A Cake-Taker

In class yesterday, a student came up to me and announced, "The printer in the library was broken, so I couldn't print out my essay for today." His tone indicated that he was handing this problem over to me to figure out what to do. We looked at each other for a minute, the missing assignment somewhere in the air between us like a hot potato.

Finally, after some negotiation, he agreed to try one of the other thousand printers available and bring me a copy of the essay. When he showed up with it, he handed it to me and said on his way out, "Oh, I didn't know how to cite the text, so I just wrote 'citation' where the citations would go, okay?"

I might have actually burst out laughing. If it were a math test, he wouldn't just write "number" where the answer went, would he?

It's like another student I had recently who copied a lot of information from an Internet source, apparently because he didn't know how to cite it properly. I suggested that he write his own paragraph and incorporate the information rather than copying it directly. "But," he said, "when I read that source, I thought it was the best way of saying what I wanted to say."

Look, dude, this may be difficult to believe, but I don't ask you to write papers so that I can find out the most brilliant statements ever made about 19th-century literature. Believe it or not, I ask you to write essays to to see evidence of your work.

I love my students, but their laziness is breathtakingly adaptive and resourceful sometimes. At least the sheer absurdity of it keeps me supplied with hilarity.