I was doing very poorly on spelling tests when I was in the second grade. I generally spelled only two or three of the words correctly. After coming home with yet another poor result, my mother sent me to my room to study my newest batch of spelling words. When I thought I was ready, she quizzed me, then sent me back to my room to work on those I got wrong. It took several repeats, but finally I had those words down cold. The next day, I sailed through that spelling test with confidence.
The day after that, however, my teacher, Mrs. Mackin, made me stay in the room when the other children went out for recess so she could talk to me about the spelling test. I had gotten nine of the ten words right, a huge improvement. The problem was that the little boy who sat next to me, whose name was Van, had also gotten only one word wrong, which we both misspelled exactly the same way. Since Van always did well on his spelling tests and I didn’t, the teacher suggested that the sudden miraculous improvement in my spelling was the result of my having copied the words from Van’s paper.
I was shocked and appalled -- so genuinely aghast, in fact, that the teacher had to believe me when I explained how hard my mother had made me study the spelling words.
What was really sad was that up until that moment it had never once occurred to me in my innocent young life that there even was such a thing as cheating.
No comments:
Post a Comment