Playing Cops When Dealing With Research Papers

It's hard to encourage a teacher to keep working when he has to play police strategies to discover who's cheating and where. Experiences of a Uninspired Teacher are most than reflected in our practice. We were glad to read his presentation: "Comments are welcome, opinions are even more welcome, and spreading the word is welcome most of all." So, we thought it will be of great use spread word on this statement: "The problem with teaching research in high school is how archaic everything still is."

Tom believes that 'normal is underrated'. But he also asks to Stop Trying to Inspire Him. What a name for a great educational blog. An excerpt of how he's dealing with frustration when a student tells him "I'm not writin' this over" is here:

I don't think that most of my students who plagiarize realize they're doing it anyway. They usually fall into one of two categories. Either they try to cite their sources and don't do it enough or use MLA format improperly; or they don't cite anything because they "didn't know they had to do that" even though I've done a day's lesson on it and there are at least one or two pages' worth of information on hand that demonstrate proper citation. So it's either not fully grasping the concept or being flat-out lazy. And while I would do what some of my colleagues do and take the latter papers to the internet (or one of those paper-checking software tools), then highlight the plagiarized passages, it's really not necessary. That's because the papers are badly organized and horribly written to the point where if proper citation was used, they'd fail anyway (or maybe get a D-).

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