The Curious Phenomenon of Hard Work

While I am not an avid techie, nor do I continually lean heavily to the left on many issues, I am still a weekly reader of Slashdot. The occasional article on education tends to raise interesting points, sometimes about technology (forcing students to submit assignments through an anti-cheating system with the suggestion that they’re all guilty until proven innocent) and sometimes not. Thursday, an article from Reuters was posted, claiming that graduate business students admit to cheating more than any other graduate field.

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Leaving behind the overt cynicism of the article and the discussion among Slashdot readers regarding the general moral standards of business practices, I found the article more interesting for the rest of the survey’s results. (I am certainly not here to defend the worth of business programs at universities, as they are usually well deserving of the snide comments their low standards and ridiculous courses produce.)

Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students.

Suggestions as to why this could be so were tossed about in the discussion at Slashdot. Myself, holding a degree in literature, I have always been baffled by those students in my classes that seemed to have an inclination to cheat. The thought of doing such a thing only ever entered my mind when trying to calculate the necessary effort such a scam would require. Because I was almost always presented with a very small number of assignments (almost all writing), and those generally required me to not only create my own topic but correctly defend my position as well, the thought of having to track down something perfectly related and somehow original always seemed to me to be a more complicated, longer task.

A few of the commenters over at Slashdot seemed to think that because original creation is so important to the liberal arts and humanities, while the hard sciences may generally have more right/wrong situations, that this could be the reason for the level of cheating. It’s simply easier when everyone is required to have the same answer. I think this is mostly logical, but at the graduate level I would imagine that engineering students are also creating projects and defending decisions, not just answering multiple choice tests.

From the words of an anonymous commenter:

As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed out in real world math you needed to be able to collaborate with other mathematicians in order to solve difficult problems, and anyone who was trying to get a “free ride” on the work of someone else would (probably) fail the tests so he wasn’t concerned.

In many humanities and social sciences the point of a paper is to come up (and defend) your own argument; any collaboration (beyond editing) can be seen as a type of academic dishonesty.

Granted, different types of material require different types of evaluation. In my own classes, I’m always cautious to mark students wrong when the question is absolutely wrong, but to allow them points if an answer is plausible. In some instances, I’ll openly allow them to defend their choices, but only if the question warrants such a possibility.

Still, the cautious reader will note how the AC’s post begins: “How do you define cheating?” For myself, I’m unsure how so many people have come to the conclusion that certain actions are only cheating if they can’t rationalize it. Several of the posts over at Slashdot had such an introduction before a personal anecdote. Here’s another example:

I think it depends less on the individuals in the field than it does on what _opportunity_ for cheating exists in the program.

A rather pragmatic and depressing introduction. The poster continues, however, to echo the same thoughts of others.

As an engineering undergrad, cheating on assignments (other than in-class exams) was rampant because there was almost always a clear ‘right’ answer. Sure, you’d fudge things a bit so that intermediary steps were different, or falsify a data point, but you’d want to get more or less the same answer as the guy sitting next to you.

As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn’t much we could do to help each other out.

Where did this sad excuse for ‘appropriate cheating’ come from?

It’s right if no one can tell… It’s not wrong because there’s no way to prove it… People do it in the real world anyway… It’s ok for some subjects because their curriculum all but asks the student to cheat…

Not even a week ago, I was discussing the upcoming first report cards with a few of my students. One student remarked that his English teacher (the year before) had “something like 63 assignments graded in the first 6 weeks alone.” He went on to tell me that he had 13 zeroes and that, frankly, they didn’t really affect him. If a student is not taught that his work has a value, why would anyone be surprised when he later takes immoral shortcuts?

Most of the education courses I took at my previous university had ridiculously complex rubrics that scored an inappropriate number of assignments (usually between 45 and 65 for a single semester) with insignificant values. (Compare this to having only four papers a semester in the Arts.) If a student has to put in a 2+ hour effort on an assignment, it is not appropriate to give him 1.5 points which contributes to a total score of 214 points. Yes, that’s about .007% of the total grade. Even the most irrational, untaught mind will kick in and see the inherent worthlessness in that kind of time-to-effort exchange.

