Today is my “work day”. I only teach Tuesday - Friday, so I spend the bulk of Mondays grading papers from last week and writing lesson plans for the coming week. It’s been a mixed session of work, with a great high and then a plummeting low.

The high:  All of my students have a journal they write in. I often give them a topic to write their 5 sentences about, but sometimes it their choice. They usually write once or twice a week. I was grading my 11th grade class’s journals today, which really just is making sure they did them and they are the minimum length. The topic was Australia. I had asked a fellow staff member to come in and speak to some of my classes. We had been studying Australia and it is Sea’s homeland. The classes all really enjoyed it. One of my students, whom we’ll call “E” wrote the following: 

Yesterday we had a guest from Australia. We had to ask her questions and some of us did that. It was interesting and fun. She said that she came to Latvia because God wanted her to do it. I wish I would know what God wants me to do. 

I was so blessed. “E” seems to be really searching for his place, not only in this world but in his faith. I’ve noticed him softening in class and some attitudes and such slowly changing, but this is the first time he has expressed anything to me in speech or writing. I pray God will show me how to best handle this. I want “E” to know I’m open to talk with him about anything, but I don’t want to push him to fast. It was joyous moment for me, though, and I’m so thankful.

The low:  Shortly after this I started grading my 12th grade essays. Last week we took our class time and watched the movie “A Walk to Remember.” I think it’s a great movie and can be very applicable for my students. Their only assignment was to write a movie review afterwards. I had given them a model/form they were to follow. That was the only assignment, but it was going to count as a test grade, so it would hold more weight in their grades. I began to read one review written by an average student and was shocked. It was really well written and I wasn’t finding any mistakes… I kept reading and then thought, “Wait, he doesn’t know the word Bible-toting, and I doubt he could make a sentence with the phrase glamorous bad boy in it.” It then hit me… I bet he copied this from somewhere. I was shocked, angry, speechless (which says a LOT coming from me). I set it aside and went on to the next one, from another average student and began to read things like “falling in love with this outwardly plain girl who possesses a passion for life he never imagined possible.” Words like cliché, overt and acquiescing filled the next paper. I was mortified. In the end, 6 of 9 papers had at least one paragraph completely copied from another review online, and 3 of them had taken the entire text, copied it and tried to pass it off as their own. Furious does not describe my demeanor this afternoon. 

I started to wonder if this was common in Latvia. Many things that we consider to be blatenly wrong in the west are still thought to be ok here. A Latvian friend just happened to stop in a bit later and I asked him what he thought. Nope, sounds like it’s pretty serious here, too. Well, at least that’s something.  So, tomorrow when I go to school I will first be going to the director’s office and showing her the papers. I even took the time to mark the copied passages and include the website addresses for her convenience. Then I will go to my 12th grade class. We will start the class with some new vocabulary words, like those above and include a discussion about the word “plagiarism,” which incidentally is the same word as “piracy” in Latvian. Then I will give them a chance to confess if they did it. If they do, then I will allow them to rewrite the review, in my presence. If I have proof that they did and they don’t confess, they’ll get a zero for this test, which will hurt them significantly. I hate being a harsh teacher, but I guess sometimes there’s nothing else to do. note: the above passages quoted are from www.warnerbros.com/walktoremember/main.html; www.reelingreviews.com/awalktoremember.htm; and http://movies.yahoo.com/1807645166/parentguide - just so I’m not accused of the same thing my students did. :-)

PS - it’s a beautiful sunny day today, though it’s only about 25F today. And the big news… my tomato seeds sprouted today! Yeah! (Simple pleasures.)