Please Shoot Me Now

Have you ever had students or children behave so horrendously, or show such lack of basic knowledge, that you wish someone would put a gun to your head and end your misery? That's what I was thinking as I recently corrected some final exams in U.S. History. My college bound juniors were asked to identify the date of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. History. Some responses:

November 11, 2001
September 9, 2001
September 11, 2000

And at least three students left it blank! I'm honestly not sure which is worse, not to have answered it at all or to have answered it incorrectly. Either way, it's pitiful.

You want me to say just kidding about now, right? But I kid you not. My generous side wants to say this can be chalked up to a long exam, hot weather, and it being near the end of the week of exams for these students. But these are all somewhat lame justifications for the blunders.

Does anyone feel inspired about the world being in the hands of these future leaders?

Another Criminal to Catch?

Student x, beware. I am on to your scent. I smell your trail. I know your shenanigans. Prepare to be busted.

Yup, people, I am once again on the hunt for a potential cheater. Call it my mission in life if you will, to hunt down those who would cheat, until all students know it is unlikely you will get away with cheating in my class, so you simply should not try it. Actually, it's probably something else in this case. I don't think there's a need to teach this student that it is not worth it for him to cheat. He has failed the semester already, no matter what he does, and I believe he knows it. So I suspect he cheated just for the sake of doing it. Probably to see if he could get away with it just for the sake of it.

Here are the details. I gave a quiz at the beginning of class. I announced it would be given in the first two minutes of class the day before, so everyone there yesterday knew it was coming. Well, this student just leaves class at the beginning of the period and the quiz to use the restroom. No asking permission as is the procedure, he just leaves. So when he comes back I start to fill out a detention slip to give him a detention for being tardy (in my book, no checking out means you aren't officially there if the bell has rung and you aren't present). He comes back. I give some more time for the quiz. He somehow gets a quiz passed in with all the correct answers. This was an open note quiz, so those who had notes shouldn't have had a hard time with it. But the notes were on class material, and I have distinctly noted that this student has not been bothering to take notes. And the answers he gave, which contained some choice on one of them, were the exact same ones as the student sitting behind him. More specifically, they were asked to give 2 of 5 names. And the two he listed were the first and fourth ones on the list given in class, just like the kid sitting behind him. Hmmmm. Is this smelling like something rotten in the state of Denmark or what? How likely would both of them pick the first and fourth names?

To reemphasize, he has no notes to answer what are some tough questions to answer if you didn't take any notes on the material when it was presented (unless he took them from someone outside of class after hearing about the quiz, but this kid is so lazy that, were I a betting man, I would put 100 dollars against that happening). He's not there for a good part of the quiz. Then he turns in a quiz with all the right answers, identical to the person behind him. And I'm mad at myself for not being more attentive. If I had paid more attention, this whole issue could have been solved. I'm also irritated that students try to take advantage of me. I'm thinking he saw I was distracted with something else, so took the chance to steal answers from the student behind him when he passed forward the quiz.

Note to self: watch that student like a hawk from now on. He cannot be trusted.

And now for the trap. I didn't actually see this cheating, so what to do now?
My gameplan: My first option will be to try and hunt down a really nice and bright, hardworking, National Honor Society student who sits in the same corner, and ask her if she saw anything. I'm hoping she did, and will have the courage and character to tell me when I confront her about it. That will make things very easy. I'll then confront the cheater and tell him his cheating was witnessed and the evidence is overwhelming against him, so he takes the zero.

Option 2, if that doesn't work. Confront the student sitting behind the potential cheater, and ask him if the kid in front of him took answers from the quiz as he passed it forward. If he's in cahoots with him, of course he will deny it. But I think and hope this kid will also admit it. He's very quiet, so may not have felt the urge to tell me at first that he saw someone steal his answers. But hopefully he'll be willing to admit it if asked...

Option 3, if I can't get a witness. Ask the alleged cheater how he thought he could correctly answer a tough quiz when he hasn't been taking any notes and came to class late. If he insists he memorized them or something, give him a chance to produce his own notes and name 2 of the remaining three names he did not list.

