You Know What Really Irritates Me?

Yes, of course I'm going to tell you.  Fifth grade is the year of research.  Supposedly.  My oldest daughter, fifth grader extraordinaire, has done innumerable research reports this year.  Countries, books, cities, states, stars.  We are now on stars.  And what really pisses me off, pisses me off enough that I'm writing this blog about it, is that IT'S NOT RESEARCH.  It's a passel of kids let loose on Wikipedia at school to find a bunch of random facts.  They are then sent home with those facts and instructions to write a one page paper, create a power point AND a poster.  Based on ONE PAGE of research, and that's being generous.  I found out the criteria way too late to change it (as has become my wont).  What I discovered will make you cover your eyes in terror.

First, my darling's paper is entirely plagiarized.  Not just a little bit, I mean her name is the only thing NOT plagiarized.  When I asked her what plagiarism was, she told me that her teacher explained that, when she writes publishable papers, she will need to learn about citation. Seriously.  No wonder I hear so many college level instructors lamenting the amount of plagiarism they see and the fact that students don't understand what plagiarism is.

It's quite simple.  We don't take other people's things.  We don't take their stereos, we don't take their words, and we don't take their ideas.  We can borrow their stereos, we can borrow their words, but we can't then pretend those words are our own. We have to acknowledge that they are someone else's. And we don't create a research paper out of willy-nilly borrowing.  There is work to be done here! Actual thinking (oh, the horror).

The argument my daughter made (from her teacher) is that citation is too difficult.  My daughter figured out how to make videos, upload them to youtube, and create a website on her own. Citation is not too difficult. I'm not even asking for citation-- just a simple acknowledgment, somewhere in the world, that these words don't belong to my child.  She has words-- weird, wild, wonderful words.  But her school does not require her to use them.

So I assume, like many students, she will someday lose her ability to create her own ideas based on the work she has read, her own analysis,thinking, and synthesis.  Because none of this is part of the process.  The process isn't even research. It's hanging out online for a few minutes, then producing, producing, producing. I read my students' research papers every term and vow to make yet another committed effort to teaching them research (or, more correctly, unteaching them research).  I wonder why some seem to have none of the excitement I feel when I start to research a new project-- passion for a topic, the basic ideas, the desire to know, the willingness to learn through the process, to maybe (oh my god say it ain't so) change because of what I learn.  Maybe that excitement has been beaten out of them by an educational system that only cares about the product, not the process.