Teacher Misery

by Jane Morris

  One week into the new school year I received the following email from the guidance counselor of one of my students:

  From: Guidance Counselor for Orville

  To: English Teacher

  Subject: FWD: Requesting new English class

  Dear Ms. Morris,

  I am forwarding a message I received from the mother of Orville Fullah-Crapp. Can you give any insight into this matter?

  Forwarded Message:

  To: Guidance counselor

  From: Mr. & Mrs. Fuller-Crapp

  Subject: Requesting new English class

  To whom it may concern,

  We would like to request that our son be removed from Ms. Morris’ Honors English class immediately and placed into the challenging academic environment in which he belongs. Orville feels that there are many struggling readers in his class, and there is simply no rigor in the assignments that he has been tasked with. Orville has tested at genius levels in math and science and deserves to be in an academic setting where his peers have equal abilities and potential. He has learned absolutely nothing new in his English class, and based on the assignments he has brought home, we are not surprised.

  We are requesting that Orville be removed from his current English class and placed into one where he truly belongs. Also, for the time that he remains in Ms. Morris’ class, we have excused him from the last two homework assignments because we feel they are simply “busy work” and have no academic merit.

  Thank you for your understanding in this matter,

  Mr. & Mrs. Fuller-Crapp

  I explained to the counselor that we were only one week into the school year and that it would be ridiculous for them to judge the rigor of the class based on the assignments that were given. I also defended the assignments with the fact that I was following the district’s curriculum and doing the same work as every other Honors English class. I offered to meet with the parents to explain this further, but they refused to meet with me. Instead, they met with the counselor and an administrator to discuss my incompetence. The administrator was adamant that Orville stay in my class and that the parents reserve judgment until the end of the school year. The parents petitioned the district and sent weekly emails of complaints to my administrators. Meanwhile, Orville was rude and often cruel to other students and did less than stellar in my class.

  From: English Teacher

  To: Jack Haas

  Subject: Concern about student

  I am writing to express my concern over Ferdinand. He has not shown up for most classes this quarter and is failing the class. If he does not meet with me to assess how he can make up the work he has missed, he will lose credit and have to take the class again.

  Thank you.

  From: Jack Haas

  To: English teacher

  Subject: Re: Concern about student

  So what do you want me to do about it?

  III. ADMINISTRATION

  “Against stupidity even the Gods struggle in vain.”

  Friedrich Schiller

  PROTOCOL

  Wilbur slept a lot in class, but other than that he showed no unusual signs that would indicate drug use or psychological problems. He was quiet when awake, and did his work with some amount of effort. You could imagine why I thought he was joking when he interrupted me, in the middle of a class discussion, to tell me that he was overdosing on OxyContin. It went exactly like this:

  8:45 A.M.

  ME: Most people don’t realize that what Hamlet is saying here is very literal…

  Wilbur stands beside me and speaks softly.

  WILBUR: Miss, I need you to call 911.

  ME: Hold on a second… what?

  WILBUR: I think I’m overdosing. The color starts to drain from Wilbur’s face.

  ME: Overdosing? On what?

  WILBUR: I took a bunch of OxyContin when I first got to class, but I think I took too many.

  Wilbur proceeds to lie down on the floor in front of me. As I grab my cell phone and begin calling 911, the rest of the class starts to chat, casually, as though nothing out of the ordinary is taking place.

  ME: Hi. I’m a teacher and I have a student in class right now who is on the floor and he says he overdosed on OxyContin. Okay, thank you.

  I call security and they contact the nurse. Then I kneel on the floor beside Wilbur.

  ME: Are you okay?

  WILBUR: I think so. I don’t know. I feel weird.

  ME: Everything is going to be okay. There is an ambulance on its way. You’re going to be alright.

  The bell rings and 29 students step over Wilbur to exit the classroom. They do not pay him any attention. One student, who is usually a bit of a jerk, asks me if Wilbur is okay and if he can help. I thank him and ask if he could tell the teacher next door what is going on and ask him to come over. I speak gently to Wilbur to try to calm him and keep him conscious. I ask if he has been depressed and he nods yes. I ask if his parents know how he has been feeling and he says no. I inquire where he got the meds and he says from his dentist. The color in his face begins to return. Suddenly the school nurse enters with a wheelchair and starts yelling at Wilbur.

  NURSE: What is going on? What did you take?

  Wilbur stammers and starts to look pale again.

  WILBUR: I took… Umm… Just a few pain killers.

  NURSE: Why? Why did you take those? Were they prescribed to you?

  WILBUR: Yes, my dentist gave them to me.

  NURSE: For what?

  WILBUR: I got my wisdom teeth out.

  NURSE: When?

  WILBUR: Last year.

  NURSE: Sit up. Get me the bottle. I want to know exactly how many you took.

