There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Starting about a month before I published my first post for this blog, I began archiving articles and blog posts that I thought might some day inspire a post. I didn't know at the beginning how much I would have to say about starting a school, and I thought it would be a good idea to have a catalog of ideas ready to go, just in case I developed a case of writer's block. Generally, when I see something that interests me and seems vaguely relevant to the topic of schools, I email it to myself, and label it for future use. At this point, I have over a hundred articles and blog posts awaiting my attention in my gmail account.

Among the articles I've been waiting to write something about is Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize winning feature from The Washington Post. If you haven't read it before, you should stop reading this right now and follow the link. You should experience his article and the accompanying video clips first hand. I found it to be a fascinating and moving piece.

To sum it up briefly, Weingarten convinced world famous virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell to play the roll of a busker in Washington D.C.'s L'Enfant Plaza metro station, just to see if anyone would realize what they were experiencing. The basic answer is no. Other than one amateur violinist, a woman who had just seen Bell in concert and recognized him, and a young boy who had to be dragged away by his mother, no one stopped to listen. Bell barely made enough money for a cup of coffee.

On a couple of occasions, I have started posts relating to this article, mostly focusing on the wonder of the young boy in contrast to the hurrying adults all around him, arguing that schools should do everything in their power to preserve and encourage this sense of fascination with the world. I never quite got the post finished, or it didn't quite fit in with the other things I was writing about, so I kept leaving it for another day.

Then yesterday, my wife forwarded me this Weingarten article from this Sunday's Post. It turns out Weingarten's fascinating social experiment had been tried and written about more than 75 years earlier for the Chicago Evening Post with almost exactly the same results. In the most bizarre of coincidences, not only did both violinists play two of the same pieces for their street performances, but for a period of about ten years, Joshua Bell played the exact same Stradivarius used by Jacques Gordon 75 years before (The Red Violin anyone?).

I write about this here, because I think there is a lesson in the way Weingarten handles the discovery that his his Pulitzer Prize winning article, surely one of the proudest accomplishments of his professional life, is not quite as original as he had believed. Instead of burying the story, or writing a defensive piece all about how he still deserves credit for his great idea, he writes a very humorous and humble piece, poking fun at his own pride in his originality. He points out that the internet, not any intrinsic differences between the two pieces, is largely responsible for the enormous success of his article in comparison to the immediately forgotten 1930 version. He revels with the rest of us in the bizarre coincidences between the two stories.

There are many teachable moments out there in the world, and this is a great one. I would present the students with a hypothetical situation, maybe translated to the world of science, where publishing original ideas if of such crucial importance. They have researched and written an article. All of the work is their own, but as the article is going to press, they discover that someone else has published something very similar before. What would they do? I think it would lead to a fascinating conversation about originality and who ideas belong to. Any chance for students to really engage with an ethical dilemma is a good thing.

In Weingarten's place, what would you have done?

What English Class Should Teach Students About Character

One of my responsibilities during my last couple years working in New Jersey was as one of the teacher representatives to the school's Judiciary Board. The Judiciary Board consisted of three teachers and three students (the student body president and two specifically elected representatives, one junior and one senior). When a major school rule was broken, it was our responsibility to determine as best as possible the facts of the case, and to recommend consequences to the Head of School and the principals. We saw a little bit of everything you might imagine that teenagers do, from the unending accumulation of minor offenses to bigger things like theft and drinking. More than anything else, though, we saw cases of cheating and plagiarism.

I had a conversation recently with my current colleagues here in northern Virginia. I am the only native born American in the Language Department, and we were discussing what they saw as the peculiarly American obsession with plagiarism. In the schools where they grew up, plagiarism was, if not outright encouraged, certainly openly permitted. It was the students' job to go out and find information from people who knew better than they did, and regurgitate that information. The extent to which you rephrased or processed that information was really beside the point, as far as they were concerned.

My background is pretty much the opposite. Where I went to school for 7th-12th grades, academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, lying to a teacher) was grounds for immediate expulsion, a more severe policy than the two strikes given for drug or alcohol offenses. That environment certainly shaped my sense of the severity of plagiarism, and made it difficult for me to sit on the Judiciary Board as student after student came through for the same dumb things and walked away with a minor slap on the wrist. I felt at the time that if we made it more clear to the students that academic dishonesty was impermissible, and that the penalties were severe, the less it would happen.

Whether or not a one strike policy would have been the solution to the problem, the issue itself is one that schools have to deal with more and more, and need to find appropriate solutions for. The Internet gives students access to an increasing number of ways to avoid doing their own work, as well as teachers more and more resources for catching them. At schools like McLean High School, right here in my own backyard, the resulting conflict is starting to boil over.

It is not just about the increased resources available on the Internet. The Information Age is changing the role of information itself, and we should be discussing with our students just what that means for the morals and ethics of using information. On the one hand you have sites like Wikipedia, where information is open, fluid, and without owners. In many other areas, though, information is an increasingly valuable commodity, and we need to think about it as we would think about anything else with financial worth. This is going to be a difficult situation for students to navigate, since the opportunities to break the rules are growing, even as the rules become more and more important.

In that context, teaching students to do their own work, and to give credit where it is due to the work of others, is a hugely important part of education. I include it here as I am working through my ideas about English class because it comes up so often as students resort to CliffsNotes and SparkNotes to do their reading for them, and downloaded essays to save them hours of writing. Severe and immediate consequences for breaking the rules may not be the best solution in all schools or for all students, although I certainly got the message from my school, but it needs to be an explicit part of the curriculum, so that when students go out into the world they are prepared for the moral questions that lie ahead of them.

How serious an infraction do you think plagiarism is, and what would you do to discourage it?