"Can't I just Google it?"

My ENG 120 students have turned in their research prospectuses (or prospecti?), narrowed their topics and are perfecting their thesis statements. Now, all that remains is to write the outlines and the essays. Oh, that's right--and do the research!

While I am no stickler to "books only" research (I would be a hypocrite!), I am very strict about what constitutes an up-to-date, valid academic source. Wikipedia is so far from my students' minds by the time they start their research, I often wonder if I've brainwashed them. WebMD and other "reputable" sites are always a challenge, however.

When it comes to how recently an article was written/published, I tell my students "If you weren't born when it was written, it's too old!" The exceptions here are primary historical sources or sources for subjects that simply don't change.

When it comes to the author of a source, I warn them, "If you can't figure out who wrote it, run away!"

Most importantly (and most terrifying for those of us who have taught today's students and know how lacking they can be in this department--), I tell my students to use their common sense.

To illustrate just why Wikipedia (sorry, boys!) isn't an academic, verifiable, or valid source, we read "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia", by Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse in The Chronicle. My students were shocked--and we had some great impromptu vocabulary work, too!

To illustrate why the World Wide Web isn't to be blindly trusted, I sicced this little gem on my students: "The Science of Vampires," courtesy of the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. Oh? You didn't know FVZA existed? Or that HVV (Human Vampiric Virus) is the cause of Vampirism? Right, because ".org" at the end of a web address does not always (or often, for that matter--most are biased) a valid, useful academic source make !

Amusingly, some of my female students who have been caught up in the throes of Edward and Bella's bliss (and seizure-causing spawning), the slightly more mature True Blood, or any of the other blood-sucking obsessions this generation drools over, actually believed the article--as much as they could, anyhow. One student flat out sighed, looked me in the eye and said, "I want to be a vampire." I maintained my composure...mostly. For the most part, though, my students realized that this article is absurd, albeit entertaining. They acknowledged that it was logically written, but their common sense simply would not allow them to buy into this nonsense about a virus causing vampirism--or the existence of vampirism at all.

Smart kids.

To drive the point home, I introduced my bright little minds to The Flat Earth Society: "The mission of the Flat Earth Society is to promote and initiate discussion of Flat Earth theory as well as archive Flat Earth literature. Our forums act as a venue to encourage free thinking and debate."

I shan't deign to elaborate on that. I will, however, thank Mr. Bill Loughran for corrupting my adolescent mind with the fascinations of Shakespeare, Latin, ancient Greek and Roman history, and ancient Greek, along with thousands of witty barbs for students--all of which I must admit I freely use today--and, the buttercream icing of it all, an introduction to The Flat Earth Society.

And thus concluded my lesson on how not to be an idiot when using the Internet to find sources.

Where did the time go?

Today felt like a constant rush and I'm not sure why; however, classes went well. After the reading quiz in the 10:00am ENG 120 class, I handed out my "Proofreading Notation" sheet and we quickly breezed through the notation and its corresponding errors. I answered any questions students had about specific points (ex: a student asked if I could give an example of a problem with parallelism).

I then handed back the students' corrected, 'graded,' Diagnostic essays. I reminded them that this was a first draft that they wrote in class, in 50 minutes, and after a break of at least a month from school, so their grades were not going to be stellar. (Truthfully, I think only one student eeked out a first draft over 70%.)

After the initial shock, head-shaking and nervous laughter, I opened the floor up to questions. As I expected, only a couple students were brave enough to ask specific questions about errors in their essays, so I changed the the "Scavenger Hunt" tactic: I chose an error off the Proofreading sheet and everyone had to find an instance of it in his essay. I had the class look for fused sentences, comma splices, run-ons, verb tense shifts, and other errors, then asked for volunteers to share an instance from their papers. After initial shyness, students started to volunteer their errors so they could ask more specific questions. Success!

In my 1:00pm class, we finished the last two types of Prewriting and covered START. I then had the students get into groups of 5--I wanted less groups for this exercise. I wrote "Homophones" on the board and asked someone to define the word for me. The agreed-on definition was "words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings." I gave the groups 10 minutes and asked them to come with as many homophones as they could.

Each group came up with bundles of examples:

where, wear, ware, weir and were (as in werewolf)
two, too, to
dear, deer
flower, flour
four, for, fore

And then we came to the examples I was hoping I'd hear: the homophones that only work in an Anglo-Caribbean dialect.

team, teem and theme -- many English-speaking Caribbean natives do not pronounce th sounds, so "three" sounds like "tree" and "thought" like "taught."

See the issue here? Suddenly pair, pear and peer are homophones, even if they are not for a more Midwestern U.S. accent. We talked and laughed about it--I believe that if students can recognize and laugh at their own idiosyncrasies, errors and differences, they will better recognize and be able to correct them. We will spend more time, in all the ENG 120 sections, on homophones and on 'regionally-specific' homophones.

More tomorrow!

On an unrelated note, I am personally against both PIPA and SOPA. You may have already noticed that Wikipedia blacked its site out today, and even Google blacked out its logo in solidarity. If you are also against PIPA and SOPA, be sure to reach out to your local and state political representatives and make yourself heard!