School is back in session, or will be soon. The labor of lesson planning begins to loom. Avoiding AI obscenity is rightly asked– Tempt me to take on helping you with that task!
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More seriously, I have years of experience writing instructional materials, ranging from short passages and poems for literary and content analysis to multiple-choice sets to banks of short-answer and essay questions–all human-made, none AI-generated. I’ve also worked to differentiate assignments for diverse learners and instructional needs inside the classroom, so I can help you with IEP-compliant work, as well.
(There’s this, too, teachers: hiring out assignment-writing is a classroom supply. Consult a tax professional for what this can mean for you!)
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I mentioned at about this time last week that I was looking at another uncommonly busy weekend. So much did, in fact, happen to be the case; I had stuff going on on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Honestly, it was all a bit much for my normally staid and stolid self; I have some hope that this weekend will serve as a bit of a counter to it, offering a time to rest and relax a bit before a bigger push begins again. Until then, though, a bit about what went on might be in order.
Yeah, I saw a lot of this kind of thing. Photo by Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com
On Friday, I went to Kerrville, where I participated in a trash pickup with my daughter and with fellow employees of the family business. Texas runs an adopt-a-highway program in which individuals and groups can volunteer to pick up trash along a designated two-mile span of highway quarterly; in exchange, the state posts signage for the individuals or groups. It’s good advertising, and it does do some good for the area. (Picking up trash is helpful, right?) My daughter and I had a little trouble getting started, as it was the first time for both of us, but once we got moving, we did well, contributing to making what had been expected to be a two-day hitch into the work of a morning. I’m pleased with how things turned out in that regard.
After the trash pickup, my daughter and I returned home. She took time to rest and play; I got to work on a freelance project that had dropped into my lap. It took me through Saturday evening to get it done, but I got it done and submitted, so that much was good. I’m pleased to know that I can still do such work at such a pace, if I have the luxury of focusing on it. I know, however, that I do not often have that luxury; my wife and daughter did a lot to take care of other things while I was pushing through the project, and I cannot always or even often ask so much of them.
Sunday was taken up with a family reunion. Much of my wife’s extended family lives in the Texas Hill Country, although there are kin spread out a fair bit further than that, and they gather annually on the first Sunday in August. Traditionally, they have met at LBJ State Park in Stonewall, but the last couple of years have had the event in Johnson City at the city park. As such, I spent Sunday at the park, helping set things up, cook and cut meat, and tear down, all while enjoying the company of familiar people seen but once in the year and meeting new folks who hadn’t been by in a while. It was a good time, although it made for a long day, and I managed to twist my right knee uncomfortably along the way. But that will heal, I’m pretty sure.
This coming weekend, I’ll be away from home for a few days. We’re taking one last chance to get away before Ms. 8 starts back at school (on Monday, if you can believe it), one last opportunity to rest and recreate before things get back going in earnest again. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it afterwards; I hope you’ll read it!
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A commentary by Chade on the map-room at Aslevjal precedes “Bee Stings.” The chapter opens with Bee fleeing from Dwalia and her company after emerging from the Skill-pillar. Her situation is related, as are her surroundings, and the voice of Wolf-Father within her bids her find a place to stand and fight. She complies as pursuit continues, and she gives as good an account of herself in the ensuing fracas as can be hoped–but she is taken again and beaten unconscious.
Bee wakes restrained and assesses her injuries as she can. Within her, Wolf-Father exhorts her to work to free herself again, and she overhears her captors’ conversation about her. Bee also hears the effects the environment is having on said captors, some of whom hear voices from the Skill-stones surrounding them. Despite that, she despairs of escape, but Wolf-Father continues to urge her to work towards it regardless. He also relates the circumstances under which he came to know Fitz. Echoes through the Skill continue to beleaguer Bee’s captors, although Dwalia cannot hear them, and she orders harsh treatment for Bee.
To her credit, Bee stifles her impulse to resist, conserving her strength. Too, assisted by Wolf-Father, she catches the scent of her father, not long gone from the place where she now is. Emboldened, she returns to the work of effecting her escape again.
I do delight in the pun of the present chapter’s title. One of the great pleasures of my life has been word-play; one of the many benefits of being a father is that I have justification for it since Ms. 8 came to my wife and me. And the pun at work in the present chapter’s title bears little explication–except, perhaps, to point out where it fails. For bees tend to die after they sting, and Bee has survived inflicting hers upon her captors, even if she suffered to do it.
