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-- April 7, 2002 --
Hello everyone,
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A student inside the station
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After classes on Saturday, the International Journalism Faculty
belatedly celebrated Navrus, which means new day in Uzbek. The
national holiday officially falls on March 21 to mark the new
year. Our celebration also commemorated the one-year anniversary
of the student-run radio station, which unfortunately so far can
broadcast only within the building--- although I hope it will
seek a government license to broadcast more widely.
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Me dancing at our Navtus festivities.
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Outside the building, our students performed music, dances and
comedy skits although I missed the nuances of the jokes in Uzbek,
so fortunately I wasn't one of the judges. Everybody ate plov
or osh, the national dish of rice, raisins, carrots and chickpeas
topped by shredded mutton, with non (a flat bread), sliced dill
pickles and cole slaw on the side, although only faculty members
were offered vodka to wash it down. Students (and only a couple
of intrepid teachers, myself included) danced outdoors to traditional
Uzbek music with a few Western pop numbers tossed in. The student-faculty
soccer game was postponed, delaying my inevitable moment of glory
on our indoor playing field.
Grading & griping I
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My first round of courses (7 weeks) has ended, and a new round
began Monday. Yes, April Fool's Day is observed here, too. Third-year
students in my feature-writing class asked me to keep teaching
them, so I successfully proposed to the new dean (who has no journalism
experience) and journalism chair an Advanced Feature Writing course.
However, I insisted on dropping the three (of 15) students who
did the least work or cheated the most or both. The award for
least imagination in cheating went to one the student whose feature
article about the Amir Timur Museum read much like a PR brochure,
which it was undoubtedly cribbed from. Amir Timur was a 14th-century
ruler from the Samarkand area whose empire stretched as far as
Delhi and Moscow and was known as "Conqueror of the World." My
favorite line in "her" article was to the effect that "It is important
to remember that the museum was the inspiration of President Islam
Karimov." She never answered my question about why it's important
for visitors to remember that. Incidentally, a number of projects
in Tashkent and elsewhere in Uzbekistan proclaim on plaques or
signs that they, too, were inspired by Karimov. I'm certain that
President Bush felt that inspiration on Karimov's visit to the
United States in March.
There was much unhappiness in my international reporting class
when I reamed them out for blatant copying and plagiarizing on
their small-group research papers (six of the seven groups got
0 on the assignment). It was their first-ever research paper.
Despite my explanations and a handout on how to do a research
paper, there was a common misconception that it's OK to simply
retype large blocks of material from books, journals and Web sites
without quotation marks, without attribution and without source
notes and without the analysis that is a key part of the assignment.
(The group that chose Canada made it easy on themselves: The students
simply photocopied material and stapled on their own cover sheet.)
Detection was simple. First, I had put much of the copied material
on reserve in the library so I was familiar with it. Second, the
level of writing and reasoning was far too sophisticated for most
native English-speaking sophomores at U.S. universities, let alone
for their counterparts in Uzbekistan. As an exercise -- before
revealing that I'd even read the papers yet -- I filled the blackboard
with words from their papers and asked for a show of hands to
see how many students could define them. No surprise: Nobody knew
the meaning of some words, and only one or a handful knew the
meanings of others. Among the stumpers: indefatigable, incendiary,
acquiesced, nadir, pontificate and exacerbated.
After an impassioned explanation of academic integrity, pride
of work, professional ethics and the fate of the Washington Post's
Janet Cooke -- and a warning that research papers are a mainstay
of higher education for students who hope to attend U.S. or other
Western universities -- I offered to hold an optional workshop
on research techniques. There's a great deal of interest, so now
I'm committed.
Grading & griping II
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The entrance to the Internation al Journalism Faculty
(department) building
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As everywhere, grading is a pain here. Students get their final
grades in a course as 5 (equal to A), 4, 3 or fail. But each class
has its own arcane mathematical formula imposed to calculate marks
- and, of course, that formula bore little resemblance to the
grading criteria and relative values on my syllabi. So after I
spent a couple of hours determining who would get what grade,
a colleague spent another hour or two with me figuring out how
to make my figures correspond with the university's figures, and
then entering each student's grade by hand in his or her individual
grade book. No computers.
The walls must have ears because even before we finished the
calculations, students paraded into the office to find out what
they earned, or at least what they got. Some whined, as always.
I was most surprised by two students who each got a 3 and asked
if I could drop them from the course (sort of a retroactive involuntary
drop) so they could take it again in Uzbek. When I asked why they'd
want to repeat a class that they'd passed, they replied, "To get
a higher grade." I wondered how they knew they would, in fact,
do better with a different instructor. I also naively thought
one of them would be grateful that he passed -- the dean had dropped
him mid-way for non-performance but I yielded to his request for
reinstatement. Grateful? Not him.
Four students were grateful though. The two highest scorers in
each class received an MSU Study Abroad T-shirt.
New courses
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The sign on the journalism shair's (CQ) door.
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In addition to feature writing, my other class now is an introduction
to reporting, called The Art of Reporting, for first-year students.
I had hoped for about 15 students with adequate English skills.
Instead, I got 60 whose English proficiency ranges from OK to
huh. (When I was asked whether I'd like to teach two sections
of 30 each instead, I explained that when it gets that big, the
extra 30 don't matter.) I'm letting them write their homework
in English, Uzbek or Russian, and one of my colleagues will translate.
Five weeks, even meeting twice a week, isn't much time to do what
we do in 14 weeks. However, I hope to get through the basics of
news values, interviewing, leads and other story structure elements,
the concepts of fairness and accuracy and a few other fundamentals.
One early disappointment with this group: In the first lecture,
I hammered at the importance of original work,. To reinforce the
message, I read them a recent Reuters story about more than 30
engineering students at a university in Ottawa who were caught
plagiarizing their ethics essays, including one would-be engineer
who changed only four words from an essay he cribbed from the
Internet. But when I read their first homework after the warning,
I found two identical assignments. Both students have the same
last name - perhaps they're identical twins?
Just in case I wasn't going to busy enough, a U.S.-educated colleague,
Dilnora Azimova, proposed that I also teach an environmental and
science writing course, which would run for four or five weeks.
Interestingly, our journalism students have no science courses
-- either required or elective -- in their four-year curriculum.
That will start in mid-April. I look forward to it, as does my
colleague who hopes it will inspire a permanent EJ course in the
curriculum.
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The door to the student radio station.
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Let me end with an ethical dilemma. Both my advanced feature
writing and environment courses will be graded but I'm told that
the grades won't be included in the students' official grade book
or transcripts. (This has something to do with the rigidity of
the curriculum and the mandatory number of courses they take.)
Dilnora and I discussed whether or not to tell the students and,
at her urging, we agreed not to let them know until after the
course ends. Her rationale, which admittedly makes sense: if students
know it won't count, many if not most won't do the work. I'm somewhat
uneasy about it -- after all, our ethics courses teach students
the importance of truth-telling. On the other hand, as she points
out, our ethics courses also teach the importance of doing the
most good for the most people -- and the assumption is that hard
work and learning are good.
Eric
The attached photos show the entrance to the Internation al Journalism
Faculty (department) building, the sign on the journalism shair's
(CQ) door, the door to the student radio station, a student inside
the station and me dancing at our Navtus festivities.
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if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
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