The Molecular, Middle-Aged Aristocracy of Christendom

This quarter has been pretty crazy because of our state tests and district-mandated service project. We did each of these in our homerooms and so for about three weeks, I didn't work with any of my students from my other classes. As a result, I have very few scores in my gradebook for them. As we began reading our end-of-year novel, Black Like Me, I decided to give each student five points for just showing up and bringing their text with them so that they could participate in class. Well, that proved pretty difficult for a couple of the kids.

One boy in particular forgot his book a few of the days and was absent another couple, so he missed out on those free points. However, when I asked what had occurred in the section of the book they were supposed to read for homework, his hand always shot up, proving to me that he had done his required reading. He approached me Friday and asked what he could do to make up those lost participation points; I told him that he had to write me a one-page summary of what had happened thus far in the text (an easy task for him I thought because he had read every page and explained it in class).

Yesterday, I get his paper and he asks me to give him some feedback. He tells me that he wrote it, but his mom and cousin edited it for punctuation and spelling. I was able to read over it during lunch and this is what I saw:

"John Howard Griffin, the author and main character of Black Like Me, is a middle-aged white man living in Mansfield, Texas in 1959."

"Great," I'm thinking, he's really understood the premise of the book and used great words to explain it...but then it starts to get fishy.

"Deeply committed to the cause of racial justice and frustrated by his inability as a white man to understand the black experience..."

That sounds absolutely nothing like anything he's ever written before. The vocabulary alone tipped me off that something was amiss (hence the title of this post). I wondered if his mom or cousin had actually written it and he just turned it in. Plagiarism to a mild degree. But then I wondered if he found this summary somewhere online.

So, thanks to my good friends at Google.com, I typed that second phrase into the search engine and was routed to http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/blacklikeme/summary.html, where, strangely, I found his one-page summary, word-for-word. Plagiarism to the millionth degree.

"John Howard Griffin, the author and main character of Black Like Me, is a middle-aged white man living in Mansfield, Texas in 1959. Deeply committed to the cause of racial justice and frustrated by his inability as a white man to understand the black experience..."

About an hour later, he came to my class and asked if I liked his paper. I pulled him aside and told him what I had found and he denied it. He stuck to his story that he wrote it and his family helped him. I explained what he had done and that he would be kicked out of most schools, but he wouldn't budge on his story.

This is the first time I've had to deal with this and it's killing me. This kid has read the book. This kid is smart. This kid just didn't try and thought he could get away with it. I absolutely didn't give him the points, but I need him to realize that this is not okay; if he does this in college, he'll be kicked out immediately with no warning and no rebuttal.

Moral dilemmas.