I’m starting to get a kick out of teaching; it makes me feel like a patriarch.  Ninety-plus needy children, some of them looking to me for guidance, some of them seeking to rebel.  All dependent on my benevolence.

As any patriarch knows, ninety-plus kids are comparable to a barrel of apples.  In my case, I have veritable orchard of strange, sometimes dangerous apples.  There, shivering in the front of the class, wall-eyed, is the obsessive compulsive who makes sure all the assignments he turns in have three overlapping folds in the corner of each page.  He’ll go far in life.  There, looking normal in the middle of the row, is the manic-depressive who went all manic on me during class last week when I asked him how he was doing.  There, doodling on her notebook, big ‘ol head laying on her arm, is the girl who won’t let me complete a sentence before asking another fucking question.

I have no qualm with any of these apple students.  I would — to continue the metaphor to its logical conclusion – peel each of them and bake them into a pie, and it would be delicious!

I have a problem with the bad apples.  The plagiarists.  More specifically, the sloppy plagiarists.  Don’t get me wrong — if I actually went to J-school, I’m sure I would have bullshitted through an assignment or two.  But never in my career have I fabricated a source…and got caught.

Because that’s what at issue here:  when you turn in something you ripped from the Internet, or when you make up sources, you’re insulting my intelligence.  In reality, effective plagarism requires so much work that in most cases you might as well just do the fucking assignment.  Because I will extract you, the bad apple, from the barrel, and proceed to grind you into a fine, dry powder.

Sitting on my desk are five research papers.  Four of them, a quick Google search will reveal, were not composed by anyone in my class.  One Mongoloid turned in a paper I think he forced his girlfriend to write.  There’s a line in the paper that makes me think this.  It goes:  ”Please, whoever is reading this, I’m being forced to write this paper.  I’m his girlfriend.  Please help me.  He won’t let me leave.  I have other homework to do.”

That one is being sent to the police, after I finish recording the grade.  As for the other four, I’m calling up the scholarly authors after class, after I have passed out all the other papers, and explaining how much I enjoyed reading their papers.  I’ll look them in the eye, tear up slightly, and tell them how the quality of the research, the insight and analysis, it makes me feel like my life actually has purpose.  I believe God put me here, at Longwood University, so that I could lead you to write these stellar papers.  They’re so good, I’m going to tell them that I’ve submitted them to be published by the Columbia Journalism Review — the journal from where two of them have been stolen.

I’ll then explain how I think this augers the beginning of a scholarly Renaissance at Longwood, how each of these students will have their own Wikipedia page, have their face painted in the Rotunda’s dome, and will subsequently embark in a lucrative career in journalism.

At that point, I will be so overcome with emotion that I will drop the four papers on the floor, hug each of the students, and flee from the classroom.

I’ll try to look through the window to see their faces, to how they react when they pick their papers from the floor and see a big goose egg, followed by a terse notification of their impending date with the Judicial Board.  There will also be a frowny face, :  (  , to make sure the illiterate fucks understand.  Suck it, bad apples.  Get that shit outa my proverbial house!

Verily, teaching is the profession of the mighty.