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The content of this blog does not reflect the positions of the Peace Corps and is solely the responsibility of the author.

In Which I Engage in Classroom Discipline

I recently saw this surprisingly nuanced article suggesting, among other things, that cheating among students tends to become more rampant as more emphasis is placed on tests.  This seems a reasonable conclusion to draw.  I teach kids whose entire future is determined by a set of terribly written tests.  Cheating is an issue on exams.  But on a recent homework assignment I gave, some of the papers turned in bore a resemblance to one another that defied probability.  I was disappointed, and actually a little surprised.   It wasn't  a difficult assignment;  I'd told them all to write a test, worth 100 marks, for the subject of their choice.  It seemed a better thing to do for teaching pedagogy than a lecture about selecting the proper domain of learning (cognitive, affective, or psychomotor, and please don't ask me what this means) when preparing a test.  As long as they put in a reasonable effort on this they were going to get full marks.

I am not a teacher, I have never been a teacher, occasional TA stints at lecturing undergrads are not sufficient preparation to be a teacher, so I am mostly making this up as I go along.  Their next pedagogy period, I started out talking about cheating, had them give me some examples they had encountered in their teaching practice, and asked them why it was bad to cheat.  (They seemed a little confused and responded that it led to an incorrect evaluation of the student.  Fair enough, it does.)  Then I picked up the offending papers, announced that their authors had cheated, and launched into, if I do say so myself, one of my best impassioned speeches ever.  I told them that by cheating they were insulting me, their classmates, and ultimately themselves.  I reminded them that, the resource situation of secondary schools being as it is, they as future teachers might be the only source of information their classes have, so if they aren't honest, god help us all.  I called the offenders by name and ordered them to stand up and asked if any of them had anything to say to me.  The offenders were three men and a woman.  The woman claimed that one of the men had asked to see her paper, she thought for the formatting, and that was all.  It sounded a little fishy, but after some quick thought I decided to accept this.   Maybe she was lying and I shouldn't have believed her, but she was the only person to offer a defense, and I have never been the teacher (and therefore judge jury and executioner) in such a situation, and if she was lying maybe the public humiliation should be enough.  I don't really know.  Anyway, I ordered my other cheaters out of my class and told them not to come back until they each wrote me a letter of apology, and then I set their papers on fire.   The things you can do as a teacher in a school without fire codes.   One of them had actually written his letter of apology during his time kicked out of class and gave it to me on my way back to the office after the class.   That made me a little happy.  That boy seriously wants to come back to my class.  Or else he just has really good time management skills.

My other class got to hear a little about cheating for their pedagogy period as well, mostly because I  don't bother having two different lesson plans, even though the lessons always go significantly differently because the classes are very dissimilar.  Since no one in this class cheated (they got the same assignment) at least as far as their not-always-observant teacher can tell, we had a discussion about how to prevent cheating in secondary schools.  I mentioned character education, which is a very buzzwordy way of trying to convince children that they should be good people and talking about what makes a person good before you start beating them for not being good people, which I think is probably worth a try.  It's not like the punishings and beatings and patrolling of the exam rooms seem to be working all that well.  But then, it might help to just not treat the students as slaves whose job is to alternate between cleaning the school (important as it is for landscaping purposes to have students paint rocks white), running errands for the teachers, and sometimes mindlessly copying things off blackboards to memorize them for exams.

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