Educators, have you ever had students use right wing sources on papers?

[pstokely]

like Faux News or Oxyrush?

[WoodrowFan]

1. yes, kinda

I dont teach anymore but when I did I had a student use nothing but RW "Christian" sources and Good Housekeeping-type magazines for an article on Abortion. She got an F.

[Desipient]

2. Why did she get an F?

I was an English teacher, and I reserved F's for only the most abject or superficial work. Did you give her an F because her work was poor or was it because she used sources you didn't like?

[WoodrowFan]

4. very poor

It was AWFUL. badly written, badly researched, badly thought out. I wasn't shy to give Fs though I didn't give many after the first paper. It was also 20+ years ago so I don't remember a lot of details.

[MsUnderstood]

3. You have to teach kids how to research

You have to train them which sources are reliable and which are not.

You have to explain the difference between opinion and fact.

You have to bring examples of articles that teach fact vs. fiction

And then, if they use right wing propogranda, you can as Woodrowfan did give them half an A.

Sad but true, I wasn't given a really strong lecture on what source is "reliable" until High School. I've been teaching my daughter early so she doesn't get caught up in use false information.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. I was on the honors committee as a college professor once

and we received a senior honors thesis from a business major whose notion was that social programs depressed a country's savings rate. Fox News and Rush weren't prominent then, but her sources were all things like the National Review, Commentary, Milton Friedman's books, and other right-wing rags.

I refused to approve her paper for two reasons:

1) She had not examined both sides of the issue, as an honors thesis should. In a research paper, you are supposed to examine both sides of the issue (or as many as there are), and your conclusion has to be supportable according to the evidence that you've found.

2) I gave her a striking counter-example to her argument: Germany, which has some of the most generous social programs in the world and a very high savings rate. She hadn't even heard of the German situation and was looking exclusively at the United States (aside from looking at exclusively right-wing sources), as if the situation in the U.S. was universally true for the entire world.

As luck would have it, her professor (who had given preliminary approval to the senior thesis) was chair of the tenure committee the next year when I was up. There went my academic career!

The honors committee also had to screen applicants for the honors program coming out of high school, and one of the requirements was an essay on a topic of current interest. Invariably the right-wing ones were rants, not essays.