Friday 27 February 2015

That's Pretty Close to Plagiarism

Since the student I worked with the first week was away for this week, I was placed with another grade eight student. He is a very frank, and very open boy who likes to speak what is on his mind. Unfortunately, most of what was on his mind was the popular game Minecraft. There was more than a few occasions where the topic of conversation had to be brought back to writing. As I looked through his story, creatively entitled "Short Horror Story," I noticed a few things right away. First, his writing is well crafted and his grammar is near perfect after the first draft. Any errors I caught, he managed to point out before I could. Second, the story had a good flow to it and his use of conventions (capitalization, elipses, etc.) added emphasis in the necessary places. Third, his story was the exact plot to the "Thriller" video from Michael Jackson.

So we had the conversation about plagiarism. I told him that there is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from another story, but that there is something wrong with copying the exact plot line. It was such an obvious rip off: the protagonist's name was Michael. That is when he admitted that he had forgotten about the assignment, and he wrote it in ten minutes right before meeting me.

So we spoke about the 6+1 traits. the word choice, voice, organization, sentence fluency, and conventions were well executed, and I felt that in the short time we had together, he would be better served talking about the sixth trait, ideas. He admitted to having difficulty coming up with his own ideas. He said he would usually just slightly modify the plot from another story, or borrow ideas from his peers. He knew that wasn't ideal and showed interest in becoming more creative with his ideas. Since his genre of choice is horror, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite horror writers. Often horror writers will start with the ending. Once they know what is going to happen, they work on the details of how the story got there. I showed him some graphic organizers which dealt with developing a sequence working backwards.

Hopefully that strategy might help him with originality in the future!

26 comments:

  1. Love this - maybe because I am part of the Thriller generation.

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  2. You're student has great taste in music!

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  3. It's surprising how students don't understand that taking other people's ideas is not the right thing to do. I feel like grade 8 students more so don't understand what plagiarizing means in the larger scope of things.

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  4. It's surprising how students don't understand that taking other people's ideas is not the right thing to do. I feel like grade 8 students more so don't understand what plagiarizing means in the larger scope of things.

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  5. It is important for students to know that plagiarism. It will be with them for the rest of their academic career.

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  6. Great moment that you will remember from this experience.

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  8. Great moment that you will remember from this experience.

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  9. Maybe he's celebrating Michael Jackson's work and its an homage to Thriller!

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  10. I agree, it's too close to plagiarism we should encourage students to be creative and trust their own imagination while creative writing.

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  11. I'm not certain that I'd consider this "plagiarism" but I think by drawing attention to his work you taught him a valuable lesson.

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  12. Kids will be kids and try their luck, but way to bring the issue to light!

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  13. Great teaching moment- Jess
    Plagiarism can be defined by professional judgment -Avery

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  14. At least the kid has good taste! ;)
    But seriously, sometimes we find inspiration from other sources, but it is important that it simply inspires and does not replicate.
    Good work, Mr Dixon.

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  15. Kids will be kids and try their luck, but way to bring the issue to light!

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  16. I think, as teachers, it's important to have these conversations before something pretty close to plagiarism occurs!

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  17. Good writers borrow, great writers steal...

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  18. Neil, first of all I am very impressed with your blog overall, and this was a very enjoyable "aha" moment.

    plagiarism is lame!
    Peace

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  19. This is a great teaching moment and I like how you incorporated the use of graphic organizers to help him develop his storyline and come up with original ideas.

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  20. Great moment! Plagiarism is definitely a huge issue nowadays!

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  21. Great story and great strategy to help this student's future writing.

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  22. I think, as teachers, it's important to have these conversations before something pretty close to plagiarism occurs!

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  23. Plagiarism can be tricky! Recently that song Blurred Lines got sued for copying a Marvin Gaye song, even though they aren't that similar. It's tough to know where to draw the line

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  24. At some point, there definitely needs to be a conversation about plagiarism with every student...

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  25. I believe that your humor will do great in getting your point across to students with regards to all issues, such as plagiarism.

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