By now we all know Melania Trump channeled her inner 14-year old high school freshman and played a little verbal Freddy Fast Fingers with her speech at the Republican National Convention the other night.
In it, Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier. Words and phrases like hard work, American dream, values--yada, yada, yada--the sort of political speech making where nothing but white noise is said, but it's an easy sell. Americans love a good fairy tale, regardless of political affiliation.
Which leads us to the teachable moment that has American teachers giddy with excitement. They can teach popularized plagiarism! The BBC reached out to various teachers, including Brad Francis, an English teacher at Davis Middle School in Evanston, Wyoming.
"Melania's speech is probably the most blatant example that I have ever seen," Francis told the BBC. "Eighth grade students need very literal examples, and her speech is basically verbatim to Michelle Obama's. It will help them learn absolutely what not to do in their writing."
Admittedly, Francis might need to learn a little bit of nuance. The speech is absolutely a case of plagiarism, but the entire thing isn't "basically verbatim." Francis would get a C+ grade for such hyperbole and exaggeration in his argument.
"I have students who try to copy and paste material from the internet all the time to pass it off as their own," Francis continued telling the BBC. "That speech was Michelle Obama's intellectual property."
The real disappointing angle that's falling through the cracks with all of this is that two different political parties actually wanted to claim that feeble and uninspired speech as either intellectual or property.
No comments:
Post a Comment