| Homeschool Kids and PLAGIARISM HomeschoolKids and PLAGIARISMfrom Susan RichmanHas plagiarism ever come upin conversation at home with your kids? Maybe it should.I think my own kids firstintro to the idea of plagiarism was way back when our oldest son, Jesse (now 24years old), was about seven. We had a huge stack of old Highlight Magazines that a retired teacher friend of ours had givento us, and we especially liked looking through the pages with kids originalwritings and drawings. And there it was blatant plagiarism by a child. One of the submitted poems was not really written by an 8 year old, butinstead was a poem Id read in a professional anthology of poetry for children.I found the original poem, showed it to my kids, and we talked about howterrible this was that the child had lied and said the poem was his when itwasnt. Plagiarism was just like stealing. Later we had other glimpsesinto plagiarism, sometimes through books we were reading aloud. We found out about the time Helen Keller was accusedof plagiarizing a story while in high school and the hurt and confusion thiscaused her. We related it to that Highlightsincident. And my kids also knew aboutthe story Id later share in our book Writingfrom Home, in the intro to a chapter about creative alternatives to reportand research writing:I remember many years ago a young 9 yearold neighbor came up to visit at our house, a borrowed school encyclopediaunder his arm. He told me that he had to write a report for school, and itwas to be about the Kremlin. The encyclopedia was appropriately Volume K. On talking more with the boy,I gradually became aware of something shocking he actually believed that theteacher wanted him to copy verbatimthe encyclopedia entry on the Kremlin. He thought thats what writing a reportmeant copying the dry words somebody else (an anonymous someone at that) hadalready written. He had no notion of the wrongs of plagiarism, that stealingsomeone elses words and passing them off as your own was very wrong. And hehad even less notion that the goal probably was that he actually learnsomething about his topic. The Kremlin meant nothing to him at that point, andIm sure it didnt mean much more once hed finished his report. And then it came closer tohome, at our own homeschool Writing Club many years ago. A 6th grade girl hadjust read aloud her report on Germany, and shed had great difficulty gettingthrough it, laboring over complex sentences that surely didnt sound like theyreally came from her and I wondered if she had copied it from an encyclopedialike my young friend writing about the Kremlin. My son Jesse immediately asked her where shed gotten herinformation for her report and the girl innocently showed everyone the book onGermany shed borrowed from the library. I grabbed it, flipped through andfound that indeed shed simply lifted various sentences about different aspectsof German life directly from a smattering of pages from the book. I was faced with a realdilemma. As leader of the group, I felt I couldnt let this pass by, but ofcourse I did not want to embarrass the girl in front of her friends. I decidedupon a sort of general approach I talked about how important it was to findseveral different sources of information on a topic, as otherwise wed oftenfeel that there was no other way to put the ideas we were learning about thanexactly the words used by the sole author wed just read. I also talked abouthow it was often a better idea to write about things we really did know moreabout that when we wrote about something quite (literally!) foreign to us, our writings were oftenhollow or stilted or... merely copied. I asked if anyone had ever heard of theword plagiarism my kids were the only ones who had. The mother of thisstudent was right in the room the whole time, and she later thanked me for mycareful approach and said shed had no idea that her daughter had just copiedthe info straight from the book. In fact, the mother hadnt yet even read herdaughters report. The mother admitted that she had never ever discussed theidea of plagiarism with her daughter it just had never come up.Around that time a new memberof Writing Club shared a poem about ballet that shed written. This girl was adancer, and I knew she was very bright (had been in the 5th grade giftedprogram at the local public school before starting homeschooling mid-year) andthis poem was remarkable. Lilting, fluid, really capturing the essence ofstretching into a ballet pose. I enthusiastically asked if we could use thepoem in the BackPack, the childrenswriting section in each issue of PennsylvaniaHomeschoolers, and the homeschool mother who was the BackPack editor then also loved the piece. She later wished thatshe had shown the poem to her daughter, also a ballet dancer, before we had published it. Claireimmediately recognized the poem it was plagiarized (with very minor changes)from a poem used regularly in a ballet magazine ad. We were devastated. Then there was the time I wasevaluating a homeschool student who had great difficulty with writing as a 7thgrader he could barely eek out a five-word sentence on any topic. But this timehis mother talked on and on about the wonderful book report the boy had writtenthat year it was his very first book report, and hed certainly spent lots oftime on it, and she was so proud. After Id read through this summary of thebiography of a western hero, I too was warmly congratulating the boy, amazed athis strong progress. Then the family happily showed me the book