JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
Almost.

An acquaintance of mine taught a senior level research methods course, and
informed the class that if anyone plagiarized anything from the web, they'd
flunk the course, no matter how high their grade was on previous work.
School policy. Two students thought she was kidding, and in their final
paper for the course, they cut & pasted stuff right off the web. They
flunked, they complained, they needed the course to graduate. Oh well.


You might like this letter in todays Chemical and Engineering News:

I'm responding to "Wired for Learning" with 36 years of teaching
experience behind me, yet with something less than enthusiasm for the
technology-savvy teachers who were profiled in the article. It has been
my experience that today's teens know very little about modern
technology except how to use it. They know almost zero about the science
behind the technology. Most know nothing about electricity, don't know
how AC differs from DC, and don't know what electromagnetic waves are or
why their frequency matters. In fact, all they know about most of this
technology is which buttons to push and in what order.

Making teens push more buttons than they already do does not make them
wiser or more talented; it only gives them a warm feeling that they
understand many things that they, in fact, do not understand.

One sentence struck me as particularly untrue in this piece: "For
example, before computers became ubiquitous, when students were at home
and got stuck on a homework problem, other than a phone call to a fellow
student, they didn't have access to immediate help."

Are they all orphans? Don't they have parents? Isn't asking your parents
a valuable learning path for today's youth? I asked my mother for help.
My children asked me. My grandchildren ask their parents, and I presume
my great-grandchildren will do the same. Surely, homework problems are
about something that parents learned also. I hope the homework problems
are not about which button to push. If so, the teacher's syllabus needs
examining.

Enough said. Your readers will know what I am trying to express. I hope
so, or my mother would be very displeased.

Roy W. Clark
Murfreesboro, Tenn.