When I was in my late teens my father and I played golf one afternoon at his club in Virginia Beach. About the third hole a man caught up to us and played along. He was good; a driver, short chip, one putt player. I was not. I had the same clubs but more often than not sliced it to the right or bounced it into a water hazard. I didn’t have a temper, but it wasn’t unusual for me to put my club back in my bag with some force, as if to say, “Don’t even think about coming back out until you know how to hit the ball straight!”

I did this after I butchered an easy fifty-yard chip shot by clipping it straight to the right into a lake. I cursed, of course. The golfer was standing nearby waiting to hit his second shot to my fourth.

“Can I give you some advice?” he asked. I sighed. First of all, no, no you cannot, because I’m nineteen and I don’t take advice, and because I don’t even know you. But noting my dad just a few yards away I opted for sportsmanship.

“Sure,” I sighed.

He paused. “You’re not good enough to get mad.”

I stared at him.

He continued: “Really, how often do you play? Do you take lessons? Do you have the best clubs? If you played all the time and took lessons, well then you could be upset at not improving. Otherwise you’re just wasting good energy.”

Ever since then, I have not only relaxed and enjoyed the game, I play better. After a while I applied this to most aspects of life, not in a way to find an excuse to not try, but to relieve the stress that comes from going through life doing things everyone else seems to simply be better at than me. It also motivated me to get into the game a bit in those areas I do have some game.

Awkward Transition Section:

I gave an assignment not long after September 11^th, 2001, when my students would have been in their teens during the attack. I wanted them to reflect on what will remain one of the most significant days in our lives. How, I wondered, do they remember that day? I thought it was a good assignment—a specific event but a vague enough request for them to wander where they wished.

One student wrote of her aunt who never made it out of the South Tower. Another wrote about her sense of horror and disbelief, which, she wrote, she could never correctly capture on paper. Several actually commented they didn’t think it affected their lives at all while others spit out what they kind of paid attention to with one ear from local television reports—about heightened security, conspiracy factors, the indescribable loss of life that spontaneously erupted on TV that morning. But one student’s piece caught my attention. He wrote, in part:

“In a way, September 11 demonstrated, more than any one phrase can contain, the strength of our Constitution. The day became the beginning of a new era of the democratic process, and the definition of how we will defend our liberty, maintain our principles and remember our purpose—to stand as an example of humanity’s potential. It was Memorial Day. It was Victory Day.“

I read this with amazement. I asked for the rough draft and received exactly what I knew I would: A similar, hand written version with some words written differently and others crossed out. Excellent.

“You plagiarized this,” I said, which, understand, is rare for teachers to say. We receive copied material all the time, but nearly never have enough proof to say, directly, “You didn’t write this.” In a world of AI generated essays, it gets even tougher, but I ask them to ask themselves if they’re good enough to plagiarize correctly. I remind them in order to pull off an AI paper or plagiarized work they need to have a deep understanding of my requirements for the essay, the style I’m looking for, the specific language, the relevant references, and to be frank, I let them know, most of them aren’t good enough writers to plagiarize that well.

But this kid nailed it. “I didn’t plagiarize that!”

I smiled. “Yeah, you did.” My small laugh, I think, pissed him off. He continued to challenge me. Normally, plagiarized papers frustrate faculty members when they know an assignment was plagiarized—either from another student or from one of the many web sites offering papers for sale, or more recently for various AI sites— but can’t prove it. So when proof does come along, while it’s disappointing to have such lazy ass students,  it’s not just slightly satisfying to stop them in their tracks.

“Yes, you did. Tell me why you shouldn’t fail.”

“Because I didn’t plagiarize it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. I want you to bring me a copy of the original. If you do, I’ll let you redo the assignment without penalty.” I figured the embarrassment would be sufficient.

Once a student turned in a paragraph she plagiarized from our own text. Another time a student turned in a paper right out of the psychology textbook assuming I wouldn’t recognize that his in-class writing had the ability of a seventh grader and the essay he turned in was written by Freud.

I don’t think they’re simply overworked. They’re bored. What they’re doing is staring at me and thinking of everything else. In the front row is the guy with his fingers in his mouth, gnawing on his fingernails, pulling them out wet every once in a while to observe his work and then shift his focus to a different cuticle. In the back row some dude’s pretending to write notes while he’s reading his text messages on his cell phone.

Certainly, some things really are boring, and sometimes it’s difficult to find the relevance. I know; I was a student.

Too many aren’t listening. And I totally understand. There’s too much noise. Streaming services, reels, TikTok, internet scrolls, deadlines, term papers, credit card bills, car repairs, moving in, moving out, daycare, spouse abuse, deployment, speeding tickets. The pace of life is at Mach 7, and we’re teaching from a stage coach—no wonder they’re bored. They haven’t yet realized that life is infinitely more interesting from the stage coach; that life exists in the margins as well as the headlines, and we should not simply focus on the large, obvious lessons we underline but the small details where we learn what we are and are not good enough at to get upset to begin with.

We’re too busy for that. Before they’re out the classroom door, students are calling each other, talking and walking from building to cars, elbows bent, phone tucked tight to their ears. We’re completely plugged in. There’s no time to think. Don’t stop, don’t listen, and don’t figure it out. Just keep yourself plugged in to create the illusion that something’s getting done.

And we keep missing the good stuff because we don’t have time. A college where I used to teach had a reading by one of America’s leading poets, Reetika Vazirani. Maybe a dozen people showed up. There was enough room for her cute two-year-old to run around the auditorium, climb across chairs and make everyone laugh. Reetika’s poetry was magic. Students who did show up sat looking at their laps while Reetika read:  

Little by little, I’ll figure it out

I’ll say to them, Relax, we’ll live to be a hundred

I’ll sort things out.

