Teaching her a lesson

"This is unacceptable, Mr. Canon," Taylor Stern said as she slapped her essay down on my desk. Behind her, her classmates looked up from their own recently returned papers, no doubt curious about how I would respond to Taylor's latest outburst.

I decided to keep things low-key from the outset, not wanting to escalate the situation. "Watch your language, and what seems to be the problem?" I looked up at her as nonchalantly as possible.

Taylor briefly removed one of her hands from her hips to flip her hair back over her shoulder, twice as uncomfortable for me with her chest thrust out and unobstructed, daring me to break eye contact and give her something else to accuse me of.

She pointed to her paper. "What the hell is this?"

"Your paper."

"It says I cheated."

"It says you violated the school's code of conduct regarding plagiarism, which you did," I added to myself. This was the fifth time in the past two years, during which I had been stuck with her in my class, that she had done so. More than anything, it was disappointing that she hadn't learned to cheat less obviously.

"No, I didn't. You can't prove it."

I spun the paper so it was right side up for her and gestured to my handwritten comment. "If you look here, I cited the URL for the site from which you lifted portions of your paper. Verbatim."

"I did not!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot this time. My peripheral vision noticed the way it made her breasts bounce in her top, the neckline of which violated the school's dress code, just as her essay violated the school's academic honesty policy. "This is my work, my words! I don't know what you think you found, but I worked hard on this, and I want a grade for it!"

I kept my voice down, but by now, the confrontation overflowing in hers had done more than enough to call attention to our quarrel. "Taylor, you lifted whole paragraphs from the site. If you'd taken a sentence or two, I might have left it at a reprimand, but easily half of your essay constitutes someone else's work."

"It's my work," she insisted. "You just don't like me, so you're going out of your way to punish me by saying I cheated. It's not fair!"

By now, the class had split into its usual two factions. The first was comprised of Taylor's friends and my detractors, watching with interest to see if she would get away with it, or at least enjoying seeing her make an awkward scene for their teacher. The second, thankfully the larger group was talking to friends or on their phones, thoroughly bored by the latest display of disrespect from their classmate. This was a marginally louder tantrum than the last one, but that was about all that seemed distinct about it.

On my end, I found myself stuck once again. I had two options: I could validate her accusation of bias by disregarding her protest, as it deserved to be. Alternatively, I could allow her to once again waste her classmates' time by publicly cementing the evidence. With the class being just fifty minutes long, wasting five of them on Taylor's antics - again - always meant sacrificing other important aspects of the lesson. Moreover, her outburst made no sense in the first place. After all, she had cheated before, and it was evident that she cheated on anything that required time or effort outside of class. However, she was one of the brightest students in the class and had a strong opinion. So, why would she cheat on an opinion essay on a topic that clearly interested her during class?

The assignment was easy for her to handle: identify a solution to a societal ill that is inadequate or flawed. They did not necessarily need to propose alternatives, though many did. The popular topics included significant issues such as climate change response, the drug war, or Middle East policy, while some went deep with niche issues. For instance, Zhaniece addressed student lunch debt at our school, and we were working on getting it published as a letter to the editor of the local paper. As often happened, I learned a lot from my students, and I hoped that it would provide them with some critical awareness.

Taylor had chosen to write on the Common Core standards, probably thinking that it would get a reaction out of me by going after my curriculum. However, I granted her the possibility of genuinely having grievances with it. I surprised her by supporting her and helping her find authentic sources that were not just whiny rants by parents who could no longer assist their fourth-grader with math. After a well-written and sincere introductory paragraph, following my guidance to outline the problem, the solution, and the problem with the solution, I noticed the casual inclusion of the word "pedagogically." I quickly located the source URL on my screen and confirmed the extent of the plagiarism. I gave her a zero and moved on.

Taylor took advantage of my brief moment of consideration and pressed her attack. "Look, you guys. He doesn't even have a response. He knows he made it up!"

I decided to resolve it quickly. I displayed her paper on the front board via the document camera and steered my computer to the address on her paper. I then turned my back from the wall and read from the site. Those paying attention to the charade openly snickered, though whether it was at Taylor's antics or at me for being baited into responding to them, I couldn't have said.

"That's only part of my paper," she insisted once my point was made, leaning over my desk from the far side as if she were the aggrieved teacher and I the misbehaving pupil. It was her last chance to try to throw me off my game with her cleavage, and it was a good try. "You're cherry-picking. I just used a source. That's not cheating. You're--"