The school year has started, in other words, the third year
when I close my classroom door and do my impersonation of Jack Black from the School of Rock. I admit,
I might not teach in the traditional way, but I have no doubt that students
learn something.
I have a new class called WIRED, where students are allowed
to bring in their smart phones and other hand held devices. A few of which, I’m convinced, will be able
to hack into the school’s online grade book and enhance their scores.
Anyway, we leapfrogged to the topic of i-cheating, in words,
using electronic devices to improve one’s GPA.
Now I don’t understand why Asian students are compelled to
cheat in the first place. These whiz
kids could memorize all of fine print in a Pfizer drug print ad yet alone
anything in a text book.
To top things off, this summer, while I was sampling libations of local Michigan
breweries and watching quality TV like Jerseylicious, several of my students spent their vacations at
English camps, practicing for SAT tests
or brushing up on how past progressive
verb usage.
Yet, they are tempted to cheat.
Mind you, Korean students think a 99% on a test is a bad
grade, which is why many are tempted to use their electronic hand held devices to cheat.
In my opinion, i-devices are cheating on cheating, eliminating the
“how did you ever think of that?” brilliance and thrill of outsmarting one’s teacher.
If there’s not an ingenious idea involved, what’s the point?
Back before Al Gore invented the internet, we had to cheat the old fashioned way: use the right side of our brains to score well on
tests designed for the left. We wrote calculus formulas between our shoe
treads or tapped out in Morris code the answers to a multiple questions. Or in mega sized college classes, we’d have
classmates take a test for us, the professor being none the wiser.
This took guts and ingenuity, not a downloadable app.
Once, I had a roommate join me to take a final exam in a
mega class at MSU, just to see if all the all nighters I pulled paid off.
She passed, not with flying colors or with black circles under
her eyes, but she passed.
Now days, students take pictures of tests, google anwers or
text each other . That’s a disgrace to
those who gave cheating a good name. It’s not that I condone cheating, but I
admire the creativity that goes into it.
So please students.
If you’re going to
cheat, use some imagination. You’ll still
get a big fat “F” and will expelled from school. But at least you’ll work out your right lumpy
lobe and will have a good “I learned a lesson the hard way” story to tell.
If not, don’t waste your time on it.
Study instead.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:56 am With so much emphasis on testing and meeting standards, its no surprise kids will try and pass test with a Malcolm X mentality, by any means necessary.I read an article in the Washington Post this year that reported, students in China were hooking themselves up to IV’s with amino acids to stay awake and cram for high-stakes testing. Students here in the U.S get hopped up on Adderall to focus and study all nite. I also don’t condone cheating or enhancing drug use for sports and academics alike. But I personally don’t put all the blame on the kids. Perhaps the emphasis on regurgitating info. for high-stakes tests is killing our children’s ability to be thoughtful and creative cheaters?