exciting new wrinkle in cheating!

So, many of my students this semester did poorly on their first papers, around mid-term. I invited them to re-write papers, spent some time discussing what had gone wrong, had written notes on them to try to help guide the re-writes.

And yes, one of the re-written papers was plagiarized. For this particular student, the basic problem with the first version of the paper was that the student pretty much completely failed to follow directions. Consequently, it was low, even for an F. I noted as much on the paper: actually responding to the questions I asked in the midterm assignment is probably going to be important, after all.

Did this student take this opportunity to go back to the assignment and answer the questions? Nah, cheated.

I've mentioned before (time after time, I suppose) how incredibly irritating cheating is to me. I'm offended, I'm angered, and I resent the disrespect and disregard that egregious cheating seems in part to be motivated by. To me it's clear that if you're cheating in a philosophy class, you are not going to be getting anything out of the class, and so you're wasting my time and yours.

Plus, it's not as though I don't inform people, at the beginning of every semester, that cheating is easy to spot. I also tell them that every semester, someone does it anyway. Perhaps I should stop saying that. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

happy landings

I'm less neurotic than other people I know. I'm not afraid of heights. I'm not xenophobic, nor claustrophobic. I do not fear abandonment or machines. When a plane is flying low over a highway, however, I do often contemplate that it could suddenly, either in an emergency or because the pilot chooses that precise moment to snap, land in front of me. So I'm pleased to report not having been on Highway 4 when a plane landed there yesterday.

The wonderfully ironic background to the story is as follows.

It was a traffic reporter's plane.
The reason it was flying over Highway 4 is because, over the weekend, a tanker truck hauling gasoline burned and caused a major interchange between Interstates 80 and 580 to collapse - an interchange used by hundreds of thousands of commuters daily, all of whom now have to find ways around it, "ways," I should hasten to add, with fewer than the 5 lanes in and out of town offered by 580.

In other news, now crystal meth comes in delicious fruity flavors!

Let me randomly add that Lancelot's tests indicate a probable kidney infection, and he's on antibiotics. Prognosis is good.