icewolf | It must be summer...

I'm bored and lonely. I hate being at home alone. Especially when there are plenty of chores I ought to be doing, and I have absolutely no motivation to do any of them.

Graded research papers last night. Ohhh boy. Even though I know I told the class "every time you paraphrase, summarize, quote, or otherwise borrow from another source, YOU MUST CITE IT," no less than five times, and even devoted an entire 3-hour class to the subject, I had to hand back at least half the papers as unacceptable. They had Works Cited pages, but no citations. WTF? *headdesk* And don't get me started on people who cited, but who couldn't manage to follow MLA format.

I really don't understand why so many students think MLA is so difficult. It's the most straightforward documentation system out there. It's sure as hell a lot easier than Chicago/Turabian. You write something you paraphrased, summarized, quoted, or otherwise borrowed from someone else, you just put their name and the page number after what you borrowed like so (Smith-Jones 54). You don't have to interrupt your reading to scan down the page to a footnote. You don't have to flip to the end to check out an endnote. Name, page number. That's it. No page number? No problem. Just put in the article name in its place (Smith-Jones "Woman Guns Down English Class"). It gets even easier if you lead in with the author, for example: Smith-Jones feels that too many students convince themselves that the MLA format is far more difficult than it actually is (87). See that? That's just the page number. You can do that, if you name the author in your statement. Isn't that cool?

Why is this so difficult?

This group was not as good as the first session folks. A lot more tardiness and absences. (Which explains some of the MLA problem--if they didn't attend class, they didn't get the message.) A much greater sense of entitlement. They wanted to be spoon-fed everything like they were in 101. (This was a 102 class--they should have learned all the documentation stuff in 101.)

Whatever happened to taking responsibility for one's own education? If you don't know something, you look it up. I gave them books and resources. They could email me if they had any questions. I don't know what else I could have done. The next crowd is getting the message loud and clear, though: if you don't cite, you fail. Period.