Yes, I haven't blogged in a while. I am aware of this. And yes fans and cringers, I do feel slightly bad. Let me tell you what I've been up to, not that anyone cares, but just that I will make a point eventually.
I've been marking, marking and marking some more, and yes such is the tragic side of the life of an academic of sorts but anyway English and language courses/humanities stuff in general means there's loads of written stuff to be sifted through. So when you've been so blessed as to have two groups of a subject subtitled Academic Writing Skills you pretty much know what you're in for. So we begin this process of learning to write coherent essays for university level blah blah blah...so we start from the basics, phrases and clauses: what is the difference?(phrase has no verb, a clause does, but you all knew that anyway :)), from there we started making sentences (I'm sure by now you're thinking if they got to varsity they probably know this?- think again).Then I showed them how to think, come up with ideas etc etc. Everything you could possibly need to get by with doing essays at varsity including referencing according to Harvard method and getting their drafts edited and revised and reworked.
So now, for two weeks i trawled through 162 of these assignments on that essentially Blaaaaah topic of Genetically Modified Foods(followed 4 days or so later by 180 exams on the same topic, and they STILL manage to fail). Some people write suprisingly well, those were the ones that were worth it. However you get some idiots who plagiarise SO badly. After hearing me harp on this for weeks, they still go and print stuff off from the net without removing the urls at the bottom of the page. Some do not remove the hyperlinks. And yet others do this copy and paste job but at some point in their blind copying they'd have the cursor in the middle of the word like this and then they'd paste a half a page of irrelevat rubbish so you'd have something like thi*IRRELEVANCE*s. *sigh*
Stuff on the net is intellectual property of someone's, whether it's from the first page of a google search or the last. Plagiarism is theft, it is so important to give reference to sources. Okay, granted I might sound all pedantic now, but I honestly do not know how people can live with themselves knowing that the supposed knowledge in their heads isn't even theirs to start with.
Random other bitching follows this colon: At this point let me say that I always arrange my scripts in alphabetical order(even though it takes at least 2 hours per class to do this for) because it's so much easier to deal with entering marks etc so I leave the assignments all perfectly alphabetically ordered,so I put the different groups into different boxes.Hell I even put the class times down so that they can identify with even more ease which classes they went to. I put a box lid into the boxes to keep the assignments upright. There's signs on the walls saying that it's all in alphabetical order and if they could please keep it like that, they just had to take out their assignment and go but nooooooo, they need to fling stuff around, mix things up and leave it all in a state of chaos with no regard for anyone else.Leaving other people's assignments torn and trampled on is DISGUSTING yet typical of Blaaaaahnians.
It is this general don'tgiveadamn attitude of Blaaaaahness that annoys many people, and you know why? Because some of us have a conscience...And some of us unfortunately give a damn about your general life so we try to help, and then you learn that for some people not giving a fuck's the nobler thing to do.
However something hilarious happened in the course of this whole episode. Some people do not get the art of saracasm....Check this out(click to enlarge the pic)...and the height of irony, I had to be one to get this assignment.I was laughing too much to even edit the other half a million incorrect things on this page...Foo, congrats you've achieved fame greater than all of us *bows a sweeping vampiric bow which you're acustomed too* :)
PS
Yes, my handwriting is that bad and yes I'm sure I'm female and no I don't buy the handwriting and doctor thing...
In LOLs-ville until the supplementary exams dawn upon me
rah*
