Notes from West Egg

One of the blogs I read is “Reflections from the Trenches“ by a high school English teacher named Julia Osteen from Georgia. The other day she posted a reaction to the widespread practice of students copying and pasting information, remixing it basically, and calling the product their own. She said:

My initial reaction to this article was one of but of course it is plagiarism! When I work with students, I fight against them copying and pasting (without thinking) and changing words here and there and calling that their own work. What I really want from students is for them to think about the information, organize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the information from a number of sources before they write.

I am in full agreement and responded on Julia’s blog with this comment:

I’m afraid that students believe they are writing when they are merely searching for and rearranging information. This process seems to be an attempt to not have to think, because thinking is hard, and much of what we are asking them to think about has already been said/solved; in other words, they might be wondering why should they have to reinvent the wheel? Just to get a grade? Just because the teacher said to? This gets us back to creating problems for them to solve — new, relevant problems, where they can apply the existing information in novel ways. It makes thinking a bit more fun, but still hard. And that makes us have to do a bit of thinking as teachers, right?

Thinking is hard. Original ideas are the hardest to produce. It’s much easier to cull a few online sources, gather the thoughts of others who have been down this road before and remix the voices into something that is, if not original, at least uniquely arranged. But what do such student products actually reflect, aside from (usually) varying degrees of plagiarism? Good Googling skills, mostly. Perhaps exposure to a variety of perspectives on an issue, if students took time to absorb the ideas as they arranged them into paragraphs. Maybe a better understanding of how others would answer the question or present the thesis. 

It’s very tough to make a case for true synthesis when reading a patch-work quilt of (hopefully) attributed ideas. And few students go the extra mile by adding personal reflection, much less their own original take, to the mix. They figure if it’s long enough, it’s done. 

Running their work through plagiarism detection websites is not the answer… Getting them to remix more thoroughly their compilations and attribute their borrowed words more accurately will not get us to true synthesis; it’s just a more tortuous path to the same end: the glorified summary.

What I see as the real problem is that teachers are continuing to assign the types of independent work that we were assigned as students and that our parents and possibly even grandparents were assigned as students. In English, this might be a take-home paper that explores the theme of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example. Or one that asks students to explain the gun/flag metaphors in the novel. A quick Google of “theme” + “metaphors” + “Animal Farm” easily produces numerous sources and an endless possible melange of ideas. Before the Internet, these assignments year after year made more sense because high school students who wanted to glean the answers from someone else would be out of luck unless they had access to Cliff’s Notes at a local bookstore or knew a student from last year’s class who’d saved their paper. Even then, at most they might be able to find one source. Not 250,000 from a single Google search. 

Clearly, these particular wheels have been invented. And reinvented. Over and over. The answers to these assignments are not only in the back of the book, they are at the tips of our students’ fingers. And this makes them seem perfunctory and incredibly boring, just one more hoop to jump through, rather than an opportunity to produce something altogether new and different and perhaps even personal. How many 15-year-olds in the past half century have explained the theme of Animal Farm? Millions! What possibly new could be added to the discussion, so why not(!) just survey the field and see which explanations you could edit and edit into one that you agree with? The internet has become a infinite recipe book and there is simply no need (in a busy student’s mind) to experiment with Metaphor á la Orwell when there are hundreds and thousands of proven recipes ready to use.

So the onus is on us, I think, as teachers to come up with better assignments for independent work. If we must assign essays on theme and metaphor, we can assign them as in-class essays or timed writing tests (giving students no class time to survey the online field). But we need other, better assignments for independent work, ones that can’t be Googled, copied or pasted, ones that are meaningful and personal and require thinking (analysis) and creativity (synthesis). 

What do those look like? And how hard will they be to come up with year after year? 

In my next post, I will present one possibility. I would love to hear your thoughts, too.