Pointless Announcements

Sentence fragment activity...check
Commas outline done...check
Reading response...check
Interview questions...check
Studying for social science exam...next

All that's left is writing a commas activity and writing my teacher observation paper, which I can't do until I observe another teacher tomorrow.

 

The great thing about smart quotes vs. dumb quotes is that I can tell when you've copied something from a web article and pasted it into your manuscript as though you've written it yourself. Microsoft Word only tends to drop dumb quotes when quotation marks are pasted rather than typed.

Now stop plagiarizing. You make six figures; you can't say you're not intelligent enough to know what plagiarism is.*

*This isn't necessarily true.

 

I had a student tell me recently that he got 1 point on an assignment in another class because he hadn't cited a quote correctly. I told him his teacher was kinder than I would have been by 1 point. I also told him that we'd talk about this during an upcoming assignment. My personal goal is to ensure that every one of my 45 students knows what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. It's perfectly fine to quote things, and I wish people would realize that. Just cite it!

That would make a great t-shirt--Just cite it!

 

I think there is a fine line between passing off something as your own and bungling a citation. It's all about appearances. One is deceptive, while the other may simply be a failure to direct readers to a source. The main difference is that the reader knows in the latter case that the material is a secondary source.

 

That's one of the things we talked about. I think part of it is that other teachers in the building assume we've covered things in language arts that we may not have gotten to yet. We've just started working on in-line citations. Content literacy is the new thing in education, but teachers in other disciplines won't take the time to ensure the students know 1) how to write a cohesive paper and 2) how to cite their sources correctly. Their attitude is, "You should have learned that in language arts!" I want to ask them if they've read the Common Core Standards for Language Arts lately. There's a lot to cover, and there are a lot of students to keep on the same page. I'm not asking teachers in other content areas to teach what I need to teach; I just want them to verify that their students know WTF they're talking about before they assign a massive research paper that's 50% of their grade.

 

Uh-oh

 

Aw geez!

Everyone, batten down the hatches!

 

You didn't miss the important stuff. You caught the tail end of the recent attacks we've had. We're calling them the Attack of the Lesbian Semen-Snatchers.

 

I was considering getting in the shower 20 minutes ago.


Now that I see Plan9 is back I KNOW I need a shower.......