Damn Sparknotes, and damn them for being forward-thinking enough to include
The House of the Spirits, and damn my students for thinking they can get away with sentences like, "The el Valle and Trueba families represent the land-owning, upper-class criollos." I mean, what in the hell is a "criollo"? And, you should see tha progression of my comments, starting off innocently with just underlining the word, putting a question mark, then reading on, and finally realizing that the reason this word has been used is because this student has just cheated. I wrote, "I found your source... Sparknotes.com... See me... Zero."
3 comments:
This reminds me of a chapter I just read from Frank McCourt's Teacher Man. In it, he relates a story regarding phony excuse notes and whether or not he should bust the students involved. Instead he turns it into a very successful lesson.
I'm not saying that you can do this with your crowd on this project, but it was an interesting coincidence nonetheless.
Ha, I used Monarch Notes once to aide in an English presentation and my teacher was like, "ooooh!" when I pointed out something I learned from the Notes. Awesome!
But using sentences word for word? That's just stupid.
"Criollo"---in this context, a South American of mostly or all European descent. Not that your students were likely to have known that, I imagine.
Criollo/a also translates roughly to "creole" when referring to food, etc.
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