Subject:  Wag the Dog

张佩佩 zhang pei pei
amywent
0807070109
 

Dear Mr David,

Firstly, I want to talk something about my favourate television drama—Prison break. Not only it let me know a famous star who I consider worthy to be respected, but also it gives me an original view to see the world. The conclusion sentence of the middle of fourth season is that “not everything is as it seems”. That is to say, we may finally find out that the things and people around us are not what they appear to be on the surface. We may get a shock!
Then a book named huo bi zhan zheng(the currency war ) in Chinese gives me another lesson about this issue. The world(mostly in Europe ), our policy, our economic, the public’s treasure are under control of few people in the world. Their powers are even higher than the government. But most of us can’t realize it.
Since then, I began to doubt the reality. What can be trust?
The movie “wag the dog” put me in this confusion again. The soldier been respected by the all nation turned out to be an indelicate rapist. So ironical! In the end, the “great” war producer put a complete end to the black humor by sacrificing his own life.
Are the general public born to be cheated? Do the few people on the top of the pyramid have the right to dupe us?
How can we identify the truth in the complicated world？
The truth is relative. We always believe in what we want to believe… but I can’t make it completely clear.
What kind of attitude should we take in the face of so many informations? All in all, we are not the group of people let crucial issues happening in the world. Nobody except themselves is really aware of the essential matter. We only step in the trap which the media designed for us.
Our eternal pursuit are the quests for: truth, honour, justice, purity, love and grace.
We have to think ,identify.
But , how?
Can you give me some suggestions? i'm confused about this.

Blessings
 

Dear David,thank you so much for not only having accepted my request but repling me so soon.you know what,it is amazing,really!speaking of rollar skating, i am also a greenhand at it.but now i drop it down and pick up something else. it seems that i am not a guy with such persverance and patience.my life on campus as a sophomore can be dull and routinelike.i am a basketball guy,and i like sports.what about you, have you ever do any sports like baketball, soccer,or even baseball?i like reading comtemporary novels, affected by jinbo, a learned man.have you read john grasham's novels, i bet the answer is yes.what do you think about his works, can you introduce some other famous novelists to me?i will be glad if you do me such a
favour.warmest regardsgrasham.m

Now,  isn't that sweet?  I'm constantly impressed with the concern that Chinese people show for the feelings of others.  Oh heck,  I might as well post my reply to her.  Just so you all know:

Now isn't that a great thing to be able to post to start the new year,  and the blog.  Makes it all worthwhile somehow.

Except I read her essay.  And here is my response to it:

Dear Zhang Mei

     I don't know whether you can really appreciate how much I wanted to give you an A plus  mark for your essay after reading your email message.  It means so very much to me to hear from one of my students that I make a difference. 

     In fact,  I was going to ask your permission to post your message and essay on my website. But whenever I get anything from a student,  I always check it for plagiarism.  Unfortunately,  a random sentence selected from your essay,  a sentence which did not include the title of the movie,  plugged into Google yielded the result below.  It's obviously a cut and paste directly,  word for word,  from a review that is up on the Internet. 

       Can you imagine how embarrassing this would be for both of us if I had posted your essay on my website as an example of my students' work?  It might go unnoticed.  But if it were discovered by one of the writers of the reviews you copied,  I would look very foolish and you would look like a thief.    

      Normally under these circumstances I would give my student a zero for the course.  In a North American university,  the student would be expelled,  and his or her name would go on a list which would prevent registration at any other university for a year.  But since you asked me to give you a pre-read,  and haven't actually submitted this paper,  I won't do that.  What I must do is ask you to go through your paper and put anything that isn't your own words in quotes and footnote the source.  This may be difficult for you to do now,  since you looked at a number of reviews and,  I assume,  chose sentences from several of them.  If in doubt,  think about what the sentence says and then put it aside before re-writing it in your own words.

   Zhang Mei,  I know you didn't do this on purpose.  You probably just don't understand the difference between paraphrasing and plagiarizing.  I'm going to send you a PowerPoint presentation that should make it very clear. 

     Finally,  let me say that I was really moved by your email message.  I'm happy to have a student like you,  and very pleased with your work.  So let's get our relationship back on track.

      I look forward to hearing from you. 