I note, too, that the present chapter does what first chapters are apt to do, whether of new books or of new books in existing series: explicate the situation. It is clear Hobb expects readers who pick up the book to be familiar with the Realm of the Elderlings novels that precede it; even the explications in place make reference to things not necessarily present in the text as presented. But she does remind readers of how matters stood at the end of the previous volume–and there was some span between publications, with Fool’s Quest emerging onto shelves in 2015 and Assassin’s Fate in 2017. Two years is enough time to forget quite a bit, and I do not think I am alone in appreciating a refresher after even that time. After all, even if I am rereading the novels on a fairly consistent basis, I am rereading them at this point; I did pick up my copies shortly after they hit print, so I did have the gap then that I do not now.
No, at this point, my memory has other gaps. Some of them will fill back in as I reread. Some, I can patch by looking at other things I have written, both in and out of this webspace. Some, alas, are gone forever, or are at best dimly recalled, shadows moving in the night.
I don’t think I’m afraid of the dark, though.
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An extended excerpt from Bee’s dream journals serves as a prologue for the novel. It speaks of children playing and singing while one, blindfolded, rages in snippets. Wind rises, bursting from the blindfolded child and scattering all. The blindfold remains, its painted eyes staring.
Because I remain a nerd…and I am not a photographer. Image is mine, as you might expect.
This is it, the beginning of the end…of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy. Fifty chapters remain to reread for this part of the Robin Hobb rereading series…which I seem not to have reviewed or commented on as I had earlier volumes of the Realm of the Elderlings corpus. It’s strange that such is the case, although I will note that I had some…things…going on when the novel emerged into the world and I read it. But not having gone on about the book before, I have the opportunity to approach it more nearly afresh now, and I’m grateful for that opportunity.
More firmly about the text: it is clear that one of the primary narrative foci throughout the Realm of the Elderlings corpus is foreshadowing. Beloved, in whatever guise, is easily the protagonist of the sixteen novel series culminating in the present volume, and Beloved’s core identity is as a prophet who must work to ensure that their prophecies come to pass; foreshadowing could hardly not be a focus in such a case. What is foreshadowed in the present passage, in Bee’s dark dreaming, I recall in broad strokes from my few earlier readings of the text. (What can I say other than that I’ve been busy?) Even without that recall, however, it’s clear that much is set to happen, and most of it will be unpleasant for those involved–but that’s Hobb, whose work I’ve loved across decades.
So, moving ahead…
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It’s not often that I have the kind of weekend that bears much reporting. It’s far more rare that I have two of them in quick succession. But the weekend before last was a busy one, and the one just past had some excitement to it. (The one coming up does, too, as does the one to follow that, somehow.) And for so much to happen to and around me so quickly bears some mention.
A view to remember… Image from TXDoT, here, which I believe makes for public domain.
On Saturday, my stepfather-in-law (there’s some interesting blending at work on both sides of my wife’s family) had his sixty-fourth birthday. He had let us know a while back that he wanted to go swimming at Johnson park and to eat at a Mexican restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas, both of which seem enjoyable enough things to do on a summer day in the Texas Hill Country. Consequently, my family and I planned to join the festivities–sensibly enough, I think, if perhaps with some caveats.
One of those caveats is that I don’t really swim. Instead, I sink. Even with a life-jacket on. And I have demonstrated this on more than one occasion, including a time or two when my wife has seen it happen. Because I am not buoyant at all, I tend not to go into the water, thinking that, even if there is something of a damper on a good time by my staying out of the pool, it’s not nearly as much of one as having to have a lifeguard pull me out of said pool–which, again, has happened more than once, and across a span of several decades, now, so that it’s in no way a one-time thing.
Now, we had thought that the park in question was LBJ State Park in Stonewall, which suited us well enough. The park itself has free admission, and the pool–recently reopened after a reconstruction previously thought unaffordable–asks for $2 to $3 per user. It’s a small enough fee, and the facility’s certainly worth the price, but I still see no reason to pay for something I know damned well I’m not going to use if I can avoid doing it. And, since the family well knows that I don’t swim, I was able to avoid doing it.
No, I dropped my wife and daughter off at the pool and retreated a little bit down the road to the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area on US Highway 290. I’d stopped there many times before, as might be imagined; I used to commute to Kerrville from Johnson City, taking 290 for much of the way, and there are still times that the cups of coffee I take in each morning tell me they need to get out earlier than anticipated. I’d not had occasion to stay there for any length of time, though, and, since there was a decent breeze and the temperature decided to confine itself to the lower 90°s F, it seemed a decent enough thing to do while my wife and daughter swam and played in the pool. (There are lots of places to set up at LBJ State Park, to be sure, but many of them are at some distance from restroom facilities, and I’d been told there was an event at the park headquarters that would make my setting up there, with access to its facilities, a bit of a challenge.)
