To think it's ok for a teacher to tell my son that he could have done better?

[crazygracieuk]

My son is 10 (Year 6) and doing well (level 5s etc..)

Last Friday he had homework where he had to find out 10 facts about the Alps and the teacher included some ideas of what to research.

Ds googled and then proceeded to copy and paste 10 sentences off the Internet. They were almost all very technical so incomprehensible to ds and me.

I told ds that I thought that he should have 10 facts that he can explain in his own words and that copy and pasting information that he doesn't understand is pointless.

I did not make him correct his homework as I honestly thought that his teacher would tell him that it was pretty poor but teacher ticked his work and wrote "Good Work " at the bottom!!!

Aibu to think that this is pretty poor form? Or is this typical in schools these days?

The instructions said that they were going to start learning about mountains this week. She had given different mountain ranges out- Andes, Himalayas etc and ds was in the Alps group. I hope that he has learned some real facts.

I worked as a learning support assistant and tried desperately hard to get my students (statemented with LD plus EAL) to write things in their own words. It was really hard when they could see girls (girls school) who could speak very little English (only been living in England for 6 weeks or so) handing in GCSE grade B (or so) work from the internet in year 8 and getting 10/10 and house points. Sometimes they left the hyperlinks in and nothing was ever said!!

I was hoping that it was ds' teacher being lax but it seems to be a common occurrence which is worrying. I didn't 't force ds to change his work because I thought that a word from his teacher would embarrass him to pit more effort into his work.

Lots of primary school teachers are lazy/useless.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't lots of fabulous hardworking ones too!

It's very frustrating when your own child's teacher is lazy/useless

I love all you sensible people! - if only there were more like you.

I'm the one that has to deal with these students when they get to university and a) can't understand (despite being told repeatedly) that there is anything wrong in lifting their essay from Wikipedia b) can't understand how I can possibly tell.

I once copied (hand wrote, I went to school in the olden days) word by word an article about turtles for a paper. The teacher looked at me and asked me "What does longevity mean?" Luckily I knew.

Maybe you can rent a dvd about the mountains of the world, of line up some youtube video's, over the week end and watch with him?

I'm an English teacher and obviously it's immediately clear when chunks have been lifted from wikipedia etc.

That said, I suppose, in this case, it could be argued that the child had done what was asked, if it wasn't specified that it should have been in their own words.

What annoys me is that I rarely "help" dd (aged 8) in any way with her homework, yet know for a fact that a lot of parents (including her best friend's mum) literally dictate answers to their children, who go on to get top marks. Dd borrowed a poetry analysis from her friend to catch up when she had been off sick and it was the kind of in-depth analysis that I'd expect a good teenager to come up with, not an 8 yr old. Because of course, her mother had dictated it to her. It comes back to bite them on the bum though, as they did SATS last year, and the other child didn't do that well, and her Mum was all and said it was because she'd had a late night the night before. (not that it was the first time the child had had to do it on their own)

Of course it is easy to tell if something is off the internet. When I had 3 identical A-level essays handed in I just googled a phrase and then handed the essays back with www.dkfhksdjfhkdjf.com written on them in big red pen and nothing else. They didn't do it again.

Copying from a book very different imo as at least there is engagement with the text. At primary level I would make your son do the job properly and then write under it yourself 'littlecrazy spent some time researching this rather than c&p ing like he did last time' and encourage your son to list his sources of info.

Whilst I don't disagree with much of what's been said, I do have to say that had the OP gone with BPotter's line of "well I mind so do it again", I'd have given a straight YANBU.

BUT, OP you didn't make him do it again, or explain it, so for that, you lose your 'not unreasonable at all' shiney

I remember a teacher when I was at primary school reading out one girl's homework - she had left in "see page 73" when she copied it out.

My DD 's yr7 teacher spotted she had relied heavily on the internet and told her not to do it again.

I fully supported her and was glad she commented on it.

I used to unplug the printer so DCs had to write out their research because the printer was" broken" [mean mother emoticon]. At least then they would read it and summarise the facts to reduce the amount they needed to write.
This was when they were in primary, I felt that they were learning to cut and paste rather than research.

This is why I put sentences that don't ring true into google. If they pop up the pupils must redo the homework/essay until they stop copying from the Internet.