In my entire life, I have only cheated once. It was something of an accident, but I can still admit that it was cheating. My high school chemistry teacher decided that it would be amusingly cruel to test us on various laboratory equipment names by pulling them from a box, throwing them up in the air (giving us about 2 seconds to recognize them) and having us write down the names. No second chance viewing. Because of the seating arrangement during tests, some students were at the regular one-piece desks and others were up at the lab tables (those big black counter-like things with gas spigots). I was in a regular desk and someone else was up at one of the lab tables, sitting almost directly in front of me, but facing to the side. Totally frustrated that I missed one (or probably more) of the items, my mind and eyes wandered away from the side of the room (where the teacher was) and back to my table, and whatever was in front of me. For a brief second, my eyes landed on a classmate’s paper and saw the answer. My mind knew the answer was correct, but also that I didn’t have it myself seconds prior. I wrestled mentally for a moment, then shamefully put the answer on my own paper.

As is evident by the story, I’ve never forgotten that moment, and yes, I still feel guilty about it. It was a stupid thing to do. Not because I could have been caught, but because it was dishonest to myself. I knew I didn’t have the answer, but I wrote it down anyway; gained through convenience and chance, not hard work.

The amount of intellectual laziness required for a graduate student to wholeheartedly believe that an action isn’t cheating if the professor never explicitly banned using someone else’s work is truly outstanding. Then again, if they do not recognize the value of completing one’s work independently, then a discussion of what is and is not cheating is nothing more than splitting sad, brittle, pedantic hairs.

While the issue of cheating in education courses might seem to rank near the bottom of immediate importance, it is, nonetheless, pervasive. I’ve yet to see an education or certification course that wasn’t built upon “groupthink” or that didn’t endorse stealing images off the internet without documentation. I can’t remember a single instance where I was asked to cite sources for lesson plans, and I have witnessed intern teachers present lessons from printed workbooks as if they themselves had taken the hours (or weeks) necessary to create them; nary a nod to the owners or authors. What is one of the most common phrases among teachers…?

“Teachers are always stealing ideas from one another.”

Like too many other things, this is said in a lighthearted, joking kind of manner, as if to play down the meaning of the words. Oh no, they’re not stealing, more like … “utilizing without credit”. Ultimately, these practices are encouraged and usually backed up with some kind of rationalized justification like, “Teachers should collaborate for the benefit of their students.”

So just what kind of teacher does this create? I won’t attempt to over generalize, but I will summarize. Teachers joke about stealing from one another. New teacher interns are repeatedly told to use images and materials without documentation. Professors of teachers model laboriously worthless grading rubrics that do not demonstrate the value of work, but push forward the idea of “busy work”. Education courses have nothing to do with the subject teachers will ultimately teach… they are disconnected jumbles of theory, slanted values and complaints about “everyone else who doesn’t understand how hard it is to be a teacher”.

If a proper teacher, instead, understands the value of hard work and awards it an appropriate value, she will be able to skip busywork. She will also be less likely to ignore the persistent problems of plagiarism. Busy work is easy enough for anyone to BUY. Thoughtful assignments that are directly related to the day’s lessons at hand (yes, that means you must be in charge of your curriculum and keep it in line with each group of students.. ) will have a cumulative effect upon the student. Assignments will be interrelated, relevant, and worthwhile. Sure, it’s likely they’ll be harder, but the worth is twofold.

So long as an appropriate academic value is attached to the assignment, the process of having to work hard on an assignment that deals directly with the curriculum SHOWS the student the worthiness of both the content and of the hard work necessary. After all, the best rewards are those the student can hold internally — those which raise his personal sense of integrity and confidence — and such rewards cannot be taught through disconnected slogans, lectures, or rules.

In the Beginning Weeks…

This post was originally written in response to an excellent essay, by Publius, on education over at The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

The public reason for public education is compassion and justice. The state must provide education because of what economists term “market failure.” The phrase is loaded and intentionally so. To describe something as a failure is of course to implicitly establish a standard of success. The market is only a mechanism and it guarantees nothing. The ability to buy and sell freely is in the end all a free market entails. What men do with such freedom is something else. They may behave foolishly or rationally. What is certain is that if a society is composed of short-sighted fools its government will be no better composed …

You cannot force men to be rational or good or honest, they must choose to think and behave.

When markets fail it means only that human beings have failed another human being’s, or a group of human beings’, standard of the good, the right and the proper. The alleged “market failure” in education is that a free market would not provide universal education. In truth nothing can provide “education” for all citizens.

The full post is an excellent read and as I stated in my first reply, I felt my best response would simply be an anecdote. This would be a prime time for me to announce to my readers that I have been employed as a public school teacher for about the last two months, which is essentially why there have been no posts. Hopefully this trend will change and I’ll find more time to post my experiences and continued thoughts on the world of educational news. Without further ado, here are my replies to Publius’ essay.

