Trust and Honesty

It's part of my philosophy as a college freshman English teacher that sometimes my class needs to play "home room" for my students. Occasionally this takes the form of student griping, but most often, we have discussions about current, pertinent issues.

For example, I assigned ENG 120's third essay today (and it will be written as an out-of-class essay, instead of an in-class essay):


Topic: Nearly everyone uses social networking sites today, but the largest group of users is still college students. While many people consider social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace to be private, the truth is rather the opposite. Many college students are unaware that what they post on their so-called “private” pages is accessible to future possible employers and may cost them a potential job. What material on social websites should users be wary of posting, how will these sites affect students in their future job searches, and could these sites have positive uses as well?

To provide background for this topic, we discuss this article about employers who did not hire candidates because of something on the candidates' social networking site. To further illustrate my point, I ask students to volunteer to allow me to Google them in front of the class. Quite often, when I am able to pull up their Facebook and/or Myspace profiles, students become very nervous--and with good reason; according to the poll, 69% of employers who responded at one time rejected a candidate because of material on his or her social networking profile!

This discussion leads to "best practices" with Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc., and it also leads to questions from my students as to how they can better use their social networking. I use myself as an example, showing them my Twitter handle (@Caribe_prof), my Facebook page (not profile), and LinkedIn profile.

Overall, I think my students appreciate that this assignment is not only interesting, but it also teaches them something they can apply to the real world and may even help them when applying to jobs in the future.

More on the "P" Word

During the discussions I had with my last two classes about plagiarism, I asked the small groups of students to discuss whether or not they thought plagiarism ought to be penalized. Most students said yes, but some in each section said no.

The reasoning behind the 'no's' was shoddy, at best, but I made sure each student explained his position clearly before poking holes in the logic. I then gave my classes my side of the plagiarism story:

I worked my rear end off in both my undergraduate and graduate programs, writing every single one of my essays and papers myself, never once "borrowing" or copying someone else's work. I earned my B.A. and M.A. and it pisses me off that there are other people who have that same alphabet soup following their names who achieved their degrees by copying and pasting or buying their work from other students or essay mills. Frankly, I don't think it fair that those imposters made it through their years of "higher education" to "earn" the same diploma I did.

I told my students that I feel the same way about them: students who work hard and honestly earn their grades (even if those grades are C's) should not be bested or even considered equal to students who cheat, plagiarize and fake their way to grades. If I can level the playing field, I will.

This seemed to resonate with my students, including the ones who initially claimed they did not think that plagiarism should be penalized--perhaps because I truly believe it. What are your views on plagiarism?

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!