Teacher Facepalm

Note to self: never have your students (most of whom have zero work experience) write fake cover letters and resumes, and as an afterthought, tell them not to plagiarize.

One of the offenders who received a talking-to this morning later sent me the following string of QQ messages over a span of 20 minutes (during which I was teaching another class and nowhere near my computer.)

 I am so sorry for my attitude today

 I this two days with many bad things

 I feel very grievance

 maybe Chinese people have different thoughts from your

 Hope I can get your forgiveness

 I really feel sorry

 but I only know sorry to express my guilty

 A I'm sorry I can not express the guilty

 sorry

 sorry

 I want to get high point,so I should write the resume again

 Thank you for your attention

 I've been trying hard

 I did not have confidence in English

 so I work harder

 I don't want you to think I didn't take seriously

 I must get it better

 at last I am sorry

 I want to go aboard in the next year.So every point is important

 I can not

 sorry

 I have send the resume to you

 Thank you

 today I want to cry

 I feel so sorry

Sincere? I only hope so.  I am letting this girl re-write her resume.  I'd prefer that no tears fall as a result of my class.  However, I have taken a strict approach to teaching and grading this semester.  Sometimes I wonder if my expectations are too high. 

As for my 5th year oral English students (who I expect to be somewhat capable since they already have a bachelor's), at this point it's too late to explain to them that when you do an oral presentation, you can't copy and paste all the information about some strange breed of dog from Wikipedia into your PowerPoint, read from the screen, and call that a good job.  Nor can you read a news article and show us a PowerPoint which is obviously stolen from the internet.  Nor can you read us a lengthy synopsis of the movie Brokeback Mountain from IMDb. Yesterday involved a series of disasters and the train wreck will no doubt continue to crash next week, when we finish up the last round of presentations. 

All I can say is:

I am also directing this gesture towards myself.  In teacher-speak, I failed to give my students adequate scaffolding.  Never again!