A couple of days ago an issue involving cheating came up in another teachers classroom. I brought up the situation in one of my classes and was amazed that everyone in the class had cheated on a test during the course of the year. While I realize that their maybe a gray area in cheating (discuss later) but I did not think cheating on a test was something that every student in a class participated in.
Cheating to me is gaining or allowing someone to gain an unfair advantage. So to me if you give someone questions on a test, or you allow someone to copy your homework in my opinion that is cheating. Now I understand that is a gray area in students minds but that is an argument for debate.
Each year our school newspaper, which I have tremendous respect for, prints an article about how cheating has increased in our high school. As a teacher in the building I always feel like a failure when this comes out. How can we as teachers do such a bad job in setting both an environment and tone that would discourage cheating? Why does this not infuriate both teachers and students as it does not send a good message out about the school we are part of?
Today, a student justified cheating because they did not think the teacher gave them a just amount of time to prepare for the test. That is not a reason to cheat but a reason to talk to the teacher about the course load. Most of us as teachers will try our best to work around situations and put the student in the best position to be successful.
I was asked today, "Did I every cheat in high school" I do not remember cheating but the truth is that school was not that important to me. There was not the pressure to get into high stakes college, nor the fight for scholarship dollars.
When I was in business my ethics were challenged often. I remember one day when our comptroller told me that one of our suppliers made a 10,000 dollar mistake in our favor. He asked me what to do. My reply was immediate, "You should not even have to ask me, get on the phone and fix it right away with the supplier".
I just think we should do the right thing. If I was not a good enough business man to make money without taking advantages of some ones mistakes than I did not deserve to run a company. As a student if you are not prepared you should take the consequences. We all make mistakes and we should use our mistakes to learn from and become better.
Really want to hear your thoughts about this topic. I do not want to judge but learn from you.
In high school, I will admit that I did not really know what it meant to struggle. I think it was this expectation and realization of success that made me fear failure. While I share similar views with you in regards to cheating and can’t remember ever cheating myself, I think I can understand where people are coming from. Cheating is not a decision you make on a whim--it is one you make when you are desperate. It’s unfair and ineffective to point fingers and individualize blame as a moral fault, however, because that ignores the larger societal structures at play that drive the rationalization of bad decisions. Cheater, facilitator, non-cheater, regardless, we all share responsibility in this seemingly growing epidemic of cheating.
ReplyDeleteI know this sounds crazy, but maybe what teachers, parents, and society at large should be doing is NOT doing their best to ensure and set students up for success, but to teach them how to fail. How to accept failure, how to grow from it, how to learn from it, and how to see the beauty in struggle. Everyone who is seemingly successful has met with thousands of failures before them, whether it be Steve Jobs or the world’s greatest athletes. Success is obvious – famous people are famous because we hear about their success, but what we often don’t talk about is the failures that built them up to the person they are today. Failure comes with so much stigma, resulting in incredible pressure to maintain perfection, yet we don’t realize how ubiquitous of an experience it is. Maybe if we normalized failure, normalized talking about failures, instead of only acknowledging successes, we would all be better at learning how to deal with it in effective ways, instead of fearing it and using methods like cheating to buy time before the inevitable failure comes knocking. Not cheating means failing the test now, but cheating means passing this test, with a chance of not getting caught, and buying time before cheating catches up with you. But what if we took failure and all its stigma and pressures that cause us to rationalize bad moral decisions out of the equation? How has cheating become acceptable while failure still hasn’t? What if failure was something to be proud of? I’ll admit I was really scared of failure back in high school and still find myself fearing it sometimes now, but one thing I’ve come to realize is that it’s those failures have taught me an incredible amount about myself. I would not trade those experiences of tears, stress, and struggle for what they’ve helped me become today. It’s like first learning how to swim. When you’re thrown into the water, you’re petrified, but once you realize you can and will float back up to the surface, it’s not so scary anymore. I’m less scared of failing now because I know what it feels like to fail. Better yet, I know what it feels like to fall, but then pick myself up again. Bruise after bruise after bruise, I know I am getting stronger as long as I am not afraid to dust myself off and stand back up.
We’re taught from an early age that if we do well in school, if we continuously get good grades, we are set for success. But no one ever mentions the struggles you will have to face to get there. No one ever mentions that it is okay to struggle – or the fact that struggle is necessary. The only people who can say they’ve never failed are the ones who don’t even stand up to try.