her able hands

Tyler’s taking this terrific Expository Writing class with one of the other homeschool Moms in the area this year. It’s a very lucky thing he’s involved in this, especially because he’s thinking so seriously about school for high school. His writing has taken an enormous leap under her tutelage, and just as importantly, so has his confidence. I think if I had had a writing teacher like her at the right time, I’d be earning a living with my writing by now. Several times in this class he’s missed the mark and swallowed his pride and fear to talk about his confusion, giving the rest of the students the much-needed chance to share their own struggles with the assignment.

This Friday presented another opportunity for him to be honest about not understanding, when he had to turn in his first report on an historical event, and now the class is deep into the issue of how to write an informed paper without plagiarizing.

He’s had a month to compose the report about Pearl Harbor, and he didn’t want any input on how to do it. I tried to remind him every few days, and check in with him about it, but he swore he knew what was expected of him, and didn’t want to make a source list, or an outline. In the end, he left it until the midnight hour, and one of the first things that is expected of him is to not leave it until the last possible minute.

Hello my young Apple! Tree Here! (Let me just share this little side tidbit about apples and trees: Chris’ brother and his wife are in town and they told me that they have an agreement with each other that they will do their damnedest to continue to get their own personal apples to roll as far, far away from the tree as possible. That if one of them sees that the others’ apple is stuck in a divet of not-so-fertile soil, they will get a running start and give the apple a swift kick into the distance. Now, that’s commitment.)

But literally. Midnight the night before the paper was due, he was putting down about one word every fifteen minutes. The day of the class, he was copying sentences out of the timeline at the back of one of his source books. In the car. On the way to class.

About ten minutes out, he asked if he could read me what he had so far, and after the third sentence I stopped him. “Let me ask you a question, dear son. Are those your words?”

He slapped the notebook down on his legs and looked out the window at the trees whipping by, then turned to glare at me, snapping, “No!”

“Any of them?”

“No! I couldn’t think of a way to say it any better than they did! I don’t get this, it’s so stupid! Why do I have to rewrite something that’s already been written?” He hung his head and looked like he wanted to throw something, probably me, as far away as he could manage.

He said he’d rewrite the three pages during our twenty remaining minutes in the car, a Herculean task if ever there was one. I gently suggested that he instead bring his paper “as is” and tell his teacher that he doesn’t understand how to distill the information and communicate it in his own words. You’d have thought I’d suggested he strip down to zebra-striped skivvies before walking into class (not that he has any zerbra-striped anything.) He held his stance of resistance, even after I reminded him about the other times he’d been embarrassed to admit he was lost with an assignment, and how his honesty had helped the whole class move to a new level of understanding. His resistance grew stronger the more I pushed, no matter how gently, so I decided to leave it alone.

When I picked him up later, the teacher came out to chat, to see how things are going with the house purchase (we should know if the loan gets underwritten sometime this week. Pins and needles. Knots in stomachs. Not sleeping. Like that.) I asked if Tyler requested help with the assignment, and she said no. He had missed class the week before, so everybody else had already turned in their papers, and they spent most of the class talking about how plagiarism is a crime. Apparently most of the papers turned in were blatant copying. So it wasn’t just Tyler. He didn’t even bother to give her his paper, and will instead focus on the new assignment. First thing due next week: a list of sources and an outline. Hello!

I remember having to learn this particular lesson—the hard way—when I was in junior high. Some report about a currently non-existent Eastern European country, via Encyclopedia Brittanica. Then I had to learn how to use attribution judiciously, after I turned in a report that had more direct quotes than original material.

I’m going to have to learn all of that, all over again. I had no idea how to help Tyler, beyond suggesting that he talk with his teacher. I felt like an idiot just passing the buck like that, and me supposedly a writer, but in the moment, I couldn’t even remember the word attribution, much less what it’s used for. When the teacher said it, I felt myself flush hot with embarrassment, and wondered if the big fraud was about to be revealed. Heh-heh. Oh, yeah. Attribution. No, that’s okay, you’re right. I’m not really a writer.

