Since I Clearly Haven't Been Up To Blogging...
Every single month, I try to get out as many blogs as possible. Of course, this is dependent on my schedule and my amount of energy to actually think outside of school, but I always try to keep my readers entertained and informed. During the month of May, I took somewhat of a break- I only posted one blog. I guess you can say this is because I completely lost all of my motivation to actually do anything. There were a few scandals I had to deal with at school, and let's just say that I was fully preoccupied. Everything had my attention except for my blog (which has been quite unusual for the past couple of years). Since Day 1 of having this website/blog, I have always claimed to keep things 100% real on here and I have claimed to not allow any topic to be off limits. So, here we go. Let's discuss the events that have occurred in my life that have kept me away from my blog...
Scandal at School
Typically, I would never want to put this kind of business out there for the public to see, but the reason I am choosing to do so is because I know I learned a huge lesson from this event. Maybe my readers will learn from it too so that they will not have to make the same mistake... Most people who know me well know that I am a writer and most definitely NOT a reader. Sometimes I enjoy reading, but I would much rather write. And when I do read, I prefer for it to be on my own terms and not on the terms of a class or teacher. Hopefully some of you can already relate... This past school year (my Junior year), we had to read a book for English class. I was not thrilled about this at all. Therefore, I did not participate. I chose to not read and I planned on passing by asking about the book and learning about it from others instead of from the book itself. About every week or so, we had a quiz over a given amount of pages of the book. I chose to cheat. Every day that we had a quiz, I would simply walk up to my teacher's desk, look at the questions that were on the quiz, and go to the people who did read to ask them if they knew the answers to the questions that would be on the quiz. Every time I went up to my teacher's desk to look at the questions, I chose to not do it discreetly at all. I guess I found it not as wrong to cheat if my teacher knew I was doing so, so that's what I did. Over the multiple times that I looked at the quizzes before anyone else got to see them, my teacher would only smirk at me and not once did she ever reprimand me for my obvious wrong-doings. Because of this, it was clear to me that I would get away with receiving a free 100 on all of my quizzes, until we had a quiz one Monday. I had planned on using the same tactics I had previously used on every other quiz in my English class. However, this time I couldn't find the quiz. My teacher was outside of her room so I decided to dig around and search for the quiz a little bit. I still couldn't find it. So I gave up and went to my desk. I thought to myself, Maybe I can guess and still get some of them right, it's not that big of a deal. Then, my friend entered the classroom. I told her that I was not able to find the quiz on my teacher's desk and that I was going to fail. I figured it was fair enough. I didn't read, so I would basically get what I deserved... Then my friend found the quiz. All of my thoughts of fairness seemed to fly quickly out of the window and my friend ended up taking a picture of the quiz on her phone so that we could look at the questions. The first picture was blurry, so she ran back to my teacher's desk to take another picture. That picture was also blurry. With a quickly decreasing amount of time before the late bell would ring and we would have to begin our quizzes, I desperately thought of a way to get a clear picture. I gave my friend my phone and she ran back, once again, to my teacher's desk to take a picture of the quiz. This picture was perfectly clear. We looked at the questions, we discussed them with the students who actually read, and we found ourselves prepared for the quiz. We took the quiz, and I knew the answer to almost every single question. The quiz took all of the period to complete, and by the time I turned it in to my teacher, I felt a nice sense of accomplishment. I had cheated my way through another quiz. Of course, I shouldn't have felt accomplished because of this, but I did. In my advanced classes, I fall upon the percentage of not-so-smart students. Yes, I am incredibly intelligent, but compared to some of the other students in my classes, I was considered almost stupid. This made me feel like I constantly had to prove myself to others; I was caught up in everyone else's opinions of me. This was sad because I used to preach and preach and preach about how you shouldn't care what others think of you, but I suddenly forgot about all of that. I would do anything to show others that I was smart, and my grades were for sure ways to get my peers to directly see results of my intelligence. So they thought. I pride myself in being real, so how could I have attempted to be so fake? I did not care about being fake or real, I just wanted my peers to view me as if I were on their same levels of intelligence. This is why I found cheating to not be so bad. After