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There are times when I get frustrated with school and just want to give in and cheat. I watch people study tests from last year, letting them ace the exam without even trying.
At one point, I attempted to wear a baseball cap to slyly peek over at my neighbor's test, but I chickened out at the last second and took it off. This fear stems from an incident that happened at summer school after my sophomore year of high school.
Math is not my cup of tea, to say the very least. I'm so bad at math that one day my mother surprised me with a wooden plaque that said "I suck at math." Real encouraging. I'm so bad at math that I had to take elementary algebra when I started at USD.
That being said, one day I was sitting at a table taking a geometry test. Nothing was getting through my head and my allergies were going nuts, so I figured that I needed to do what I normally did when I got stuck: Cheat.
I noticed that my teacher had the answer key on his desk, so I got the idea to constantly walk up to him to ask him the dumbest questions possible.
Every time he replied he kept looking down, so I would take that opportunity to look at a couple of the answers. I would then continue to robotically memorize the answers and go back to my test to write them down until I was finished.
When I handed it in I was beaming with confidence and smiles because I knew I was going to get 100 percent and I was on my way home to lounge and do absolutely nothing, courtesy of my brilliant scheme.
After I packed up my bag, my teacher sternly instructed, "Alana, come over here for a minute."
What made me want to urinate my pants even more than what I anticipated that he was going to say was the fact that his face was beaming red with anger.
When I reached his desk, my test was resting in his hands. His finger pointed to a question as he said, "Tell me... just tell me... how you possibly got this for an answer?"
My eyes slowly followed down to the top of his pointer finger which revealed my huge mistake. There it read: "Answers may vary."
I literally wrote down the answer key's response, "Answers may vary." As I tried talking out of my ass to explain how the answers could "very well differ from person to person," he just sat back and rubbed his eyes with frustration.
I luckily didn't flunk the test, but because I got caught cheating I got a D. What I did flunk was the respect my teacher had for me. What I did flunk was myself. What I did flunk was this column, because that was overboard corniness.
The moral of this story is whenever you feel like cheating, choose not to so you actually get an education.
Or, don't be stupid and not pay attention to what you're writing.
Reach columnist Alana Bowden at Alana.Bowden@usd.edu.
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