Salmon, you are kinder than my teacher DH. His school supsends pupils for plagiarism.
I think that some of the pupils are a bit thick, they do it at least four times a term. One boy has been suspended twice. Some people never learn.

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I have had the exact same problem!

Ds1 has aspergers, so takes things very literally. So as you said in an earlier post, he feels he has done his homework perfectly adequately if he has c&p'd, because in literal terms, he has!

I ended up having to talk to his teacher about it, because I really needed them to reinforce that the work had to be in his own words. Otherwise I just had battles with him where he just simply couldn't see why I was telling him it had to be in his own words, because the teacher hadn't given him that instruction. And he had a valid point! You really need to get the teachers on board with this one.

My ds has now started secondary, and I warned them that he would take instructions very literally. They have been good so far at explaining exactly what they expect, because ds will now say that his homework does have to be in his own words.

Every time I set a research homework I explain to my classes that I expect a brief summary of what they have found out in their own words. Every time I mark their work I find that at least one pupil has handed in a page or more of C&P nonsense from the web. And it's usually more than one pupil.

Annoyingly showing the pupils how you know it isn't their work and making them redo it doesn't stop them from C&Ping the next time (and the next...) and

After maligning my DC's school on this thread yesterday, my daughter came home with homework that explicitly stated it should not simply be lifted from a website. She's actually happy about this, because she feels that her work, even if it's less polished than a cut-and-paste job, is going to be rewarded.

My mum's been retired for a few years now, but about 10 years ago she was a class teacher in a school with 3 classes of the same age group (mixed Years 3 and 4). Every pupil had to produce a project on the class topic once a term, and different numbers of house points were handed out for 'good' projects. This was a time when it was less common to have a computer and the Internet, but about half the class did.

My mum always preferred to receive hand written projects, with hand drawn illustrations etc, rather than typed ones, as with typed ones there was no way of knowing for sure that parents hadn't typed them. At least with hand written ones she knew that the children had written it, even if the parents had written something for them to copy. Sometimes she was sure that the typed work had either been copied and pasted from the Internet, or that the parents had typed it, as the grammar and punctuation and vocabulary was so much better in the project than in all if the child's previous work. Those projects she didn't give as many house points to as the hand written ones.

It used to really annoy her when the teachers of the other classes gave the most points to the neat typed projects, with information lifted off the Internet just because they were a few pages longer than the beautifully handwritten projects, with carefully hand drawn pictures and leaflets and photos of museums that the child had been specially taken to by their parents because they were to do with the project topic. It was obvious those projects had a great deal more effort in them, but my mum was the only teacher who rewarded that effort.

On a related topic, my mum has always said that there should be a children's Google, that just links to sites written for kids about various topics, because when children have to research things on the Internet, a lot of the time they can't understand what they're reading. Still, I suppose if there was it would be even harder to tell if stuff written by children has just been copied and pasted!

It's the teacher's fault for being so lazy. I wonder if she even bothered to read his answers seeing as they were so obviously plagiarised.

Even if the intended brief was 'find 10 facts that we can discuss' that was incredibily lazy of her too. She's expecting 10 year olds to do her lesson prep. Does she do anything herself?

Good on all the teachers here who've said they do pull pupils up on this.

No idea what you can do beyond talking to her about it. I suppose you'll just have to keep checking and then making him do it properly. You shouldn't be doing her job for her but the one consolation is that your son will benefit from your hard work in the long run.

So glad it's not just me ... I am biding my time until our parents eve (pre half term, thankfully) before raising these issues with ds1's teacher. I was hopping mildly concerned that despite not actually completing the task set (book review) ds1 still got great feedback on his h/w (he summarised the plot but clearly did not review the book but he'd done the 2 pages of writing as required). And don't get me started on teachers not correcting spelling in h/w ...

hanahsaunt - it's actually seen as good practice to not correct every spelling mistake in a pupil's work, however it's expected that at least one misspelt word be picked up per piece of work (unless there are none!) Our policy is to focus on subject specific key terms and commonly misspelt everyday words and I would normally correct one or two words (definitely no more than three) per piece of homework/classwork marked.

Ignoring - Why? Why would you NOT correct all of the spelling mistakes? I genuinely don't understand.