Dear Members of a Certain (High-School?) Class in Delhi, New Delhi, India or Thereabouts:
Your teacher has set you a very interesting assignment. He* has, in fact, asked you to write a paragraph on what it would be like to be Batman for a day. I would like to have been set this assignment in high school myself. There are many things I would do if I could be Batman for a day, though I am not going to tell you what they are because you little freaks of nature are trolling the Internet in an attempt to plagiarise the Batman assignment.
What the hell is wrong with you? Your entire class has googled this phrase and stumbled upon my website. Are you really all going to hand in the same paragraph? I hope you do. I hope your teacher googles the phrase and comes across this blog entry. Hey, teacher in India! Guess what? Your students are a bunch of spineless cheaters! They are completely incapable of independent thought. If you told them to jump off a cliff, they would jump off a cliff, though perhaps not before googling the best cliff locations worldwide.
Hey, students in India! You are cheating. You are stealing. You are taking credit for work that is not yours. You are Avoiding. Writing. A paragraph. On Batman. Your teacher is not asking you to describe a room or explain how to make a sandwich. He wants you to write on Batman! Batman! Batman! My God...are you really that lazy? Are you truly incapable of spending fifteen minutes thinking about what you might do if you were Batman for a day? Okay, so not everyone likes or knows very much about Batman.** If you must go straight to the goddamn Internet as soon as you get your assignment, why not, you know, use this fantastic resource to find out what kind of person Batman is and what sorts of things he might do in the course of a day? This sort of research is creative (not to mention fun) and will give you the background to come up with ideas of your own.
However...nooooooooo...you plug the title of your assignment into Google and hope against hope that someone else has already completed such an assignment and posted it online. Your laziness truly knows no bounds.
I lied earlier. I shall tell you what I would do if I were Batman for a day: I would work my little armoured butt off to figure out who you guys were and rat you out to your teacher. Boring, I know...but Batman could certainly do it.
Love,
Kem.
*Or she, but let us simplify our pronouns.
**I do, though.
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11 comments:
Uhhhhhhh...
...does anybody know whether or not the preceding comment links to porn? 'Cause if it does, I'm going to delete it.
I'm just sayin'...
I'd just delete it anyway. It's obviously spam. And I'm not brave enough to click on the link to see where it goes.
Good point. Okay...goodbye, Batman spam. I shall bat-delete you with my bat-keyboard.
I wish I had an assignment like this in school.
So, Kem, what would you do as Batman for a day? Inquiring minds who are already employed wish to know.
Kem,
My son reads and loves your blog. I'm just discovering it because he copied some paragraphs to test Holt Online Essay Scoring, just so you know. We also credited you. :)
Anyway, my daughter's high school uses this computerized essay scoring program. I'm a writer/educator and can't believe anyone thinks a computer can score an essay. So we tested it. The results are pretty funny. If you want to see the ridiculous essay my son wrote that got a pretty good score, it's on my blog.
Thanks for the sanity you inject into the world of school writing.
VV: Well, I do answer the question in the post...but let's see...what else would I do if I were Batman for a day? I think I would probably turn up at a prominent Gotham theatre in the middle of a showing of The Dark Knight, leap upon someone sitting in the front row, hiss, "I'm Batman!", then use a remote control to cause the Batmobile to burst through the screen. I would also teach classes in full costume, of course.
Jena: That is one of the most appalling bits of essay-related news I have ever seen. I may even have to rant on it myself or at least link to your own beautiful rant if I manage to finish reading up on Gothic horror in time to write a lecture on it and still get some bloody sleep. Why would anybody think that an automated essay-marking system could possibly be a good idea? I absolutely condone your son's emperiment, including his use of poor Siegfried the Plagiarist. Your daughter's teacher needs to get...with...the programme.
*copies, pastes into Word, submits as own rant on plagiarism*
:=)
*Descends on exvanp like the Wrath of Murphy and does quite a lot of screaming and stamping for a rather long time
I recently found a very odd bit of plagiarism.
I wrote a two paragraph critique of a book and posted it at a website. Someone else wrote a one paragraph response to my post, disputing one of my points. I responded with another couple of sentences and the other person gave a "let's agree to disagree."
Someone else took all four posts and turned them into a review on Amazon. This included the minor dispute, so it looked like the review was disagreeing with itself.
Firstly, why does someone want to lift something and post it somewhere where there's no money or grade involved? Secondly, why would they do it so incompetently? And lastly, why would they do it at a place where they're posting under their real name? I sent an email to the offender, who hasn't replied and who has disappeared from the original website.
Some people are just strange.
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