So I have a current professor who I’ve also had a class with a year and a half ago (Fall 2013). I have him for a different class now, but both of which are for my major. He assigned my class and I an assignment to go his favorite church and do a paper for him in 2013. Now he’s doing this again, and honestly, I don’t want to go again.
He already gave us (my CURRENT class) the research prompt/questions and I feel as if I can answer them in a paper, in enough detail to NOT have to go again. I took good notes a year and a half ago and I remember the event very well.
I liked the event, but I just don’t want to go this time because I have other classes and obligations (a sports team, a job and other family members to care for) and I just don’t think I’ll have enough time to go again. I did not have so much on my plate a year and a half ago.
Just the thought that he’ll probably make me go again stresses me out, due to time.
So how can I politely tell my professor that I don’t want to go again, I remember enough from last time to write my paper, and that I WILL STILL do my paper?
I don’t really want to just pass the Time Sign Up sheet for the event along to the next person without signing because it may raise questions.
If I honestly cannot tell him this, fine, I’ll try to move over, make time, and go again.
If it’s a time constraint/stress issue, I suspect that he will have little sympathy (depending on the Prof, of course) because a teacher expects you to make time for the class and assignments. If it’s because you’ve experienced the Experience and can still thoughtfully complete the assignment, I think that’s a more valid reason (assuming that was the Prof’s intention in giving the assignment).
As an aside, I’m just curious whether it’s an appropriate assignment. When I took comparative religions in college, we picked ANY three (different) churches and then wrote up papers following our visits.
Writing it based on your previous experience would be academic dishonesty and potentially an honor code violation.
One approach might be to go to office hours, mention how you found the assignment very helpful/interesting/something positive when you did it for the previous class, and ask if there might be some way that you might do an alternate assignment that would expand your understanding of whatever the concept behind the paper is.
I’m the only student with this. I’m the only student who has him for a second time in my class. And its 50-50 for both reasons. But how would be writing on a previous and remembered experience be plagarism? What if I write from another perspective/have different thoughts from a year and a half ago?
The problem is not the redundancy but rather the fact that you don’t have the time for it - and usually professors assume that academics come before most other obligations, so I don’t think the professor would be all too understanding of your circumstances.
No, writing a paper based on your previous experience is not academic dishonesty. Think about it this way - an anthropologist might publish several papers and a book based on one 2-year long fieldwork experience, or an epidemiologist might publish several papers using the same large data set - just on different topics/aspects of the data. As long as the paper you are writing is substantially different from the first one, you can indeed use your data/notes from the first visit without it being plagiarism.
I agree that your professor is unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument that you don’t have time to do the assignment. Everyone’s busy. I would rather ask him briefly whether it would be okay if you didn’t revisit the site, because you took excellent notes last year and are prepared to write the paper without another visit. You might give him a little verbal abstract of your idea for the paper to provide some evidence that you know what you’re doing.