I feel so bad but i’m just sitting here cackling as my bestie is sending me increasingly exasperated texts about her students’ first research paper (1 page long lol). Like. Despite having deadlines for each stage of research and writing, one kid emailed her at 7:45 pm for the final 10 pm deadline with a question about “resurch.” Multiple kids have plagiarized their papers, one of whom didn’t even bother changing the font or the color of the sections he copied and pasted. One girl just cited a fucking fanfiction story as one of her sources.
Middle schoolers are so precious, but god they can be so stupid too. Darling children lol
update: fanfiction girl may have put it in the works cited but didn’t even bother to put quotation marks in as she just copied and pasted two full pages of a fanfiction into her paper. every little additional detail i learn about these papers just gets worse lol
she sent me the link of the story she copied and pasted. it is…not good. it’s not even a good story. why did she steal it? god this entire sordid tale is so baffling. is it possible that this child has genuinely mistaken bad self-insert fanfiction for legitimate greek mythology? the world may never know
“Also, fanfiction.net is a community of modern fiction writers, and is not a credible source for your research papers.” - an actual sentence my friend just had to write to her students. i’m dying this is incredible lol
“Although the Trojan horse is something we all think is real, it’s actually classified as a myth.” oh you sweet summer child
“I used this video thing to find out what the roman house you can find out.” what does this even mean lol
god they’re such precious babies fumbling around like newborn colts and i am living
“The Trojan War Horse was built around the time the Trojan War took place.” I mean. He’s not wrong…
“ Like Gaea, Ouranos had a human form too, in his human form he was a tall buff guy, with long black hair, wearing only a loincloth… (don’t judge me, Gaea was the one who made him…) So then they get married, bla bla bla bal bal.”
“ So they have triplets, and these kids define UGLY. Now don’t get me wrong they were as big and strong as the titans but they were so brutish and NEEDED any kind of waxing, and to top it all off each one had a huge eye in the middle of their forehead. They became the elder cyclops.Of course when Ouranos saw them he was like “Nope!” and made chains out the nights pure blackness and chained up the triplets and tossed them into the pit.”
“ So Gaea had come up with this new and brilliant idea called killing.”
“ But that is a story for another time. For now I will work on painting some of the moments for the LAVP so see ya later.My references are:“Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods” book by Rick Riordan, Goggle, Wikapedia”
Okay I honestly never anticipated this post to go beyond my immediate circle, and apparently some people have missed the point of this post. This is their first paper. They are learning and part of learning is doing things very badly before doing them well. Honestly I only wanted to share some nostalgic cute-response trigger with y’all witnessing the first adorable, fumbling baby steps into this kind of assignment, not for some of you to fucking judge them or their teacher just because their first attempts aren’t perfect. So like. God just enjoy it without being an asshole.
“In this paragraph I will be telling you the dimensions of the Colosseum in Rome.” “In this paragraph I will be talking about the features of the Colosseum.”
Not what was meant by making sure you have a strong thesis statement, but kudos to this kid who was obviously listening and trying to apply that to their paper <3
“I am going to talk about things like Odysseus’s stops, the characters involved with his stops, and how long and far he traveled to get home. I can’t wait to show you everything that I have learned so far!”
oh my god this precious sunflower
“Nearly every town in Ancient Greek has a patron god or goddess because most gods didn’t share well.” There’s almost nothing wrong with this sentence I’m just enjoying this masterful use of understatement.
i read this entire thing nodding, going, yes, yes, this is what my students are like also. this is #relatable content.
then i read “middle schoolers”
i am a graduate assistant
i teach college students