While at the rest area, I sat at one of the covered picnic tables that grace it, my back to the highway and the wind coming from the southeast, and I wrote in my journal in the shade. There is something to be said for an occasional chance of scenery for the writing I do. Most of it happens while I sit at my desk at home, and a fair bit while sitting at my desk at the office where I still work. It’s sensible enough; I have the bulk of my supplies in one or another of those places, and the former is where I have such research apparatus as I still maintain. I also have chairs in those places that are not apt to aggravate my sciatica, and I have ready access to coffee and other things to drink (I’ve found I do better when I cycle more fluids through my body more rapidly). That I can also shape my soundscape to a large degree helps; certain music conduces well to how I think, and writing is thinking.
So much noted, and true, I also know well that being at home or at the office presents distractions. In both places, I have things other than my supplies and apparatus, and they call to me. At home, I’ve not only a decent chair, but also a bed and a couch that beckon. I can call the tune, but the cats’ meows and the dog’s whine also ring out for attention, or the phone rings. And even aside from all of that, I fall easily into ruts of thinking and depressive spirals that lead me down into dark places I’ve too often visited before, and at far greater length than is good for me. There are limits to how good my setup can be, given my resources, and I am ever near them.
Consequently, popping out every now and again has a salubrious effect on my work. It keeps me from falling into unhelpful cycles or helps me get out of them, which is its chief virtue. I know those cycles present danger to me; they echo with words perilous to hear and ultimately fatal to heed, but getting out every so often quiets the bitter monologue that delivers soliloquies on nothing but my failures. Getting out helps me to remember that the world is more than me, both myself and the externalization of self that the settled-into home is.
I do not always do well with remembering as much. It is easy for me to withdraw, to retreat, from a world I find confusing and frightening. It is easy for me to see what is wrong and what might well grow worse and to take myself where I feel some sense of control. It is this all too easy for me to fail to look outside myself and to focus on what might well go well after all. So much is a problem with which I struggle, with which I have struggled and likely long will. I try to take what are ultimately small steps to get away from it…when I remember to do so, which is, again, not often.
When I do remember, though, and go somewhere else to put my thoughts down, I am the better for it. I cannot always do so, of course. I do have tasks as demand I be in one place or another. I do have to be findable for a few folks at all times and for some more folks a fair bit of the time. And I do get a lot of good work done in my accustomed places; they’d not be my accustomed places did I not. I have worked to make my places good ones from which to write, but I am still glad to get out and about every now and again, to air myself and my places out and return to them ready to address what needs doing.
So it was that my time at the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area was a pleasant enough experience, the decent weather and available shade doing much to help it be so. The facilities are constructed and maintained well, and, the noise from the highway aside, things were rather quiet. Some birdsong and what I think was the chittering of cicadas reached me, and a few people stopping to make use of the facilities happened by, but the last were content to keep their own company and leave me to mine. I appreciate the courtesy, and I appreciate having gotten to have the peaceful time to myself. I think it’s something I might do again, go there to write, as duties and weather permit.
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The final chapter of the novel, “Emergence,” is prefaced by an excerpt from Bee’s journals. It opens with Bee emerging uncertainly back into existence. She hears the voice of Wolf-Father urging her to rise, and she struggles to do so, assessing herself and her surroundings. Some who made passage through the Skill-pillar with her had not survived; others are stripped utterly of sentience. Dwalia, however, retains herself. As Wolf-Father bids Bee flee toward “one here who will help us if I can wake him” (754), and Bee complies with a remark on the changing season, Dwalia commands her pursuit.
Here, again, is Verity-as-Dragon by John Howe, from The Plenty, here, and still used for commentary
The present chapter is, as is often the case with Bee-centered chapters, brief; in the edition of the text I have, it’s pages 752-54, and it empties onto a brief author-blurb. As such a brief thing, and at the very end of the novel, it functions much as a mid-credit or after-credit scene in a movie, gesturing towards the sequel that the audience knows to expect; I want to think it’s a reaction to the prevalence of such devices in movies, although whether on the part of the author, the editor, or the publisher is not clear to me. The argument could be made that, to keep like with like, the chapter could feature early in the third volume of the trilogy…but I also think that the trilogy structure itself rather demands that Bee’s reappearance (which links back to earlier notes that travel through Skill-pillars can occasion displacement in time and that there are agents in the Skill-stream that take some interest in others, such as this) in the present chapter. The confirmation for readers of something they might well expect–Bee received a lot of narrative attention to be discarded–does occasion some shift in tone for the reader; there is hope yet, and for more than just vengeance by Fitz and what might be something like justice for the Fool.