Warmest regards 

David Scott,
Foreign Teacher for the Movie Course at SYU

Here's Zhang Mei's response:

If you read the post below this one,  you'll get an introduction to the plagiarism problem at Chinese universities.  For my Movie Appreciation Class,  I asked all of my students to write a short essay about any subject to do with the class that they wanted - comparing movies,  talking about their favorite film, or talking about the class in general.  Posted below this is a submission from Zhang Mei with a request for a pre-read.  I gave her a good beating for submitting plagiarism,  she thanked me and submitted original work.

Yesterday morning I picked up the remaining student essays,  which were delivered to the classroom by the class monitors.  I have one hundred and forty-seven students in that class,  so it's a stack of essays.  So far I have looked at  91 of them.  Of these, only 29 seem to be original writing by the students.   The remaining  62 are obvious and blatant cut and paste jobs straight off the IMDB reviews or DVD user comments. 

Zen ma ban?  Zen ma ban?  What to do?  What to do?  Well,  every cut and paste ripoff paper is getting a C minus mark,  the lowest I can give students without actually failing them.  In any north American university they'd be expelled and blacklisted for a year,  but this is China.  Obviously I didn't give them adequate warning,  or instruction,  and apparently they have never been taught how to correctly attribute a source,  even though they are graduating English majors.
Handing out a C minus to most of the students is going to make them very unhappy,  and my popularity at this university is going to plummet.  They are all looking for jobs,  or wanting to go on to "further study", and this is really going to clobber their grade point average.  I really hate to do it.  This is not my country,  and not my culture.  But I can't see giving students a decent mark for handing in something written by a native speaking teenager in North America,  or a professional film reviewer working for the Washington Post.  That wouldn't be fair to the students who did do original work.
I'm not marking down any paper unless I can actually find the source of the cut and paste.  In most cases this is easy,  and only involves an entry into Google.  Sometimes it takes me a few minutes,  even when I just know the work is stolen.

Here's a letter from one of my students in response to this policy:

Subject line:  I want to rewrite my paper on "Searching for Bobby Fischer"

Dear David:
 Since you said that if we send you a movie review downloaded from
Internet,you wil give us  a mark of C,so I want to rewrite the review by
myself.
 Please tell me when and where should I give you my second revie.Thank you.

Dapper

English 0301

No.0343xxx

Class No.:21

To which I replied:

Dear Dapper:

To be fair to everybody,  I cannot accept your second review.  You
handed in a review.  If it was plagiarism,  you will have to live with
it.

So far I have looked at 55 papers.  Of these,  only ten were not
obvious and glaring downloads lifted word for word from the Internet.
Some were very difficult for me to deal with, because the student
wrote touching and original paragraphs and then did a cut and paste of
material from the Internet as part of the film description.  Much as I
want to give those students a high mark, they are also getting a C
minus mark.  A little bit of plagiarism is too much.

I cannot believe that so many students are about to graduate as
English majors thinking that this kind of thing should be acceptable.
You are all supposed to be able to write English,  not cut and paste
it from the Internet where it was posted by native speakers.  I also
asked you for your opinion.  Did you think I want to read what some
North American teenager had to say about the movies?

I expect to lose a lot of popularity points for this,  but you should
all be happy that you don't get a zero for the course.  In North
America you would all be expelled,  and blacklisted from attending any
other university for a year.

Sincerely,

David Scott

Dapper's response:

Dear David:
  I've read you email. First,maybe I should apologize for what I have
done. you said that most of the students just downlod the articls from
internet, I think this is because now we are senior students, we have to
take a lot of time on looking for job, And sometimes we don'take the
student's work seriously.

 I remember that when we are freshmen,we also had a movie-watching
class.And the finanl examination was to write a movie too. My roomamtes all
got about 70 marks,I got 80. Because I wrote it by myself. The content, the
things I learned from the movie, I wrote every word and it took me a whole
night. It's a french movie maybe named Bear. I like it very much.

 Well, to be frank with you, I think most of your movies are  violent and
erotic which I don't like. Maybe it's too late to tell you this. In fact i
like the movies about commom people juse like the first one. And I think
that sometimes we cannot get the actor's lines and make some
misunderstanding about the movie. So my suggestion is that next time you
can tell the students what movie you'Ll show a week before the class to let
them have time to know something about the movie they'll watch.

