Good Job, Little Cheater

My kid basically cheated his way through 8^th grade math. And I’m proud of him.

Okay, that was a cheap intro to grab your attention, because, no, I’m not proud of him for cheating. Obviously.

He used an app to help him through his math homework for basically the entire year. And by “help” I mean to give him the answers.

Most assuredly, he is in the vast majority of teens today letting technology do their work for them in any and every possible way. As his parents, we can push back but it’s an onerous battle. The kid doesn’t even have a cell phone yet – as in, he may be the only 14 year old in his school (town, country…?) without a neck permanently bent over a gleaming little rectangle of all-consuming, electronic life. Short of homeschooling him on a Mennonite farm - wait, hold up, I think even Mennonites are on phones these days, make that an Amish farm – we must understand that he can and will live a life seeped in near-constant access to the Internet.

I seek not to decry the progression of technology or repudiate its advantages, (she types on her laptop, connected to high-speed DSL.)

Instead, I think we should not ignore any face of this integration into our and our children’s lives. Because there are A LOT of faces to this. Like a massive glimmering disco ball, there is applicability and integration of technology at every slight turn. Most parents have joined the conversation of concerned masses to keep their pubescent boys (and/or husbands) off of pornography and their pre-teen to teen daughters sheltered from cyber bullies, body shaming, cyber creeps and the like. But there are whole lot of additional faces to challenge their budding moralities.

In the first year back to in-person school, after a quarantined year and a half of 100% at-home/on-computer education, it’s either ironic or completely obvious that the blinding glint of this turn in the shiny ball that is technology today has me stumbling. 

Technology can also have a nefarious role in my kids’ education?

Straddling the chasm of pre and post technology, having been born in the very first year that classifies the Millennial Generation, I feel like it might be apropos to use “in the good old days” at least once in this discussion. So, here goes…

In the good old days, which I currently apply to the early 2000’s, you heard about cheating like you heard about teen pregnancy. There was shock-value, reprobation, maybe some reverence, and almost always degrees of separation. So-and-so heard that somebody’s cousin bought a term paper and turned it in as their own and got an A! Can you believe that?!

Now, however, the ability to cheat easily sits ever-present in our children’s back pocket. Literally.

So, when my 8^th grader was showed an app that would not only give him the answer to math problems he struggles to understand at every level, but would also display the steps for him so his teacher wouldn’t be able to tell, he acquiesced into the world of present-day cheaters.

I was not oblivious to this. It took a few months into the start of the year, but then I began to notice something was amiss. We weren’t spending hours into the evenings trying to teach math and get through endless problems. Why didn’t he have more homework? Why weren’t we all trying to fall asleep frustrated and slightly hopeless every weeknight?

There was a progression of our pushing back: monitoring him, driving to tutoring, reaching out to his math teacher, de-incentivizing a good grade in math, etc. Suffice it to say, our efforts were generally fruitless. He could do the work in a mere fraction of the time – I mean, he may not know what a fraction is – but he could get through it quickly, with no frustration or arguments, and no fear of having to fail and repeat the class as a 9^th grader – the ultimate shame. And so he did.

And a week before finals, he cheerily sat at the kitchen table sharing with his family Greek pita sandwiches and the news that he has an 86% in math. Inciting yet another lecture, and not at all the reaction he was irrationally hoping for, my husband and I reiterated we expect an honest grade, whatever that looks like. We expect to raise honest humans, whatever the consequences.

I will spare you the round-and-round details in which I mostly wanted to bang my head on the very table I should have been slogging through 8^th grade math problems with him on, late into the night for the past ten months.

But I will tell you the details of today, because this is where I get to be proud of my difficult, obstinate, cheater of a son, who is occasionally surprisingly brave, gracious, and upstanding. He sent me and his dad an email from school (remember, kid doesn’t have a phone to text from) and said,

"I chose to have integrity and went and talked to the middle school principal and told her what happened."

He walked into the principal’s office and admitted cheating his way through a math class that he couldn’t understand. We told him this was the right thing to do – and then he actually did it.

I repeatedly tell this growing man-child all kinds of things… to stop leaving his dirty socks everywhere in the house, to get out of bed before 1 PM on the weekends, to get off his computer, to brush his teeth, to leave his sister alone, to clear any of the given 2-dozen dirty dishes out of the dark, stinky den that is his bedroom - to not do his math homework without me or his dad present… and he ignores every word.

But this he listened to. He actually went in on his own and admitted his wrongs and is prepared for the consequences that will ensue. That makes me proud.

One small victory in the ongoing war that is raising a moral human today.