Plagiarism OR How I Made a Student Cry for the First Time

This whole speech thing has been much harder than I thought it was going to be. Yesterday, when we introduced the speeches, we gave everyone time in the afternoon to work on them, and it seemed like everyone had a pretty good grasp on the concept of giving a three minute speech. They all worked diligently, scribbling down things onto whatever paper they brought that day, and asked the proper questions about translations and expectations and such. Today was a completely different story. The first warning we got came from Class 3, where one of the kids came in at 8AM, and handed a Zowahh a speech, saying "I couldn't print my speech at home, but here's one I wrote a couple of days ago". It was way beyond his English level, and as soon as she brought it out in the teacher's lounge, I googled the opening line, and sure enough, it was wholesale stolen from the Internet. We all thought it was an isolated case. It was not. The same speech popped up in Paja's class, and then in another.

When we got to tutorial time, I asked if any of my kids had finished their speech. When nobody said yes, I thought I had dodged a bullet, but they just didn't understand my question. The first girl to come up had a printed speech that, like the speech from class three, was way outside of her skill level. I made corrections (It had errors!) and noted a line to google in my head. As I fiddled with the school's WiFi to get the internet working, I was approached by another girl, who had THE SAME SPEECH. They sit next to each other, and they thought this would work! I chastised them for plagiarizing, which they didn't understand, and told them to write their own speech. Not five minutes after I made a big deal about all of this, two more girls came up with the SAME SPEECH. I made an even bigger deal about this, and then one of them tried to defend their obvious theft by telling me that it was a speech that they had written last year and won an award for, which is why it was on the Internet. The question of the day is: How dumb do they think I am? I'm not mad, just kinda interested and dissapointed. In the end, over a third of the speeches in the class were plagiarized from the same source. When I told one of the girls that I knew she had stolen her speech, and that she would have to write an entirely new one before tomorrow, she started crying. I didn't care. This isn't as bad as Jenny's class, which had a 90% plagiarism rate.

Dan pointed out that in a country with no regard for copy write law, we shouldn't expect them to care about plagiarism, and I think he's kinda right. They were completely blatant about it, much like how blatant they are about the 5 yuan pirated DVDs in the marketplaces. Or maybe I'm completely wrong, and it's like this anywhere in any middle school. Jeff Johnson should comment on this issue if he can. We'll see how the speeches go tomorrow.

Other than that, a bunch of 10-16 year old soccer players moved in down the hall, and let me tell you, they are truly awful. They're up running down the hall screaming before we wake up in the morning, and they're screaming long after we go to bed. They were told that they can't come to our side of the hallway, but there they are, knocking on our doors at random times and running away, using our shower, and filling our squatters with their poop. They have their own toilets, and it's not like ours are clean, why are they using them? We talked to Don, and he's going to talk to them, but I don't have much hope. Either way, I'm only here until Saturday, then it's off to the middle of a different nowhere.

-Cooper

P.S.: If you want to read the plagiarizer speech, it's here: http://pabg.net/blogs/entry/as-everyone-knows-english-is-very-important-today