bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. What else is there to say?

Thanks to Nick Carbone of Bedford-St. Martins via the Techrhet list for this link to a recent interview of Carlin: http://tinyurl.com/5o6g8y

I'm having a hard time blogging of late. I just checked and I started on February 19, 2005, so I guess that makes a little over three years of intermittent blogging. I don't seem as invested, or vested, as I was at some times. The problem is what to write about. I have this desire to write about the life of a community college English teacher, not like that matters much in the long run.

My wife is in Tokyo (pronounced toke-yo for those in the know) for the next three weeks. This is what time it is there, compared to where you are. I'm on Pacific Daylight Time so the difference for me is 16 hours ahead.

I had a student come to my office last week to ask about a failing grade I'd given him on a revised essay. His essay didn't receive a grade because of plagiarism concerns. I returned the essay to him with a note to address the concerns, which I didn't take to be intentional. Turns out they were. One of the plagiarism concerns in the essay was an entry in the works cited section that I couldn't find in the body of the essay. In my note, I told him that any material used from that source had been plagiarized. It didn't change during the revision process.

Yesterday I got myself into a bit of hot water during our regular curriculum committee meeting. For anyone who works in any level of academia, you'd know this committee, the one that approves new courses, deletes old ones, and approves of or suggests revisions to course and program revisions. In some respect, we are the guardians of the institutions academic integrity, whether it's involving college transfer or technical/professional education, what many who are not in the community college loop would consider to be job training degrees.

This week Spokane has been visited by an Iranian couple, Somayeh (Nasim) Yousefi and her husband Jafar Edrisi, who are bicycling around the world and planting trees for peace. You can read more about them on their website: www.rmc4peace.com. Today they visited my college, SFCC, and last Saturday they joined a number of bicyclists and planted one of their trees for peace. In honor of them and their trip, I've figured I'd embed this latest video from MoveOn.org. Here's hoping saner minds prevail.

A month or so back I was invited to participate in a college readiness program by a colleague down the road at Washington State University, otherwise known as WSU or Wazzu. The project is sponsored by the Higher Education Coordinating Board, otherwise known as the HEC Board.

I'm on the techrhet mailing list, hosted by interversity.org, which is a collection of mostly college and university English teachers who have an interest in the roll of technology and writing and learning. Every now and again the discussion turns to plagiarism, often prompted by some news or question about plagiarism detection software or services such as turnitin.com.

I turned 50 this last weekend and thanks to Rachel (my wife), I had one of the nicest birthdays of my life, maybe the nicest. First, she let me buy a new part for my bike, a compact carbon crank, but that wasn't one of the things that really make her such a great partner in life. But it was sure a step in the right direction. I'd be crazy to say otherwise.

I took in my first batch of English 101, generically known as first year composition, essays on Friday, and right off the bat, plagiarism. I wrote about this before, and that ended up as part of a CCC article, which I kinda didn't like in the way I was portrayed, but I'm over that. this is, of course, a different student and a different class. I think every time I get an obvious example of plagiarism, and this one is, I'm going to write about it.