Cheat the System

First off, long delay in posting. Like everyone else, I’ve been buried under work—both professional and personal. I’m hoping spring break (next week) can get me back on track. I have to assess the (very good) posters and the group papers, and to plan the final projects. It’s good to be busy, I suppose, but I feel on the edge of dropping some major ball.

Today the groups used Foucault to analyze topics I had passed out last week. The topics were abortion laws, academic integrity, immigration policy, music downloading, and drug laws. I was greatly impressed by the presentations and the conversations they sparked. In fact, I was taking notes during several of them. A few major points:

1. I also collected the peer review sheets today, and my first quick glance tells me that they are not all that different from the first set. That is, students are pretty generous with each other. There are some negative reviews, and it’s clear that some students just don’t like working in groups. But the discussions today seemed to have demonstrated that the students who have a vested interested in the class can really pull things together. It’s not good that some students are riding on the coattails of others, but I take some solace in knowing that the level of discourse is raised by a good number of students who want to have intellectual conversation.

2. I’m taken by this point from the group on academic integrity: students cheat as a way of subverting an educational system that has come to value things they simply do not. Sure some cheat because they are unprepared, but according to this thesis, others cheat because they do not accept the definitions and boundaries of knowledge that the contemporary corporate-like institution create. A generation of students have come of age in a time of easy file sharing and cut-n-paste rhetoric. They see the traditional ideas of academic integrity as arbitrary and controlling—a form of discipline and punishment. One student noted that as college education has become more and more of a commodity—rather than a process or experience or some other word equally unfitting to what I mean at this moment—the stigma attached to cheating has lessened. Why should students feel bad about trying to pass or get ahead in a system that cares more for the final product than for the path one takes to it? In many ways our students are more in-tune with the changes in higher education than we teachers are. They see it for what it is: a thing to be had.

3. The DAJs have probably lost their effectiveness. I’ll know more after the Wed. survey, but I’m somewhat convinced that the students are racing to fill in the entries in the next two days—which of course defeats the purpose. It might be an interesting article to explore why this assignment didn’t catch on.

4. From the group on downloading: the RIAA is still into spectacle punishment because they are yet to establish authority with the general public. So they sue 12-year olds for millions in the hope they will scare me away from downloading a Tom Waits song. It works.

Comments?