The Twinkies

No one was ever amusingly brazen when they cheated in my class (1). All I ever snagged were cheat sheets under tests and dull re-writes of SparkNotes. However, some people have some really amusingly stupid cheaters. (2) I offer, for your reading amusement, the following:

1. The dunce who turned in an essay from the second semester freshman comp textbook for an assignment in the first semester comp class. (3)


2. The lulu who sat crumpling up paper during an in-class writing and then turned in a neatly written essay IN HIS GIRLFRIEND”S HANDWRITING. As it happened she was my [the professor's - ST] babysitter and I knew her writing from phone messages. (3)


3. The witless one who turned in a paper [that had been] … already graded as someone else’s work the previous term. (3)


4. The goof, who upon be confronted as a plagiarist, bolted out of the room and came back with the book he had ripped off, proudly proclaiming that he hadn’t copied it from a fellow student. (3)


5. The student who did not bother to look at the author of the essay she plagiarized. When I [again, the professor - ST]met with her, I told her it was one of the best essays on the subject that I had ever seen – or that I had ever written . . . One of my essays was available online; she had copied and pasted the whole thing and put her name at the top. The look on her face was priceless. (2)


6. My personal favorite was a Chinese student I [still another non-me professor - ST] had in a Freshman Comp class for ESL students. He had several suspicious passages in his research paper, but the one I asked him about was this one: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I asked him where he got this line, and he said he composed it himself. “Out of your own head?” I asked. “Yes,” was the reply. When I told him it was a famous line from Shakespeare, he just looked at me for a moment and then said, “Ah, so!” (4)


7. The prof saw all the tell-tale signs, found and printed up the webpage, and called the student into the office. “I’m going to have to flunk this paper because it is clearly plagiarized.” Student: “That’s not possible; there’s no way this is a plagiarized paper!” Prof: “But look: here is the material from this website, and the paper reproduces it word for word.” Long pause. Student: “You mean Mom plagiarized my paper?” (5)

Anyone else have any good ones?

(1) At least, no one I caught was brazen. I guess anyone I didn’t catch was subtle enough.
(2) All examples taken from MEDTEXTL
(3) Miriam Miller
(4) Brian W. Gastle
(5) Edwin Duncan
(6) Tom Farrell

I was asked recently whether I liked breastfeeding. The question took me by surprise; I have been so grimly focused on getting breastfeeding to work that the question of whether I liked it hadn’t occured to me. It wasn’t relevant.

The short answer is that I am incredibly GRATEFUL for breastfeeding. It reassures me that my body will do something right. It allows me to maintain a bodily connection with my children past their birth. It feels like a sacred communion between me and them.

It is also a pain in the ass. There are days when chomping is rampant and my gratitude is focused more on Soothies than breastfeeding. Cluster feedings are tough. Growth spurts are tough. The day I had a baby at the breast for 90 minutes straight remains memorable. Sometimes I find myself looking at the babies going “Reallly, again? Please not again.”

I remain annoyed that I was told breastfeeding was “easy.” Oh, it’s so easy; all you have to do is pick the baby up and put it to your breast; if it hurts, you’re doing it wrong. Yeah, umm, not quite. No one bothered to mention that surgical birth can impact breastfeeding, that the antibiotics I was loaded up with can cause thrush, that thrush sounds innocous enough but feels like someone stabbing you in the nipple with a razor. Breastfeeding advocates need to drop the “breastfeeding is easy” message, which can make women feel like they’ve failed at something simple. I suspect that “easy” message leads to more women quitting than would if they were just given accurate information. I have a suggested alternate message:

Breastfeeding is going to suck at first, pardon the pun. It is going to be really, really hard and awful and you are going to want to quit. You are going to cry and it is going to hurt. Possibly a lot. But if you make it through the first 6 – 8 weeks it will suddenly get much, much easier. You won’t have to wash bottles, you won’t have to carry formula around when you go out, you will lose a lot of weight very quickly and, oh yeah, it is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world to look down at your nursing babe.

So, yeah. I guess I like breastfeeding.

Yep. I’m an idiot. I was getting “spam” in the comments, so I set them so that people had to enter a crazy serious of letters and that I had to approve them. I promptly forgot I did this, and comments accumulated without being approved. Now that I have finally noticed this, I will say that parenthood apparently begets a loss of IQ points.

Now, to respond:

Jenn Michelle — POLYPS!!!! indeed.

Jen — Baby Gap: crack for parents. What size in Madison is these days?

Jennie — How embarrasing that you have correctly identified a baby and I didn’t. Now…go study chemistry or something. (Love you. )

(There appears to have been a “Jennifer-esque name’” theme.)

July Moms — Found you!

I looked up and she was on her tummy! I moved her back to her back, put J. in his swing, and, while doing that, turned to look at her and she had done it again. She then did it a third time while I was watching.

This has nothing to do with babies, other than because I don’t get out much I spend a lot of time on message boards for new moms. From these I have garnered very helpful breastfeeding advice, chatted with adults, and so on. However, I have also discovered that the state of English education in this country is awful, based on the spelling and grammar mistakes people make. And I’m not talking typos here. Some of my biggest pet peeves are:

1. I too tired to take two babies out. Adverb. Preposition. Number. They’re different; figure it out. They’re, there and their are also regular problems.


2. When bragging about using your time to get a graduate degree in education, make sure you talk about your precious time, not your presious time.


3. If you don’t have the patients for something, I hope you mean that you, as a doctor, don’t have enough patients to open a profitable private practice, not that you lack patience.


4. You are not e.e. cummings. Use standard capitalization and punctuation for clarity.


5. OVERUSE of…..punctuation….and CAPITALS..is as hard to understand as a – total – lack of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Grumpy English teachers, unite!