And her child danced down steps toward the small crowd. They missed that for the noise. Noise, that unlike the rest of our lives, won’t ever fade but instead will grow in intensity until it blends to the point of saturation, and becomes inaudible, an undercurrent of indiscernible distraction.

I can’t help but sympathize with students. They see the careers of their parents or friends, and they know at best the future holds the slow erosion of enthusiasm.

Early before class one day, I waited for my student with the plagiarized 9/11 paper to show up. Some papers are so moronic I pray they were plagiarized just so I don’t have to believe one of my students wrote that crap. I read a paper once which began, “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet almost a decade ago.”  Another paper I received once had the same page printed three times. When I pointed out the mistake, he said he couldn’t think of anything else to write but knew the paper had to be 800 words, so he just copied it a few times.

When the student with the plagiarized paper returned, I was ready. “Ah, did you find it?” I asked when he came in and tried to sit down without looking at me.

“No,” he said, as I knew he would. Pride sucks.

“It’s okay. I brought a copy. Shall I read it to you?”

“No.”

“Great! Here goes:”

I believe our best education has nothing at all to do with the classroom or the assignments or the degree. It’s between the lines and off to the side of the narrative where we discover the best of what we need. This isn’t original; in fact, it’s a thought and practice older than formal education.  I don’t remember much from grammar school, which they called it then because they still taught grammar there. But I do remember my teacher taking us all out one April afternoon to lie in the grass on our backs and stare at the sky while she told us about the tragedy aboard Apollo 13 going on right then in space above us. All the discussions about what went wrong and how they might not make it back were irrelevant until we rested in the grass and stared at the sky.

The thing is, we’re all the same. Conditioning has them believing that life is supposed to be some Reality Television show. There’s no plot, no writers, no purpose.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students behind accidents. In fact the rate is higher among college students than it is for the same age group who aren’t enrolled in college—you know why? Because life is infinitely more interesting than most of the crap we’re fed in school. No one cares about most of the material we spend so much time preparing.  In the real world, however, we tend to seek out challenges we know we are up to, where in college students face new levels of expectations, and when they’re not up to the task they complain instead of asking themselves if they’re good enough to be there to begin with, if they’re willing to get better. They’re trying to make sense of it all—or want someone to help them, and when they can’t they rely upon what others have done and plagiarize that.  No wonder they’re bored. Hell, I’m bored.

Sometimes I try and picture my students as toddlers and help them not in a childish way but in a way which I hoped faculty had helped my son, as if he were their own. Was he paying attention when teachers taught?

Was I?

Recently I remembered Reetika’s son, who ran through the vacant auditorium while his mother read poetry. Shortly after that reading, just before taking her own life, Reetika—riddled with psychological challenges—killed her son. I’m tuning that one out. There’s no lesson there. Sometimes I picture my son at twenty, wondering which of my students he would have been like and how would I have answered his questions, approached his plagiarized paper.

I stared at the young man that plagiarized the 9/11 story and asked if he were ready. He turned his head to one side, trying not to make eye contact. “Hey, it’s from the local paper! Well, let’s see:

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…”  I stared at him: “Oh my god, Dude, should I go on?” He laughed a little at my sarcasm because he knew what came next and because, really, it’s so laughable.

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…” I stopped and looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

He spoke quietly: “I didn’t know you wrote it.”

“Where’d you get this?” I asked. A friend of his gave it to him from his developmental English class but had taken my name off his copy.

“I was set up,” he said.

“You think? Do it over. Here. Now. You’ve got the whole class.”

I opened the door and the class came in. I talked about something, I forget what since I wasn’t really listening, and after class everyone left and he gave me his paper. He wrote:

September 11^th scared the hell out of me. I was only fifteen and our country was being attacked. I remember rumors that a bomb had been planted at the State Department and I really thought it was just starting, that we were at war right here in America. My brother was nineteen at the time and in the Army in North Carolina, and I couldn’t sleep. Our teacher talked to us about it during the following period at school, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of my brother and about war. I was thinking about how a few hours earlier my friends and I were talking about how some guy bought us beer that weekend and we hung out in Croatan, and suddenly none of us was talking at all, and no one wanted to. We just stood around and said, “Damn,” and we were scared.

He found his voice. “I’m disappointed,” I said. “This is way better writing than the one I wrote that you tried to plagiarize.”

“See you Thursday.”

Most students don’t find their own voice or would even hear it over all the noise. When things finally do settle down and it gets quiet and the cell phones are turned off, most of us wouldn’t know our own voice. Maybe we’re scared. I know I am. Maybe we don’t want to know what we sound like, preferring instead to fall into some mainstream composite of expectation and predictability. I tried to tell my son to figure things out for himself. Don’t rely upon being taught, but instead, learn. They’re not the same thing. I hope he listened.

And I’m certain he hoped I listened as well. I tried to pay attention, but it was hard back then with the constant noise of students and papers and classes and all the other voices in my head. So sometimes, too often I suppose, it was difficult to always pay attention and listen to everything. And that scares me.

Turns out it is the small stuff that mattered. It’s the details I should have paid attention to. In class I wonder if I have any right to get angry when they’re cheating with AI; I mean, maybe if I were a better professor they wouldn’t do it. But it’s more than that: In the hallways, in conversations, in all lessons I want to drill into them that the larger objective is not difficult to digest; it is the details that we need to spend more time focusing on. It’s the same for college students as it was for toddlers. You see, I had this fear when my son was little that I would get mad at him one day and he would turn to me and say, “Dad, you’re not a good enough father to get mad. Maybe if you’d practiced a little more.”