Wow, it's been almost a month since I've posted.

A very confusing and hectic month. My goal is in the next week or two to get caught up writing about it on my blog. I keep having good blog ideas, but I can't seem to get the opportunity to write about them.

The reason I'm back, though, is this. I'm angry.

The subject: my students.

I had my students all writing a paper on "Flowering Judas." This is a story that centers on the theme of spiritual betrayal. The main character supposedly cares for several different ideologies and several groups of people. Nevertheless, she cannot commit to love any of them. As a result, she is a hypocrite and is spiritually dead. The students were supposed to write on this story.

The problem was this. I have graded the first class's papers, and I have found at least four of them plagiarizing. The bigger problem is this. They all have pretty much the same interpretation of the story as I had. They were writing on the topic of why this main character could be described as evil (a topic I supplied them), and so they wrote these papers on how the main character was spiritually dead because she had betrayed all of her ideologies, including Christianity. And they all wrote on this topic while plagiarizing!!!!

Irony on top of irony. I was really bothered by this.