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A Teacher Asking Students To Destroy Notes?
zwei2stein writes "I found this question with far-reaching implications in the off-topic section of a forum I frequent: 'My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it. Is that legal?' Besides the issue with private property invasion, which was the trigger of that post, there is much more important question: Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge? How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge? Whose property are those notes?"
Also here's the original posting
> http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10351058
The original poster says this is High School.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
... back in my undergrad days I had an issue with a professor who tried to pull his own stunts, even trying to call me out (while claiming to not know who he was calling out) publically in class. After a conversation with couple of lawyers and a few folks at the university after making a complaint of harassment (me being a white male who at the time was in his early 20's) and which at one point resulting in the university president calling me on my cell personally, it was decided that given the professors work was a paid for by the university, they had effectively no rights to it... so my copious note taking, and eventual whole scale recording of classes what perfectly legitimate and up to the university... and not the individual professor who was being paid to perform for the classes behalf.
As sad as I am to say it... a tape recorder, obvious or not (ideally obvious be it in public or private) can be your best friend... though in my case I also had a laptop recording everything as well.
Let me give you the advice I was given when I was dealing with an overzealous professor who thought they were god in the classroom and eventually was threatening to sue me and the school... talk to a lawyer.
Remember though... I am not a lawyer, I've just talked to a few over this issue and think you should to.
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Ask a lawyer, it could prove interesting. If the lawyer smells a chance of winning a case it may be even more interesting.
But this means that you shall always have a backup of your work. A copying machine will do fine!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
(A) Let me know when high schools start having fraternities. The origin of this story was a high school student. But regardless, in the case of colleges:
(B) Frats and so on have been building up files on her class for years already, and will continue to do so. My University found that it was pointless to fight this and allowed the Student Body Association to print and sell copies of "official" lecture notes, approved by the professors, for recurring lectures. As it turned out, it was a very positive thing and everybody benefitted except those who were too poor to spend $10 for a semester's worth of notes.
(C) Yes, self-taken notes belong to the writer.
(D) This is a matter of legal rights, not University rules, so whether the professor is tenured or not is irrelevant. Lawyers and police can nail a tenured professor for theft and invasion as easily as one with no tenure.
(E) "Don't file a police report", my ass. If somebody steals my property, I am going to report it. Again, this is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of the law. The more illegal activities you allow someone to get away with, the more they begin to feel they have the right to do it.
Funny thing for me is that I find the whole situation bullshit from the beginning. I understand the idea is to verify that the student has retained the information and more preferably can demonstrate an application of that knowledge in a meaningfully productive way. What I find is bullshit about it, is that it does not represent real life for many people in most the of the areas of study that I am aware of.
Personally, I have an inordinate number of reference books around me and when I code I even have a whole monitor dedicated just to references on my systems. Many people are no different. Mechanics, Plumbers, Doctors, Lawyers, Coders, Technicians, Teachers, etc. all have access to reference materials around them at all times. You almost cannot do most of the jobs without it.
The value that a class should provide, IMHO, is the core understanding of the material itself and how to apply it. Critical thinking. Additionally, any academic institution should be instilling very strong research skills into their students. Research is a person's real strength. Not that they have the answer immediately on the tip of their tongue, but they can say, "I don't know, but I will get the answer shortly". Over time any experienced person will refer to the references less and less, but they will never have to stop doing research.
Look at this way. If you have no beforehand knowledge of the material and you cannot apply it to a problem either, how can references possibly help you solve a problem in a real world time-frame? You would lose the contract or get fired since you have zero experience entering the field. A genius cannot become a doctor and diagnose and heal a bunch of people within 24 hours with references alone. It would be a rather huge learning curve to overcome.
The only way you could do that in an academic setting is if the test is multiple choice, and multiple choice tests are the biggest single catastrophic failure in our education systems since we first had written languages. There is always one right answer, a reasonable answer that is not correct, and a 2 or 3 other answers that are off the wall bullshit. It's the easy way out for educators and most often leaves students with very little retention of the material over time. Life is not a multiple choice test. I know that sounds counter intuitive, but it is true. There is not always a sign in front of you with the correct course of action. You have to be able to think and gather all the data around you and analyze it. In short, research skills.
I would absolutely challenge anybody to the following experiment. Have 100 students that have been discussing the material for 6 months with their professors and each other. Have 100 students in isolation, or with no exposure to the material at all. Create a test with no multiple choice answers. This test would have so many questions that nobody could answer them all within the testing period. Allow any and all references to the students during the test.
Grade it according to a curve. Look at how many wrong answers a person gives relative the right answers. Then look at that relative to their peers.
I would be willing to bet the 1st set of students do dramatically better overall than the 2nd. Some of the students in the 2nd group may be do as well as their 1st group peers, but I would bet they are already possess exceptional research abilities and be able to think fast on their feet. Some of the students in the 1st group may be "low watt bulbs". Even after being exposed to the material for six months and talking about they have not retained much information or garnered any insights as well.
The students that do well in such an experiment would probably do well in any real world setting too.
Problem with testing that way is that it represents more work for the teacher. However, that is what teaching assistants are for. Just do the damned work IMO. My tuition paid for it.
Well you can't do anything now since you consented to her taking them by letting her in your backpack. Sounds like you just got a lesson in 4th amendment rights. Never let anyone, including authority figures cop teachers, have your personal property ever. Even if you have nothing to hide.
Of course you can do something. He didn't consent to hand it over, he was tricked into falsely believing that she had the right to it. So making him hand it over fully fits the definition of fraud: Fraud happens when you hand over your property yourself because you were made to believe something which is not true, whereas theft happens when something is just taken away from you illegally. If he believed she had the right to take his notes and handed them over, she committed fraud. If he refused to hand them over and she just took them, then it is theft.