Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. (They’re combined together this month.) This is the twenty-sixth one.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. This week I noticed that a student has been cheating in one of my intro to creative writing classes. I had to go into the “gradebook” feature on Canvas and give this student lots of zeros. As I was doing it, I almost felt like I was about to cry. I think most teachers feel this way when they catch a student cheating. It feels exactly the same, physically, as someone dissing you, or yelling at you—that punched-in-the-face feeling. But why? What’s so personally insulting about it?
It’s not because I feel proud about the assignments I’ve written and think they’re cheat-proof; I know that’s not why, because I’ve been just as hurt when students cheat on assignments I stole from other people (is that cheating?).
When we do workshops about online learning in a committee I’m on, everyone wants to talk about students cheating. They think students cheat more online. I always have lots to say about this in these workshops, all of it lifted from James Lang’s book Cheating Lessons. Lang says that students cheat because of way the class or the assignment is structured, not because of something about them that makes them cheat, like bad moral character. He gives what I think is really good advice about specific things, like how to write exam questions that discourage cheating and encourage real learning, and general things, like how to structure a course in a way that makes students motivated to learn for their own reasons, not yours.
But when I tell this to colleagues in these workshops, someone always says, well, I teach classes (like math and science) where you actually have to make sure students know things. They say that they need to write “traditional” tests that determine whether students know real, actual knowledge, and so they can’t do what Lang says to do. But my students have to learn real things, too! I know they do (I feel like screaming). I wouldn’t teach a class where they didn’t! I give them tests and stuff, too, with real information on them! But why don’t I ever say that? Why do I just nod like a fool?
I never, ever cheated in school. Ever. I had what Lang calls intrinsic motivation. I wanted to learn for my own reasons, not the reasons school, or teachers, or specific assignments or classes, supplied us. Freshman year of high school, I was nominated for an award where we had to read a short story and write a paper about it in a certain amount of time, like two hours or something. We were handed photocopies of “The Skater,” by Joy Williams, an absolutely beautiful story about a girl driving around New England with her parents, looking at potential boarding schools. Halfway through the story, you find out her older sister had recently died, which had set the events of the story in motion. As I read, I began to cry. I looked around the room. All the other nominees were stony-faced, task-oriented. These were kids who were good at school in ways I could and would never be. But I won the award.
I also was intrinsically unmotivated, in that if there was something I didn’t want to learn, or disliked, or hated, I didn’t mind failing. In fact, I almost preferred it, because it offered evidence of the truth about how I felt. When the chemistry teacher made a kind of rudimentary infographic on the blackboard of everyone’s test score, with mine way down at the bottom on its own to represent how much worse I did than everyone else, I felt a kind of perverse satisfaction: that was honest; it was the truth.
My dad helped me a lot with my schoolwork. He read my English papers and helped me make my arguments better. Sometimes we conferred for hours. I was wracked with guilt about this. It felt like cheating. I thought about all the other kids in school whose dads weren’t argument-obsessed lawyers. They didn’t get this special service. It wasn’t fair, and my paper shouldn’t count as good, or count as mine, or count at all. This is a thought pattern that has traveled with me into adulthood. But why?
What’s cheating, when you’re an adult? Keeping your camera off during a Zoom meeting? That feels like cheating, because it’s comfortable and I like doing it. I cheat by taking a walk with Bea during a meeting.
I cheat all day. I cheat when I’m with Bea—when I’m looking at my phone and worrying about my students and not paying attention, I cheat her. And I cheat when I’m working—I’m not actually working, I’m out with Bea having fun. But that’s where the fine line is: am I cheating, or am I being cheated? The rules are unclear, the situation is designed for failure.
I have a crystal clear memory of every student I’ve ever had who cheated and how they cheated, dating back to a plagiarism incident in the very first class I ever taught, a creative writing workshop at the University of Michigan in 2005, when I was in grad school for the first time. I remember these incidents better than the work of the best students I’ve had. Did they cheat so I’d remember them?
Sincerely,
Lucy
That was a good one. You so accurately describe the feelings of finding a cheater. I cry too but it is a mad cry not a sad cry. I can picture you with your dad discussing arguments. You must have been good at arguing back. If you think about it, everything in words is an argument.