Friday, June 16, 2006

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*

5 Comments:

Blogger Saaleha Idrees Bamjee said...

that one is a beauty :)

June 19, 2006 8:34 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I once wrote an essay for English.
My teacher thought I stole it off the internet.
I was so annoyed.
I think it was too funny for her. I used to write serious essays(oh how gloomy the world is). I think this time I just caught her off-guard when I wrote about a surfing cricket.

June 21, 2006 1:30 pm  
Blogger rah* said...

lol...you know if you steal a piece of creative writing it's probably due to your lack of creativity which is directly proportional to your lack of imagination, I think.

But when you get to university and your lecturer makes a song and dance a nd even goes so far as to read extracts out of a 70 page Senate document on the University's policy towards plagiarism, then there's something wrong with you.

Even sadder than this one (which was at least referenced and some kind of the student's own thought is evident)was the one I attached a screen shot to. :(

Blaaaaahnians come standard with a lack of a conscience me thinks.

June 21, 2006 5:22 pm  
Blogger MasterOfChi said...

I once wrote a short story about life it was brilliant, well, i thought it used love and a wooden door as motifs; the damn editor changed it to make it about love cause he liked it but it was too long for the book or something like that, so if anyone asks me if that was the story i wrote, i just tell them it another guy with the same name.

So its practically the reverse of what the blog is about, and actually makes no sense in context, but hey im famous now, do i need to make sense?

June 25, 2006 7:29 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Used to always score badly in essay's due to bad spelling and a doctor worthy script.But then came the word proccesor and I started getting A's.Cant understand how people can still not get it right with spell check.Have to admit you hands on marking really scares me.Thank God you were not my teach.

September 07, 2006 3:15 pm  

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