It’s not just because it’s stupidly underpaid.
Not because you have to establish a Roman emperor’s dominion over teenagers who are disrespectful to everyone around them.
Not so much because the benighted ignorance with which American students pass out of secondary schools leaves one weeping for one’s country and for its hapless children.
Not because reading their drivel is excruciatingly time-consuming and excruciatingly boring.
Not even because spending one’s time trying to assess said drivel intelligently and trying to advise its authors in ways to write less idiotic pap is a heartbreaking waste of energy and hours.
No. Not necessarily those things.
It is because no matter how much effort you put into them, no matter how much faith and hope you invest in your students, sooner or later they will disappoint you.
And you will be disappointed not just in them but in yourself and in your profession and in the entire flicking society around you.
They cheat. They lie and they cheat. And they do it all the time. It is so routine as to be unremarkable. And it’s not the ones who are so hopelessly dense that they have to cheat to pass a lightweight course like freshman comp. No. Half the time, God help us, it’s the smart ones.
I just returned (and forwarded to the division chair) a 300-point paper that failed because a good third of it is a copy-and-paste job.
Annoyingly, the author is one of my favorite students. She’s bright and gregarious and funny and she even seems to be paying attention in class. And, even more annoyingly, she’s no young kid who might be expected not to know better. This is a grown woman, thirty-five…maybe even pushing forty. And she’s a pretty typical plagiarist: smart, articulate, and full of potential.
Why do they do this? They’re not cheating anybody but themselves. They’re not cheating me. They’re not even cheating their classmates, since every person who enrolls in a college course gains from it as much as she or he individually puts into it. Why would you pay for something and then waste your time and energy on it? Is it arrogance—are they so smart they think they don’t need to be bothered?
When I was a kid, I was too terrorized to do this kind of thing. I would get caught (for sure!), and then I would be thrown out of school. My mother would weep and my father would disown me. I would spend the rest of my life in abject disgrace. So socialized was I to believe that you could not get away with cheating, lying, stealing, embezzling, arson, or murder that it wasn’t until I reached my mid-40s that I began to realize how much people do get away with. It was about then that I met a young woman who had spent a fair amount of her adult life committing insurance fraud.
She was minting money and new cars. Even whole new houses—twice she got insurance companies to tear out and rebuild the interiors of entire dwellings! That was an eye-opener.
By then I was on a university faculty. Informed by my young friend’s revelations, I began to notice the number of colleagues who pretended to serve on committees. They’d show up (sometimes) at meetings, do exactly nothing, and at the end of the day take credit for the work two or three other people on the committee actually did.
Should I mention the associate dean who arrived at his elevated position (and salary) on the strength of a three-volume magnum opus? When you opened the covers, as apparently few of his colleagues ever did, you discovered it consisted of offprints from the Congressional Record! Yes. In three volumes, the only parts he’d written were a short introduction and a series of two- or three-paragraph headnotes: maybe 35 or 40 pages in total.
How about the associate professor who was asked, three years running, to write a proposal to establish a program for which funding and administrative intent already existed and who never could manage to choke out anything acceptable, and how the program didn’t happen until a certain non-tenure-track lecturer of your acquaintance sat down and wrote the damn thing?
The search committee that was determined to hire a minority to its faculty, even though they openly admitted that a WASP woman was by far the best of the applicants? When the single African-American applicant accepted a job elsewhere, they closed the search rather than hire a better-qualified white candidate, and they conspired to flamboozle the Affirmative Action office with a set of phony reasons for rejecting her.
Dishonesty and cheating and devil-take-the-hindmost ethics are endemic to our culture, from the kid who pastes a web page into a term paper to the merchant who sells second-rate goods at first-rate prices to the manufacturer who fills “NEW!” packaging with less product at the same price to the pharmaceutical industries that foist unnecessary and even harmful drugs on “patients” who shouldn’t even be patients to bankers who entrap borrowers in loans everyone knows they can’t repay to crusading politicians who think the end justifies the means to presidents who lie to get us into unjust wars.
No. It’s not because they’re arrogant that the cleverest students cheat. It’s because they’re smarter than I was at their age. They’ve already learned they can get away with it, because everyone gets away with it. It’s the thing to do.
That is why I hate teaching. It is, in a word, profoundly demoralizing.
Reminds me of an accounting teacher I know. She tells me all of her students are crooks – every one of them. She has them submit examples of true instances where employees (either themselves or someone they know) have stolen from their employer. She then uses these examples to discuss internal controls. Every semester every single student has submitted a story. She has been doing this for about six years and it is one of her most popular lessons.