” I am now employed as a public school teacher in the States. This choice of job was in part financial and in part a mix of curiosity and personal education. In the future, I would prefer to work in a private school environment (and much later have my own school). However, I felt it would be useful for me to experience, first hand, exactly the problems (and potential benefits) of being in a public school, as a teacher. In the past 5 weeks I’ve realized a few things that should be obvious to most people that agree with Publius’ position.

” The willing and able are trapped with the criminal and incompetent until the age of 16. “

1) The amount of time that a teacher can spend with students who want to learn, much less those students who excel at learning, is cut almost in HALF due to the pervasive problems of disruption from hostile and apathetic students. In class, I find my time being sucked away by these students who demand too much attention, simply to keep them on task so they will be *as minimal* a disturbance to others as possible.

After class, during conference time or after school, the time spent on disciplinary phone calls home, paper work and trying to keep track of which students need to make up what (due to excessive truancy) steals away almost all the time I *NEED* as a new teacher for creating lesson plans.

This was a harsh lesson for me. The amount of helplessness I felt for the other 90% of my students was quickly turning to anger… an emotion incompatible with student discipline. Since the second week of school, I began using any resource I could to stop these students. Some of them were given detention (a bland threat for most habitual trouble makers). Some were sent to the office (some of them would rather be there anyway). At least one was taken from my room by a police officer. Many have begun to taste an older form of discipline, such as being thrown out of class into the hall or having to stay after class and pick up text books.

I keep hearing that new teachers face all sorts of problems like this, but I refuse to keep such a high amount of my attention on these students if it means stopping my instruction. The impossibility of public education, however, is that these students can never be fully kicked out of school, leaving the parents to find more appropriate solutions on their own time and money..

We can put them in In School Suspension, send them home for extended suspension, or even remove them to an alternative school.. but never for an entire year. At some point, these students who are incapable of interacting with the rest of the student population, are simply dumped back into the system. Teachers have to figure out how to keep them in order as well as catch them up (sometimes 6 weeks worth of work). Both, in a realistic sense, are borderline impossible. Assuming the teacher is giving instruction in a proper hierarchical fashion, it is not appropriate to say, “Well, they shouldn’t be held accountable for the previous material,” because they will not be able to understand the new material without what came before.

What is a teacher to do? I can’t simply forget about the problem (behavior) students. If I do, I can’t teach my class. Even when they’re not in my class, I know they’re coming back. Either I devote an even larger portion of my day to those students and privately tutor them in an attempt to connect on them at some social/emotional level with the goal of reducing the behaviors some small degree (as well as keeping them up to date on my curriculum) or the problem completely takes over my class, again, when they return.

In the horrendous excuses for teacher education/certification classes, one keeps hearing a veritable hodgepodge of idealistic (yet philosophically disconnected, irrational) jargon about how to “reach every student”. Suggestions for dealing with disruptive classroom behavior include: move desks around so you can walk, recognize diversity, consider home situations, remember biological developmental stages…

Not once, in all the courses I’ve taken, has a single instructor ever dared to mention that the actual content being offered has anything to do with student responsibility. Not once, in all these courses, has anyone ever suggested that academic standards have anything to do with all these disruptions. And not once has anyone ever DARED to suggest that a system where teachers can’t give proper academic marks (nothing below a 50 for a report card), can’t use academic consequences for disruptive behavior, and can’t permanently toss students out of a classroom… might, just might have something to do with the apathy of parental involvement.

I absolutely love being a teacher. The thrill I get from even a single student who asks a question, based upon her own curiosity due to some tiny thing I’ve mentioned, is one of the sweetest experiences in life. Watching my students struggle through the beginning stages of a new concept to the last moment when I’ve asked them to think imaginatively and critically about that same topic holds the same joy for me, as if I had also just experienced that same intellectual triumph. The pleads of “read it again!” or “say that again!” or even “how do you spell ‘obnoxiously’?” are a rare form of music I know I am personally directing.

In a sense though, teaching in a public school is like directing a symphony next to the highway. A few instruments will still be heard, but the end performance could have been vastly superior given a different location. The obvious enormous distractions and detriments are offered to me as normal and expected and in the end, the advice offered to me is about as effective as putting up a fence next to the highway.”

[And Part 2 ...]