  Wilbur rolls around in confusion a little. I offer to get the bottle. I ask Wilbur if it’s in his bag and he nods yes. I find the bottle in his backpack and hand it to the nurse. Before she can say anything else a crowd of people rush into the room. There are lots of EMTs with a stretcher, all of the assistant principals, the principal and a few others I don’t recognize. No one addresses me. They put Wilbur on the stretcher and everyone follows him out, including the nurse. I am left alone, sitting on the floor of my classroom, wondering what the hell had just happened. Before I could pull myself off the floor, one of the assistant principals sticks her head into the room.

  ASS. PRINCIPAL: Are you okay?

  ME: I don’t know. I mean, I think so.

  ASS. PRINCIPAL: You didn’t follow protocol.

  ME: Huh?

  ASS. PRINCIPAL: During a medical emergency a teacher must always press the emergency call button and alert the office, who then alerts the nurse. She is the one who determines if it is necessary to call an ambulance.

  ME: Oh, I didn’t realize. It’s just-

  ASS. PRINCIPAL: Next time press the call button.

  The Ass. Principal exits. Just as I stand up, my next class comes racing into the classroom, with no knowledge of what had just happened. So I put on my game face and prepare to talk about Homer’s Odyssey.

  *NOTE: The general wait time for a response to the call button is 15-20 minutes if you are lucky enough to get an answer at all. Even if the office responds right away and tells the nurse immediately, by the time she makes it over from her office at least ten minutes will have passed. If she then makes the decision to contact an ambulance, there is that much more wait time.

  I didn’t hear about Wilbur for a few weeks and I didn’t have his contact information. Eventually, he came back to school and handed me a note. It read, “I’m really sorry about what happened. I’m so embarrassed. Thanks for being so understanding, it really helped. Happy Halloween!”

  Wilbur graduated and came back to visit the next year in an EMT uniform. He had decided to become an EMT to help people have a better experience in an emergency situation than he had. This was a beautiful full circle, as it never usually is.

  A BIT OF AN INTROVERT

  Bilbo’s behavior was very strange during the first few weeks of the school year. On
the first day, he wore a hooded sweatshirt and tied the hood around his face very tightly. When I asked him to remove his hood, he ignored me. During the next class, he had his hood tied just as tightly and kept his head down the entire class. I tried to engage him, but he completely ignored me. By the third class, he was sitting with his head between his legs. I asked him if he was okay and told him that he needed to sit up, but of course he never moved or showed any signs that he had heard me. I asked my supervisor for help and she said that I should be firm and tell him that if he didn't sit up and take off his hood he would need to leave. By class number four he was actually sitting on the floor underneath the desk with his hood tied so tightly it covered his eyes. I got down on the floor and asked if he was okay. He didn’t answer. I told him that if he didn't get up off the floor he would need to leave the class. There was no response.

  I reported back to my supervisor and she said she could handle this quite easily. She came to the following class where he was under the desk again. She stood in front of his desk and firmly told him to get up. He didn’t stir. She tried again, but there was no response. She got down on his level and yelled at him to get up and when nothing changed she got up and told me to tell the Ass. Principal to handle it.

  The Ass. Principal was sure that she could take care of this issue. According to her, I was a new teacher and didn’t have much experience dealing with these types of students. She would show me how it should be done.

  She marched into the class and did the same thing my supervisor did but got a little angrier and a little more animated. After yelling at Bilbo to get up for a while, she called me into the hallway and said, “Just ignore him. If he wants to sit under the desk, let him.” So I spent the rest of the semester trying to communicate with a student who was tucked into a sweatshirt under a desk. I’d ask how he was, how his day was going and if he planned on doing any work. I’d even slip papers and pencils under him. I never got a response and after a while the class forgot he was even there.

  THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE STILL NOT OUT

  Dictionary.com defines plagiarism as “an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author.” Essentially, it is cheating. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is a major problem. Why would students write their own papers when they can easily copy one from the endless amount of websites they have access to? If integrity isn’t enough to keep a student honest, then hopefully the fear of disciplinary consequences would prevent them from cheating. Right?

  Well my school, along with many other high schools and universities, has adopted a very soft approach to dealing with the overwhelming amount of plagiarism. The most common excuse that students give for plagiarizing is that they did not realize they were doing it. Now I’ll admit that it is an understandable mistake to quote something and not say where you got it from. But here I am talking about something very obvious, one that you wouldn’t need a lesson to prevent. I am talking about taking huge chunks or in some cases the entire paper from someone else and passing it off as your own words.

  Since students claim they have a lack of knowledge in this area, it has become something to blame the teachers for every year. We are expected to explain to the student what they did wrong, how to properly cite sources and make sure they understand how to avoid plagiarizing in the future (even though we probably already went over this ad nauseam in class). We are also expected to let them redo the assignment with no penalty. Whereas plagiarizing one’s paper used to mean at least receiving a zero for the assignment, and sometimes even detention/suspension/expulsion for academic dishonesty, it is now an opportunity to redo the assignment for a better grade! There is no record of how many times a student plagiarizes so they can pull this trick as many times as they wish, always using the same excuse that they didn’t know and getting away with it on the occasion that they are not caught.

