Last Friday my teacher was absent. I knew ahead of time and she left me lesson plans. In two classes all I did was journal sharing at the beginning of class, giving instructions on an assignment, and pressing play on the movie they were watching. That was the easy part.
In the other class I had to give a quiz and teach. Giving a quiz does not mean hadning out the sheets and sitting down. Not with seniors who could care less about vocabulary. With those students giving a quiz means: sneakily walking up and down each aisle looking for cheat sheets, watching them all to make sure they aren't talking to each other, and in the case of last Friday, running to the back of the room while pretending to see a bug on the wall.
Now that I have retold this story multiple times, I realize how crazy it makes me sound, but I don't care. I don't know where to draw the line on talking to the students about cheating. I did walk up and down the aisles with the purpose of catching cheaters and I found one cheat sheet. This was fairly obvious, but I didn't feel comfortable camping out in the back of the room behind the students. I didn't want to make them feel uncomfortable or to think I was suspicious of them.
So I told them I saw a bug on the back wall. Yep. LIE. I walked back there every couple of minutes and pretended to look at the shelf while really looking at all of them to see if they were cheating or not. I felt really good about this choice. I have no idea if it worked or not.
Cheating pisses me off like few other things. Particularly when the students get 10 minutes to study in class right before the quiz and there are only 15 vocab words on the test. I want to slap 0's on assignments that I think students cheated on and send them to ISS ("the Hut" at my school). But proving that a student cheated is really hard unless you actually catch a cheat sheet on them.
Other than that, it just looks like you are accusing them of not being smart enough to make the grades that they make. And that sucks for everyone.
When I have my own classroom and can arrange the desks in any way I want, I will probably have them arranged in a way that allows me to circle the room constantly. That way I can monitor students during tests, quizzes, activities, and I can move during lecture. It would also prevent me from clearly being in their area to make sure they aren't cheating.
No comments:
Post a Comment