Notes on a Scandal

Many of my students don't actually read the books I assign to them. Why read in full when the internet provides summaries chapter-by-chapter of the literature instead? As a nerdy English teacher, it saddens me to see my students forego wonderful classics for the easy way out. Still, I can't be too critical because at their age, I did it, too. I couldn't stand to read the dialect of Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I resorted to Cliff Notes. For a few other novels, I had more pressing television to watch, so book notes became essential to breezing through the material.

As prevalent as this activity is, it is one of those unwritten rules that you don't acknowledge doing so, particularly in front of authority figures, much like the subjects of smoking pot, being homosexual, and watching VH1 reality shows. Recently, I collected my students' folders to check their journal entries and one student turned eir folder in with about fifty printed sheets of internet book notes. Given the student's responses in class and on the test, I would have suspected as much, but incriminating oneself in such a way takes it to another level. How stupid do you have to be to hand that in to the teacher?

I cackled, but I could not judge. During my junior year, I committed a similar, perhaps even more ridiculous, faux pas. We were reading A Passage to India, which made little sense to me at the time. I'd be interested in going back and trying again now that I have a better grasp on such things as imperialism; it would probably even be a book I enjoy. At the time, however, it was right over my head. I blame our nation's educational approach to teaching history: I understood the colonial perspective and cheered for the colonists' plight in the context of the United States' history, but the connection was never made between similarly discontented settlements on an international level in world history. Perhaps this is just an oversight and flaw of separating the two subjects, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was an intentional division. Fucking imperialism - but I digress. Anyway, since A Passage to India had indiscernible themes, I resorted to printing out notes from the internet. At the same time, I printed out a draft to my essay on a different novel, one of my all-time favorites, The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. I had to turn the draft into my teacher because we were to have a writing conference the following day. In my moronic haste, I managed to staple the A Passage to India notes to my essay and hand it in to my teacher. Later in the day, I recognized my folly and attempted to break into her office to destroy the evidence. I was unsuccessful, so I came back later, bringing a friend to distract her. He briefly lured her out of the office while I snuck in and scavenged through her papers without trying to leave any evidence. I never felt more Mission Impossible-esque in my life, yet my hunt turned up empty. The following day, I was literally shaking with nerves before arriving for my writing conference, as I was going to have to cop to my crime.

As it turned out, she clearly hadn't even finished reading my paper. She made comments on the first couple of pages, and made some general statement on how the rest of it was; the vagueness was a sure sign of an unread paper. At some point when she wasn't paying attention, I discreetly tore the incriminating back pages off the essay and slid them into my folder. I couldn't believe I had gotten away with it. I had handed in documentation of being a poor student and managed to collect it back with no harm done. Now that I am a teacher, I'm not nearly as impressed with my perceived suaveness. I can't even begin to describe the number of assignments I've merely pretended to have read. Looking back, this particular English teacher is the teacher I feel I teach most like at this point. A lot of class discussion, inconsistent quizzes, and proposed projects that were never really followed through on. I use class discussion since it requires little to no planning on my part, I quiz inconsistently because I'm disorganized, and I really just never got around to typing up the explanation for the projects, though the students react very favorably when you lead them to believe that you cut it out to give them a reprieve. This isn't meant to insult her teaching, or mine for that matter. When you're first starting out, you do what you can to survive, and improve from there. To be clear, I never realized at the time that these lesson plans were probably thrown together. In fact, she exemplified such a love for literature that she was my favorite English teacher. For the most part, students don't think about what goes into lesson planning and what amount of time/effort the teacher spent preparing it. It's school, so it's being done exactly as it's supposed to be done. Unless I do an especially cruddy job at a given lesson, I tend not to beat myself up too much because the students are truly oblivious to the workings of the system.

Originally, I had intended to cut the student some slack about attaching those book cheat notes. In honor of our shared experience, I thought I should let it slide. Later, however, I decided it would be more fun to make him paranoid. Instead, I've commemorated my mistake by stapling the internet pages to his most recently handed in essay without any explanation as to how and why they were attached. That'll make him sweat. See, I am a good teacher.