Student as author...

A response to Ritter’s The Economics of Authorship

I believe that the idea of the student seeing him or herself as the author, thus taking responsibility and pride in their work, is essential to getting students to feel some moral obligation to produce work that demonstrates their own originality and complexities of thought around a topic.

It is easy to believe that most students plagiarize out of sheer laziness and lack of motivation, but isn’t it more plausible to believe that a truly lazy student wouldn’t care enough to go through the trouble of finding a paper to purchase. Then it is a natural assumption that most students that purchase papers from paper mills and other sites putting a price tag on someone’s writing are actually being driven by their desire to succeed at any cost and unable to see how they themselves could author a paper that would be able to gain them that success.

It would then appear to me as an educator, that while addressing issues of buying someone else’s work, I must then too address their desire to succeed. It is that desire that I can help them repurpose in a way that would lead them to the conclusion that they are capable of ensuring their own success using skills perhaps they don’t feel they have and they may need additional work around.

In my opinion, though I haven’t had this experience with a student yet, this is an opportunity to encourage and motivate a student that already appears to view their success as a priority.

With the advent of new media and the easy access of writing then publishing writing for a legitimate audience, facebook, twitter, etc., our students are already authors and all we have to do as educators is illuminate this point for them and then help them to see that if they are already publishing hundreds if not thousands of words a day, then they can also write a thousand word essay given the opportunity to practice the skill over time without fear of being ridiculed and or humiliated.

I am not a teacher that marks up my students’ papers. Though I deal with younger students, 11 or 12 year olds mostly, I feel that it is imperative that I encourage, not discourage. Writing is a wholly personal experience, or it should be. Even academic essays are personal when a writer has put their own critical thoughts, observations and interpretations on paper. It is a vulnerability that some students feel teachers have not been empathetic or sympathetic towards.

Ritter uses a quote by Ed White that states some educators might not be aware of the complex and multitudes of reasons a student would purchase a paper instead of completing the assignment themselves. Something I hear a lot of educators say is that students are not motivated to succeed. I go by the philosophy that even the student that consistently puts their head down on their desk and rarely turns in homework is indeed motivated, but in a different way than what we are use to recognizing as motivation. This is where I feel a lot of educators may fall short. We need to put the focus on open communication, and some students are going to resist in ways that frustrate us, but we have to help them see themselves in a way perhaps they never have before. It takes more time and who has more time? In a perfect world, we’d be able to reach every single student that sits in our class. Perhaps this is an idealistic view of what education should be. But I’d rather be the ideal than the alternative.