that all three of her relatives had described death as a falling away from waves of bright, white light into utter darkness, followed by a rush of serene contentment.

photo: Carlos Porto via photopin cc

The extent to which the student was accurate in her descriptions of the near-death experiences of family members is superfluous. Soon, students began to run with the idea of the mysterious realms between life and death, and the entire class became engrossed in trying to figure out what poets had to say about heaven, hell, and the spaces in-between.

Next time you begin study on a new book, story, poem, or topic, remember to give students the time to “get to know” the topic first. The initial introduction is the first date in what will eventually be a life-long relationship between the student and the text. Don’t blow it by coming on too strong.

Lawrence Baines is a professor of English Education at The University of Oklahoma who has worked in over 350 schools. Baines is obsessed with the peculiar art of teaching writing to adolescents, and co-wrote the book Going Bohemian: How to Teach Writing Like You Mean It (published by IRA) with his buddy, Anthony Kunkel. Visit him on the web at www.lawrencebaines.com.



Teaching Tips: The Reading Makeover

Putting the 'Fun' in Reading Fundamentals

I’m embarrassed to say how long I have been sitting here, trying to come up with a good idea for this blog. Maybe this is shameful because I know it’s going to be read by teachers, who are not people who like to hear you are unprepared. There’s also the fact that I am a “professional writer,” so this shouldn’t be like pulling teeth. (I use quotes because I still can’t quite wrap my mind around that, for some reason. When asked what I do, it is still always my first instinct to say, “Waitress,” even though it’s been over ten years since I last served a dish of salsa to a customer. Why is that?)

It’s not like I’m an inexperienced blogger. I’ve had my own, which I update about three times weekly, for almost ten years now. I started it when not that many people were blogging, stuck with it when everyone was, and now find myself in dwindling numbers as the world has moved on to the more concise forms of tweets and status updates.

So few folks are still blogging regularly, in fact, that I’ve given a lot of thought lately to quitting it altogether. I have a lot of followers on Twitter and Facebook, and there is an admitted ease in just having to do little bits, a sentence here, a sentence there, rather than paragraphs of entire cohesive thought. And no one has long attention spans anymore, anyway, if you believe the media. (The same media also recently reported that parents aren’t reading their kids picture books anymore. But if the bookcase I just tried to organize in my daughter’s playroom—stuffed to bursting with Knuffle Bunny, Llama Llama and others—is any indication, this isn’t necessarily true either.)

To be honest, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with my blog. I like having something so immediate I can put out there, without waiting the two years or so that it takes me to get a book fully ready for release. Once I began working full-time as an author, leaving my teaching job at UNC-Chapel Hill, the blog also became my water cooler, a place where I could always find someone up for discussing American Idol and my obsession with coffee and chocolate.

At the same time, though, it requires discipline and a certain amount of creative energy, two things that are often in short supply when I’m deep into working on a book. It’s hard enough to keep a novel going during that dreaded stretch (for me, anyway) after the fun burst of the beginning and before the rush towards the end without trying to come up with something else to say every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

And yet, I do. Why? Well, I actually think it’s good for my writing. If novels are marathons, blogging is a quick mile, just to keep my legs strong and get some air in my lungs. When I feel the same dread sitting here, staring at a blank blog page that I do a half-finished chapter, there is nothing better I can do for myself than push forward right into that hollow, anxiety-filled place and just start writing something. Anything. It’s a leap of faith I can never take enough, because no matter how often I land on my feet, I’m convinced it won’t happen the next time I’m poised on the cliff.

And you know what’s the weirdest thing? When I do just start, and trust it will somehow come and make sense, it does. The entries are not always perfect or even good, but neither is every word of every draft.

With tweeting and Facebook, I can take two minutes and tinker to come up with something (hopefully) witty and worth reading. But a blog entry requires more patience. It forces me to do one thing I am not good at except when I am writing, which is slowing down. (There is nothing slower than being at about page 250 of a novel you are already sick of, knowing you have another 100 pages to go. Nothing.)

The truth is, we live in a world that is moving faster and faster every day. In response, our lives are abbreviated, as are our conversations and our reflections. Writing is one thing that forces me to be still and take my time. Reading is another. And judging by the uproar in the comments section of my blog whenever I’ve mentioned giving it up, I’m not alone.

And see, this blog itself is perfect proof of my point. I was sitting here, chewing on a thumbnail, wracking my brain for something to write, and now it’s finished. One mile down, 25 or more so to go. But that’s okay. What matters is that there is still room, out there in this swirling media universe, for something that takes more than 140 characters to say.

I just can’t promise that mine won’t have to do with television or chocolate. Sorry about that. 

Sarah Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and attended UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating with highest honors in Creative Writing. She is the author of several novels, including Someone Like You, Just Listen, and Along for the Ride. A motion picture based on her first two books, How to Deal, was released in 2003. Sarah's tenth novel, What Happened to Goodbye, hit bookstores yesterday.



Engage - In Other Words

Every word holds worlds of stories. One thought leads to another. To demonstrate how easy it is to get started, I challenge students each month to write a poem inspired by a single word. I call it "Word of the Month Poetry Challenge," or W.O.M. for short. This takes place on my blog.

Surveys of young people confirm what we observe. They spend a lot of time texting and working their computers. In one study of 8,000 children, texting and visiting websites were two of their five top choices for reading and writing.

Students like blogging because they can spontaneously interact and share thoughts. When a teacher posts poems by budding poets, students adore seeing their work “published.” They love even more reading positive comments posted by teachers, family, friends, and numerous adults who follow W.O.M. and routinely offer encouragement to the young poets they read there.

Lisa Martino, a Florida high school teacher, says, “I am grateful that you allow my students a platform for their expression at their level. If you could only see their faces when I bring up their poems on the internet and show them all your comments, strangers who write words of encouragement to them. They are beaming. Writing for your contest definitely has encouraged them to write with conviction.”

During a school visit in Missouri with fourth graders, I helped them brainstorm using the word “feather,” which was the word for February 2011. Their list started with practical words—chicken, bird, flying. Then someone made the leap of association. “Feather pillow?” she asked. “YES!” And we were off and running.

In two or three minutes we added down jacket, tickled with a feather, snuggling under a comforter, and writing with a quill. I added Dumbo’s magic feather because that was the subject of my own monthly poem. (Have to write with the students!) I read my feather poem, which begins like this:

I never thought I’d fly again,
or want to,
considering
my original owner,
all caw this and caw that,
dreadfully dull, self-centered.
Scruples? Don’t ask.
Stuck in his tail, I want out of the business.

When the old cheat helps
this chubby kid,
the only decent thing he ever did,
you could blow me away with a . . .

When I finished reading the whole poem, I asked who was speaking. Dumbo? His mouse pal? The crow that donated the feather? The limb that Dumbo sat on? Nope. It could have been any of those, but in my poem it was the feather itself telling the story. This led to thinking about how the poet must decide on who is telling the story.

All this sprang from a single word. In twenty minutes we covered a lot of ground. In a follow-up note, teacher Roxie McQuarry said her students were excited and couldn’t wait to get started on Word of the Month Poetry Challenge. That’s a typical response. In New Jersey, a fourth grade student wrote, “I keep getting my notebook to write poems. I showed them to Ms. Propersi. Guess what she did? She screamed so loud the world heard and New York heard it too. Your friend Ariel.”

If you would like to use this free service, guidelines are listed on my blog. To open the page, click on YOUNG POETS “W.O.M.” POEMS in the upper right margin. Everything is spelled out, but you can always contact me at Davidlharrison1@att.net if you have questions.



Engage - Teaching Tips