deirdreofthegaians

I have been fascinated by KWC ever since seeing it in Shenmue II and remember being really disappointed by finding out it had been demolished.

Therefore, my only question is whether there were actually elevators that only stopped on about 1/3 of floors, necessitating puzzle-like solutions to get to markets where you could buy birds.

That's exactly why they gave it to you--they were confused as to what you wanted.

I used to work as a tutor in my undergrad institution's writing center. While on average, writing center tutors nationwide are given only a couple days' worth of training before being set loose on kids who need help, I was lucky enough to go to an undergraduate institution that emphasized giving us a real class on teaching academic writing first. In addition to many weeks spent on other topics relating to tutoring students, we spent about 20 total hours on international issues of academic understanding, information transmission, and cross-cultural difficulties before we ever set foot into the tutoring rooms, and continued to train as long as we worked there.

Being an asshole to your Chinese students isn't going to help. a lot of them are honestly, genuinely confused about the "plagiarism" issue because it doesn't come up there. Kids would copy and paste from sources and assemble a kind of Frankenstein monster of a paper, and the reason? They've been taught that if someone else said it better than you could, don't be arrogant and put it in your own words. Use their words, which are better.

"Cheating" versus "Collaborating" is different cross-culturally. It's a shame that so many academic institutions, instead of recognizing these cultural issues and making sure that international students are given a coherent view of how things work here, simply laugh at these students, call them cheaters, and hurt their academic future when they're largely simply doing what was acceptable in the country they came from.