I got an email from a student today asking me to do her homework. This is not exactly unusual--the more thoughtful ones provide word counts that I am supposed to hit--but usually they try to be a little more subtle, asking me to "summarize" or "clarify". With the typical conviction of the teenager that adults are total morons who were never young, they expect that I will not recognize the poorly disguised voice of a blurrily photocopied handout peeping out of their request. This one bypassed such subterfuge and threw herself on my mercy.
Having already passed ninth grade, in however desultory a fashion, I find myself unwilling to take on the repeat burden of someone else's homework. I kind of admire the chutzpah of the thing, to be sure, but I am afraid America's students will have to struggle on without my help.
I dunno, I think if I had a chance to repeat 9th grade while in my early 30s, I might enjoy it a lot more than the original confused experience.
At any rate, this phenomenon is or used to be extremely common on subject-specific forums and email lists. For example, some of the Computers & Technology forums I have visted used to get very regular requests -- often, oddly, from Indian and SE Asian names and IP addresses -- that went along the lines of "HELLO I AM IN COMPUTER COURSE AT XYZ UNIVERSITY, NEED DETAIL INFO ON DIFFERENCE AMD V INTEL CPU, THANKYOU, YOUR NEW FRIEND CANDRA YTSUIN MOHALI" or some such.
This post is useless without the original email.
I have posted about 30 book reviews on my blog mainly for the purpose of having a repository for my thoughts on the books reviewed. I get the impression from my few hits that students sometimes find them useful; I do not doubt that some are being used as sources. Oh well, an unintended consequence - I'm providing content for the lazy student who hasn't read the assignment.
I think you sort of missed an opportunity to provide America's youth a valuable lesson. You could have provided a response that would have gotten her enterprise the reward it deserved. Something like this, if the question was about Islamofascism, for instance:
http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2007/10/celebrate-islamofascism-awareness-week.html
Will--I thought the point was to educate people, not to make them dumber.
RICKM - "Don't cheat" is a kind of education, no?
Ryan-
I think you should be directing that comment to Will. I was commenting on his inane discussion on 'Islamofascism', where he claims that...wait for it...'Islamofascism' is an offshoot of right-wing Christians!
RICKM wrote: I think you should be directing that comment to Will. I was commenting on his inane discussion on 'Islamofascism', where he claims that...wait for it...'Islamofascism' is an offshoot of right-wing Christians!
I think I just got dumber in reading that comment, since I can't find anything even vaguely like it at Will's link.
I wouldn't consider it chutzpah since it's become so commonplace for kids to cheat one way or another that there are no longer any real repercussions.
One specific example I know is a kid who graduated from my high school a couple of years after me and subsequently was one of the many kids involved in the UVA cheating scandal in 2001.
http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~lyuu/virginia.html
Instead of getting kicked out of school, he just had to take the class again.
Of course, this same kid was notorious for cheating throughout high school, so no one was surprised that he carried that habit on to college. People were surprised that UVA would be so cavalier (ha!) about it.
It is in the second sentence where he writes that "Islamofascism was...obscure offshoot of the Lebanese Phalangists in the 1930s."
Rickm wrote: It is in the second sentence where he writes that "Islamofascism was...obscure offshoot of the Lebanese Phalangists in the 1930s."
Yeah, uhm, I realize it's Monday and all, but I'm pretty sure that was part of the satire, i.e., Will was suggesting that MM feed the girl a line and see just how much credibility she could stretch out of it before getting the girl in hot water.
Kind of like how a friend of mine, while attending high school in backwoods Georgia, managed to convince a girl that the moon was made of green cheese and the 60s space exploration missions had not only confirmed it, but there was a government conspiracy to cover it up on behalf of the dairy industry. Which she then repeated in dead earnest seriousness to her fifth-period science teacher.
A local High School made national news recently. A few students hacked into the administration computers and changed grades. The pressure to get into the good universities was cited as the reason.
It seems we now have some students too lazy to cheat.
Alternatively, the request might have been genuine, in which case you have just missed an opportunity to pass along your unique insight to a willing subject. Not only that, but depending on the tone of your rejection, you might have convinced that person that you are a stuck-up ivory-tower Expert Economist(tm) who refuses to talk to the lower life forms.
Nice going.
MarkD, how is doing a little Ferris Bueller/Matthew Lightman hacking being too lazy to cheat? You've got to actually sit down for your exams with little crib sheets balled up in your palm to be really cheating? Got to cheat like we did back in the old days? Forget that. If kids are going to cheat, I want them to cheat in the most expedient way possible. If you're going to cheat, be good at it, be creative about it. Of course, these guys got caught, so we can at least say they weren't that good at cheating, even if they were ambitious
Maybe Rickm is one of the people that asked Megan to do his homework.
I don't believe you. No ninth-grader reads your website in the first place. I have no idea why a high school freshman would email you asking you to do her homework. What kind of homework? Trig? Lit? Chem? Econoblogging?
Give me a break. And who are these other "students" who also email you to do theirs, with a specific "word count" no less? I have never, ever read another blogger claiming kids email asking to get homework done.
B.S. You are lying.
Post the emails of these kids to prove they exist, liar. Liar. Pants. On. Fire.
I too would like to see the email. But Mortimer have you never heard of Google?
Megan -
Why not post the email and let your commenters do her work for her?
Perhaps you could make a specific challenge to the ones that seem to have too much time on their hands...(he said, leading with his chin...)
You cou've tried my approach.
I think you really ought to post the email as a sort of "learning through punishment" exercise.