Today...I had a frustrating session
When I hear the words, "your most frustrating session," I am assuming that the worst session I have ever been in should be immediately conjured. But this is not so. I have most certainly had my fair share of not-so-great sessions but definitely nothing that I had to fight through excruciating pain for.
Today was frustrating because I am almost positive that my tutee had plagiarized half of their paper. I tutored an ESL student who was exquisitely kind and definitely had a lot to say about their paper, but the sections that they did write were very evidently of an ESL dialect, "for every all students are being to respecting the school universities." These were the majority of this student's sentences, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. What was wrong were the interlaced paragraphs in which the writer's dialect dramatically changed. Paragraphs that read like I had a stick in my mouth were immediately followed by an entire paragraph without a single error.
After reading the first paragraph of near perfect English, I paused, dumbfounded. I then circled the entire paragraph and said, eyebrows raised, "Now...I did not spot a single error in this paragraph..." Because the first page had taken us 30 minutes to get through, it was a dramatic change of pace to briskly read through another portion that contained complex sentence structure and an extremely heightened vocabulary.
"Did you write this?" I asked.
The tutee said yes. He almost beamed with pride.
I was very frustrated.
This is really only an example of me being judgemental. I have no way to prove that the student did not write in broken and confusing English for the initial part of his essay, and then suddenly became an English professor at the end of each paragraph.
Rock and a hard place. I could not stand up and yell, "LIAR!" and if I kept questioning his writing, I would only prove that I was being judgemental.
To add to my frustration, I was supposed to be off work a half hour ago, and I was still jumping back and forth between two separate people writing the same paper, unsure of how to tutor his paper. If our job is to improve the writer, not the paper, plagiarism is the most detrimental thing a student could do. This student was not learning how to improve themselves as a writer. However, because I had asked the student if it was their words, and because he had answered yes, I felt there was little else I could do.
The irony? The paper was about the ethics one should follow in order to be a good student.
Today was frustrating because I am almost positive that my tutee had plagiarized half of their paper. I tutored an ESL student who was exquisitely kind and definitely had a lot to say about their paper, but the sections that they did write were very evidently of an ESL dialect, "for every all students are being to respecting the school universities." These were the majority of this student's sentences, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. What was wrong were the interlaced paragraphs in which the writer's dialect dramatically changed. Paragraphs that read like I had a stick in my mouth were immediately followed by an entire paragraph without a single error.
After reading the first paragraph of near perfect English, I paused, dumbfounded. I then circled the entire paragraph and said, eyebrows raised, "Now...I did not spot a single error in this paragraph..." Because the first page had taken us 30 minutes to get through, it was a dramatic change of pace to briskly read through another portion that contained complex sentence structure and an extremely heightened vocabulary.
"Did you write this?" I asked.
The tutee said yes. He almost beamed with pride.
I was very frustrated.
This is really only an example of me being judgemental. I have no way to prove that the student did not write in broken and confusing English for the initial part of his essay, and then suddenly became an English professor at the end of each paragraph.
Rock and a hard place. I could not stand up and yell, "LIAR!" and if I kept questioning his writing, I would only prove that I was being judgemental.
To add to my frustration, I was supposed to be off work a half hour ago, and I was still jumping back and forth between two separate people writing the same paper, unsure of how to tutor his paper. If our job is to improve the writer, not the paper, plagiarism is the most detrimental thing a student could do. This student was not learning how to improve themselves as a writer. However, because I had asked the student if it was their words, and because he had answered yes, I felt there was little else I could do.
The irony? The paper was about the ethics one should follow in order to be a good student.
posted by Anonymous at 5:05 PM
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