As I have lost all honor and integrity this week, I might as well have copied this column off the Internet. In the tradition of such great men and women as George Harrison and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I have been labeled a plagiarist.
Mind you, I've never been accused of cheating before in my life. Not even my ex-girlfriend levied such a charge against me. I'll admit that once, during a test in Mr. Donoghue's 9th grade geometry class, when I just couldn't figure out a question and he had the answer key sitting right on his desk, I glanced at the answers while pretending to ask him a question about where to put my name on the page. Aside from that crime of opportunity, that's it for my history of academic dishonesty - until last week, when my previously unblemished reputation was marked by scandal.
A week after handing in what I thought was a group assignment, our professor detained my fellow group members and me before we could leave the classroom. "How do you explain this?" she asked, as she passed our neatly photocopied answers to last week's assignment across her desk.
The assignment had been to "complete chapter seven, and also do chapter eight and a statistical power analysis, which you can hand in as a group." A poorly constructed sentence led the three of us to believe that we could do chapter seven individually, and chapter eight and the power analysis as a group. We each did our work individually, compared our answers for chapter eight, and the one of us with the neatest handwriting put them all on one page which we photocopied and stapled to our individual chapter seven answers.
Seems pretty reasonable, right?
Back in the academic hoosegow, our professor informed us that we'd obviously just stolen one group member's answers and photocopied them, trying to pass them off as our own. As such, we'd be penalized 25 percent of the assignment grade. Ah, it's the old "photocopy my friend's homework (which happened to be in his own handwriting) and try to pass it off as individual work for three separate people in a class of only twelve students" ploy. A common college mistake! Surely such a fraud was the work of crafty but dim-witted plagiarizers, not just three students who happened to misunderstand the directions to an assignment.
In fairness, perhaps my professor had been watching a little too much "Saved By The Bell." I could just see a well-coiffed Zack Morris conning his way into using Mr. Belding's new photocopier and trying to hand in Screech's math homework - but even Zack would have had the presence of mind to white-out Screech's name before handing it in.
If it's Wednesday and if I kept your attention long enough, you can bet there's a lesson here. My professor should have realized that if something looks like the result of tremendous stupidity, there's probably another explanation for it.
Getting to the root of and attempting to understand the explanation is always more constructive than cursing the stupidity.
In our case, our collective assignment was not the work of the academically dishonest, but rather a simple miscommunication.
Similarly, a $50 fine for not moving a car from Somerville's streets during street sweeping (try saying that five times fast) may seem a little outrageous, but is a lot more understandable when the streets are later strewn with debris because cars blocked the path of the cleaning crews.
Another example: Monday's headline about the inadequate size of the music building's performance space may seem outrageous, but the whole story takes on a different light when one realizes that the architects didn't just conveniently forget the TSO and Chorale, but that a smaller performance space was part of the plan all along.
On a much larger scale, the Boston Catholic bishops' decision to ban gay parents from receiving children from Catholic adoption agencies seems like one homophobic and bigoted decision. In the greater context of the Church, however, it can be seen as just another manifestation of the homophobia and bigotry that sadly have become interwoven with the teachings of a faith.
The answers to these seeming cases of stupidity aren't simply penalizing my group, complaining about $50 fines, bemoaning the size of the music building and cursing Church policies. All of these apparent cases of stupidity may or may not be justifiable, but the justification or condemnation can only come from a better understanding of the situation. Blaming the outcome never has as much of an effect as understanding the rationale.
In the meantime, for my part, I'll try to collect on the extra 25 percent that I feel I'm owed, and I'll remember that street sweeping begins Apr. 1. For the Tufts Daily, I'm Mike Barnicle. See you next week.