Sincerely, Dapper

A Shot Across the Bow?

Does this mean that the students will trash my course and my teaching in response to a hardass stance. After sleeping on all of this,  I woke up with a feeling almost of dread.  Was I making a terrible cultural mistake,  causing problems where a Chinese teacher would just turn a blind eye. Here's one last letter from a student:

Dear David:

Thanks a lot for your reply. 
Though you have said that to be fair to other students,you will not accept my resubmissiom, I still would like to send it to your email. Just to show my sincere sorrow.Because this essay is written on my owm, witn no single word copied from the Internet.
I know you feel very angry about this. To a lot of Chinese teachers, they will not care at all. Beause they know Chinese students quite well. They get accustomed to the cut and paste. You are the first teacher to show your angry over this issue.

Thanks for your responsibility, and thanks for your reply.

Once again, I am sorry for my copying material from the Internet.

Sincerely,

 Breeze

I ran this whole situation past Jin Bo, our administration liaison.  He took it to Linda,  the head of the English department,  who said go with the C minus marks.  No doubt this will not be the end of this issue.  Sigh.
 

One of my great fears here is that I will say something in class that will get misunderstood,  misinterpreted,  or taken as criticism of my host or host country.  I received this email:

And here's my response:

Dear (name removed):

I am very moved by your message and all your kind words. It's people like you and your boyfriend who make me feel like I can never leave China.

I'll put an announcement on my website about your intention to contribute to our bursary fund. You are so generous, and maybe it will be the beginning of something. There are many students here who come from quite wealthy families, and who don't have any problem with spending thousands of yuan on a fancy new mobile phone when the one they have is perfectly usable. Maybe some of them will follow your example. Maybe some of the other foreign teachers will follow our example. Maybe the bursary fund could grow into something really significant. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Don't worry about me getting discouraged by the lack of response from some of the students in class. I feel I am of some value just by giving them a chance to hear a native speaker, and the students who do respond, like you and your boyfriend, are well worth any effort I'm putting out. I love being here. I feel like I am surrounded by the leaders of the future, and who knows what my students will become in ten or twenty years.
If you love me, please know that I love you back. All of you.

Merry Christmas

David

I'll tell you a big secret. The way to get really good at English is to DECIDE that you LOVE to speak English. If you love to speak English, and are always trying to find better ways to say something, or more interesting English words and expressions, more English magazines and books to read,  songs to sing or videos to watch, then it stops being work and becomes fun.  And once it becomes fun, it's amazingly easy.

If you said I had to learn to play basketball, it would be very hard for me.  But those boys I see out there practicing every day don't think it's hard. They think it's fun. They love it.  That's why they are doing it all the time.  And that's why they are getting good at it.

If I WANTED to be good at basketball, the first thing I would do is decide that I LOVE practicing and playing basketball. Then I would want to be out there practicing all day long and into the night.  And pretty soon I'm sure I'd be good at it too, or at least a lot better than I am right now.  Not only that, but pretty soon I REALLY WOULD love to play basketball.  Do you see what I mean?  This is the big secret to getting good at anything.  Decide that you love it.

I hope this helps.  I know it has helped me learn all kinds of things that seemed difficult at first.

Good luck,

David

Dear Student Friend (and all my students who feel like she feels):

     It sounds like you are having a crisis of confidence. Unfortunately, the more you dwell on this, the worse it will get because, after all, it is all in your head.  The thing you need to understand is that you are causing these feelings.  They are all yours.  Nobody else is making you feel this way.  So you need to ask yourself why you have chosen to feel the way you are feeling.

     What?  You don't think you chose to feel this way?  It isn't a choice?  These feelings just happen to you,  and there's nothing you can do about them?  Children think that their emotions are beyond their control. They think that emotions just happen to them.  Part of becoming an adult is realizing that your emotions are your own. They are the result of decisions you make.  You aren't a child anymore.  Why are you making the decisions you are making?

     Here's how it works: Your mind is created by your brain, which is an organ that was given to you by evolution to help you survive in our ordinary, every day reality. Your mind does this by reviewing memories, and creating fantasies about the future. These memories and fantasies are like television dramas that play in your head. Pictures. Scenes.  Voices. They generate emotions, which are the basis for every decision you make. Without emotions it is impossible to make ANY decisions.  You need your mind,  but it's there for you to use.  It shouldn't be causing you the problems you are having.  And make no mistake about it,  your problems are all being caused by your mind.

