I’ve been trying to finish up all the work I have to do with the first group assessed but some things are just beyond my control, such as students handing in texts which were copied from the web. I’ve been doing this job for three years now but never before have I seen so many people blatantly copying entire paragraphs and including in the text. Some of the guys didn’t even bother making an intelligible connection between sentences and many parts don’t make any sense at all. So, what to do? My boss thinks I should have contacted the company about it and disclosed the names of the employees who did it, on the other hand I didn’t want to get them in trouble, so I decided to contact them individually and gave them a new task to do over the weekend. If they don’t send the new text, I’ll leave the writing task box blank and send the results to the company, which would probably contact me about the missing grade and then I would inevitably have to tell them what happened.
What really pisses me off here is that they thought I wouldn’t notice that, proving that they have no respect for what I do. Are they so stupid to think that I won’t notice that a person that struggles to make themselves understood cannot simply write a spotless, almost native-like text? Well, apparently some of them are and now my work has been delayed because of that.
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You look around these days and you see that everybody is out there and doing stuff, so much information, so many copies that you think it would be nice if there were something unique about you: a physical trait, personality or whatever that would make you stand out. I thought I had something unique but now it’s all gone. It all started when my sister googled my name. She sent me an e-mail saying she had come across this page on Gazeta do Sul website. Gazeta do Sul is a newspaper from Santa Cruz, the very city the company I work with is based in. It’s the 17 February edition (my birthday) and if you scroll down to the “Bom Dia” heading you’ll find that my name is there. Now, how do they know when my birthday is?
Well, after passing the stage of wonderment, I decided to google myself. It wasn’t the first time, though, and let’s admit that everybody has googled themselves already, at least once. And if you tell me that you’ve never done it, well, you’re either my mother who’s afraid of turning on the laptop or you’re lying. So, I googled myself and I see the newspaper page, but there are also these webpages with some “Fernanda Gruendling” other than me. Huh… I looked into it and I have a namesake. She’s a student and lives in my city! I once saw my look alike and it was pretty weird, I tell you… And now this…
MY NAME! Now look, you expect to see thousands of Joao da Silva, Ana Martins or Maria Souza, but Fernanda Gruendling? Come on! The only thing I thought nobody else had, this non-territorial Brazilian-German name, has instantly gone down the drain. Frustrating…
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World Cup final today. Spain and the Netherlands. I guess it’ll be a good match but not really sure which team should win. The Netherlands beat Brazil, so maybe Spain should kick their asses. On the other hand, if the Netherlands beat Spain and win the Cup, at least we can say we lost to the world champion…
Spain or the Netherlands?
-- Never too many beers -- 