My daughter is in online school. It’s a state public school, not a private school or homeschooling. She’s in it due to being severely bullied. I have to stay home with her, but I don’t actually teach her anything, I’m a designated ‘learning coach.’
She has assignments based on the same shitty Pierson textbooks the regular school kids use and has online classes with accredited teachers. Those teachers are generally get paid better than other public school teachers since the whole thing is a deal with Pierson, so they’re usually a better level of teacher, which is part of what pisses me off so much.
My daughter worked really hard on her science presentation, a slideshow she was assigned to do. The overall topic was humanity’s impact on the environment and one of the options she could pick was disease. My daughter is a weird kid- in a good way- who is into history when it’s weird too, so she picked the Black Death.
Like I said, she worked really hard. I was really proud of her too because it was the first time she worked on a project this big without asking for or needing any help from me. So, she saved the project as a PDF and submitted the assignment.
The next day (Thursday), she gets back a grade of a zero. This is the teacher’s note:
I noticed that you submitted a placeholder for the portfolio assignment. Is this an error? The portfolio is worth a lot…so please contact me as soon as possible. Please note that intentional placeholders are subject to not being accepted. If I don’t hear back from you soon, I will assume that it is a placeholder. Please do not upload placeholders to move ahead in the class as this may result in failing grades, calls home and referral to administration.
My daughter isn’t a cheater and, like I said, she worked really hard. This stressed her out a lot because one of the reasons we took her out of her middle school was that the teachers rarely had her back when it came to bullying and sometimes also treated her like shit. Because that’s what school is like for neurodivergent kids, even in 2024.
So… were totally confused. On top of everything else, the PDF was right there to download when you review the teacher’s message. I sent her an email asking her what the hell is going on and also have my daughter send her a Google Slides link instead just in case there is some corruption issue on her end or something even though I can download and view the PDF just fine.
We don’t hear back all Thursday and nothing until mid-day Friday, when she sent us both what is clearly a form email, ignoring both of the messages we sent:
Hello Parents and Students!
I wanted to take a moment to let you know that your student received a 0 on their science portfolio, but the great news is that there’s still a chance to improve that grade!
Please log into your student’s gradebook and click on the science portfolio grade to read the feedback provided. This feedback outlines how your student can correct any issues and resubmit the portfolio within the timeframe specified for a better grade.
Let’s work together to help your student succeed! Thank you!
She also responds to my daughter’s google slides link and says it’s a very interesting slideshow and asks where she got it from (you will see below why that is just a bullshit lie to get her to reveal that she cheated).
So I have my daughter also send her the PDF the “fill this out to help you with your research” document my daughter diligently filled out before doing her slideshow and I got mad and sent a message to her homeroom teacher, who you’re supposed to go to for any major problems.
My daughter is now super stressed, and Friday is a pretty easy day for her, so I take her out to do things to give her a nice day- get her a smoothie, let her walk around Five Below, etc.
When we get back, maybe at 1 pm, I check my email. I get this from the teacher:
I have to apologize!! When I first saw her portfolio and saw all the old pictures and the Black Death title, I assumed ( I know, I shouldn’t have) it was a placeholder.
She left a similar voicemail to my wife and apparently one to my daughter, but I didn’t read it. I just said thanks and told my daughter to say thanks as well.
But I’m just floored. She didn’t bother just reading the text. This is the slide right after the title slide. If she had taken a few seconds, she would have realized this is a middle schooler doing a science project:
(I’m not suggesting my kid is stupid, I’m saying that’s pretty typical for her age.)
Be a little less lazy than your eighth graders, lady. And maybe don’t automatically assume they’re cheating.
At least she ended up giving my daughter 100%.
I once had a professor post-facto accuse me of plagarism because he found my paper “online.”
On my own web site.
Which had my name at the top.
Did you put the paper online before or after the assignment?
I don’t know that “plagiarism” is the right word for it, but this was something that my instructors in college made sure we aware of. I’m in tech, and a lot of us had some portfolios already, so we were warned that if we recycled stuff from a previous project it would fail to meet our academic code of conduct and be scored as a zero.
I’m not saying that’s what you did, and again, I wouldn’t exactly call it “plagiarism” either. You can’t really copy yourself, y’know? But I could see how somebody who doesn’t know better could get tripped up
Well after. Like, months. With edits.
Ah, then condolences. Your professor was not a clever cookie
He definitely was not. During the calling on the carpet I got he repeatedly and specifically made it clear that he was under the impression that I’d sourced the text from “someone else,” i.e. it wasn’t mine. When it clearly was.
The telltale heart being under the floorboard? This was back in the dark ages of the internet when it was a big deal that your (dial up!) ISP would give you a tiny slice of hosting space – like, 10 megabytes – which was a url in the form of something like http://www.isp.com/users/~firstnamelastname.
Not only the column itself, but the URL literally contained my name. Which he printed out and literally physically waved in my face as if it were damning evidence. I’m pretty sure it even had a publication date on the top. I slam dunked him in front of an administrator and he didn’t even have it in him to apologize for being wrong even after being proven so with 100% certainty. I could tell he walked away from the encounter still believing I “must still be guilty of something” but I just weaseled out of it on a technicality or something. Honestly, I’m not sure the lights were ever on upstairs, there.
(The paper was about LED’s. I liked the research I did on it and it was quite relevant to what I was doing online at the time. I was enough of a nerd that I hammered it on the anvil a bit until it became something suitable to post on the internet since I’d already put the work into it. Ye gods forbid.)
This had her name at the top! So I guess the teacher thought she just put her name on it?
I imagine the teacher took a shortcut, assumed that she was right and did not apply the brain cells required to verify if this was the case, and did precisely what she surely would have admonished one of her own students for, at length.
This is why this kind of thing gets under my skin. In my experience, teachers consistently refuse to make even a perfunctory effort at applying to themselves the very same standards they demand that their students must exhibit flawlessly and constantly, all of the time, under threat of punishment. But if they fuck up, that’s still your problem.
🤦