I used to have a brain somewhere in the space between my two ears that seems to be full of nothing but gardens, potty training, and trying to bring mindfulness to my parenting. I used to be able to read, remember what I’d read, and then write about it with a critical mind and an eye toward enlightenment. Women’s lit, comparative religion, sociology. In school, my critical essays always brought me attention, and I loved finding the connections between the different subjects I was studying. Then I had kids and fell in a sort of love with the so-called Domestic Arts. My analytical mind has dwindled away during these home-focused years. I read every day, but seldom remember what I’ve read beyond the general flavor and whether or not I liked the book. I can think, but I have a hard time connecting all of the dots and an even harder time honing in on each individual dot with that underused laser beam of truth. Whatever the hell that means.

Then I started to blog, and blogging has made me lazy, lazy, lazy. It’s almost enough for me to only have this online diary, where I don’t have to keep track of sources, facts, or even repeating my content. Oh, the irresponsibility of the online journal! There’s near total freedom, much like what Tyler has felt with his writing class until this point when they switched over from opinion pieces to straight reporting. I empathize with the boy.

In this age of copy-and-paste, the temptation to cull straight from Wikipedia, and World Book online must be overwhelming. It wasn’t impossible to stay under the radar when I was in school, especially if the topic was obtuse enough. Like my10th-grade, twenty-page comparative essay on John Updike’s Rabbit series (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich.) Okay, that’s such a bad example, because it was fiction, and I didn’t plagiarize a word of it, and I’m hard pressed to deny the fact that I understood less than half of what I read, what with the marriage, and sex, and the ongoing midlife crisis of the protagonist. I guess I just mean that by not doing the standard Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Twain, I took myself out of the teacher’s usual lexicon. I got an A+ and an embarrassing speech delivered by the honors English teacher (during class) about what I did and why everybody else should have, too. Can you feel the hate that flowed my way?

Anyway, back to my point about copying—which is that now there’s Google. I have heard several recent stories of college professors doing a search on random sentences from students’ papers, and finding massive copyright infringements, and those students failing the class, or worse—being expelled. Plagiarism is wrong, and cheating wastes everybody’s time. (It must be a pain in the ass being a professor today, having to take the time to run students’ work through the internet search engines to see if it already exists out there.)

You don’t learn anything besides how to work the system when you cheat, and so why bother even going to college if you aren’t going to try to digest and then spew out the material in the expected way? I’m a little bitter about plagiarism because when Chris and I were taking a class together back in the late 80’s, he copied about 90% of his material for the midterm paper directly from his sources over a couple of afternoons, and I spent weeks laboring over my content. He got an A for transcribing. I got a B- for writing. He always explains it that he knew what the teacher wanted. He had to live with an angry, not-having-sex-with-the-cheater girlfriend for quite some time. Eighteen years ago, and I still break into a hot sweat when I think of the injustice. But I married him, so some part of me must have forgiven. But he’s lucky I didn’t report his ass.

Something about the insane amount of money a lot of people spend on an education in relation to the often non-existent financial return on that investment via a career (I’m talking about some of us liberal arts and humanities majors) makes me cringe when I hear about somebody being thrown out of a program they’re paying for because they cheated. It’s not logical, this feeling. I know that. But that’s feelings for you.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting week here at Chez Unschooling In The Loosest Possible Terms, and I’m suddenly bit by the Finish My Degree and Do an MFA Program Bug again. This periodic bite is worse than the red welts delivered by the seasonal black flies in New Hampshire, I’m telling you. It’s currently fed by the blood of the fact that I’ll now be in walking distance of a brand new Creative Writing MFA program at the university. The good thing is the swelling goes down fast when I get sucked back into the reality of my life, in which there is not a moment of free time, or a single nickel to rub together with the empty air, available for going back to school.

Okay, well. Now it’s time to go plant those potatoes!

Ha. Hee. Potatoes. Because I have so much time for all of that in the middle of trying to make our house ready to sell, and packing. Ha. Ha hah.

It’s all about priorities. Ahem.

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