update

So it's been almost a year since I've posted here; I fight a daily battle against plagiarism, yet I leave it all at work when I come home, and choose to fill up my
main blog with other routine business, like what it's like to constantly drive around the same small town. Thus slowly but surely I've driven most of the traffic away from my main blog, which is ok, because I don't really want everyone lurking around there anyway, with its connections to all my private universe. I did however receive an offer to advertise there which I am considering.

So there is obviously a fork in the road: I could make that one a little livelier, better pictures, etc., and move my mindless rambling somewhere like here (since, in fact, the mindless, mundaneness of it is probably due to the quantity and quality of writing I deal with on a daily basis)...I could basically stay in practice (which is what I'm doing with my mindless writing: treading water, so to speak, so my arms don't fall off)...or I could stick with the status quo.

This blog is a fairly simple collection of my work on plagiarism, but much of that was eliminated when CESL chose to destroy its own website a little while back, and I've done very little to preserve what I wrote or what I did. But another thing happened that more or less also took the wind out of my sails. This blog was the documentation of a plagiarism case at this very university, but the president not only survived it, but went on to create several more generations of administrators and teachers, many of whom have no memory or active knowledge of what went on. I'm not especially on a campaign about this guy one way or the other; actually, I've met him, and kind of like him, but in principle am against plagiarism and all it entails; still, teaching twenty hours a week and doing at least thirty or forty more hours of prep and administrative stuff, I've had no time, even in these three years or so, to even look into the charges against him. So what use do I have to keep this open sore up in a place where the whole world can still see it and ruminate about it? None. It's kind of like the travel stories on my blog: I don't really need all the people in my present world to keep experiencing and reexperiencing my wilder years.

It's in that spirit, that I put some "content" (or "roughage" as I could call it) to ram that other junk down into the past a little, and rekindle an examination of the frustrations of teaching and simultaneously living in such a small town.

So think about this convergence of events as we go reeling into November. The state pressures me to do another ethics test (stay tuned for a report). Two of its former governors are in jail; scores more deserve to be. The president of a university, accused a few years back of copying large chunks of a dissertation on the education of the gifted in the public schools, orders an internal committee to tell him what to rewrite and clear him of the charges; meanwhile, my own children, and every other child educated in the public schools in Illinois, are subject to a system of early classification and labeling that, presumably, affects their lives in some way (labeled an achiever, or non-achiever, they soon begin to fulfill our expectations). If anybody does real, current research on the effects of this tracking, I'd genuinely like to know. In any case, soon after nineteen Saudi boys blow up our trade center, Bush signs a deal with the king of a certain kingdom, sending hundreds of students over here who culturally share a weakness in writing, a propensity for copying and remembering, a disinclination toward critical thinking, you get the picture; fortunately, the best I can tell, they are quite polite, and they are not making bombs. My life becomes a story of either wading through grammar as thick as pea soup, or experiencing the finery of somebody else's grammar masquerading much as the students get wound up for halloween. In any case, some young folks in the English department, now these would be American young folks, same age as my own son, just entering the university, find nanowrimo and start encouraging everyone anonymously to write a novel. I am one who could actually do it, as I've been filling my blog with drivel for months, and merely need direction, spirit, and purpose, and a deadline; as far as I'm concerned, those signs are speaking to me. But finally, the other forces in life also get wound up and get involved; the holidays are coming; I want to put what I've already written in tangible form; I teach twenty hours, remember; I'd like to reacquaint myself with the technology that people are integrating into the classroom these days, or at least become better at the moodle, which more and more, people are using.mTiime is in short supply. Leaving old laundry out on the line is unnecessary, impractical, even wasteful.

The other day, however, at an orientation, I got to tell one of my favorite plagiarism stories. I got an audience of new students to our university and got to remind them of how American ideas of plagiarism differ so much from those of other countries. I got to relate a story of a guy who almost lost his PhD program because his master's thesis had copied parts of the lit review; this story came from my wife. But the next one is even better; I'm not sure where it came from. A guy was at his own PhD thesis defense, and the people he had invited, at the top of their field, were somewhat unprepared and leaving through the thesis right as he was defending it. One professor saw his own writing plagiarized in the thesis and got steadily angrier and angrier as the defense went on. You can imagine how it happened; there are only so many people in a field that you can invite; one gets sick and calls another; the writer loses track of who exactly he copied from; etc. etc. In any case the plagiaree (victim) eventually renounces the PhD student, blows his whole plan. PhD shot. Years of education wasted.

As you can tell, my own writing is entirely original. Deadly dull, sometimes, tending toward drivel and the mundane, yes, but always entirely my own. I can't tell you how to fight plagiarism in academia. The more I hear about the countries my students come from, where entire masters' theses are copied, and where teachers expect copy/paste as a modus operandi, well, it makes me not really know what to tell the students these systems create. Some experience the joy of being able to think for themselves, being expected to do so; others shrink in terror (so to speak) at the prospect, being thoroughly convinced (perhaps by experience?) that they have nothing to say. In the same way a corrupt state oils its bureaucratic machinery to try to get its academics to run through an ethics test, warning them that if they read to fast, they'll get caught up in the system (chewed up, spit out), and it will be assumed that they cheated or that somehow it's not right that they learned how to read so fast. And how are these two related? Not sure. Today's philosophy of public education is tomorrow's philosphy of government, though, so if our educational system is based on bogus research, or if, womewhere down the line, there were a few too many goldbrickers trying to justify their own existence, making up tests for people to pass, then, the entire system will have the same metallic glow, through and through. And I suppose we have no one to blame but ourselves.