and I wasdevastated to realize rather quickly that the boy had simply copied varioussentences from different chapters, and strung them together to write his bookreport. In this situation, I chose not to say anything. Maybe I was too dumbfoundedand startled. Maybe I was hit with the fact that maybe the parent didnt evenrealize how wrong this was. Or maybe I worried about what might happen to theboy if I exposed the fact that the boy had just plagiarized maybe the familydidnt know. For whatever reason, I said nothing. I did give many ideas forother types of writing the boy could try for the next school year, and hopedfor the best.Then there was the time thatmy daughter Hannah came up to me during an evaluation I was doing at home withanother homeschooling family. She interrupted me quietly, saying, Look at thisstory, showing me the new magazine that had just arrived that day, Merlyns Pen, which is devoted to publishing original childrenswriting. This was their big awardsissue, and the top prize went to a lengthy story by a 12 year old girl thiswas the story Hannah pointed to, asking me to read the first paragraph. Thenshe held out another magazine, this time an older copy of her beloved American Girl magazine she often spenthappy hours in those days curled up on the sofa with a full stack of issuesnext to her, reading and rereading articles.She opened to a story in AmericanGirl, and pointedly said, Now read this.It was the identical story withonly a few names changed, and an occasional (very occasional) word altered. Theyoung girl had copied this story and submitted it as her own and won firstplace! We were all stunned. We poured over the two stories very carefully,noting every little word altered these minute changes must have made the girlfeel that she wasnt reallyplagiarizing. I immediately had Hannah write an email to American Girl Magazine and had my older daughter Molly email Merlyns Pen, letting them knowimmediately about this blatant plagiarism. Both magazines wrote back by the endof the weekend, thanking us for alerting them, and noting that several otherreaders had also reported the situation.We put all these letters in our girls portfolios that year a major lesson inethics for them, and on writing for a real purpose. Over the next several monthswe continued to receive updates from the magazines, telling the lengthy processthey went through with the girl to ascertain that she had not copied the story (one editor had had some doubts about itsauthenticity.... but wasnt a connoisseur of American Girl like my daughter Hannah, and so of course couldntverify the steal). The girl had originally submitted the story to a teacher fora routine assignment, perhaps thinking that writing it out by hand equaledwriting it in the real sense. And she had made those little changes.... Theteacher had raved about the story, insisted it be sent in to the competition,the school had a special assembly when it won, and on and on. How devastating forthis young girl to have to now face the humiliation of having it admitted toeveryone that she had cheated, that she copied, that shed merely plagiarized.The girl was now receiving special counseling. And how foolish the teacher musthave felt she should have realized this was not the work of that child. Ithought too of that ballet poem Id gushed over and remembered vaguely thatthe girl had sort of tried to get me not topublish it, but Id thought this was just a bit of normal shyness or humility.I had reacted just like this teacher.And plagiarism isnt justseen among young kids who maybe really just dont understand fully what theyare doing. It happens even with Advanced Placement level homeschool students.Ive uncovered plagiarism at least four times in my own AP US History onlinecourse, and have had to discuss this issue at length with these students, andbring the issue up for discussion at times with the whole class. I now haveplagiarism warnings right in my syllabus and I let kids know that if caught asecond time in this, they will be dropped immediately from the course. Alloffenders were strongly religious kids, from good families the types of kidswho would never steal things. Theyjust didnt think of words as things. Interesting enough, in mycurrent studies of Hebrew Ive found the fascinating fact that the Hebrew word devar means both word and thing in Jewish tradition, stealing words isequal with stealing anything else, and much attention is given to the ethics ofproperly attributing ideas to their original source. I think more attentionneeds to be given to this in our homeschooling, to specifically telling ourchildren about plagiarizing, and not just hoping theyll somehow make theconnection. Some wont. In my class, plagiarism hasalmost always been in a biography assignment, where kids are pulling info offthe Internet. Computers just make it so very easy to copy-and-paste and bedone with an assignment when youre pressed for time. Now whenever I seesomething odd in a biography essay things out of chronological sequence, ideasor even whole sentences repeated in different paragraphs, or simply a verychoppy presentation, I now do a quick googlesearch on a few sentences from the piece and unfortunately the plagiarizedwebsite quickly pops up on the screen. One student even copied a short bookreview from Amazon.com instead ofwriting his own response to a lengthy original document. Several years ago agirl actually plagiarized directly from the textbook that everyone in the classwas using, claiming she had