Let’s just say I’m not in a position to turn down work. That may be a sorry excuse, but it’s the best I can offer. When I was offered a freelance job writing a commercial cheat-sheet about a classic work of African-American literature, I took it, even though I knew it was the most shameful sort of hack work. What was worse, it only paid about three cents a word, lower than the lowest-paying communist weekly in the country. Actually, the thing about which I was (and continue to be) most regretful was just that: the crappy pay. That and the fact that eight weeks after approving my copy, the (large, multinational) cheat-sheet company has yet to send me a check.
I confess that I didn’t think too thoroughly about the ethical
implications of the job. After reading the samples sent me by the company, which
I’ll call "Fake Notes," I reasoned that any high school kid
who would choose to read a dry, fifty-page summary of The Sun Also Rises
rather than just reading the damn book must be in serious trouble. If they couldn't
even comprehend Hemingway, these poor boneheads needed my help.
I told myself this, even though my husband, who happens to teach
high school English, faces a dispiriting weekly crop of cheating and plagiarism
cases. His tony private girls' school has a policy specifically banning Fake
Notes-- which is the preferred brand these days, being both "hip"
and online-- from its campus. This same school, home to our Southern city's
most revered debutantes, also pays him a wage that scarcely keeps our two daughters
in pinafores and My Little Pony accessories. So if his spoiled, Land-Rover-driving
students wanted to squander the $15,000 a year their parents pay in tuition,
was there not some poetic justice in my profiting, however meagerly, from it?
They were already cheating their asses off every day. Yes, I know it's the self-justification
of cosmetic surgeons and SS officers the world over, but if I didn't do it,
surely someone else would. So I shrewdly negotiated a raise of one cent per
word and set to work summarizing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Next to Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, Incidents is
probably the most widely-assigned firsthand account of American slavery in print
today. Its author, Harriet Jacobs, escaped from an abusive master, spent seven
years hiding in a sweltering attic crawl space where she could neither sit nor
stand, was permanently crippled by her ordeal, and devoted the rest of her life
trying to improve the sorry lot of African-Americans. All I had to do was desecrate
her legacy by condensing her narrative into 18,000-30,000 easy-to-read words,
which would no doubt spool effortlessly from my Ivy-educated brain.
The Fake Notes editor, a congenial young woman with whom
I communicated only by e-mail, and who I suspect is all of 23 years old, encouraged
me to send along my copy as I drafted it so she could "troubleshoot."
I tossed aside the style guide she sent-- was I not a mature, professional writer
with advanced degrees? -- and got going.
Her comments on my first attempt were none too encouraging. My
writing was too abstract, too academic. Sentences should be shorter, and should
feature concrete, human subjects performing actions denoted by easily-identified
verbs whenever possible. Syntax had to be simple, vocabulary basic, topic sentences
crystal-clear. The text, she instructed, must be simple enough for a dimwitted
sixteen-year-old to understand while skimming it in the hallway before class.
Evidently, not only were these geniuses not going to read the book; they weren’t
even going to read the cheat sheet.
Other obstacles to finishing quickly and painlessly soon became
evident. Each 750 words of summary-- for summary, in spite of Fake Notes'
supposed purpose of helping students "understand" literature, is the
name of the game-- had to be accompanied by at least 500 words of discussion.
Each discussion paragraph had to be 150 to 200 words, and freestanding-- no
complex "academic" maneuvers like extending a single argument over
more than one paragraph here! Do the math: in order to meet all these requirements,
I had to squeeze at least three separate low-level literary-critical ideas out
of each section I summarized. This was not easy-- this book is no The Sun
Also Rises, you see. I was in a hell of my own-- and the corporate para-educational
machine’s-- making.
Yes, yes, I had only myself to blame. While my poor husband struggled
to sow fallow minds with the seeds of higher learning, I trailed behind him,
greedily pecking at those plump kernels like some disaffected intellectual crow.
