Thanksgiving Drafts

The students third rough draft is coming up; it's due the Monday after Thanksgiving Break. The due date was supposed to be the Monday before break, but things got pushed back and the students had some work to do over break. Initially, there was some groaning, but I stepped in and told them I had work due on the actual Day of Thanks. Yes, it is an online class and we are at will to get our work done, but none-the-less, there were things due on Thanksgiving.

The students really have three choices for their essays - I will not explain them here. I will, however, go over the main ideas. As this is a sort of environmentally based unit, topics focus on environmental ideas - global warming, war's impact on the environment, animal rights, the food industry, etc. I have made my contributions to the intellectual information that was expelled towards the students, but upon returning to my apartment on that sunny Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving Break, I found something else that would help the students.

I opened my door to find my that my mailbox had sprung open and spewed forth my mail onto the concrete sill-way between my screen and wooden doors. Apparently, my mail box can not hold magazines too well, and there on the floor was the December issue of Harper's. In this month's issue is an article regarding animal rights, and the white mouse that has become so loved in science laboratories all over the world. It raised some interesting points, and it could have been of use to the students, not only for it's content, but also because it was current. I read the article, made sure it was relevant, and e-mailed The Professor who then e-mailed the rest of class. Exciting, eh?

Buy Me Books

I have confidence that most English majors, or English teachers find solace in libraries and bookstores. More so bookstores than libraries, as the bookstore allows for ownership. They allow the buyer to purchase a ticket to a world unknown.

There's two types of book stores - chain bookstores, and private bookstores. In the private bookstores there is a quiet resemblant of the silence in a library. A silence allowing the books to do the talking. The calling out to a new audience delicately tip toeing through lengths of shelves that need a ladder to reach the top. A book gives us direct insight to the author's mind; an intimate relationship unattainable any other way, and a bookstore is full of hundreds of these relationships waiting to bloom.

Unfortuatnely, as a college student, new or used books are too expensive and instead we must turn to websites like Amazon.com. It is no bookstore, but it suffices. The other day I mentioned that I spoke with The Professor about the class I will be taking with her. We ended up putting a tentative book list together. It is as follows (they're all links):

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Oscar Wilde - "The Importance of Being Earnest"
Samuel Beckett - Endgame
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
Evelyn Waugh - The Loved One
W.Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
John Fowles - The Magus
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Zadie Smith - White Teeth

It's British Lit, and while I've read the classics - "The Rape of the Lock", Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein - but I'm looking forward to reading some more current stuff, and some other classics.

If you have money and don't know what to do with it, buy me the cheapest books on this list.

Because Writing Is Just Not Enough

On Wednesday and Thursday nights I devoted myself to a cause: writing fifteen pages. Fifteen pages isn't really all that much; I've written more, but this paper was of a different style. I am used to writing creatively for fifteen pages, or analyzing a text for fifteen pages, but this paper I was not ready for. It was a literature review, and there is something about writing a document that is almost entirely referenced that makes me feel incredibly less accomplished than if I had written fifteen pages of my ideas.

I finished the paper Thursday night, and was ready to spend Friday relaxing watching television letting my brain turn to mush. That was not what I ended up doing. I met with The Professor Friday afternoon to discuss a class that I will be taking with her independently, and as the discussion wound down we decided to go get some coffee and grade the students' third reflection paper. We each had ten, and she finished a bit before me, but had other work to do so I wasn't left alone. It took me three hours or so to grade them. This may seem like a long time to grade ten papers of two pages in length - and it probably is - but I'm getting better. Earlier in the semester it would have taken me much longer, and this time I did it in one sitting.

The students' papers were still riddled with errors that we've discussed in class - run-ons, citations, possessives, etc. - but the grades were higher, and it is evident that the students writing has improved from the beginning of the semester. On top of this, at the beginning I was apprehensive about grading, but this is changing. I'm not the most assertive person in respect to judging people, and I'm not always so sure if I'm grading too hard, or not hard enough, but The Professor read two papers that I also read, and we both gave them the same grades within a plus or minus.

