love changes everything (everything)

I am gathering student-written scripts for the one act play festival I want to put on in May.  Today a student handed in a short play and asked me to read it and tell her whether I would allow her to enter it.  My goal is to have as many student-written pieces as possible, and to have students do much of the direction too.  I was excited to receive a script from this girl, a girl who previously showed no real inclination to attempt any writing.  

I brought it home to read and found it odd, containing both vocabulary and themes that seemed unrealistically sophisticated for a tenth-grade student.  I began to ask myself whether the girl could be more gifted than I'd ever given her credit for.  Did I have a young prodigy in my program?  Exciting, that prospect.  And further proof that there is often more to people than what is readily obvious.

But sometimes I'm a cynic.  It only took one search word to find the website from which she'd downloaded the play, and the author whose work she'd grabbed - and not only grabbed, but messed with by changing the climactic poetry at the end to a rap song.  Goddamn it.

No prodigy.  No script.  And on top of the disappointment now I have to have a conversation with this girl about plagiarism.  Blech.

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PS:  I have plagiarized almost every single blog entry title from the first one forward.  But when the original title was a love ballad I always refrained from rapping to it.  For the record.

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