When I next pick up this series, it will be with what is (presently) its final volume: Assassin’s Fate. After going through that novel, there are several directions I can take. There are a number of other Realm of the Elderlings pieces, including The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince and Words like Coins, as well as some few short stories. There is also the Soldier Son trilogy, which presents a different take on things; I’ve done some work on that series before, and I have had thoughts about returning to that work off and on across time. Further, there are some decidedly different pieces by Hobb of which I happen to own copies, and I’m sure there is other work that I don’t have ready access to–which is all to say that there’s a lot of rereading left for me to do.
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Another quarter past The clock ticking inexorably towards twelve and Standing now well into its evening Though the night is hot, now, hereabouts And the years-long fight that thundered and trumpeted Has quieted down to a great degree Hollow promises no longer echoing in the world
I think this one really pops… Photo by Toni Cuenca on Pexels.com
The scars remain for those who have Suffered under incendiaries Something made worse in the summer when So much seems already to burn And the sound of shots firing can be heard even When no report comes in from outside They itch, and they scratch
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Put on the show! Photo by Donald Tong on Pexels.com
On Friday, I took my daughter, Ms. 8, up to the last rehearsal day at her theatre camp. She was wrapping up the second week of the two-week intensive program, and she had already given one performance in Matilda, Jr., at the Hill Country Community Theatre in Cottonwood Shores, so the day was given over to fine-tuning the performance for the remainder of the run and getting a preview of next summer’s show. Ms. 8 reported to me that the day went well and that she is enthusiastic about the coming show, already thinking about what character she’ll try to land. And it seemed to me she had good reason to be enthusiastic; I went and saw her in Matilda, Jr., that evening, one of a number of her family to do so, and I enjoyed watching the performance greatly. It was clear to me that she and the rest of her company had put a lot of work into the show, and I was and am proud of her for it.
On Saturday, Ms. 8 had a matinee performance of Matilda, Jr., so my wife and I took her up to Cottonwood Shores for her midday call-time. After dropping Ms. 8 off at the theatre for her performance (both of us had already seen her show at that point, and so we figured we’d give others a chance at seats), my wife and I headed to nearby Round Mountain, where a cider mill and event space had recently opened. Admittedly, we put in at an off-peak time, such that we were among very few in attendance when we arrived, but other people came in as we remained on site, and it was clear that the place is already gaining something of a following. I’m glad of it, because it’s the kind of place I could see myself visiting fairly often. The taproom setup is of interest, as is the selection on offer through those taps, and I have to note that the doughnuts they have for sale are excellent. The flavor is sweet enough to satisfy without being overpowering, and the texture is solid without being heavy; I could easily eat far more of them than would be good for me. Ms. 8 also appreciated them, as well as the loaf of home-kitchen sourdough we picked up there.
On Sunday, Ms. 8 had a second matinee performance of Matilda, Jr., so my wife and I once again took her up to Cottonwood Shores for her midday call-time. After dropping Ms. 8 off at the theatre for her final performance of the run, my wife and I went to a coffee shop a couple of miles up the highway from the theatre. It was a familiar enough place; we’d been there in previous years in similar situations, and my wife had spent more time there. At the coffee shop, my wife caught up on some of the administrative tasks she had to do for her job, while I thought and wrote and read. When the performance was done and we had collected our daughter, we went to eat at LeSturgeon Seafood, where we found ourselves in the company of several of Ms. 8’s fellow thespians and their families; it is evidently a popular place with the area actors. The food was good, and it was good to have eaten before what we did after: grocery shopping for the coming week.
Altogether, it was a good weekend. I don’t know that it’s the kind of thing I can do often; there was an awful lot of revelry and fun for me, sedate as the weekend might sound to others. I am not a young man anymore, and even when I was one, I wasn’t prone to doing a lot of things that other people thought of as being fun; there’re reasons I learned the words “stolid” and “staid” early on. But all that said, I am glad to have had the weekend, and I do look forward to the next such time. Another is coming up for me soon enough, after all…I suppose I’ll write about it, too.
