Breaking on through...

Yesterday was not a very good day. I gave two exams and struggled to get them graded. I wound up spending a good half-hour being an unwilling party to a heated discussion/gripe session taking place outside my (closed) office door. Just as I was getting up to poke my head out into the hall and ask them to move, I realized one of the people was talking about me, and felt all weird about it (it goes back to an old incident in high school where I inadvertently heard people I thought were kind of friends of mine talking about me) so instead I stuck my fingers in my ears for a while. (FWIW, what I overheard this time wasn't all that negative)

Then, just as I was getting ready to bail and go home around 4 pm, one of my colleagues stopped me to ask if I had ever caught a student in my ecology class fabricating data.

Because, his TA in one of his classes came to him and said she caught several people fabricating data for the semester-long project done in his class.

This is like the biggest no-no ever in science. (Well, plagiarism might be bigger, but in a way, data fabrication seems worse to me). If I ran the circus, any kind of data fabrication in a class would be grounds for expulsion. (But I don't, so it isn't.)

I realized: no, I've never caught anyone. I did have one case of a plagiarized paper, but that was different. And then I realized: if the person were good at fabricating data, like they had a fake data book and everything, I'd never catch them. Even photographs can be faked. If I see data that seem a little wonky, I think, "well, the person collecting it is not an expert, and the data I collect sometimes seem a little strange." (I'd actually be more suspicious of data that were "too perfect.")

And that made me all depressed. I don't like to think of students figuring it's OK to cheat their way through a class. It's hard for me to really put my finger on what bothers me the most - whether it's that word may get around that I'm blind to that particular form of cheating, so "Just go ahead and do it" or that the students who DO do the work, their grade and their degree is somehow worth less because there are people who obtained it fraudulently, or that we may be sending people out into the workforce who figure cheating is OK as long as you get away with it.

(I also remember now that I had an issue a couple summers ago of a student who received a poor grade on his project, trying to intimidate me into giving him a better grade because he said "I have evidence that other people made up data." My argument was that if he had that evidence, he should have come to me as soon as he had it, and not "saved" it for a contingency. Noises were made about a grade change protest being filed, and I braced myself for things to become really ugly...but then nothing came of it, so either he had no evidence, really, or someone told him that he couldn't protest his grade on those grounds. I will say I found out a semester later that he tried to pull a similar stunt on one of my colleagues, which makes me think HIS claim was fabricated. Also, ironically, this was someone who had ambitions of going to law school. All I can say is, if he ever got there, I hope they had honors codes they made him sign...)

I posted in dismay on an internet forum I frequent, and got some sympathy, but also a somewhat-stern reminder of "YOU NEED TO BE TEACHING THEM THIS IS WRONG." Oh please. These students are 20 or 22 or some even older. If they haven't learned right from wrong - or if they've gotten so good at justifying what they're doing - there's nothing I can say (short of catching them and failing their sorry butts, and that will only teach some of them, "Be more devious next time"). I think there are two deterrents to this kind of cheating. The first one is simply, "Because it's wrong" and the second is "I might get caught." For a lot of students, the first one is the foremost, with the second one maybe being there somewhere in their minds, but the first one is the important one. But for a few people, it seems like only the second one is the deterrent. And if that's the case...well, that's where the "evolutionary arms race" of cheating establishes. The profs figure out a way to bust one type of cheating, the devious students figure out a new one. (My colleague proposed requiring the students to photograph themselves collecting the data and I pointed out that my plagiarist had included staged photos of herself "collecting" the "data").

And that just kills me. It really does. It kills my spirit and optimism about teaching. I don't want to be a cop. I don't like having to think about all the ways a person could cheat, because it just makes me sad and paranoid and angry at humanity. (Ironically: last night while doing the last bit of grading, I had a re-run of "Criminal Minds" on in the background and at the end of the episode, Hoch was making a similar observation: how much depravity could his team see, and still be able to retain the "pieces" of themselves that kept them whole? While what I deal with on campus is nowhere NEAR what someone in law enforcement has to deal with, still....it seems that in every profession there are things that conspire to steal your soul, and you have to work very hard to hang on to what keeps you, you, and to hang on to whatever misguided optimism you may have)

(Another person on the forum went into a philosophical discourse about how "corruption" is probably the default condition for humanity. Yes, and you could argue that from both an evolutionary and religious perspective....but I don't want to believe it, really. Or I want to hope that people in college would be striving to do something a little better; we're not just cavemen grubbing in the dirt any more...)

So I don't know. I just know I was very sad when I got home. And it was one of those wharrrgarrrbllll after noons: I had to go to the bank (and more: had to transfer a big chunk out of savings so I could pay my tax bill for the year. I do not like depleting my savings account because that's my emergency money, if the airconditioner dies or something like that). And I still had to practice piano. And I had a whole class' worth of tests left to grade. And I had wanted to do an hour's work in the garden...

So I ran to the bank (before they closed for the day), and then when I got home, I decided I'd work in the garden.

That was probably actually the best choice. I finished all the area in the garden to the north of my house, cleared out the rest of the herb garden. I noticed that the little beans I planted last week are beginning to germinate - I can see the little "crooks" of the stems poking up through the soil.

And now, after I get done with stuff this morning, I can go and buy nasturtium seeds and scarlet runner bean seeds and some more herb plants (A lot of the herbs didn't make it through the combination of being covered with weeds and a cold winter, I guess). (However, my balloon flowers are still there, which makes me happy)

And I am going to move next to the little area under my east-facing bedroom window; there's enough space there for a couple tomato plants, maybe. I'm going to try to keep motivated for weeding - maybe not work as much as I did this past week, but maybe try to accumulate an hour or so of work a week, and then keep up with weeding as the season progresses.

I felt a lot better after working in the garden. I went in, took a shower, ate a quick dinner, did my piano practice...and it was still early enough that I managed to get the second set of exams (this was a class only half the size of the class I graded this afternoon, also, it's a more advanced class, so there's less staring at the essay-question answers and trying to suss out what the person meant vs. what they said). So I got those done.

This morning, I need to enter the grades and sort soil, but then I get to go and have a weekend.