Salon.com > teaching

Wikipedia editors accuse professor of editing site with plagiarized text

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:53:00 +0000

Wikipedia editors are furious after a college professor assigned his students to edit the encyclopedia, riddling it with errors and alleged plagiarism.

Professor Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto assigned more than 1,700 students the task of editing and improving two different Wikipedia articles on topics pertaining to the lectures he'd given.

The students dug in and amended the articles, but something fishy caught a site editor’s attention: Of the 1,700 students who'd been handed the assignment, an estimated 85 percent had plagiarized their edits.

“Pause it when he gets shot”

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

My school was on lockdown last Thursday. At recess, 12 shots rang out; we shuttled the children inside and declared a school emergency. Half my students suddenly had to pee. I couldn’t let them go; all doors shut — no movement. Our security guard stopped by each room to announce the danger.

Then, we kept teaching.

The week after Sandy Hook, I’d had nightmares about places I could hide my students if a shooter came — they're little, so I could put them in closets or drawers, I could stand outside the door and try to talk the guy down, I could dial 911 behind my back — but that’s not what our lockdown ended up like.

Our lockdown wasn’t very scary at all. It was usual for New Orleans. Our lockdown meant an 18-year-old boy died a block and a half away -- he was the only intended target, the only death.

His mother, the news reports, cried in the middle of the street and would not stand up for anything. It was 2 o'clock in the afternoon, not a cloud in the sky. And inside my school, as the lockdown ended and we heard the news, I thought: Thank God it’s not one of mine.

Last year, I taught high school, and when it comes to my big kids, gun violence is a text message I get in the morning while I’m headed to school:

Teacher could be fired for stomping on U.S. flag

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:15:00 +0000

A South Carolina English teacher may lose his job for stomping on an American flag during a class demonstration. Scott Compton was attempting to illustrate to his students that the flag was a symbol and also that the physical flag is just piece of cloth -- a point likely lost on the class now that Compton has been suspended for treating the "piece of cloth" as such.

Compton, described by a local conservative news site as "very liberal," teaches in a community with a "robust military community," adding to sensitivity around the treatment of flags, the HuffPo reported.

Although flag burning and desecration of the flag is legal and constitutionally protected, the Lexington-Richland school district deemed Compton's behavior "unprofessional and inconsistent with conduct standards."

Ohio Supreme Court hears appeal from creationist teacher

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:36:00 +0000

When John Freshwater was fired from his job as a science teacher at an Ohio school earlier this year, it was not just because he propounded creationism. He also pushed a Christian view against homosexuality and, according to reports, used a Tesla coil to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.

Now Freshwater has appealed the case to the Ohio Supreme Court. As Raw Story reports, secular and science groups in the state and beyond are urging the court to uphold the school board's decision.

"Freshwater’s pedagogy serves no legitimate educational purpose in a public school science class, is scientifically unsound, and serves only impermissibly to advance a sectarian purpose, namely, to teach creationism in its tradition version of ‘creation science’ or its modern incarnation of intelligent design,” National Center for Science Education told the court last week.

Teaching ate me alive

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 19:00:00 +0000

It wasn’t one single incident that made me quit teaching in a public middle school. It was the steady, moldy accumulation of dehumanizing, lifeless, squalid misadventures of which I was a part. Like that time with “Carlos,” to pick an incident more or less at random.

I can’t even remember what it was that happened between Carlos and me. Anger, impatience, frustration, stupidity — and that was just me. Probably just another student who categorically refused to do as he was perfectly reasonably asked — open a book, pick up a pencil, hand in homework — or a teacher’s ineffectual attempts to come up with any good reason at all to learn the Pythagorean Theorem, or some such timeless knowledge. OK! Let’s say you have a ladder leaning against a wall. Suffice to say, our “conversation” ended without closure. But, evidently I said something that upset Carlos.

The next day I saw my friend the Dean of Students. He told me that he ran into Carlos’ father and a couple of his uncles; they were looking for my classroom. They had baseball bats. I am not the coach of the baseball team. There is no baseball team. In fact, there are no teams at all.

