Your Personal Introduction To Plagiarism

My middle school has two periods dedicated to English: reading and writing. Both are taught by the same teacher. She is not very popular with my class, for many reasons.

One assignment in our writing class is to research and write an essay on a current event. We start out by writing a rough draft. I compile a decent enough body for the paper, filled with lots of quotes about the event I chose, but the part I am particularly proud of is the original introduction I wrote for the paper. I spent a good amount of time on it until I was finally happy with it.

The day after we print off and turn in our rough drafts, out teacher starts the class by lecturing us on plagiarism, stating that she received an obviously plagiarized paper. She then reads this “plagiarized” paper in the most condescending voice I have ever heard, and by the first sentence, I realized that she is reading my paper.

She finishes mockingly reading my introduction, and says that she knows it is plagiarized because no middle-schooler could write that well. She passes back the papers and we are sent to revise our drafts, but she doesn’t say anything else to me. I am quite obviously upset, and not really working on my paper, since my heart isn’t in it.

I later learn that she didn’t even run it through a plagiarism checker before deeming it plagiarized. Later, after a private confrontation, she did accept that I had written the introduction, and had not taken it from another source, but I despised her for the rest of my middle school career.