@ Savvy Working Gal: Wow! That is amazing.
But come to think of it…breathes there an employee or former employee among us who hasn’t ripped off the occasional pen, roll of Scotch tape, or ream of printer paper? I think that kind of petty theft if pretty common — in fact, I’ve heard people remark that since they’re expected to work at home, they’re sort of “owed” office products.
One could ask whether there’s any difference between that and embezzling money from petty cash or the company bank account. In absolute moral terms, IMHO, there’s none.
When I was applying for an admin job with the church, I did a bunch of research on what church admins do. One of their tasks is to ride herd on income and outgo, including donations. Turns out one of the commonest sources of loss for churches is ushers and even clerics (!!) palming cash out of the collection baskets. In one case, a pastor was actually stealing large amounts of money that way. Can you imagine?
Totally understand your frustration. It can be overwhelming.
One of my constant internal questions, now that I’m in my sixties, is has the world really changed since I was young or do I just imagine it as I age.
It is certainly a much cruder society. Less moral? Still grappling with that one. Although perhaps I’m just afraid to admit it because I’ll sound like a whining old lady.
Sorry, had to add one more thing. A decade and a half ago I was in Medical Assisting school and one student was caught cheating on tests, TWICE.
The instructor wanted her thrown out but the school adminsitrators wouldn’t do it because of her tuition money.
Enough to make your snatch yourself bald-headed.
@ E. Murphy: No, I don’t think this represents a change. That it shocks me reflects only my naiveté: I keep overlooking the fact that everybody gets away with stuff and so everybody expects to get away with stuff! Also sometimes it’s easy to forget that my subject is utterly meaningless and worthless to most people and that freshman comp is an onerous hoop to have to jump through. Because students see no real value in it, other than as another rubber-stamp on the way toward an A.A. or a B.S., they quite reasonably do as little work as possible.
Agreed, our manners have become cruder. But morals? In general, no worse…and in some specifics, such as the way we regard members of minority groups, we’ve probably improved.
IMHO it is a much cruder, meaner, less caring society with lower morals. Just by seeing network TV now compared to the 70s. So much talk and behavior that would have never been then. I don’t watch but my son has it on and I am continually shocked by what I hear. I think in the past people still did cheat, lie etc. but I think there was a little shame in it. They knew what they’re doing was wrong and weren’t so open about it. Now it seems not too many have a conscience.
Thinking about teaching at the end of a semester is hazardous to your mental health. Last spring, I burst into tears more than once (not in front of students!). My most egregious plagiarizer (TWO assignments) is presently appealing his grade. You’ll feel better soon, I hope.
It has always happened. Unfortunately, cheaters now feel free to defend their cheating (as frugal scholar is finding). The worst part is THEY WIN! They defend it a collaborative learning.
@ Barb: I don’t know. One thing’s for sure: people are a lot more open about this stuff. Maybe we just didn’t know what people used to get away with, because no one discussed that kind of thing in public.
@ frugalscholar and Jan: Get the perp in front of a university disciplinary committee and you could very well see him walk away. When I was at GDU’s West campus, my department tried to spearhead an initiative to get everyone across the campus to take a firm stand on plagiarism. It flopped. Incredibly, several faculty members in other divisions actually said, out loud, that they didn’t see how it mattered whether a student plagiarized.
Whenever I accuse a student of plagiarizing, I send a copy to the division chair. Because my students submit their assignments electronically, it’s easy enough to do that. What’s not so easy is going through the entire goddamn thing, highlighting the stolen passages, and inserting URLs or bibliographic entries to the sources. That is a MONSTROUS waste of my time, and I deeply resent it.
It might not be so annoying if all I were doing is teaching. But at $2400 per 16-week course, a pay rate that forces me to squeeze income from two other sources (on top of Social Security) just to keep my head above water, I don’t have the time to kill that way. It’s infuriating.
This was a long one, but I read the whole thing. Because man. Man. It’s true. It’s very true. I try to teach my daughters to be honest, to stand up and put the work in, to not make excuses or be lazy. But it’s hard to do. Hard to do when the country is plagued by dishonesty, irresponsibility, cheaters and liars. And I can’t even point to our country’s leaders for someone to look up to. THey’re all liar and crooks, too! BUt looking up to heros is a mistake anyway, because even heros are human with mistakes. So I’ll just keep teaching about honesty, putting the work in, and not being lazy.