     Very often we make the mistake of thinking that we ARE the pictures, thoughts, voices, and dramas that are playing in our minds. We accept these as real, and we accept our emotions that result from them as real. We think that these things are beyond our control. But in fact they are not real at all. They are only memories (and the past is gone, so it isn't real) or projections of the future (and the future is only a guess at the best of times, because we don't know whether we even have a future.) The only thing that is actually real is this present moment, right now, and the physical things that surround you RIGHT NOW.  Understand this and you can stop taking your mind so seriously.  You can watch what it gives you with amusement,  and laugh at the foolish scenes it creates.

     If your mind is creating fantasies that are making you feel gloomy, robbing you of enthusiasm, imagining a horrible future, then it is time to take charge of your mind. Your mind is setting you up for failure. You must ask yourself what you are getting out of it, and figure out how to set your mind on a better course.

     You say that you are afraid. You must ask yourself what you are afraid of. What are you afraid of that could possibly be worse than what you are creating by being afraid? By being afraid you are creating failure, loss of opportunity, loss of growth, and possible disgrace. What are you afraid of that could be worse than that?
     Are you afraid that others will have an opinion about you? They will. This is something that you cannot help. Others will judge you. They are already judging you now.  Whatever you do or don't do they are judging you. You must ask yourself why this is so terrible? Why is what they think so important to you?  After all, their opinion is really nothing to do with you.  It's only their opinion.
     What would happen if you decided to purposefully create a bad impression? What would happen if instead of being afraid, and refusing to take your turn to speak, you actually spoke in a very loud, strong voice? What would happen if you shouted? Is what would happen worse than what you are creating for yourself?
     You can give in to fear, wallow in your self pity, and point outside yourself to find excuses for your behavior. But really you should grow up and develop some guts. Go crazy. Decide that you don't give a damn what anybody thinks about you. You don't even give a damn if you fail. But you are NOT going to live in fear. Then take action.

     By taking action I mean, make yourself do things you are afraid to do. Sign up for the next speech contest.  Stick your hand up in class and volunteer an answer.  Don't think about it.  Just put your hand up without even knowing what you will say.  If you "can't say a word" then laugh at the predicament you have put yourself in. This is the only way to overcome fear. You must feel it, and act as if you don't feel it. Just do things that you know will help you. Tell your mind to shut up.

    You should take a lesson from Li Yang,  the man who invented Crazy English. He was just exactly like you. Then one day he decided he wasn't going to be like that any more. He got so angry about the way he was feeling and acting that he went crazy. He started to shout. And he found out that when he shouted he felt strong. So he shouted some more. And pretty soon he wasn't afraid anymore.

     I don't know whether you have noticed, but I am a little crazy. Many people have told me this. I do outlandish things that people laugh at, things no "dignified" teacher would ever do, like putting on a clown nose and acting goofy.  I try to speak Chinese when I hardly know any words and my pronunciation must hurt your ears.  But the truth is, I don't really care what anybody thinks about me.  I am trying to achieve something, and I think I am going to do it.  Then people will change their opinion.  Or maybe they won't,  and what does that matter to me? I invite you to follow my example.  Be a misfit.  Stand out from the crowd. Go crazy.  What's the worst that will happen?  What do you have to lose that you aren't already losing?

I hope this helps.

Warmest regards

David

I'm so lucky to choose this course.  I learned many things.  At first,  my vocabulary is enlarged.  I can use many words which I didn't know before to express my opinions. The vocabulary is very important for me because I'm an English major.  Secondly, I know how to read newspapers and magazines effectively.  When I read an article I know I can't believe it all.  The truth is always changing.  Different for people or groups.  Then, from the course I learned how a foreign teacher do to make his class live.  David deserves my respect.  He put a good example for me when I become a teacher after graduation.  Last, I want to say I learned that the world can change and dream can become true.  When teacher David want to sell his helmets and make all the students,  even all the people to wear helmets, in order to keep safe, he taught me a deep lesson.  In the following day of studying, I know how I can do, because everything can become true and David said "The world can change."

                        - word for word from the first paper I picked up off the pile