Plagiarism: A Short Rant

            Plagiarism is a crime that should be punished to the full extent of the law.
             Sites like this one promote cheating among students who have good ideas, but are reluctant to believe in themselves. Instead, they take the easy way out, relying on other people's opinions and ideas, instead of trusting their already shrinking thinking abilities.
             Students have always looked for the easy way out, but it has never been so easily accessible, nor has it been so difficult for teachers to trace.
             While many students lift entire essays from free essay sites, other manipulate the vocabulary enough that teachers cannot find the original sources. What concerns me is not that students do not do their own work, but rather that they have an apathy toward working hard at anything that is not immediately pleasing to them. Rather than looking for the long term rewards, they short-change themselves and find comfort in the easy way out. They never learn how good it feels to earn a reward through hard work, and as a result their work ethic suffers greatly. This country is full of young adults who will not work hard for anything unless it produces a satisfactory answer to the question "What's in it for me?". Gone is the day when students learned the benefits of hard work, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Soon the adult work force will be pumped full of people incapable of thinking for themselves and working for others.
             Students look at plagiarism as a minor infraction instead of the crime that it is. Students resent teachers who catch them. Teachers aren't trying to catch students to make their lives hell, they are trying to save them from giving up on themselves. Sometimes the lesson that we want to teach isn't found in the pages of the books they are not reading, or in the words of the essays that they are not writing - it is through the example of caring more about our students than they care about themselves, that we hope will make a difference.