In this passage “Too Much Pressure”, Colleen Wenke is illustrating how cheating became a habit upon students in high school or college. Wenke defines cheating as getting your work done by somebody else, you don’t spend take the time and do your homework and learn from it but you are just copying. According to Wenke, there are different types of cheater, there are those who will wait and ask their peers who just take the quiz what were the questions Wenke’s history teacher named them as “cafeteria scholars”. They were the cheaters who won’t even realize they cheated by asking their friend to copy on their homework. There are those who will have too many activities that will push them to cheat because there is a grade required in order to stay on the team. And finally there are those who will cheat because they just want to get over it and get their diploma.
I don’t think I belong to any of this type of cheaters even though I won’t deny it I did find myself cheat couple of time by coping over my friend homework, but that was because I had completely forgot that specific homework was dues that day or I didn’t have time to finish it all. My point of view about cheating will be what the point of cheating is and get the best grade when you know you don’t deserve that grade. I prefer do the test get the a bad grade, know where I should improve and work harder and get a better grade on the next test and be proud of it because I know I deserve it. Cheating is like lying to yourself, you make yourself believe you are a A student when you are only a B or C.
Colleen Wenke think it is not right for student that work and deserve their grade, because the others that cheated get better grade than them. Even good students are tempted to cheat, because they see other students who cheated get better grades than them. Wenke blamed the school system because they are allowing students cheating and are not reinforcing the rules about cheating, so cheating was alright as long as you don’t get caught. Because of the school system not fulfilling their role students don’t know anymore what is right or wrong. We can’t blame our parents because they taught us that cheating isn’t right, that we should earn our grade, we should blame the school system. Like the author I’m intrigued just by thinking those cheating are the one getting the best grade ending up in the best school and ends up ruling our country. I can’t imagine having a doctor who cheated throughout his entire education and didn’t even know how to be a doctor even though he has on his wall posted his doctoral diplomat.
I know step back and see cheating as the author Colleen Wenke is describing us in this essay; we created a society that believes cheating is okay, how far would this go? Just like the author, I don’t respect any of those people that cheated because they don’t deserve anything that they earned from it. We have to stop this from spreading further, and this will only stop when schools reinforce the rules and people realize that they aren’t earning their diplomat.
In this passage, Stephanie Ericson did a deep study about lies and came up with all this different way of lying. The one I could related to myself are, “the white lie”, which is when you tell to your friend that she looks good even though you know she looks horrible. I remember when this happened to me, I was shopping with my friend and she started going ballistic about a shirt and “OMG this look so nice!!!” I knew it looked horrible but she seemed so into it that I felt like I had to lie so I won’t hurt her feelings. Ericson thinks we shouldn’t make the decision about what would make other people happy or sad, what will hurt their feeling. The other kind of lies I could relate to is “facades” and “omission”. I think everyone could relate to the facades kind of lie because the way we dress up to go out with our friends isn’t the way we would dress up to go to work. When we go to certain places we have to adapt ourselves to those places and dress appropriate. For example we can’t wear bikinis and go to school. Putting on a suit and go to work or meeting is a way of projecting an appearance, showing that you are a serious person and hard worker. According to Ericson “omission involves telling most of the truth minus one os two key facts whose absence changes the story completely.”(p29) For all the people that wear glasses this already happened. I actually had an omission lies recently, my mother brought me this new glasses that were horrible and she spent a lot of money on it. I lied and said I like it and wore for couple of weeks when she was around just to show that I did like it. However, after a month I threw them on the garbage and told my mother that they have been stolen and next thing I know I was back in the store with her choosing another pair of glasses, this time I made sure I was around to pick them. One kind of lie I found it funny and relevant that Ericson cited is the “out -and -out lies”, this kind of lies you know that person is lying because it is obvious but you just can’t get mad because you find they way that person lied funny. It happened to me couple of times when I was with my nieces and nephews.
Ericson has other ways of defining lies, but the overall is we can’t stop ourselves from lying. We basically lie at least once a day. Stephanie Ericson tried to spend an entire day without lying but it was too frustrating. We lie for little things every single day. For example, when somebody ask you “how you are doing” you may be not feeling good or having a really bad day but because you don’t feel like talkind you will just end up saying “I’m fine and you?”.
This two passages are related in a way were, when you cheat you are lying to yourself because you are earning grades and post you don’t even deserves. And when you are lying you are cheating because you make other believe you are someone you aren’t.
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