  Several English teachers proposed doing an extensive lesson on plagiarism and how to avoid it in class (which most do at the beginning of the year anyway) and giving each student a form to sign that acknowledges they know what plagiarism is and what the consequences would be if they were to plagiarize their work. The administration decided that even if students sign the form, they are likely to make the same mistakes, and we should show that we understand the plight of young writers.

  Needless to say, a lot of kids plagiarize. And a lot of them are just downright lazy about it, cutting and pasting whole articles into their papers and not bothering to change the fonts to match each other.

  That is what “Goober” did. He emailed me a research paper that was almost entirely comprised of a Wikipedia article. I found the article by googling merely one sentence. I discussed the consequences with him and allowed him to do the rewrite, since he claimed that he uploaded the wrong paper (the second most commonly used excuse). Since he claimed that he had the correct version on his computer I gave him the weekend to email it to me. The second paper that I received was also mostly plagiarized from an internet article. I discussed this with him and explained that he would be receiving a zero since he was now aware of his actions and how to prevent making the same mistake twice. He now claimed that his brother wrote the paper and that it wasn’t his fault that his brother chose to plagiarize. “Clearly,” I explained, “having your brother write the paper is also cheating so that excuse does not work.”

  I received an email a few days later from an administrator about Goober. Apparently he was very upset about his zero. The only reason he had his brother write the paper, he said, was because he was very sick, and I only gave him two days to rewrite it. I explained to the administrator that the reason I only gave him two days to rewrite it was because he claimed that he had already done it, and merely needed to email it to me. I never received a response after that. I angrily accepted Goober’s third draft.

  Guess what happened next? Parts of the third draft were plagiarized. I contacted the same administrator to ask that disciplinary action be taken. I received the following response:

  “Spoke with student. Student understands the gravity of his actions but explained that he really does not understand what plagiarism is and was not merely trying to pass off the work as his own. Please re-teach the student how to properly cite sources and allow for rewrite.”

  By draft four I was ready to explode with frustration, but thankfully it never came, and Goober received a zero, which is what he should have gotten in the first place.

  Other commonly used excuses for plagiarism:

  • “It must be a coincidence.” Sometimes high school students are able to write the exact same paper as a scholar on the internet, by accident. It’s pretty much a modern day miracle.

  • “I never said that I wrote it.” Even though they put their name on it, they never announced within the paper itself that these were their own words. So obviously, they are not at fault.

  • “I have a photographic memory, and I thought I was writing my own thoughts.” Amazingly enough, some students take pictures of essays with their brains, and then later copy directly from those photographs, mistaking it for their own thoughts.

  • “Someone else uploaded the paper for me and uploaded the wrong one!” Parents and siblings are giant morons when it comes to uploading the right file for their family members. For some reason, they constantly upload essays from the internet and put their family member’s name on it!

  • “But I didn’t copy the whole thing! Some of those words are mine!” Yeah, and the words that are yours are the shitty ones.

  • “Everyone does it.” Yes, that is very true. But you are the fool who got caught. It’s cool though, you can just rewrite that shit over and over until you get the grade you want!

  REAL WORLD SCENARIOS

  In my school, we have two grading policies that are a bit nonsensical. While one would think that in high school we sh
ould prepare students for “the real world” by showing them that they must actually earn their grades, the administration does not seem to agree. The first is a policy mandated for all students within the district. It states that if a student receives a grade that is higher than a zero but lower than a fifty percent, it automatically gets bumped up to a 50%. For example, if a student gets one question right on a ten question quiz, they automatically get four more free points added on to their final score for showing “minimal effort.” So if a student basically farts on every assignment for an entire semester, they’ll end up with 50% in the course. If they put just a dab of effort into a few assignments, they’ll pass.

  The other policy that is unwritten, but widely understood, is that a teacher should rarely, if ever, give a student a zero. To put a zero into the grade book, the teacher must have successfully contacted the parent or guardian of the student to inform them of the missing assignment and provide opportunities for reassessment. If no contact has been made, even if the student’s home phone number is out of service etc., the teacher must give the student half credit for the assignment, even if it does not exist. To clarify, even if a student tells me to shove my assignment up my asshole, if I do not speak with his parent, he still gets half credit!

  Let’s examine real life situations where this might be the case:

  Scenario: I pay absolutely none of my $150 credit card bill for the month and avoid their phone calls.

  Outcome: $75 is not applied towards my outstanding balance. Instead, my credit score goes down and I owe more money in late fees.

  Scenario: My house is on fire. I make absolutely no attempt to put the fire out. Outcome: Not half, but my entire house burns to the ground.