Easy Week

This is going to be an easy week. We had a holiday on Monday, and a professional day on Tuesday. The first day of the 3rd 9-weeks was today, I have an IEP meeting last period on Thursday (which gets me out of my 9th-period class!!), and a workshop out of town on Friday. A strange week, which usually translates to quick week. One can only hope...

BTW - the 9th-grade Summit on Tuesday was much less painful than expected. In fact, it was rather dull, and not worth talking about.

I realize I write more about my full-time job than anything else on this blog, and I feel a little repetitive. So, I'm going to vent a little about my part-time gig. For the past 5 years, I've been working for an online university, teaching courses in their Master's program in education. These courses are not easy, and are very intense - considering most are 4-6 weeks long. A ton of information is contained in these classes, and the assignments are very labor-intensive for the time the students have to complete them. Over the last 6 months or so, I've had at least one student in each class I've taught to turn in a plagiarized assignment. It's unbelievable. I state in my syllabus that I will check every paper for plagiarism, and will levy appropriate sanctions when plagiarism is found. I guess the students (at least some of them) don't believe me.

Ok - so in my current class, I have a student who has been (for lack of a better word) prickly. She doesn't want to work with her learning team - in fact asked them NOT to edit or critique her work. (mind you- they are working on a team paper, worth almost 30% of the overall grade) She offered to write the introduction and the conclusion for the paper. The others finally agreed, figuring she would cause the least amount of damage with these portions of the paper. (I also have in my syllabus that I reserve the right to grade team members separately - according to how hard or collegially each member works on the project) Obviously, this woman is not a team player.

At the same time, a paper was due individually. When I started grading the various assignments, this one student's paper came back as 35% plagiarized. And that's after I omitted any quotations and referenced material. Totally unacceptable! Then, I graded the team paper. You guessed it - both the introduction and conclusion were plagiarized. Hoo, boy....

So, I notified the student of my findings, and asked for an explanation. Basically, her response was that she had never had this problem before. My response? "Well, you've got this problem now!" She received a '0' for the individual assignment, and a 50% deduction for the team assigment. I explained to her that, if she had allowed her teammates to critique and edit her portion of the paper, this problem could have been prevented. She emailed me with threats of a grade grievance. I replied with the reality of an academic violation report to the university. She dropped the class the next day.

Now, I'm glad she dropped the class - I didn't want to have to deal with her anymore. Here's my issue: We are in Week 5 of a 6-week course. These courses start every Tuesday. I'm scheduled to start a new section of this same course on Tuesday, February 3. What are the odds that this person will show up in that class? I think it's a sucker bet, the way things seem to go for me....