2002-01-16
cheatin' kids, posted at 3:21 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I will never ask students to turn in chapter summaries again.Over break, I had my 9th graders read the first 90 pages of The Chosen and my 10th graders read the whole of The Great Gatsby. Yeah, I know, kind of a jerky thing to do, but I figure that if I could read the whole thing in an afternoon (in both cases), then they could read it over the span of 10 or 12 days.
To get them to verify that they read it, I had them do a couple of things. I had the sophomores write a short summary of each chapter (I figured this was cool, since summarizing is a skill that will be tested in the citywide tests in just a few days), then pick out a key line and write a brief explication as to why they consider it "key." My freshmen had to do something similar - summarizing and then an explication of a quotation.
Anyhow, I did all the grading today (I was the movie king today, as I had only about ten students in each of my classes because of testing for other subjects, and they were all pretty "into" the movies), showing the 2001 film version of "Gatsby" (starring Paul Rudd and Mira Sorvino, and not bad) and a 1981 version of "The Chosen." I had no less than ten students completely cheat on the assignment, getting all their summaries from Sparknotes.com or some other similar site and then passing it off as their own. Do they think I'm dumb? A couple of others got away with things because they were able to change around words enough so I couldn't prove it, but many simply copied and pasted from the website into a word document. Not only is it unethical, it's plain old lazy.
I now see the assignment as kind of bogus to begin with, that I shouldn't ask students to summarize, but rather to do something more original. The key line activity on its own probably would have been okay. Or I could even be more creative, like have them choose a song to represent each of the chapters and explain why it fits. That gets them to think about things a little bit more, anyway.
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I feel so drained right now. Mentally, physically, fiscally. I need a pick-me-up of some sort. I said earlier today that it was already "Hump Day," but now my attitude is more along the lines of "I can't believe it's only Wednesday and I have to come back here two more days this week." Thank god for the three-day weekend coming up, which, although I have nothing planned, will be a welcome respite.
Maybe I'll go buy a car tonight.
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Hey, could anybody give any tips on the following html-related question? For those of you who don't know, in September I switched over from my old alias (which was my actual name) to this new one. In the transition, I lost all my entries from July 13 through the end of August. I don't know what happened. Anyhow, I can still access that old site, and I wanted to retrieve those entries - there's some stuff there that I'll want to remember, like my finals days at college, my move, 100 things about me, etc. I tried starting to copy and paste the entries over today, but had some problems. I had no problem creating a new entry with the content, but I did have a problem archiving it in the right place with the right date. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Any tips? Much appreciated.