10:10 class, please add the following to the list of blogs you are following:
http://gwrtc103kait.blogspot.com/
12:20 class, please do the same for this blog:
http://jayanderson-jordan.blogspot.com
Monday, September 7, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
Cheating: An art of deception or act of empathy
As I read over my students' blog posts on Rebekah Nathan's piece on cheating, I found my own views on the subject become muddied. One student who professed he never received assistance admitted to giving assistance on more than one occasion. His reason? It is within human capacity to empathize and aid others. I thought this was noble. But I can think of many reasons why sometimes we shouldn't aid others. For example, if the point of education is to learn and become a more enlightened citizen, isn't it ironic that students are cheating? Others in my classes pointed to the great American Dream and the immense pressure to succeed as a reason for the culture of cheating that is so prevalent in education and elsewhere. I agree that we and those around the world expect and even idolize the American success story--but once upon a time, success was a result of hard work, not merely doing what one could to get by, even if it involved dishonesty.
When I was a new teacher and discovered my first case of plagiarism, I felt a bit violated. To me, the act of cheating was an act of disrespect for me and my class. I started checking student papers with anti-plagiarism software. When I found multiple instances of undocumented research, I even became a bit angry. I worked hard in designing a curriculum for students. Shouldn't they work as hard in meeting the goals of that curriculum? But after a while, I realized students didn't plagiarize as some collective statement against me. In fact, many liked my class and wanted to impress me but lacked the confidence or the time to do well on their papers. In part, I implemented the portfolio system because of this discovery. It has been my hope that students never feel the desperation to copy and paste from the internet for one of my papers.
Yet I still strongly believe that cheating is wrong and hurts everyone, even those not involved in the act, itself. Consider the most recent CEO scandals--Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, AIG--or Bernie Madoff. All of these people in positions of power cheated. They misrepresented their companies' financial transactions or blatantly stole, which ultimately led to the fall of their companies and, subsequently, the foundations of the American economy. There isn't a single person in America that hasn't been affected by their cheating. Sadly, it would be naive to think these men cheated for the first time when they became CEOs.
So my question to those of you out there reading this and Nathan is this: Would we be so willing to help Johnny or Sarah cheat on that college test if we knew that twenty years later, they'd behave like some of these CEOs I've mentioned above? Can we really excuse the acts of these CEOs as simply a by product of American business culture? This is where I feel Nathan misapplies the idea of cultural relativism. In order for cheating to become part of our culture, we all have to accept it--students AND teachers, CEO's AND middle class stockholders. Let's not.
When I was a new teacher and discovered my first case of plagiarism, I felt a bit violated. To me, the act of cheating was an act of disrespect for me and my class. I started checking student papers with anti-plagiarism software. When I found multiple instances of undocumented research, I even became a bit angry. I worked hard in designing a curriculum for students. Shouldn't they work as hard in meeting the goals of that curriculum? But after a while, I realized students didn't plagiarize as some collective statement against me. In fact, many liked my class and wanted to impress me but lacked the confidence or the time to do well on their papers. In part, I implemented the portfolio system because of this discovery. It has been my hope that students never feel the desperation to copy and paste from the internet for one of my papers.
Yet I still strongly believe that cheating is wrong and hurts everyone, even those not involved in the act, itself. Consider the most recent CEO scandals--Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, AIG--or Bernie Madoff. All of these people in positions of power cheated. They misrepresented their companies' financial transactions or blatantly stole, which ultimately led to the fall of their companies and, subsequently, the foundations of the American economy. There isn't a single person in America that hasn't been affected by their cheating. Sadly, it would be naive to think these men cheated for the first time when they became CEOs.
So my question to those of you out there reading this and Nathan is this: Would we be so willing to help Johnny or Sarah cheat on that college test if we knew that twenty years later, they'd behave like some of these CEOs I've mentioned above? Can we really excuse the acts of these CEOs as simply a by product of American business culture? This is where I feel Nathan misapplies the idea of cultural relativism. In order for cheating to become part of our culture, we all have to accept it--students AND teachers, CEO's AND middle class stockholders. Let's not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)