Ex-NYU professor sues James Franco

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:03:00 +0000

James Franco, the fiction, poetry and comedy writer who supports himself by acting, is embroiled in a lawsuit with a former NYU professor. According to the New York Post, Franco called Jose Angel Santana "a bad teacher" after receiving a D in his "Directing the Actor II" class. Now, Santana is suing Franco for those "disparaging and inaccurate public statements," telling the New York Post that Franco "uses the bully pulpit of his celebrity to punish anyone who doesn’t do his bidding.”

In Santana's opinion, Franco earned the poor grade due to extremely low attendance, saying that “Whoever was in Clint Eastwood’s chair at the Republican National Convention was more present than Mr. Franco was in my classes."

Franco's attendance record will have to improve going forward: The MFA grad has signed on to teach a poetry-inspired short film course at NYU, HuffPo reported.

Teaching the People’s Republic

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

BETWEEN 1999 AND 2001 I lived in Shaoyang, a city in Hunan province famous for clementines and murder. The clementines were best when green-skinned and sour; about the murders, I cannot speak.

Though 'Shaoyang' means 'the town on the north bank of the Shao river,' it spreads along the junction of two: the pale green Shao Shui river — whose colour is said to derive from a slumbering dragon — and the wider, brown Zijiang. In 1999, the city’s population was just under half a million. From the rampart above the old city gate, one could look over an expanse of roofs whose thick gray tiles were like scales. The streets were lined with peddlers and stalls; most of the shops had roll-down shutters instead of doors. On the pavement, people washed vegetables, impaled eels on a nail, and welded engine blocks. Outside some of the restaurants there were dogs in cages that no longer bothered to bark.

Apology to my former student

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I’m not in the habit of checking Rate My Professor, a popular a site that allows students to critique a professor’s teaching style, personality and even “hotness.” But with a new school year around the corner, I figured: Why not? The comments from the previous semester were posted, and I hadn’t checked the site in a while. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the academy snooping around to find out what my students say behind my back. So I pulled up the site one day, and I found this:

I really expected to enjoy his course, but I ended up dreading it. He is more interested in his own writing than in teaching. Unimaginably self-absorbed. Thinks very highly of himself and is close-minded toward any opinion that differs from his own.

Ouch. Teachers have always been subject to criticism, and lord knows I’ve endured negative feedback before, but Rate My Professor is a public kind of scolding, and this one stung. It didn’t make me angry. I didn’t stomp around my office. Instead, I just felt sad. This student had showed up, enthusiastic to learn — “really expected to enjoy the course” — and I had failed him or her. I kept looking at the blue frowny-face icon that rated my teaching as “poor quality,” and it seemed to capture my feelings exactly. Not because I thought this anonymous student was wrong, but because I feared this anonymous student might be right.

My public school beat-down

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:30:00 +0000

Two years ago, I accepted an offer to teach seventh grade English at an urban middle school. I remember following a woman into a little office to sign papers, papers for a regular job not headquartered in the spare room in my house, a regular job with a designated lunchtime and human beings. The last time I did such a thing was in 1986. When the woman left to photocopy my signature, I translated the salary I was to receive on the back of her business card. It seemed low. It was low. But I had not arrived in that spot -- a table pressed into the corner of the Dallas Independent School District personnel office -- because I intended to make lots of money. I was going to change lives, I reminded myself. You do not make a lot of money when you change lives.

“Are you ready to start today?” asked the woman, returning.

“Today, gosh. That’s fast.”

She waited. I could be ready. Yes. I could be ready. She checked her watch.

Not an hour later, I clicked up the metal steps into Portable Room 1464. Twenty-five 13-year-olds whipped their heads around, like ballerinas doing chaine turns.

Charter schools’ darker side

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:21:00 +0000

While my last post on charter schools was overwhelmingly positive, it ended on the note that charter schools cannot be a panacea for educational issues because quality public education needs to be made available for all students. However, after spending a week in Detroit in March working on the issue of charter schools, I realize that my previous post reflected the charter school experience of the Northeast rather than the country as a whole. In the Northeast, charter schools are supported as innovative laboratories for educational development and reform. But other areas of the country are skeptical of charter schools, and for good reason. In Michigan, that skepticism stems from the fact that about 65 percent of charter schools in the state are run by for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs). Without proper oversight and accountability, this runs the risk of turning a system that’s meant to make a quality education available to everyone into a purely profit-driven enterprise that lacks concern for the well-being of students.