Severian has another tale of his university teaching career to share:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008. (Not the educational institution in the story…)
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
The Basic College Girl is so dumb, lazy, and entitled, she makes Hillary Clinton look like a criminal mastermind. I caught one recycling a term paper from another class because she’d forgotten to take the other professor’s name off the header. Hell, I caught one copy-pasting straight off Wikipedia because she’d left the hyperlinks embedded in the text.
And these were not Hail Marys. Just copy-pasting something, anything, Cuttlefish-style makes sense if you haven’t done a lick of work and it’s due in five minutes. It’s a one-in-a-million shot, sure, but since it took you all of 45 seconds and you’re going to fail anyway, you might as well try to shoot the moon. No, these were papers turned in with plenty of time to spare (I always had my term papers due at least a week before final exams).
Think about that for a second: Instead of coming to my office hours with a sob story, or trying to talk the registrar into an incomplete, or faking her own death, or doing literally anything else, more than a few BCGs turned in visible-from-space plagiarism and skipped on down to Starbucks for a triple foam half-caff venti soy chai pumpkin spice latte. YOLO!
That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is the BCG’s reaction when you catch them. When you point out that no, I’m not Professor Jones and this isn’t Spring 2014, the BCG’s universal, invariable reaction is … anger. At YOU.
At the time I was simply too pissed to think about it rationally (I trust you’ll believe me when I say that in the semesters just before I retired, my biggest challenge was keeping a look of utter contempt off my face). Looking back on it after some years, though, it makes sense. BCGs are all grandiose narcissists with Borderline Personality Disorder. Of course they’re just so wonderful that anything they deign to turn in should be given an A+, sight unseen. What other purpose could I, the professor, possibly serve, other than to mark it down for record-keeping? Now she’s forced to take the time to email me, or come down to my office hours, or what have you, just to set my dumb ass straight. It’s a real inconvenience!
