It's spelled with a double e and a "-ah" ending!

I know I put really random pictures on my posts, which is why I try to make the captions relate to the topic. So I tried to google images of "cheater" so make the words and the graphics match for once. I really should have put "academic cheater" or the like, because I really didn't need to see some of those images. Yet, I can't decide if those images were more disturbing, or the fact that I also got a bunch of photos of cheetahs as well. As in the animal. Yep.

A fellow educator friend sent me this link last week. It's not new news; people have been plagiarizing since the dawn of time. Not that it makes it right. But China is a country famous for bootleg, so I'm not surprised either. I'm actually willing to bet that for every one cheater they catch each year at the exams, another ten goes unnoticed. Or at least uncaught.

I admit, I've used things without giving the proper citation. With the internet the way it is, it's sometimes hard not to. The image above links to a url that only has the image and nothing else because I couldn't find the origin in the time I have to write this post. I sincerely apologize, whoever created this image. If this is yours and you want recognition for it (or if you want me to take it off my blog), let me know. I'll gladly do so. All you need to do is identify yourself. Preferably with a valid link.

Plagiarizing is rampant. In my art classes, for the 6-8th graders at least, if more than one student worked on that piece I always make the contributors sign their names on it. It's collaborative, which makes it a social as well as a content lesson. And nearly all social lessons naturally lend itself to language lessons. And thus, I've effectively covered all three major (to some teacher, the only) objectives of any well-formed and well-delivered lesson.

I've used images from the internet in my lessons without citing them. I've taken ideas from other teachers and used them in my class without saying where the idea came from. I've tweaked activities I've found so that they fit in my teaching without telling the person who I got the activity from. Sure, that's what teaching is all about; we're not here to "reinvent the wheel" (a UTEC professor, 2008). But this is also a form of plagiarizing too.

Ok, re-reading what I just wrote makes it look like I condone cheating. I don't. If I catch any student cheating, they get an automatic fail on that assignment without the possibility of re-doing it. They'll probably get suspended too. But that's the point. This issue goes beyond the surface - aka the actual act of cheating. It's the growing ideology that one must cheat because:

a) like the parents in the article, one cannot get ahead in life without doing so. I should also acknowledge here that the BBC has a blatant bias against China and its social norms as well as its political policies. There is definite spin here. Because in China, this item is true. More likely than not, any one with any kind of status in China has cheated at one point or another. Which also makes the BBC's bias understandable. And now I'm definitely rambling.

b) that plagiarizing is just "sharing." It is and it isn't. I'm not smart enough to determine when it is either.

c) that the world has become so casual, indifferent to any kind of etiquette whatsoever, that people cheat without even thinking about it. They can't even identify when exactly they cheated, even if they know that cheating is wrong. Because cheating now doesn't look like the cheating of 25, or even just 10, years ago.

It's not limited to these three points either. And that's the one major issue I have with all the positive, collaborative discipline models I've learned so far. I can address the behavior and give a logical/natural consequence for it but that doesn't necessarily address the underlying, maybe psychological but definitely social, problems that led to the misbehavior in the first place. Case in point: the girl in JL's class who lies and steals and lies about stealing. She's repentant and willingly participates in the consequences of her actions. She's even more willing to do it again at a later date.

I have no answer for this. These are just my thoughts.

EDIT: I should give credit to Bop Bop (see link list on the right, under Friends) for pointing the above image out to me. She with the backwards smiley faces. =)