the teacher as a cheato-meter

i dont understand cheating. First of all, somebody once said “if it makes them feel better, let them cheat” you can’t help it anyway. I became immune to this. Secondly, I cannot sue anyone as there’s no high court of justice for people who break people’s heats. These things go unpunished and people do them over and over again, without taking notice of any change inside them…

i dont understand people who cheat in general. young ones cheat in test papers like there’s no tomorrow, teenagers cheat because they are cool to have cheated, adults cheat because “c’mon, everybody does it and who has the time to study anyway”… I read in newspapers that people plagiarized others in their PhD disertations. Is it because they feel the need to empasize any aspect on that paper? I am abhored of this trend here and this is not recent.

people cheat like they breathe. it’s a cholera spread here and this is hand in hand with corruption at any level.

i was teaching an intensive English class once, only young learners of 11-12 and to my amazement they moved their desks and sat at their desks, the type of desks that are individual ones (one drawback of the internet as it alienates people from people in a kinesthetic way but i will go back to this later). the youngsters were supposed to take my test after i, their clairvoyant teacher had announced “a test shall fall upon you this friday”…i had a good, close to a normal state of mind feeling. the papers were handed out by me. i explained that they are not supposed to ask any question. and the time started to tick. countdown. silence fell like a velvet blanket in that classroom of 10 pupils. all of them, and i mean it, all of them concentrated throughout 50 minutes solely on the paper. occasionally a few of them raised their look and smiled at me or looked outside the window. at the end, they handed out the papers on my desk and left the room. i heard them talk at the break about the solutions they gave and it filled me up with nice post-trauma mixed feelings…have these kids been taught not to breach the protocol? not even ‘verify’ answers amongst them? how come it seems so natural the test hour? are they pristine and i am just obsessed with this idea of cheating? as their teacher, favourite teacher i might add with lack of modesty, i couldn’t help asking myself ‘why’.

still, these are the only 10 people i know in my life not to have wanted to cheat and it made me think harder about attitude.

I also pleaded for this “cheating-free imaginary world” during my class as a tutor. of course i explained the whole line of punishments they would get once they try it, and, in the end, i expressed my feelings in relation to this act. i said i felt, as a teacher, that i am called stupid in my face if any of them tried to cheat, i also mentioned that my blood pressure goes up and i am merciless if it happens under my nose. besides they tested my perfect eyesight and i even spotted the guy figdeting at the back within split seconds. don’t know how many understood. didn’t care. they tested my endurance, my level of “kindness” as they called it, in connection to cheating…

 i am convinced that at least one person out of 28 doesn’t cheat. because it’s 3 years since they graduated and i still get messages from them saying that they are great in their jobs and managed to get in this or that company with their own forces, after they passed honest contests, and also because they learnt how to learn; it makes this life of an educator bearable…

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