So, my teacher assigns us this long term history project. For this project we a required to do 1) Find news articles 2)Write a summary on said news article and 3) write how it ties into the class. So just to see if my teacher even reads what we write, I took This article and wrote a summary and tie-in for it. I should note for some reason he actually requires us to put the original article in the portfolio thing he has us keep this whole project in. That article is from The Onion, which is a satire news site. Which means the people in the article don’t exist and neither Bush nor Rove said any of those things. Proves my point that he doesn’t actually read this junk. I got a score of 3 out of a possible 4 on it. Not only did it score well it was my best scoring article yet. Makes me wonder if I could just make stuff up and get away with it. Is what I did dishonest? Most likely. Is what I did morally bankrupt? You betcha! Do I care? Not a bit.
My history teacher my third year in high school was also my basketball coach. It was an honors history class. For our final at the end of the first semester (in my honors history class) he had us make a collage. In an honors class. We spent the two hour period when most people were writing essays and we cut pictures out of magazines and glued them to poster-board. They were supposed to reflect the last two-hundred years of history. (My collage included a picture of a train, because trains happened in the last two-hundred years.)
Oh, it was a group project.
I kinda got the feeling he didn’t really want to grade essays so much. Actually, he used to spit a lot when he talked.
Anyway.
I’m a teacher. I don’t know of anyone who reads all the assignments. Strike that- I knew one teacher who did. She stayed at school until three or four AM every night, and had a nervous breakdown that forced her to take a long medical leave.
I make assignments that I know will help my students learn. If they don’t do them, they don’t learn. Some days I read all of the papers, some days I skim them, some days I don’t read them at all, and some days I pull two or three out of the pile to read.
Make a habit of this, and your teacher will catch you, sooner or later. Plus, of course, you aren’t learning what the teacher is hoping you’ll learn. The grade is a letter on paper- it’s the learning that you actually need.
Shame on you. I used to teach – English at high school and junior high level – and if I assigned it, I read it. What’s the point of assigning something if you don’t use it to either assess the student’s accomplishment or to determine what he/she needs more help with?
I don’t get your line of reasoning here. How are you supposed to help them learn if you don’t show them their mistakes and the only way to find their mistakes is to actually read their papers.
This assignment was a test grade ( I had to do six articles and this was only one of the six. The other five I did legitimately. I figured if he caught on one lousyn article wouldn’t make much of a difference) I don’t know about anyone else, but I think teachers should actually read stuff worth that much.
This is freakin’ hilarious. Once your class is over and your grade is set in stone you ought to let the teacher know what an idiot he is.
I had a social studies class with the football coach one semester. Several of his players were in my class so we spent a lot of time on the social studies of the high school football playbook. We were assigned weekly reports and could do them on pretty much any topic we chose. The first one I actually did some research and turned in a good paper and got an A. The same A that the people who copied articles out of the encyclopedia got. Copied articles out of the encyclopedia, and stopped copying when they hit the word limit for the assignment, even if the word limit was in the middle of a sentence. We could get extra credit for reading our assignments out loud in class. One day two people read their essays. They had copied the same article out of the same encyclopedia and stopped at the same word. They both got full credit.
Another time I had an English teacher who used to teach in Texas. She fled the state because they implemented basic skills testing for teachers and she couldn’t pass. We read a lot of short stories, and she used to mock me openly because a) I had read many of the stories on my own for pleasure and b) I had been accepted to college on a full academic scholarship. Why in god’s name a teacher would mock a student for reading on his own time and securing a scholarship to college is incomprehensible to me. She would assign essays too, and I used to turn in soft-core porn stories for the fiction ones. I guess she liked them because I always got As.
Mold me people. I’m an intern right now
If you assign it you should read it. Though having said that I’m finding I assign things that I will less likely have to spend hours marking. That may be the first sign I’m destined for a new career.
It is the responsibility of the teacher to read what he assigns. However I agree, depending on how much a teacher (especially English teachers) you may be spending a pile of hours marking. I will agree though, not all teachers I have known read through all of the assignments. I knew one who only read the first and last paragraph!
My solution: Pay teachers the money they deserve so they/we can’t complain about marking 
Amen. The first year I taught, I made a biiiiigg mistake. I had term papers in 3 classes due the last day of the term, and gave a final exam the same day. Of course, there were essay questions on the exam. I read the equivalent of several copies of War and Peace that weekend. With annotation. After that I learned to stagger the due dates. But I always felt I owed it to my students to read everything they wrote.
