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In an attempt to declutter my life, I went through a box of old teaching materials–mainly old student papers that I didn’t know what to do with, hand-outs, and articles that I thought might prove useful again in the future.

I came across two things, however, that I couldn’t throw away because without such tactile evidence, I’m not sure anyone would believe me.

(I also just want to preface this with a statement on my views on plagiarism. I am not a witch-hunter or blood-hound when it comes to plagiarism. I do not fail my students. I do not give them F’s. I do not take plagiarism personally. Many of my students were students who needed a second chance in life, and I was happy to help them and not hold them back. I always gave them opportunities to correct their wrongs. In the second example below, however, the student adamantly denied having done anything wrong and chose not to redo his paper. I did fail that paper, but I didn’t fail him for the semester.)

The first item that I was unable to toss out was an essay on how to make Kool-Aid. That’s right. I was teaching a very basic composition class, and it was my first semester teaching. I hadn’t quite learned yet that there are ways to curb plagiarism in assignment design. My assignment was really bad–I simply asked my students to write an essay that explained how to do something, anything. One student, who was probably the worst student I had–he never came to class and didn’t seem to know how to write a complete sentence–turned in this marvelous gem. I, of course, handed it back to him with a print-out from the website stapled to his paper.

After class, he came up to me to say sorry, that he had written a paper, but he asked his cousin to type it up for him. She somehow ended up typing this Kool-Aid essay word for word.

My absolute favorite was from a student who wrote this letter to me when I stapled a copy of his source to his paper:

This letter is in regards to a paper I wrote on energy. Professor, I was very stunned and taken aback after being notified by you, that two lines in my paper should have been quoted from an already printed article. If I was aware that it was already in another article, I assure you, that I would have sited it. I am genuinely in shock and am having the most difficult time believing that lines that I sat and wrote on my own could have already been written up by some else. Ironically, I had not even seen the article, prior to your printing it out for me, and did not even visit the site the article is to be found on. To add to my dismay, my original sentences were, ‘As Congress ponders how the country can steer clear of a power disaster like the one that has affected California, many people consider that only science-fiction can offer a long-term solution–a resolution in which discoveries in hypothetical physics would lead to an innovative energy-producing expertise. The fuel for this technology, as they envision it, would be copiously accessible, secure, economical and uncontaminated.’ After I had revised it, I had changed a few words around and unbeknownst to me, it became the same words as Mr. Travis Norsen’s.[sic]

What gems do you have hiding in your filing cabinet?