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Commentary from Chade regarding his scrying precedes “Heroes and Thieves,” which begins with Fitz waking in darkness, coming up from the effects of the sleeping draught he had been given. Fitz assesses his experience and surroundings, finding the Fool sleeping next to him. After Fitz rises and dresses, he and the Fool confer about the previous evening, about the Fool’s own shifting personal presentation, and about their long and tumultuous friendship.
Yeah, that’ll attract attention. Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com
Further talk is interrupted by the arrival of Spark, who attends to the Fool-as-Amber, and then breakfast. Over the meal, Spark notes the high regard in which Fitz is held in Kelsingra, and afterwards, they are conducted to meet with Reyn, Malta, and a number of Elderling families whose children are in need of attention. Rapskal confronts them before their meeting, accusing them and approaching taking them into custody when Reyn intervenes.
Fitz, the Fool, and Spark are joined by Lant and Perseverance at the meeting, and proceedings begin. Rapskal, present, does speak against Fitz and his party, to general disapproval. Fitz bows to the pleas of the parents around them, channeling the Skill to amend and ease the changes wrought by dragons upon the children of Kelsingra–including the child of Thymara and Tats, on whom the narrative dwells for a bit. Other healings ensue, and Amber cries out to have Fitz stopped before he expends himself utterly. The surrounding Elderlings plead for more aid, and Lant doses Fitz with elfbark while Amber puts a Silvered hand to him. And at the last, Rapskal cries aloud for their arrest for theft of Silver.
As is not unusual, the prefatory materials on the chapter attract attention. That Chade is able to scry is long established in the Realm of the Elderlings novels; I recall Fitz making mention of Chade trying him on the art, if without success. I also recall that not terribly much is made of it in terms of providing details of scrying’s workings, certainly not to the same degree as other magics at work in the series, whether or not Fitz possesses them–but I will admit that I did not pay particular attention to that aspect of the works. I suppose it becomes another scholarly someday to pore over the works and see how Hobb depicts scrying, at the beginning of the present chapter and elsewhere, and to compare that depiction to others in fantasy literature (Katharine Kerr’s Deverry novels come to mind) and in “real-world” precedents. (If someone’s already done it, please let me know; I’d love to add it to the Fedwren Project, on which I need to do more.)
In the main line of the chapter, I am again put in mind of Fitz as acting something of a Christ-figure. In my remarks on the previous chapter, I noted that healing Phron was not entirely voluntary on Fitz’s part, which, on further reflection, echoes Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:30, and Luke 8:45-46 (possibly something I should have included in my 2019 comments about medievalist religion in the Realm of the Elderlings corpus). In the present chapter, Fitz is beset by a group of whom he notes “Some pushed toward me out of hunger and need. Some strove to be first, others only to see what wonder I would next work, and some pushed to try and break through the wall of people in front of them so that they might have a chance to beg a boon of their own” (749-50), even as he continues to heal them. To my mind, as I read again, the scene rings of Luke 6:17-19 (also something I might ought to have included in my 2019 comments). I’m not sure why such passages are on my mind at the moment, though, and I’m not sufficiently skilled a theologian to unpack it further at the moment. But I do think that looking at how Hobb applies the Christ-figure here is something else worth doing–and, again, I’d love to know if someone’s already done that work.
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As I was chatting with an online group of which I am pleased to be a member, the topic of cheating in academic contexts came up. A number of those in the group are or have been involved in education as a profession, and a larger number have degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, so it’s something no few members of the group had experienced in one form or another; as I write this, nobody had admitted to engaging in the practice, but we’d all seen it and its effects. And so I got to thinking about my experience with cheating in and around the classroom.
How lovely a sight! Photo by Polina Zimmerman on Pexels.com
I’ve not hidden the fact that I used to teach a technical writing class at Oklahoma State University. Given institutional demands, each section of that class taught there while I was engaged in that work followed a common set of assignments, of which one was the composition of a set of technical instructions. The assignment makes sense in the context, of course; a fair bit of technical writing is process documentation, whether as a descriptive thing or as an instructional aid, and most students took it reasonably seriously. They were able to see easily its application to their prospective careers, and many of them had had the experience of being given poor sets of directions, so they knew first-hand the annoyance of receiving them and were therefore inclined to do better than they had been done. (Maybe that’s a Platinum Rule: Do unto those better than they have done unto you. But that would be a decidedly different matter to treat than I mean to here.)