“At the repeated request of some readers, I offer a “part two” which was originally supposed to be in my first post.

2) If one desires to become a new public school teacher in the states, they must become familiar with the word “contradiction”. It will never be used by your professors, mentors, administrators or parents; however, it will haunt you continuously, making you doubt any rational thought you have managed to acquire thus far in life.

The summer before I got this job, I took a required course on multiculturalism that espoused the wrongs of the majorities (so long as they weren’t composed of minorities) the moral grayness of presenting single sides of complex ethical decisions as “the only right choice,” (discussing sexual orientation with 3rd graders who have no range of knowledge to understand it meaningfully) and was expected to ignore direct evidence of meaningful standards for unealistic, impossible standards. (That is, English should not be considered an official language because it is discriminatory.. However, the only person in the class who had to learn it as a second language thought it would have been easier for her to have learned English, had the national standards been higher.)

The week before school started, our administration took us through a fairly generic pep rally for new teachers, a convocation for the entire district (complete with motivational speaker), constantly repeated the slogan “Every child, every day” and urged us to do our best as sculptors of the future.

Before school started, new teachers were advised that the “mean” teachers are the best ones in the school. Those who don’t put up with anything, who keep the kids working, who the kids hate on the first day of school.. Those are the ones our administrators liked. Many new teachers repeatedly hear, “Don’t smile until Thanksgiving” (late November). I.e. “Put the kids through boot camp”.

The first week of school, a fellow teacher told me, “One of the hardest lessons I learned my first year as a teacher was that I wasn’t going to get through to every student.”

Two weeks into school, I had to attend a seminar on class discipline and management, where I was taught repeatedly that being hard on students doesn’t do a damn thing. You must connect with the students, find out what’s going on with them, read their signals.. be a psychologist to figure out their motivations for acting out. But you’re reminded never to “be their friend.”

Three weeks into school, I’m told that it’s perfectly appropriate to send students to the office. After all, that’s what they’re there for.. to back up the teachers.

The weekend after the third week, I’m taught that teachers who send students to the office aren’t dealing with management and discipline properly, and that “Master” teachers almost have no office referrals at all.

In the fourth week, I am told by my administration that it’s ok to send students to the office and that in fact, many of the students are already “frequent flyers”.

Also in the fourth week, a parent of a student who was talking during a test (and consequently was awarded a zero) decides to challenge my decision, stating the rules about how it’s illegal to give academic consequences for behavior related reasons. My administration does not back me up, telling me that it’s against the law to do what I did. Explaining to them that talking during a test = cheating is a universal law in practically every classroom did not seem to sway my contact in the administration. I am urged to allow the student to retake the test.

This weekend, I am told by another teacher (for a class management course) that my rule (re: talking during tests) is good and to ignore the law. It is suggested to me that I stand up to the parent, since it might be the first time this student has ever had to meet some kind of standard of behavior.

This weekend, I am also told about a student who failed all of her subjects and state tests with the exception of science (in which she made an A and received a commended performance on the test), because the teacher had made a connection with the student. The teacher had become the student’s friend and the student “didn’t want to let her down.”

This weekend, this same teacher tells me about one of his students that is excelling in mathematics to such an extent that he does not need to write his problems in order to understand concepts or to get the right answers. He explains to us that he is going to attempt to hold a field trip (as bribery) over the student to get him to do his homework (which he obviously does not need to do). Suggestions from myself and classmates that it’s hellacious to have to be restrained academically seem to be ignored. “Put him in the accelerated class.” … He already is .. “Put him in math that’s two years ahead..” No, the field trip should be enough to make him do something he doesn’t need to do.

Connect with your students, but don’t be friends. Be mean, but don’t be angry. Don’t take it personally, stay calm, but deal with it at all hours of the day. Help every student, but not some. Deal with your problems, we’ll help, but not when you need it. Worry about the worst students, ignore the best students, unless they’re misbehaving.

And oh yes.

Don’t bother trying to get help for the students who have no discipline problems, but are honestly struggling, and who are also too far away from moving from “not met standards” on the state test, to “passed”. Focus ONLY on the ones who barely failed… so we can raise our standing in the district by passing just a few more students.

Teach, but don’t worry about it being meaningful to those who need it the most.

Con * tra * dic * tion
n.
A denial.
Inconsistency; discrepancy.
Opposition between two conflicting forces or ideas.
The mental process through which one becomes a public school teacher.”