Call Me Forrest

Can I tell you how much the kids here suck? I spent all weekend grading independent novel projects, which my students have had three months to work on. The class was divided into two, and I had six kids. Four of them were reading Catcher In The Rye and two of them were reading To Kill A Mockingbird. For the project, they had to write chapter summaries, keep track of vocabulary they didn't know, write about the theme, give a brief oral presentation, and do a combination of character, plot, and creative projects. For the projects, they had to earn 60 points, but were given options totalling more than double that. They had a ton of freedom to do whatever appealed to them. They also had a ton of time. Three entire months. So what kind of projects do I get? Bad ones, yest, but no, not just bad ones. I get plagiarized ones. Four of my six kids plagiarized almost the entire project. Unabashedly plagiarized chapter summaries, theme papers, poems about the story, songs about the story, obitutaries for characters...things you wouldn't even imagine could be plagiarized. They managed to do it. And the plagiarism was blatantly obvious. They didn't even change a word. They simply found what they wanted on the web, printed it out, and claimed it as their own. In Google, I'd type in a sentence of what they wrote, and magically their whole paragraph/essay/project would pop up. There were lots of tip-offs to the fact that they were cheating, but the most obvious was the ridiculously high level of English that appeared in the writing. These kids do not speak English as their first language. They make mistakes with really basic language. Do they think I'm not going to notice that sentences such as,

"Other elements provide cohesiveness to the plot, such as Holden's dependence on telephone communication to relieve his anxiety attacks and his frequent condemnation of movies. Most important, however, is his fluctuation between depressions, which occur when people disappoint him with their insincerity, and manic states, such as his fight with Stradlater, his argument with Sally Hayes at the skating rink, and his frenzied conversation with Carl Luce at the Wicker Bar. The obvious conclusion to his escape from Pencey is burnout and complete exhaustion."

don't sound like things that they would say? Hell, I wouldn't even say that, and Rice actually awarded me a degree in English. I'm annoyed that these kids are so lazy. I'm frustrated that they wasted my whole weekend with their bullshit. And I'm really pissed that they think I'm stupid enough not to notice. I don't come off as being that dumb, do I?

And as a side note...these are the kids in my "good" class. Just try to imagine what my "bad" class is like.