Sometimes, amidst all this, I feel like giving up. I spend so much energy hunting down cheating, and said hunt usually happens whenever I have a huge suspicion someone has cheated. My instincts on this have been developed over my years of teaching (it feels weird to say years, but it has been that now), and are pretty good. But sometimes I think, is it worth it? My finely tuned sense of justice says yes, it is. Students who behave this way must be caught and punished. They must know that someone in their lives will hold them accountable for it, and some teachers are not so dumb that students can get away with it in their classroom. On the other hand, I get so tired of dealing with fallen nature. Sometimes I just want to bury my head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, and that I should not do anything about it because it's not my problem and I'm not the one who will ultimately suffer for behaving in such a manner. The verse about the saints being worn down comes to mind. Not that I'm much of a saint, but I still get tired of dealing with evil. And don't get me started on the whole issue of constantly confrontly girls who dress like harlots, and having to send them to a principal to be dealt with. That's another burdensome and tiresome issue, which seems to be a losing battle and sometimes not worth it. For your info, any parents who are reading this, there doesn't seem to be a lot of parenting going on in the public schools. Or even worse, there are plenty of parents who don't seem to mind, and perhaps even promote the idea of sending their girls to school dressed like some of those women mentioned in Proverbs. Sadly, I'm not talking about any Proverbs 31 woman either.

Ok, that's the end of my spiel and tirade. Time for me to get some rest before my daily struggle against the forces that be starts again.

Tagged

Ok, I suspect that most anyone who has a blog and knows me has already been tagged. If not, I'm too lazy to tag anyone. But here are my random facts, along with the rules of this game, in case you care....

1. I eat Great Value spaghetti rings with meatballs about 3-4 lunches out of every 10. This is a cheap way to eat. I also attribute my ability to be living in my own condo to this cost-saving measure. Though it does get kind of boring sometimes.

2. I usually eat Cheezits with my spaghetti rings. I mix them with said spaghetti rings. It makes for a crunchier and tastier treat. I definitely need some way to get them down easier than just eating them on their own. I mean, wouldn't you need the same after having such a diet for the last two plus years?

3. I am irritated, because on several occasions recently when shopping at Walmart I have not found the above mentioned GV spaghetti rings w/ meatballs. They seem to be a hit or miss item. There are always plenty of GV spaghetti rings. And plenty of GV spaghetti rings with franks. But both of those are not worthy of serving even as a substitute for the delectable GV spaghetti rings with meatballs. So last time I found them I had to stock up big time on them. Then the last couple of shopping cycles they have been gone again. So now I am out, and am at a bit of a loss to know what I will eat for lunch this coming week. You would think that the law of supply and demand would mean this item would be in plentiful supply on the shelf. My purchases alone over the last two plus years should mean more of it there. But it hasn't happened. What gives?

4. I sometimes get tired of making my lunch, even if it is as easy as opening up a can of GV spaghetti rings with meatballs, putting some cheezits into a sandwich bag, and packing a yogurt and granola bar to supplement things. So I eat microwave popcorn instead as the main course for my lunch.

5. I think I might have ADD. Not because I can't focus, because I can (it's a misnomer to say that people with ADD can't focus, because they can.) But I get easily distracted. And my mind races a lot. Case in point on the distraction thing: while paying my electric bill online a few minutes ago, I got a sudden urge to empty trash cans, after spotting one of mine that was full of trash. So I went and emptied trash cans in the middle of paying my bill. This is just one example. At school it's way worse. There are about ten things I could be doing at any given time at school (I'm talking about during my prep mod or study hall, not when I'm teaching!) I often work on five of them before completing the one I started. Some might call that multitasking, and a good thing. But since I'm a guy, and guys aren't supposed to be able to multitask well, I think it must be ADD.

6. I sing for my students. Sometimes.

7. I take comfort in the fact that those with ADD have nothing to be ashamed of. It's not the same stigma as it used to be. In fact, those with ADD are usually above average in intelligence level.

8. And speaking of missing food items, I am really bothered that Walmarts where I live do not stock a particular kind of crackers and peanut butter that I could find when I went to school in Virginia. You know the packaged crackers you can get, with 8 or 12 packages per box? In VA I used to be able to find a kind that is sort of like a sweet graham cracker, with peanut butter in between. Here I have searched the packaged crackers section on multiple occasions, longing to once again taste the sweetness that those crackers are. But they are apparently not stocked in these parts, for some reason that mystifies me. I never knew that sweet crackers with peanut butter is something reserved for Virginians.

That's 8, which is above and beyond the call of duty, I do believe.

Each person tagged must list seven random facts about themselves, as well as the rules of the game on their blog. Then tag seven other people and write their names on your blog. You have to leave a comment on their blog so they know they've been tagged and have to read your blog.