Bits and Pieces

#1 First Class?

My friend and her husband just returned from a seventeen-day vacation in Europe. They made their flight reservations just under a year in advance so that they could use points and get first-class seats. Lovely… On the flight over, when the airlines like you to pretend that it’s night and bedtime, my friend noticed that the man behind her was breathing weirdly. She looked back a few times, but his wife had her eyeshades on and was sleeping soundly. The man appeared to be sleeping also, but breathing noisily.

In the morning, as the plane was about to land, a member of the flight crew announced that all passengers needed to stay in their seats upon landing because a medical team needed to board the plane. The medical crew went to the man behind my friend, and determined that he was dead. His wife kept protesting, saying that he had been “fine just a little while ago.” Apparently not.

The crew whispered to each other but my friend could hear part of the discussion. “We need to get the passengers off the plane.” Everyone was allowed to leave.

I told my friend that at least her vacation could only have gone uphill from that point on. But really, wouldn’t you think that flight attendants in first class—and even in cattle class, for that matter--would at least NOTICE that one of their passengers was no longer among the living? Just a thought.



#2 I Hate to Dust.

I really, really do. I don’t like to do any cleaning, but dusting is my least favorite part of it. I suppose there are people who like to clean, people who really enjoy how wonderful everything looks when the cleaning is finished. Not me. I know that if I can see a big difference between the before and the after, way too much time has elapsed between the two.

I blame this attitude on my parents. My mother went back to work when I reached middle school and as a result, my sister and I were assigned cleaning the whole house on Saturdays. As we cleaned the house, and fought about who was to clean what, my brother got to do the fun stuff outdoors, where we longed to be, like mowing the lawn and raking leaves. #$%^& sexist upbringing!

So that’s why I hate to dust.



#3 Why I Shouldn’t Knit While I Am Being Assaulted by the Medical Profession.

Yesterday I had to get a cortisone shot in my knee, and as I hate having this done, I decided to take my latest OTN sock with me to distract me. I couldn’t knit while the Dr. was injecting my foot; I had to concentrate on not kicking him. There is lidocaine mixed in with the cortisone, but it arrives at the same time as the cortisone does and doesn’t really work anywhere near quickly enough. I did knit as I sat in the exam room after it was over, while the Dr. decided what to do with me next. Then I had to shove the knitting in my purse so that I could hobble down the hall to the room where I waited to make an appointment for an MRI. There was a boy about eight or nine years old there with his mother, and he whispered to her, asking what I was doing. She whispered back that it looked as if I was knitting a sock. His reply? “It’s going to take a really long time to get a sock that way.” Yes, it is, especially now that I have to frog a good bit of it.

Anyway, as I sat there trying not to think about the PAIN, I messed up big time. I came home and tried to sort the whole thing out, but I can’t. If my knee had been working well today, I would have gone to my LYS to get help, but that will have to wait. I should have taken a book, or better yet, just read the mind-numbing People magazine in the office. That’s what they are for, I guess.


#4 More on Plagiarism.

The Dean of Student Affairs at the school where I taught writing just e-mailed me to say that he caught a student plagiarizing her final paper. She failed the course, and when she called to complain about the F, he told her that plagiarism results in failing the course. She replied that it wasn’t her fault. She had asked a friend to write the paper, and the friend hadn’t told her that he had taken the whole thing from Wikipedia. Nice try! She missed the point that taking anyone else’s writing, whether it’s a friend’s or Wikipedia’s, is plagiarism. One of my students plagiarized from Wikipedia also, and I just don’t understand why they consider that to be a legitimate source in the first place!



#5 Why Young People Have Children

Older daughter has three children ages seven and under, and another on the way. She’s not crazy (yet); she and her husband just love kids. But she also has double ear infections and possibly a perforated ear drum. OUCH! But does she farm the kids out, ask her husband to watch them, or otherwise arrange time to recover? Nope. She just keeps going, plus doing the writing job she can do from home. If it were me, as an older parent (and there are lots of them out there---grandparents who have had to take over raising grandchildren, or people who have adopted later in life), I would be sending them out, poorly dressed, to trick-or-treat until someone took them in and fed them. Or I’d put them in foster care.

BAD MAMMA!

If I Hadn't Been Sure Before

Last night was my last class. I've been teaching Academic Writing 121 as an adjunct instructor for a Florida-based Catholic University for about four years. My classes have been held at a military base in Georgia. I've enjoyed meeting so many military members--the classes are held on military bases throughout the southeast and our contract with the military makes the school a bit different from others. The military promises recruits that they can go to school at the DOD's expense, but doesn't tell them that they have to be college material. We aren't allowed to use SAT scores or any requirements other than that they can write a check for $35 that doesn't bounce. So we get students who, because of their intelligence level or because of poor preparation from previous schools, really don't belong in college. My course is one of the first ones they take, so I get quite a few below-par students. It's difficult to assign a failing grade to a student who has failed, but who has survived several tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Most of the military students are just ideal students, regardless of their ability levels. They are so grateful to be in college and for most of them, access to college is why they joined the military.
Then there are the students who only want the degree, not the education. They tend to be the poorer students, in terms of ability. They plagiarize, and they are really bad at it, which makes it easy to spot. Last night two students turned in plagiarized papers. One had done this previously in my class, and I had explained to him (when he protested and said that he had written the paper himself) that blue hyperlink text does not appear in normal writing. I also told him that the different types and sizes of fonts in his paper was a clue. He re-wrote the paper after changing the topic. It was off-topic and probably written by him since it was poorly written. I was concerned that all I had accomplished was teaching him how to plagiarize better, and that turned out to be what happened. The paper he turned in last night was clearly plagiarized, was off topic, and didn't make much sense. But the blue hyperlink text was gone. I was able to google a couple of sentences and find his source, from which he had copied text word for word. He fails the course.

The second student has been flying under the radar for the whole course. I wasn't suspicious of him at all until last week when he turned in his rough draft for a compare and contrast essay. There were no mistakes in it. I gave it back to him, and last night he turned in the final copy. I googled a few sentences from it, and up popped the source. This man is a polite, gentlemanly, forty-something student, and I am so disappointed in him. He fails the course also.

I had decided before this term started that I didn't want to teach for St. Leo anymore. The commute is over seventy miles roundtrip, and the security at the base is annoying. (If it made sense, that would be fine, but it's very erratic and nonsensical. It's outsourced and that may explain part of the problem.) Also, I am only allowed to teach the one course because my Masters is in education rather than in English. My undergraduate degree is in English, but that doesn't allow me to meet St. Leo's requirements. I'm tired of the course.

If I had had any second thoughts about my decision, getting the two plagiarized papers last night would have taken care of that. I asked the Dean of Student Affairs if I was a cop or a teacher. He thought for a moment, then answered, "As an English teacher, you're probably mostly a cop, because of the plagiarism issue."

No thanks. I'm done.