I have never taught a class where plagiarism would be a concern and I don't intend to tell other teachers how they should run their classes. I think every teacher has the right to expect students to do their own work, if for no other reason than that the rules against intellectual dishonesty are fair and reasonable and explicit.
On the other hand....
In my long academic experience I have come to know a fundamental truth about professors and teachers: that many of us---even we soi-disant progressives---are, all protestations to the contrary, among the most conservative, hide-bound, change-resistant, even lazy people of any profession. This comment is not directed specifically against English and Social Studies teachers. There are still departments of Physics in prestigious colleges which offer obsolete classes in FORTRAN programming and numerical methods, classes obviated by fast computers and inexpensive (and even free) calculation software. These classes are only offered, as near as I can tell, because their instructors learned the same material while they were in college and are convinced of its eternal value (not to mention how trivial a teaching assignment it is after one has taught it for 3 decades).
As I've made clear, I'm in no position to help English teachers work out these issues; they will work these things out on their own, and the rest of us will support their demands for integrity. But I'm not the first person to imagine that the venerable "paper" has, in the age of Wikipedia, outlived its usefulness. And I wonder if we, as teachers in the premier lab school of this solar system, couldn't put our heads together and find a modern way to get students to think critically and independently.
Plagiarism at Uni
I have never taught a class where plagiarism would be a concern and I don't intend to tell other teachers how they should run their classes. I think every teacher has the right to expect students to do their own work, if for no other reason than that the rules against intellectual dishonesty are fair and reasonable and explicit.
On the other hand....
In my long academic experience I have come to know a fundamental truth about professors and teachers: that many of us---even we soi-disant progressives---are, all protestations to the contrary, among the most conservative, hide-bound, change-resistant, even lazy people of any profession. This comment is not directed specifically against English and Social Studies teachers. There are still departments of Physics in prestigious colleges which offer obsolete classes in FORTRAN programming and numerical methods, classes obviated by fast computers and inexpensive (and even free) calculation software. These classes are only offered, as near as I can tell, because their instructors learned the same material while they were in college and are convinced of its eternal value (not to mention how trivial a teaching assignment it is after one has taught it for 3 decades).
As I've made clear, I'm in no position to help English teachers work out these issues; they will work these things out on their own, and the rest of us will support their demands for integrity. But I'm not the first person to imagine that the venerable "paper" has, in the age of Wikipedia, outlived its usefulness. And I wonder if we, as teachers in the premier lab school of this solar system, couldn't put our heads together and find a modern way to get students to think critically and independently.