On the evening of Sunday, December 5, I was with my cousin Steve, my brother Justin, and our friend Craig, enjoying some relaxing sound boothery at our church. We were running lights, sound, and graphics for that evening’s Night of a Thousand Candles service.

The mood was suddenly shattered as Steve’s dad, my Uncle Pat, approached the sound booth with a calm, but distressed look on his face.

“Make this call before 9:30,” Pat said, handing Steve a note with a phone number and the name of his English teacher. I offered Steve my cell phone and he took it. He was back within a matter of minutes.

“I failed my exit exam,” Steve said.

And thus began a one-week drama that featured a two hour after school student-teacher debate, Internet hijinx, and an increasingly entrenched group of Richland High School educators buried in email from all over the Internet.

The controversy involved?

Steve wrote a “compare and contrast” essay distinguishing piracy from stealing.

Sidenote: Piracy/File-sharing is most certainly a sticky subject. I’ve found that people for whom the Internet is wholly integrated into their lifestyle hold very different opinions on this subject than those who use the Internet as a tool or not at all. It’s typically easier for the uninformed to cry “moral relativism!” than it is to do a little reading.

The essay has its shortcomings, as Steve himself is quick to point out, but it incorporates research and anecdotes, as well as a creative mathematics illustration. (You can read the essay here, transcribed as it was written, with all spelling mistakes, and including the grading rubric and the 3×5 note card that was returned to him from the English Department’s review of the grading.)

As he normally does, Steve posted the details on his web site. After his unsuccessful attempt to get the English Department to reverse his grade, I decided to get a little more proactive on his behalf, writing up the following “news brief” detailing his plight and sending it out to the authors of several large weblogs. The only site that picked the story up was boingboing (which I won’t link to because it’s been pointed out that their site contains pornographic ads.)

Piracy vs. Stealing: Teacher Fails “A” Student for Topic Choice

Sixteen year-old Steve Geluso was failed by his English teacher for choosing to distinguish piracy from stealing in an essay.

Geluso, an ‘A’ student, recently completed an in-class exit exam for his Language Arts class. The goal of the exit exam was to write a comparative essay on a topic of the student’s choice. Being a student who enjoys a challenge, he wrote an essay contrasting piracy with stealing.

His teacher failed him, saying there was no difference between the two and that he was “splitting hairs”. Other teachers who read his essay said that he did well from an organizational and technical standpoint, but because his teacher felt that there was no difference between piracy and stealing, she gave him an ‘F’ because she disapproved of the content of his essay.

I must point out that it’s very easy for me to understand the opinion of Steve’s teachers, who are most likely light Internet users and are probably unaware of the side of this debate that isn’t holding the bullhorn. I actually have great compassion for the Richland High English Department. The world is changing in ways they can’t understand and it must be very frustrating to be flooded with emails telling you you’re wrong.

Having been asked by Steve and his parents to join him tomorrow afternoon for a meeting with his principal, I would like to lay out the argument I have prepared on behalf of Steve.

The Case

This is an issue I am very passionate about. (Passionate enough about it that I came a few inches from being an Intellectual Property lawyer instead of a pastor.) It would be easy for me to get into discussing copyright and the RIAA. But this would be a major mistake. The issue It isn’t really about the content of Steve’s paper.

To me, there are just a few real issues at stake here. Past all the
emotional argument that has obviously arisen, there are just a few
questions that need to be answered in order to resolve all of this.

Question 1: Did the paper meet the requirements of the assignment?

One teacher’s note read, “Student is capable of writing an essay - C/C.” Assuming that “C/C” stands for “compare / contrast”, we already have one admission within the RHS English Department that Steve met the goals of the assignment.

In an article titled, The New Accountability, Professor John Lovas of De Anza College questions the graders’ application of the rubric.

“Of course,” Lovas says, “the key in fair scoring is not just a clear rubric, but well-trained readers who consistently score to the rubric, not to their own preferences or ideologies. That’s where the readers seem to have gone wrong, since they don’t apply the features of the rubric in making the judgment about the paper.”

There are no fewer than half a dozen other teachers or college professors who have either in email, on their weblogs, or in comments to Steve’s site, expressed similar opinions.

But was it a distinction that had value in being made? Was it truly just “splitting hairs”?

One teacher took issue with the grader’s point that Steve’s essay was “splitting hairs”, saying, “This point is irrelevant here: Isn’t splitting hairs one of the ways our understanding of our world can be advanced? Most academic papers are hair splitting definition arguments!”

Question 2: Was Steve’s distinction appropriate in any sense?

If anyone, anywhere, had ever made a sliver of distinction between piracy and stealing, it would have been appropriate.

If the grader(s) were more informed, he/they would have been aware that Steve makes the same distinction that a prominent Supreme Court case does. See Dowling v. United States, 1984 - “(copyright infringement) does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud… The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use.”

Were there a few other people who had described piracy and stealing as different from each other, Steve would have pretty fair grounds upon which to say he had a right to do so as well. But when the Supreme Court makes the same distinction he does, there can be no question.

Question 3: Was the paper in violation of school policy?

The school has no policy against writing on a controversial subject or a topic that teachers disagree with.

The school district does have a policy against advocating a violation of the law. However, there is absolutely no advocating here. Steve never suggests he is engaging in piracy, nor does he call for others to engage in it. He suggests that the music industry allow piracy as it may actually help them. His paper is comparing and contrasting two things and he sticks to doing just that.

Question 4: Was Steve’s response to his grading in violation of school policy?

Richland High does not have policies that attempt to regulate what a student does with his personal web site.

One of the significant complaints made against Steve has been about his decision to the post his teachers’ email addresses. There are no visible student policies against the republication of teacher’s email addresses. They are already public on the school web site.

In Sum

As these questions have illustrated, it is crystal clear that the Richland High School English Department owes Steve an apology for failing his first exit exam and any decision to reprimand him for the large number of emails sent to them on his behalf would be wholly without base.

One final note: Although it’s sort of irrelevant, something significant just occurred to me.

This was, I believe, an honors English class. Why in the world, in a 10th grade Honors English are students still forced to write standardized moronic five paragraph essays and taking pass-fail exit exams on them?

With the exception of having to learn “T-R-I paragraphs” in 9th grade, I stopped writing formulaically in about 5th grade, thanks to some great writing teachers I had who made the goal to teach writing by helping us learn to write about things that were interesting to us.

I’m sure Richland’s teachers are sadly pressured by WASL testing to pump out students that can nail the WASL rather than learn to love writing, discover their voice, and get grammar, style, and citation coaching along the way.

Standardization is to education what “one size fits all” is to things that are, uh, more than one size.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 at 12:22 am and is filed under Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.