My Virtual Dog Ate My Homework

Last week, I was writing a research paper. I wanted to quote a speech and the first and fastest way I knew how to find the exact line I was looking for was from a video on YouTube. Sure enough, I found multiple copies of the speech uploaded. I listened to the part I needed, and, without wasting the entire night watching all the other videos YouTube suggested I might like based on this video, I continued to work on my paper. Then, I realized I had a problem. What is the proper way to cite a YouTube video in a works cited page? I would like to call this a modern time college student problem. (Or maybe, if are really going modern, some hashtag like #citingasite #youtubeislegit). When I first learned what a bibliography was in middle school, YouTube did not even exist yet (I Googled that).

Finally done with that research paper, I was reading a book for my English class.  One of the main characters, in his rebellious teenage years, decides not to do his homework. He logically thinks to himself, “It’s okay, I will tell the teacher my dog ate my homework.” Now of course, in literature, and certainly in real life, teachers rarely accepted this excuse.

Today, this clichéd phrase is not frequently heard. The expression is ridiculously false and students have more creative excuses for not doing their assignments. Nonetheless, I do not think this is the only reason for the decline of the phrase. There is one important fact why such an excuse, the most well known and over used reason for not being able to hand in your work is falling out of use.

Homework is no longer done on paper, but on a computer. Whether it is an online portal for math and science problems, a more productive, technological system for multiple choice questions in any subject, or simply sending an essay to a professor as an attachment to an email, who hands in hard copies of assignments these days? You can always say your computer crashed, but for some reason, that excuse, while certainly more plausible, is not as endearing as my dog ate my homework. Can I feel nostalgia for a dog I never had?

We are in the modern, technology age, and it is great. Doing assignments on a computer is not only more productive, but it often provides for instant feedback, which allows students to know how they are doing in class and which areas they might need to improve. Students can then review all the material they may have struggled to grasp before moving on to the next topic. This allows for a continuous learning process, even when students are not actually in school.

All the information on the Internet, and even YouTube is only enhancing our learning in college.  Class presentations are exponentially more intellectually stimulating and permanently penetrating when they are accompanied by a related video from from YouTube. Technology and the media are infiltrating our lives. Why not harness its potential for educational purposes?

Or at least learn random facts, like when YouTube was created.