In the end, grading papers was probably better than wasting away on the couch with radiation shooting at me from the wall. And, believe it or not, it was relaxing. By the way, that isn't a picture of me.

Group/Individual Help

The Professor was better today. She handed the classes Final Paper Number Two back to them with comments and marks - lots of marks. Most of the marks were typical proofreading marks, but she introduced two new marks that she wanted students to work with. The marks were placed along the left margin of particular lines - a check if the Professor found a particular point to be exceptionally strong, and a dash if the Professor found some sort of error - usually grammatical.

Students were to look over their papers and notice the checks and dashes. They then got in groups of two and attempted to figure out why the dashes were in place. While this was going on, the Professor and I milled about making sure groups were on task as well as making sure that students were correcting and finding the proper issues denoted by the dashes. Inevitably, some students had more marks than others. Some students found themselves attempting to fix every other line of their paper, while others found themselves searching for dashes to correct.

The most common mistakes I saw surrounded the inclusion of quotes. Many students failed to properly introduce a quote and ended up with redundant statements that needed to be fixed. Others simply dropped the quote in the paper with out any sort of introduction, or synthesis of the quote. The Professor and I have discussed these issues before, and some of the students are getting it; others are not. Another huge problem with quotes was citation. Now, I am no APA pro. I spent most of my college days using Chicago, or MLA, and consequently I do not know the finer points of APA by heart. However, I do know how to properly cite a quote. I have a general rule, and it may not always be correct, but it is ninety-five percent of the time. If you can't figure out what to include in your parenthesis look at your works cited. What belongs in the parenthesis is probably the first thing you see in the citation for that article. One thing I saw a lot of, and I'm not incredibly sure where students learned it or why they are doing it, but they have been inserting complete url's as a citation. Not okay.

Another big problem that seemed to be found in over half the papers was students using the forbidden comma splice, or using incomplete sentences - sentence fragments. Apparently my lesson on the comma splice didn't strike the hearts of all of them.

Plagiarism Vs. Paraphrasing

I awoke this morning in my apartment and thought I was sleeping in a tent. I have no insulation in my ceiling, or my walls. It was cold. It was ten o'clock when my phone rang with The Professor on the other end explaining to me her battle with a sinus infection, and asking me to take the class on today. Her requests were simple:

1.) Go over plagiarism and paraphrasing. Apparently some of the students had difficulty paraphrasing in their final draft of paper number two. Instead of paraphrasing, they changed a few words and subsequently plagiarized. In the world of literature, plagiarism is not a more-or-less topic, you either have plagiarized, or you have not.

2.) Students were to hand in their third reflection piece today, and I was to go over their paraphrasing in those papers with them.

They were not heavy tasks for me to accomplish, and I feel I got them done appropriately. I began by getting students to give the class their definitions of paraphrasing and many of them explained that paraphrasing is simply not using a piece of text word for word. I sort of cringed at this. Unfortunately, I think this is what we teach students. More often then not, students think plagiarism is using an exact copy of part of a text; they don't seem to grasp the fact that in order to really paraphrase, they need to put the entire quote in their own words.

I put a quote on the board from the Funk article that students read for class the previous class and had them attempt to paraphrase it. The students that opted to share their paraphrasing had completed the task correctly, but I'm not sure of the students that didn't opt to share. The ones that share clearly have a grasp as they have the confidence to share with the class.

I then decided to explain to them how to go about paraphrasing. It is not the quickest technique, but it pretty much guarantees you won't exactly plagiarize. When we look at a quote, we need to glean the facts from it. If we can figure out the bare-bones facts that we are interested in we can do away with the quote and the language the author used. We then take these facts and put them into our own words, and make the connection using our own language. At this point, you should have a statement that doesn't mirror that of the original quote, but still contains the main ideas. Of course we need to reread the original quote and make sure ours is not the same, and even more importantly, we need to remember to cite. The ideas are not ours and therefore need a citation.

I also had the class exchange papers and read through them looking for paraphrasing/plagiarism as well as other grammar issues we had discussed in class - run-ons, comma splices, in-text citations, and comma usage. While this may not be full bore peer-editing, it is a beginning, and will eventually allow students to edit their own work more efficiently.