It must be the weather. I walk my kids to the cafeteria at 11 am and the weather has seemed pretty decent lately. Then, by the time I get off work and home, the temps are dropping, the wind is blowing and everything is generally not nice. This coupled with pictures of guys getting paid to race in places like Mallorca, Langkawi and Qatar, seems to be driving me slightly bonkers. Rode the bike home from the shop last night and had to take 20 minutes to warm up afterward. I touched Owen's cheek and he got the most shocked look on his face! It was so cold, the base of my skull hurt.
I got assigned a teaching intern from ASU. She graded some papers for me and wrote a test that I will administer tomorrow. It was a great help and I actually got to spend time grading papers and then sifting through the papers she graded looking for anything "suspicious". Now, let me briefly say that by no means does one have to be a rocket scientist to identify plagiarism. I had several papers that just didn't seem right. Perhaps it was the 8th grade essay on "How global warming affects me" that cited an article from the scholarly journal Science or the fact that the font changed size half way through a paragraph in another essay that raised my suspicion. Anyway, a little Google and about 2 minutes and I had pulled up every uncredited source article that my students had used. It isn't amazing that they try to plagiarize, but it is amazing that they absolutely, positively do not see anything wrong with it! Well, tomorrow while they are taking the test, I will be making phone calls to parents to discuss the situation. I feel like I have to address academic dishonesty firmly at this point in their education in order to try to prevent it from occuring again. 8th grade is a better place to learn from a mistake than a university is...
This weekend sounds like lower 40's temps. I'll get the "Real Deal" weather report from Jeff and share that with you tomorrow.
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