11/10/10

Today in class I felt an oppressive, physically heavy feeling settle on me and realized, oh no, summer is back. It literally went from spring to full, hot, miserable summer overnight.
This week is final exam week. I hate it. Aside from dying of boredom every test (only 4 per day, but still not much fun), teachers are randomly assigned to classrooms and I hate being with students who aren’t my own, mostly because they aren’t afraid of me the way my own students are. All of my colleagues say they take cheating very seriously. Some do take it very seriously and some don’t. With my own tests with my own classes anyone caught cheating receives a zero, but with other teachers’ classes it gets tricky. They are all cheating. If cheating means using any information that didn’t come from your own head, from a cheat sheet, to looking in their notebook, to looking at their neighbor’s test, to whispering answers back and forth—they are all cheating. So what I do now is I try prevent cheating, tell the people using their notebooks to close them, take the cheat sheet from people who have them. With the really blatant cases of cheating I make a mark on the test and when I give it to the teacher responsible I tell them that the tests with marks are those of people who were cheating, then they can decide to do what they want with that.