http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/202105m.html
2021.05 minutiae
* This month's minutiae article has a theme: life as a public
school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021.
* Even before the advent of the internets, catching students
cheating was generally not particularly hard. When a kid who
can't string a sentence together in class shows up with an
essay full of phrases like "prone to disintegration" and
"underscore the paradoxes", something doesn't add up. (The
appearance of the word "whilst" is another reliable red flag.)
Catching this sort of malfeasance has gotten even easier with
the development of plagiarism detection software. You click on
a student's submission and it pops onto the screen with the
bits that have been copied from Sparknotes already
highlighted. Recently I encountered a student who thought that
he had figured out an ingenious way to defeat these programs.
You know how sometimes you will run a web search on a phrase
and it pulls up a bunch of sites with URLs that look like
randomly generated passwords, whose preview text reveals that
they collect other people's posts and run them through
thesaurus software? This kid turned in a bunch of assignments
that looked like that preview text. I had asked students to
write responses to each chapter as they read through Philip K.
Dick's The Man in the High Castle; here was how one of this
kid's submissions began:
In chapet 4 candidates welding abilities were sharpened at W-M
corporation which makes created Iron articles even as pre-war
American ancient Rarity phonies, sold at places like childan's
shop. the biggest interest from the Japanese has made an
immense Marketplace for such things and no one addresses them
intently.
Here is the original text from gradesaver.com:
Frank's welding skills were honed at W-M Corporation, which
makes wrought-iron objects as well as pre-war American artifact
forgeries, sold at places like Childan's shop. The massive
demand from the Japanese has created a huge market for such
items, and no one questions them very closely.
What I found particularly amusing was that, as you can see
above, one of the main characters is named Frank; the student's
responses repeatedly referred to this character as "Candid"
(which, above, was further mutated into "candidate"). And the
plagiarism detection software was indeed fooled! What the
student didn't realize is that teachers don't need software to
be able to tell the difference between honestly composed
sentences and computer-generated gibberish.
* Another thing I've discovered is that many students-- not just a
couple here and there, but several in every class-- consistently
use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks
in place of apostrophes. For instance, here's a student
recapping an issue of Scott McCloud's Zot!:
Brandy says, " who wants to go out with me? " All the boys yell
" ME, ME, ME ". Brandy ' s first date was with Spike at his
house. Woody calls Spike and tells him that it ' s his turn to
date Brandy. Woody and Brandy go to Restaurant for a date.
Woody ask her if she is feeling right and she says " yes ".
I don't know how this happens-- I had to do some poking around
on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate
the effect. What's more interesting to me is the students'
confusion when I point out that, hey, those aren't quotation
marks. It suggests that they haven't read enough books with
conventional typography to have internalized what quotation
marks and apostrophes actually look like in print.
* Ellie reports overhearing some high school girls at the bus
stop talking about The Great Gatsby:
Q: "Do you know what's going on in this book?"
A: "Not really. The one thing I know is that the main
character goes by he/him pronouns"
That one is pretty much impossible to beat, but here was an
honorable mention from the same conversation:
Q: "Does the teacher read our annotations?"
"Nah, which is good because I just look for when weird
A: things are happening and then write slang words she won't
get like 'oh shit' and 'what the fuck'"
Ellie was struck by the way this kid seemed concerned not that
she would get in trouble for cursing in a school assignment but
rather that the teacher would be baffled by such esoteric
slang. Did she really think that the words "shit" and "fuck"
were coined by zoomers?
* Meanwhile, here's what it's like in the teacher email threads.
This is a verbatim, non-ironic quote:
"I didn't really hear you at first, steeped as I am in a
culture of assumed patriarchal white privilege, rank privilege,
and inequitable hierarchy."
* The school where I've been teaching is notorious for its
extremely lax attitude toward student discipline. Back when we
were still on campus full time, rarely did a week go by without
the fire alarm interrupting classes. This was usually due to
someone smoking in a bathroom, but one time during my student
teaching year it turned out that someone had tried to set one
of the buildings on fire deliberately. One of the vice
principals came on the intercom a couple of days later to
announce that the school was taking a zero-tolerance stance
toward arson. "We will impose the harshest possible penalty,"
she declared: "Five days of on-campus suspension!" My mentor
teacher burst out laughing. "That makes it official-- there is
literally nothing you can do to get expelled from this school,"
he mused. But that sort of thing actually has less of an
effect on the overall culture of the school than day-to-day
issues like the lack of consequences for tardiness. Most
teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the
class is going to wander in half an hour late during first
period-- it's so early, you know!-- and during fourth period,
because you know how long those lines can get at the lunch
places the kids all go to, halfway across town. I've sometimes
even had to remind myself that, hey, wait, when I was in
school, class started when the bell rang because everyone was
there! Of course, it's different at a suburban school where
parents are driving their kids to the front gate instead of
leaving them to get there by their own devices, except wait no
it isn't because from age sixteen on my old classmates were
generally driving themselves. It really is a matter of school
culture.
* And this culture affects academics as well. Prior to the
arrival of the covids, my program had a no-homework policy: if
I wanted my students to write an essay, I had to block off a
full week of class time so they could write it at their desks,
and even assigning a book meant that I had to either spend a
month reading it out loud all the way through or at least
devote big chunks of every class to silent reading. (I did a
count of the number of books I was assigned in my last two
years of high school English classes, and I came up with
twenty-three. I assigned three per year and had parents
emailing me to thank me for the academic rigor of my class, as
apparently a number of teachers weren't assigning any books at
all.) With the move to distance learning came state-mandated
homework minutes, but soon the directives from the school in
this regard became a confusing mishmash of "you're legally
required to assign this much homework, so make sure you do
that, only don't, because the kids are overwhelmed". That too
was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned
above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails
sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have
overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a
student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set
of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking
tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please
excuse him from work of those types. Another initiative headed
for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can
receive a grade of less than 50%, even if it was never turned
in, the idea being that if you blow off all your work for
months on end and then decide, with two weeks in the semester,
that you actually do want to pass the class, seeing that you
have a zero is too discouraging. It goes without saying that
in tandem with this came a corollary that late work must be
accepted right up to the end of the term. And my direct
supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the
benefit of the single student in each section who was
struggling the most, which quite literally would have meant
putting students who had signed up for Advanced Placement into
a remedial course. Colleagues from programs where these moves
happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been:
kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing
recommendations, get into top colleges, and... drop out after
about three weeks, saying that they feel like they're years
behind everyone else and don't know what's going on, because
they are and they don't.
* Early in my previous career teaching test prep, a trainer told
a story about how during George W. Bush's tenure as governor of
Texas, the state implemented a testing regime to identify
students whose measured proficiency was not up to standard. As
it turned out, there were a lot: the first batch of test scores
was abysmal. And so the state of Texas remedied this gap by...
making the test easier. The next time around, scores
skyrocketed. Problem solved!
Anyway, it turns out that you don't need to go to Texas for
that sort of thing. With half the term remaining, teachers of
seniors received a notification that they would not be allowed
to fail students unless they filled out a form right then and
there declaring that the student was certain to receive an F.
See how that works? First you require that teachers accept
late work right up to the end of the term; then you load up
your "F Confirmation Form" with language indicating that only
students "receiving a guaranteed F" (at a point when nothing
could possibly be "guaranteed") and who will "absolutely get
an F" and are "definitely not going to pass" (at a point when
nothing could possibly be "absolute" or "definite") can be
given failing grades. Failing grades are thus impossible.
Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school!
[bar400x3]
[zt_] [zemt] [zptt] [zac]
return to
comment on reply via support the
Tumblr email this site Calendar
page