Brrr

Ok, it's way too early for this kind of bonechilling cold. I get up in the morning and it's freezing in the house, and when I'm home between school and work I've got slippers, sweatpants, and thick wool sweater on. You see, we have an oil burner and I'm a bit nervous about turning it on before absolutely necessary, given that our heating costs were about 25% higher last year than the previous year, and "they" are saying the heating bill may be 35-40% higher this winter than last. Jesus. Poor Cha's got it tough because she doesn't tolerate cold nearly as well as I do.

We need new windows, doors, and attic insulation ASAP. One of our tilt-down windows (probably from the '80s) tilted down of its own accord; turns out the mechanism broke, so I have to hold it up using little widgets and the latch (it's the top pane). Several of them are malfunctioning, and during the winter air blasts in around the vapor locks, all long unsealed.

I took a lazy half-day at the Library and lounged around watching TV before taking a glorious two-hour nap. Ahhhhh. This morning in ENGL263 I lectured about academic dishonesty and told them "You have a 24 hour amnesty to keep this between ME and YOU--if I don't get apologetic emails from those who knowingly stole stuff off the internet, this will be between the DEAN and YOU, with really yucky consequences." All three students I'd busted were there--they got the message, and several others stayed after class to say "I looked at some sources and thought about what they said but didn't take anything from them," which I reassured them was ok. I'm not sure why I took this tack this year; last semester I kept the sole plagiarizer after class when I handed back the essay and gave her an ultimatum: "Admit what you did or I take your paper to the Dean now." If I hear from the students I'll have them sign a pledge of some sort never to steal ideas again, and I'll let them write a new paper on a different topic with a 2-letter-grade penalty. The Dean would likely fail them in my class and put them on probation, which stays on the transcript.

Did I generalize the stern disappointed lecture to the whole group because:

I wanted to ensure that everyone in the group thought about plagiarism, and I was hoping that other writers about whose papers I had doubts, but whose source material I couldn't find would be "scared straight"?

or

I don't want to spend 20 minutes each confronting the students I had dead to rights because of the time factor, or because it would bullying, or because I didn't want to hear excuses?

or

I'm a coward who'd scold the entire group rather than simply confront those who were to blame.

I thought about these issues beforehand, and changed my mind three times about how I was going to handle the situation (including just passing the papers and the source materials to Dr. Duncan and washing my hands of the whole affair). But, some people have reasons for such behavior above and beyond simple laziness or dishonesty; it may be the first mistake they made, or they may not have understood the plagiarism policy, or gramma might have gone in the hospital and they ran out of time, etc. etc. I didn't make my decision about putting it out in front of the class until the very last minute when I found myself bringing it up after our Hemingway discussion.

How do we make these decisions? Obviously many processes beyond conscious control were at work as I churned over this dilemma. I only "thought" consciously about my approach three times between Thursday and Tuesday, and for a total of an hour, and when I'd last "thought" about it I'd left my options open and the issue unresolved. What decided it? Now I've got to figure out if I think this was the right or wrong way to do it.

Or, I can simply stop teaching after this semester...