Day 38 - Final Projects and the "P" Word

Fortunately for Carrie and I, the 11th graders took the science FCAT yesterday, so our supervising teacher told us not to even bother showing up at school since we would be doing nothing productive with our time anyway. That certainly is making this week go by quickly.

Today in and of itself, though, felt like a lifetime. Both 4th and 5th periods had the whole 100 minutes to work on their projects. Our UF supervisor was there for about half of 4th period. I felt bad that she had to sit there while we basically ran around from student to student answering questions. On the up-side, she did get to see us in the midst of major classroom management and individual interaction with students. She left us a nice note and when she emailed us our observation forms, we had passed all the "benchmark" criteria : )

Now, for the "P" word part of the day . . . Let me preface this by saying that in our class at UF last night we discussed plagiarism (the "P" word) and what we would do to handle plagiarism in our classrooms someday. Carrie and I made eye contact during class and I know we were both wondering if we had set ourselves up for a disaster with the project we had assigned. Just you wait and see.

We began class with a few announcements/reminders about the requirements for the project, including a do-not-copy-someone-else's-work-and-cite-the-sources-you-reference caveat. Carrie and I felt pretty good about the students' projects . . . until we started grading them. Out of the four or five we have graded already, one or two would qualify as pretty well done. The others are examples of extreme plagiarism. We are talking like 90% of the work was copied directly from one or more sources and not cited properly. Even if it was cited properly, as was one that I began grading, it is unacceptable for your "work" to be only a shortened version of someone else's words.

Carrie and I reflected on our plagiarism discussions from class last night. We thought about what the students' prior knowledge on plagiarism might be and how we had prepared them to avoid doing it. We don't really know the answer to the first part, but we do know that we only briefly told them not to do it. You can not expect someone to do something when you haven't told them how to do it. Being the nice and inexperienced teachers that we are, we are taking the "we didn't prepare you well enough" approach and on Friday we will be doing a lesson on avoiding plagiarism followed by giving the students the opportunity to redo their work. Sounds like a fun way to spend our last day teaching, right? Not really, but we were wondering how we were going to fill that last day, and now we have a plan. Fortunately we caught this now, before we see 1st period tomorrow. We will give them the plagiarism crash course before they finish their projects. I would dread telling them that they had to rewrite their assignment.

This internship has truly been a learning experience and I am so glad to have had the chance to make these mistakes now, under the guidance of a mentor teacher, rather than later when I am on my own. Moral of the story- never assume that teenagers know anything.