class, I walked to my truck in the parking lot and before I could even remember where I parked, I got a phone call. It was a call from my friend in English class, the same friend who helped me cheat during the quiz I had taken only minutes before. My friend told me that after class, she had to go back to the classroom because she forgot something. Well, when she got back into the classroom, my teacher approached my friend with news that she was aware of our cheating. Our teacher told my friend that she was informed by other students in our class that we had taken a picture of the quiz and that we cheated. My heart dropped when my friend told me this, and I quickly tried to think of what I could do to make the situation better. There was nothing I could do. I went home and went about my evening as if nothing had gone wrong that day. Perhaps the situation would just fade away. I shouldn't have thought this way, but I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it especially because the next day during English class, my teacher didn't even say one word to me about what she had found out. I thought the whole thing might just blow over, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. Well, the next day came and I had started to hear things. None of these things came from my teacher's mouth to my ears. I began hearing from my close friends that my English teacher was talking to her other classes about my cheating. Oh hell no, I thought. As most of my friends can probably visualize, I began to lose it. My eyes got big and I just wanted to burst out of control because of my sudden anger towards the fact that someone was spreading my business around. My friends were always quick to inform me that my teacher wasn't mentioning my name to her other students, but I did not care about that. My peers were smart enough to put 2 and 2 together, and what made the situation worse for me was knowing that she knew they would be smart enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out that I was the one my teacher was talking about. I felt betrayed by my teacher who I used to get along with so well. I tried to reason why she would be acting this way, and I discovered a likely possibility: She felt betrayed as well. What I did was sneaky. How could I go behind my teacher's back like that? She had so much trust in me (so I thought), and now every ounce of it was gone. Then, I thought some more. Does she really even have the right to feel betrayed? She had known that I was cheating on all of these quizzes. There's no way she didn't know. There had even been a time when I was looking at the questions before I was supposed to and she asked me what I was doing and I told her with out hiding anything about my actions! If there was a time for my teacher to feel betrayed, it should have been the very first time I walked up to her desk to cheat. I was over that moment of sympathy very quickly. However, I still knew that what I did was wrong. But I still didn't think being gossiped about by an adult was proper punishment either. A day after I heard of my teacher's gossiping, I had her class again. I thought that she would mention something to me for sure that day. I was wrong. She didn't say one word about cheating to my entire class. When I got home that day, I couldn't take it anymore. I hate being in a place of "I don't know", and that is exactly the place I was in. I decided to come clean to my teacher about the situation, even though she already knew. I'm not sure if she knew that I knew that she knew, but I decided to own up to my mistake and sincerely apologize for it. I wrote her an email explaining what I had done and describing just how sorry I was for betraying her (even though I felt it was a little unfair for her to play the "betrayed" card). Within minutes, she responded with "Thanks for the admission". She went on to tell me that she was still trying to decide how she would handle the situation. Okay great. I'll take it for now. That means there is still hope. Oh, how I was wrong... Friday, my teacher announced that we would be grading our quizzes. She handed them back, and everyone got their quizzes except for my friend and I. She chose a student to read the key out loud while she took my friend and I into a separate room. I thought she was just going to talk to us about how disappointed she was and how wrong it was for us to do what we did. Oh, how I was wrong. My teacher told us that what we did was wrong, and she knew that we knew that. Then she went on to say that because we cheated in front of the whole class and because the situation became that of a very public one, she felt almost forced to follow through with complete disciplinary action. Okay, I can take it, I thought. Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My teacher told my friend and I that that disciplinary action would include a possible removal from the National Honors Society club, a zero on the quiz, and a notification to our principals of the situation which would result in either detention or in-school-suspension. Oh! And she threw in that this incident would be placed on our record. I was furious. I could have flipped over every desk in that room and ripped off the paint from the cheap walls with my bare hands, but I stayed calm. I stared off into the distance and remained completely silent. This was unusual behavior for me. I would have usually lashed out and spoke my mind, but I just wanted the situation to be over with, so I kept quiet. My friend tried to reason with my teacher, but my teacher's actions showed me the true type of person she was, so I found that arguing was not worth a thing. Immediately after school ended, I called my mom and told her about the situation. Yes, I was told that what I did was wrong, but I was not in deep trouble at home. Maybe this was because I had already experienced a lot of punishment by not knowing the "outcome" of my situation for a week. Or maybe it was because I had already experienced punishment by my teacher gossiping about me to my already judgmental peers. What ever the case may be, I was reassured that yes, I was wrong- but I was not the only person who was wrong in the situation. To cut a long story a tad bit short, over the next few weeks, I was exhausted. I was exhausted because of several reasons. I felt betrayed by my teacher. I felt betrayed by my peers who had told on me. I felt betrayed by the students that told my teacher they "saw the picture of the quiz" when they know for a fact they did not. I had deleted the pictured the day we took the quiz and did not send it to anyone. I had English last period, there was no reason for me to send it to anybody! Anyway, I was exhausted. My teacher and many others were just keeping me in the dark. No one was telling me anything regarding my upcoming punishment or anything. I couldn't handle being in that place of "I don't know" and I felt extremely unmotivated to do absolutely anything. I deserved to be punished for my cheating, but I did not deserve to be kept in the dark like this. I'm not sure if anybody (including my teacher) knew exactly the toll this whole situation was taking on me. Or did they? The answer to that became even more unclear when we had a National Honors Society meeting about a week after my incident became public. I was not kicked out yet, so of course I attended the mandatory meeting. The meeting went well, until the very end of it when my English teacher decided to share some words. She talked to a huge lecture hall full of students about how wrong it was to cheat. She said that as people who were a part of National Honors Society, we should not try to cheat our teachers and our fellow students out of a grade. She went on to say that cheating was a very dishonorable thing for someone to do and that Honors Society was for honorable people. Did she just imply that I am not an honorable person because I cheat on quizzes even though she used to seem to not care that I did so? Yes. What a confusing point of view my teacher seemed to have. When these statements were made in front of some of my most intellectual peers, it seemed as if everyone was looking at me and my friend. They knew exactly why my English teacher had said what she said. This was absolutely humiliating. Was she just trying to bring me down now? Who knows... A couple weeks later, my friend and I had meetings with "officials" and we were both kicked out of Honor's Society. We also received a certain amount of detentions, but I was pretty okay with the outcome. I was just glad it was over. So to get back to the point of this story, this situation kept me in the dark for the whole month of May. Yes what I did was wrong and I should have never felt anything positive towards that action, but I did not deserve to be kept in the dark and I did not deserve to be humiliated. The moral of this story? Don't cheat. Cheating just is not worth it and I would never wish what I went through because of it upon anybody. But, when you do slip up and make a mistake (not necessarily cheating), own up to it. That is the only thing you can do to try to make the situation better. I learned a lot from this experience and overall, I guess I am glad it happened to me. I did not cheat for the rest of the school year, nor do I plan on doing so for the rest of my school career.
Work
I have an amazing job at the mall that has also been keeping me busy. I love working where I work. My coworkers are completely amazing and what I do is enough to keep me thinking while occasionally getting the opportunity to stay social with people who are incredible and fun to be around. My job really remains sure to keep me busy, but I love it. I hate sitting around and not doing anything at all, it just isn't productive to do so.
So school and work are pretty much the main two reasons why I have been missing from my blog for the past month or so... But don't worry. The writing portions of my brain and soul have been fully rested and I am more than ready to dive back into this passion of mine. I never contemplated giving up my blog or not... So here's to the future of my website. It will only get better from here!
I really hope that you all learned something from my story about cheating. I did not write it to put anybody on blast or to blame anybody else for my actions. I just hope that at least one person out there reading this will learn from my mistake. If that occurs, I will have done my job.
Thanks for reading,
-B
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