Welcome to My Life

Since elementary school, I have been pretty eager to learn. Learning was the most important thing to me. Now how I learned, what I learned, just that I learned. And most of my teachers were pretty happy with that. I made good grades, I expressed interest in class. But I was never at the top, I was never part of that core 15 kids who made up the top of the class. I didn’t want to be up at the top. I was happy about the way I was going through school. I have always had problems studying, because my attention span and my brain do not want to participate in that. I’ve been an A student most of my life, and studying was not a big part of my success.

I find it hard to believe the statistics from CNN’s article on cheating, and how 75% of the population of students engages in it seriously. I’ve never cheated. In any way. I am able to admit that pretty easily, because it isn’t something I’ve ever thought about doing. If I can’t do something myself, and through my own efforts, then it’s my fault, and I should have done something else. Cheating is dishonorable and disgusting to me. I probably have such a problem with it considering members of the top 12 of my class were notorious cheaters, and had been caught several times. But they still went to college. The school didn’t offer harsh penalties. So is this why kids think it is okay to cheat? Because no one has thus far enacted a punishment? Of course. And their parents don’t care so long as they get through high school.

Plagiarism is also a touchy subject for me. I have never committed it, and I have actually been pretty conscious about not doing it. I have teachers read over my papers beforehand to tell me what sounds like plagiarism. I’m a good writer. I know this, I have been told this, and before someone calls me out for being cocky and self-assured, I’ll hand them the stack of papers I’ve accumulated since ninth grade, all of them having received an A. There is nothing more insulting than for a writer to be accused of plagiarism, essentially not being able to come up with an idea of their own that is good enough.

Watching the video about the students that surveyed themselves was a little discomfiting. Not that any of the statistics really bother me. I knew some of them. My issue with the statistics was how taken out of context they were. Sure, people Facebook through class, I do sometimes as well, that doesn’t mean we’re failing. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be good people. I just think that some of the most inane, irrelevant things are chosen to be put in the facts. They don’t really reflect the parts of college that really annoy students. Not that I have the definite list either.