So much said, I did always have some smart-alec in the class, whether a student who claimed that the inclusion of new words into dictionaries represented the influence of “troublemakers” or one who decided to provide a detailed and richly-illustrated set of instructions for how to address some critter or another that was coming in to mess with crops or livestock. (That I had grown up in Central Texas was something I let my students know in most every class, and many classes also learned that my family comes from Midwestern farming stock. I don’t know why they thought it would be shocking to me, as seemed to be the case. Ah, well.) And I always had one or more who thought they’d be able to find some process with which I was presumably unfamiliar and simply copy others’ work as their own.
Cheating long predates AI, as the online discussion acknowledged.
One of those last sort of students was a woman I’ll call Trig. In class, Trig presented herself as a much put-upon wife and mother, struggling to earn her own education while caring for one child and pregnant with another while her husband worked long hours away from home in the oilfields. It was a common enough thing, to be sure, and while I sometimes found her in-class comments annoying, it was usually the kind of annoyance stemming from I-just-answered-this-question-for-another-student-why-didn’t-you-listen rather than from some deeper thing. For the most part, I found her pleasant enough to deal with, and although her first major assignment wasn’t done spectacularly well, it was solid and reasonably good. I’m sure an employer would be reasonably pleased to receive it in the workplace, or work on that level of performance.
On the technical instructions, though, Trig decided that she, like many others who sat for that class with me when I taught it, would address herself to firearms. (Maybe they did understand that I grew up in Central Texas and thought the topic would be near and dear to my heart, those students. Trig, though, was not among them, I think.) She decided that she would break down the process of cleaning a sidearm, some model of Sig Sauer pistol or another. (It’s been a few years since I taught the class; some details fade over time even without me eliding others, such as the student’s name or enough information to identify her.) The topic didn’t attract undue attention from me; again, I knew where I was, and it was a common enough thing for a student to address. Nor was it particularly rare for me to see usage errors in the piece as I sat to read and review it. But it was odd to see duplicated periods and some specific comma-splice errors, things I’d not seen Trig have problems with on previous assignments, major or minor.
At that point, I selected a passage from Trig’s instructions, copying them and pasting them into a search–and, lo and behold! they turned up as coming from the arms-maker’s own online documentation, usage errors and all! So did the rest of Trig’s instructions, as reading the two documents side-by-side showed in short order.
Now, I’d already had some experience with grade appeals and the like at the institution, so I knew 1) there were eyes on my classrooms and 2) I had better be sure to follow policy. Fortunately, policy was pretty clear on the matter at that point, and I followed it, documenting everything I’d done, pulling down copies of Trig’s submission and her uncited source materials, and filling out the requisite paperwork. A facilitator was assigned to the case, and a meeting with that facilitator, Trig, and me soon happened.
Trig, as might be expected, disclaimed having plagiarized. She led off with pathos, reminding me and telling the facilitator of her home situation and claiming that she would never do such a thing, that I must be persecuting her somehow because of the differences in our beliefs. She also remarked that “there’s only one way to clean this gun,” and that I should know that.
I was aware of that, as it happened; like I said, Trig wasn’t the first to write on that topic for me. She also wasn’t the first to be sloppy in her copy-work, which I pointed out. “It’s got the same comma-splice errors,” I said, pointing to them on the printouts. “And the same double periods.”
It was at that point the facilitator closed his file folder and turned to Trig, telling her what she’d won: a notation on her transcript for having failed the course due to plagiarism, the inability to withdraw from the class for the term then in progress (thus ensuring the mark wasn’t subsumed by dropping the course), and a requirement to sit for a one course-hour academic honesty seminar for regular cost but no credit. I wasn’t “happy to ruin [Trig’s] life,” as I got screamed at me as Trig left the room; I’d’ve rather not had to deal with any of it. But I also couldn’t let the lie–and poorly-told–slide. I don’t know that I could now, and I’ve mellowed out quite a bit in my old age.
I am aware that the use of so-called generative AI presents issues of cheating far different and far harder to identify and prove than Trig’s little trip. I know that, while the pap it spits out after scraping other people’s work (including possibly this very commentary) and recombining it sounds somehow like every other piece, the word-choice and -order are likely largely new. I know that it “knows” enough to throw in citations, even if those citations are themselves hallucinatory, having less grounding in reality even than Asimov’s thiotimoline. I know about a great many of the problems involved in addressing the fraud of students presenting AI-spewing off as their own work, and I do not envy those who have to deal with them–especially since there is less and less extrinsic incentive to rebuke AI-vomit and more and more to simply let it, and the students who do it, pass.
As I noted to my online group on at least one occasion, it’s probably a good thing I’m more or less out of academe anymore, painful as it still is to have made my exit.
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Elliott RWI 