no clue this was not allowed. How to help your kids avoid plagiarism? First, tell them some ofthese stories even read this whole article around the lunch table and discussit. Keep your eyes open for other examples. Let them know plagiarism is wrongbefore the story you find out about is your own childs. Bring the issue up fordiscussion directly. Recently I continued this with my daughter Hannah byreading aloud an essay from Timemagazine about the popular history writer Stephen Ambrose. Unfortunately, thisfine writer has now been caught in multiple cases of plagiarizing fromsecondary sources in a number of his recent books. This doesnt just happenwith kids. Heres a favorite quote from this essay, by Roger Rosenblatt: Thesewere people who defined their lives by the words they made. What laziness ormadness could possibly explain their deliberately wearing someone elses mind?(Time, January 21, 2002).Next, see that assignmentsare structured to almost make it impossible for a student to plagiarize. At thesuggestion of some wonderfully creative students in my AP online course, Iveencouraged the kids to write their Biography Essays in innovative ways. I letthem know that their audience is their classmates, who really want to learnsomething from their piece but they may fall asleep in three sentences if anessay starts out droning John Doe wasborn in 1827 in Philadelphia.... If they find a creative way of bringing outall the information theyve gleaned from many different sources, their readerswill keep reading. Students have been remarkable in the range of formatstheyve developed now for this assignment theyve done mock interviews,funeral orations, series of imagined letters from the famous person to agrandchild, or from an invented friend to the famous person. Theyve writtenmock news articles from different periods of the persons life often makingsure they write from different perspectives in each article so we get a senseof how opposing groups reacted to the person. Theyve created journal entriesspanning a lifetime. Perhaps one of my very favorites was one written this yearabout President Buchanan. The student created a whole story she, as a studentin my course, was touring outside the White House, and pondering her upcomingBio Essay assignment.... when all of a sudden a strange, skinny old man popsout from the shrubbery and eventually starts telling her all about Buchananthe man is a fount of knowledge on everything to do with the history of thepresidency it seems. She eventually finds out at the very end of the story(after weve learned a remarkable amount about Buchannan) that this old man isreally... Uncle Sam. It was delightful. Students who take this sortof creative approach cant possibly plagiarize they have to use the info theyve gathered in reallynovel ways, showing us both personality as well as facts, and they have to maketrue decisions about what is really important to include. Students caught doingcut-and-paste from the Internet are always those trying to get by with astraightforward, bare-bones, factual, and usually short essay they then must rewrite it completely, this time usingone of the creative approaches. The difference is remarkable. Next year, Imrequiring inventiveness from everyone, right from the start. This idea can be adapted toall ages, and across many disciplines. I remember the time our daughter Mollywrote about Helen Keller in her very early elementary years. Rather than havingher write a report, the task was to create an alphabet book about Kellerslife, coming up with something for each letter of the alphabet that would tellsomething important. It was charming perhaps my very favorite entry is thisone for the tricky letter Q:QUIET: Everybody was quiet. She could not even hear herself. It is likebeing sealed in a rock that only your hand could go through. There was no plagiarism here!And what if you want yourchild to write a report on a foreign country? In 7th grade my daughter Hannahwas faced with this for a distance geography course she was taking. She had towrite about a country that was a new political entity, and she chose Eritrea, acountry shed been interested in as she used to have a homeschool penpal whosefamily lived there as missionaries. Hannah was bored thinking shed have to dothis as a straight encyclopedia-type paper, so instead she developed acreative story format. A girl from the US, who knew little to nothing aboutworld geography, went out in her backyard and was suddenly in a very strangeland.... which she eventually finds out is Eritrea. The format gave her ampleopportunity to bring in all the information required in the assignment, and herdistance teacher was delighted with the amusing approach. And Hannah wasdefinitely not bored while working onit and no option of merely copying info from a website or atlas. One last story aboutplagiarism, one with a positive ending: several years ago, when my daughterMolly was editing the BackPack, shewrote an editorial about plagiarism, telling a bit about that Merlyns Pen fiasco I shared aboutabove. She knew her writing had really done some good in the world when a youngboy wrote to her a few months later, apologizing for sending her a poem thathad really been plagiarized he now knew what this meant from her editorial,and he was sorry. I dont think hell ever plagiarize again. Hope this will betrue for your kids also. y Return to the PA HOMESCHOOLERStm Home PageReturn to our newslettershome page |
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