Lesson Learned?
In decades past, it had been assumed that teachers came in but one form-the form of the human person. In high school settings especially, it was assumed that all teaching was done by the teachers and all learning was done by the students. The teachers taught the students, and the students learned from the teachers. It was a cycle, or a pattern, if you will, that had remained virtually unchanged since the days of our parents. Yet I must announce that this pattern is breaking. Yes, high school students are still learning, but a kind of unconventional teacher has arrived on the scene. What is the identity of this new teacher? It is none other than the proverbial "high school experience." The "high school experience," as I have observed in recent years, is now one of the most influential and powerful teachers of high schoolers today. This observation really shouldn't surprise you. After all, when a person spends around 1/4 of his or her day in a particular environment, it's logical to suspect that he or she will inevitably learn from this environment in which a quarter of their day is spent. The "high school experience" is no exception to this rule. Students spend at least six hours in school each and every school day, and they learn most, not from the teachers who stand at lecture podiums, but from the person-to-person interactions within the school community, and from the often life-changing occurrences which combine to form the high school experience.
In recent years, high schoolers have learned that cheating is an acceptable practice.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, "How do students cheat? How is it accomplished?" Unlike our parents, students have more at their disposal than just a pen and crinkled-up scraps of paper. Students utilize the most technologically advanced devices and instruments to sneak answers into tests, send test answers to friends, plagiarize, and the list goes on. In today's high schools, "studying" for a test may only be a simple matter of snapping a camera-phone shots of the textbook pages. Bring the phone to the test, and your worries are over.
Now we ask ourselves the big question: "But why do high school students cheat?" The answer to this question is simple. As seen in the example above, the "skill" of cheating is becoming easier and easier to master. Well, why is that? To answer this question satisfactorily, just consider the ways by which high school students communicate on a regular basis. As more and more students opt to use blackberries, cell phones with text messaging, cell phones with cameras, e-mail, Instant Messenger, the tools with which students cheat multiply exponentially. As I have said before, in days of old pen and paper were a cheater's only hand tools. In today's world of technology, the possibilities are as endless as the world-wide-web.
This cheating and dishonesty among high school students is greeted all too often with permissiveness and shocking indifference. The students adopt these attitudes, although it has been my experience that teachers are automatically held accountable for the students' breaches of academic integrity practices and policies. However, I do not believe that teachers are the guilty parties. After all, the teachers can enact anti-cheating policies, yet it is up to the students to adhere to these policies. Unfortunately, if the students draft into their dishonest service the latest, smallest, most "undetectable" ways by which students communicate with their schoolmates, what can be done to allay this assault on the very foundations of academic integrity?
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