My “Cultural Studies” teacher in 10th grade had us do a slightly watered-down version of that same BS - cut out a news article and bring it in.
Though ours didn’t involve any writing or cognitive work whatsoever, it still sparked my smart-ass sensibilities and after about 2-3 weeks of the class I did the same thing you did - onion.com (my favorite articles, in that they are the ones I remember, were something like “Russians discover secret of fire” and “Scientists find race of skeleton people”). I had that class with that teacher for a full nine weeks and she never said one word to me and always gave me full credit for the assignment.
I didn’t care if it was dishonest either because as Homer Simpson once said “It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.” - if she wasn’t listenin’, I wasn’t lyin’. When she showed us 45 minutes of “Rugrats in Paris” on the day before finals, that only validated my opinion that what I had done was just fine.
My teachers not only read all the papers, they wrote long chatty comments in the margins. The letter grade was just the icing on the cake.
Did you submit the article? Did you summarize it? Did you tell how it tied into the class? The article, while a joke, is in fact relevant to the events of the past few years and could very easily tie into a history/current events class. Maybe you actually did something well and have failed to notice it. Like Bart Simpson, “Knowing the answers was like a whole new form of cheating!”
I once graded tests for a prof during the summer break. One student came in extremely upset that he scored a 35%. Of all his answers there was one that was actually correct and well-done. He refused to believe that it could be a good answer because he did not feel personally confident in it; however his shoddy answers, which he was very confident in, were quite poorly done.
It would be a shame if you mistook your good work for teacher apathy.
Maybe a little bit of a hijack, but thematic:
I used to teach Sunday School in our church, to High Schoolers. I incorporated material from wherever I could find it, to make discussions of faith and philosophy and life in general relevant.
One piece that I used was the Onion article headlined “God diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder.” Hilarious article. I sent copies of it to my former Pastor (who had just retired), my brand-new Pastor, and the Education Director at the Church. I told them I was going to use the article in the next week’s class. It was a great illustration of Old vs. New Testament emphases, an object lesson on how people try to force-fit God into their preconceptions, and an observation on the inconstancy of human viewpoints on God and “stuff”.
The Education Director loved it, and asked me to let her know how the discussion went. My former Pastor loved it, but advised me to be prepared to field concerned questions from parents not familiar with the Onion. My new Pastor wrote back to express his concern that the article might confuse the kids, perhaps even shake their faith. He strongly advised me to think long and hard before introducing the material. He clearly did not recognize the satirical nature of the article.
Well, I used it. We had a terrific discussion on the nature of God, and on our perception of the nature of God - how it is formed, how it has changed, what effects it, societal expectations, the role of the “religious” in its formation, etc. etc. It was a great discussion, and everyone came away with a little more insight than we had walked in with.
Feedback? None from the parents, except a few who wanted to know how I came up with so many ideas that seemed to really energize their teenagers. My students came back the next week with more ideas that had percolated during the week, related to the article.
And my (now former) new Pastor? He’s still as clueless as he was then.
It sounds to me like many of the above mentioned teachers are making more than they deserve.
I also had a history teacher who didn’t read the assignments. Every week, my class had to answer a series of essay questions for homework, with each answer just a single paragraph long. I suspected he didn’t read them because there were never any comments, just a series of checkmarks acknowledging that I had in fact written one-paragraph essays. I started testing the teacher by inserting nonsense sentences in the middle of paragraphs, like “Basset hounds have very long ears” and “Scotsmen wear nothing under their kilts.” The teacher never noticed.
I had the same experience, except I would actually write in the middle of the paragraph, “Are you reading this?”
My religion teacher does the exact same thing, but then I don’t really expect much more from him…
I’ve had some of my students try this stunt. They usually don’t believe I read them, because I read 1000wpm and get them back to them very quickly. I don’t comment on their “inserts” and wait until they try it with a major assignment. Then I nail them to the wall. I rarely have to reinforce the lesson later.
This was a rather major assignment.
In one language class where we were supposed to write a commentary of a particularly insipid piece of French prose, I wrote that the text seemed to “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor” (with mental apologies to Douglas Adams).
When I got the essay back, I found that I’d gotten my best mark ever, and the passage in question was marked with a big tick.
Obviously the teacher thought it actually meant something.
I hope you and your colleagues are in the minority.