So what if his students were empty-headed debs who dressed like streetwalkers
when they were out of their school uniforms? That's no excuse. Even rich skanks
have a right to a liberal education unimpeded by the cheating materials that
flood the internet nowadays. I knew all that. Nonetheless, the thought of all
the time I had already committed to this beastly job-- and the 1100 clams waiting
at the end of the tunnel-- kept me plugging away. Themes, symbols, foreshadowing,
characterization, voice. Suggestions for further reading-- ha! -- I gave a bitter
laugh as I listed scholarly works for my readers to fraudulently cite in their
plagiarized papers.
Just as I was hitting rock bottom, my long-suffering spouse announced
over dinner that much of the senior class at his school was implicated in a
brand-new plagiarism scandal. Rather than reading the assigned book, they had
used-- yup-- Fake Notes to write their papers. Their teacher was furious,
threatening to fail them all and thereby prevent their graduating on time.
Those of us who went to public high schools in the North may
have difficulty appreciating the seriousness of this threat. For us, graduation
was about rented, shiny polyester robes smelling of disinfectant and rows of
folding chairs in a school gym-- something we barely showed up for. Kids dropped
acid before my high school graduation. But at my husband’s school, it's
a huge deal. All of the students buy their class ring. All of them. There is
no such thing as a punk-rock girl who shows up at the prom in combat boots.
High school graduation is a big, big event-- bigger by far than college graduation.
Almost as big as a girl’s-- gasp-- wedding.
In an effort to throw themselves on the mercy of the court, the
cheaters filed one by one into my husband's classroom (he's on the disciplinary
board, natch) to tearfully acknowledge their misdeeds. Not to confess, per
se, or to apologize for any actual wrongdoing. Rather, they came to say
that they had never "realized" that paraphrasing an entire paper from
an unacknowledged source constituted plagiarism. That their teacher had never
told them that they had to footnote sources, even sources which were specifically
outlawed by school policy. That they were very, very sorry to have done something
that their teachers regarded as cheating. These were classic "I'm sorry
it upset you when you allowed your leg to be run over by my Land Rover”
non-apologies.
Evidently kids today don't even know how to fake a convincing
apology in order to save their sorry asses from failing, not graduating, and
having to go to summer school. (Perhaps I should pen a brief monograph for them
outlining the technique.) I suppose you can hardly expect them to feel actual
shame or regret, since most have never been meaningfully disciplined. Have you
noticed how parents talk to their children these days? Go to a playground and
sit on a bench for a while; you’ll see what I mean: "Hunter, it’s
time to go home and have dinner now, okay?" "Ashley, please
stop delivering those kidney punches to Britney, okay?"
If you are dubious about my blame-it-on-the-parents gambit, or
think it's Janet Jackson's fault that kids are cheating on their term papers,
get a load of what happened next: One of the cheaters' fathers, who was some
sort of local muckety-muck, threatened to obtain a court order stopping graduation
unless his child received a passing grade and was allowed to to parade around
in her evening gown and her hairdo so shiny you can see your reflection in it
and the boob job she got for sweet sixteen.
Okay, so he didn't actually mention any boob jobs. But this is
not the first time legal action has been threatened by a parent whose child
was about to be punished for some admitted misdeed. Actually, it happens all
the time. Kid gets thrown out of National Honor Society for cheating; parent
threatens to sue school. Kid gets caught on videotape with a bottle of Southern
Comfort on campus; parents call Dean of Students to reprimand her for "harassing"
their child.
The kids aren't sorry. Their parents, clearly, aren't sorry.
And I'm supposed to be sorry? I think not.
Juliette Guilbert is
Literary Editor of Lime Tea, and is a correspondent
for Agence France Presse, which is probably based somewhere
in France. She also holds a PhD. in American Studies
from Yale University, which, plus 4 bucks, will get
her a cup of coffee. Juliette lives with her two children
and her husband, Ben, in New Orleans, LA.
Note: Juliette did not write this
bio, and she really wants me to take out any mention
of her PhD. Ha ha, sucks to be her.
