This week we tackle the topic of cheating in school. You might be amazed at just how many kids cheat in school. Some do it deliberately while others may not even realize they are doing it. We'll talk about some of the different ways that students tend to cheat in school and their motivation for cheating. We'll also discuss both the short term and long term consequences of cheating and why ultimately it simply isn't worth the risk or the consequences.
An original podcast by a husband and wife team of self professed pop-culture geeks. It is a discussion about all things entertainment from movies and music to television and pop culture. We examine some of the more obscure aspects of the entertainment industry.
This week we tackle the topic of cheating in school. You might be amazed at just how many kids cheat in school. Some do it deliberately while others may not even realize they are doing it. We'll talk about some of the different ways that students tend to cheat in school and their motivation for cheating. We'll also discuss both the short term and long term consequences of cheating and why ultimately it simply isn't worth the risk or the consequences.
An original podcast by a husband and wife team of self professed pop-culture geeks. It is a discussion about all things entertainment from movies and music to television and pop culture. We examine some of the more obscure aspects of the entertainment industry.
Insightful podcast by informative insights, a podcast network.
Speaker 2:[inaudible].
Speaker 3:Welcome to insights into teens, a podcast series, exploring the issues and challenges of today's youth. Your hosts are Joseph and Madison, Whalen, a father and daughter team making their way through the challenges of the teenage years.
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 4:welcome to insights into teens. This is episode 54 cheating in school. I'm your host, Joseph Whalen and my intelligent and responsible cohost, Madison Waylon.
Speaker 5:Hello everyone.
Speaker 4:How you doing today? Maddie? I'm okay. So how was your week this week? Kind of bad. Kind of bad. What was bad about it?
Speaker 5:I dunno, just stuff happened. Um, especially on to Tuesday that Tuesday was one of the worst days of the week.
Speaker 4:I feel like we should be doing a podcast about that instead of cheating in school. Really. Maybe we'll do it. Maybe you'll have a band week next week and we do a podcast on it. Here's the hoping. Yeah. Nice. So we are talking about cheating in school. Um, a problem that you haven't had. Nope. Or maybe you have and you don't realize. See, let's say, uh, we have some brief statistics. Let's talk about very brief, but alarming. We will talk about how people cheat. Then we will talk about why people cheat and we'll talk about what can happen when you cheat.
Speaker 5:Oh, I know a lot more about this because it gets way worse in middle school than it does in elementary. Let me just say,
Speaker 4:okay, well that sounds ominous. So are you ready to get into it? Why not? We're early and I probably shouldn't be tired. We are early and if this works out we'll try to do a little bit earlier each night. Each week rounds. Yeah. This isn't going to turn into a nightly podcast, although given how your days have been, it probably could. So. All right, let's get into what is cheating. So according to kids health.org, uh, cheating is when a person misleads, deceives or acts dishonestly on purpose at school. In addition to cheating on a test, a kid might cheat by stealing someone else's idea for a science project or by copying a book report off the internet and turning it in as if it's his or her original work. Um, so I'll ask you right off the bat, have you ever cheated in school? No, not that I know of. Based on that definition. Never. So you haven't cheated on tests, you haven't played your eyes, which is what the copying of the report would be? Nothing like that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We've, we've actually talked a lot about play during, in middle school and I've never done it.
Speaker 4:Okay. Well I'll make you know, a confession and say that when I was in school, I had cheated on a few occasions. Um, I wasn't necessarily aware that what I was doing was cheating. Uh, cause it usually came down to copying something. Now at the time the internet didn't exist. So when you had to do research on something, you went to the library and you pulled out books and I would take notes out of these books and I would write down verbatim what was in the books. And then I would cite the books as a resource and or a reference. And you know, I was always under the impression that that was all you needed to do. And, um, a couple of of teachers actually went and looked up the books and, and did the research and found out that I was plagiarizing the book. So it was one of those things where I was okay using that book and its materials a reference, but for me to copy it word for word, um, the idea was I was supposed to use it for reference, digest the information and then summarize my interpretation of that and I wasn't doing that and it kinda came as a surprise to me that what I was doing was wrong, but I was just at the time learning how to do research. Yeah. Um, so I was, I was technically guilty of cheating. Um, so we'll come back and look at statistics real quick and look at why or how people cheat. So would it surprise you to know that 58% of teens polled admitted to teaching on cheating on tests? Not really, no. This comes from edutopia.org site we haven't used in the past. I thought that was kind of the fact that they admitted that many people admitted to it. It doesn't surprise me that they did it, but admitting it I think is what was more surprising to me. Um, 64% admitted to plagiarism and it doesn't surprise me that that was, or because I think a lot of people may have phoned in the same boat that I did. Um, the one that was really interesting, and this was kind of vague, but they had 95% of teens polled admitted to quote unquote some form of cheating. Um, what do you think of those numbers? Is that alarming? Is that what you expect? What do you think?
Speaker 5:I mean, I'll start off with the 85%. Who admitted to cheating? 58. Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 6:Mmm.
Speaker 5:I'm honestly not surprised with the number of people cheating, but I am a bit surprised with how they actually admitted for the 64% who, um, were caught plagiarizing. Um, I'm not surprised that that's higher because a lot of teens plagiarized and they don't know that they are. So that makes more sense. Number, the 95 that, um, had some form of cheating, um,
Speaker 6:I can
Speaker 5:kind of tell because like you can like look up someone's answers or something like that. Um, and, and uh, and that's a form of um, cheating and there's like so many other ways that you could be cheating. And even though it just said some form, it's still a pretty big number. I mean, we don't know the whole logistics of all of the possible ways of how they could have cheated, but, um, that's a pretty big amount for all teens. Like only 5% have admitted to not even doing it.
Speaker 4:Right. So let me ask you this. Have you ever, you said you've never cheated[inaudible]. Have you ever been tempted to cheater or had what you thought was a reason to cheat either, um, to, to pass a test or to get an assignment done or anything like that? Have you ever been tempted to but decided not to do anything like that?
Speaker 5:Well, I'll go on with the assignment that's made, I'm going to base it off of homework.
Speaker 6:Mmm.
Speaker 5:When I was at aftercare, I couldn't do it because like there was barely anyone in my grade and like most of them were just younger than I was and they didn't even have the homework. So there was no real way I could even cheat. Plus now I can't even cheat when I do my homework because, well I do it at home and I'm, I don't have any other students in my house hopefully like to cheat off of. So I've never cheated on homework. I know that, um, for tests I don't like cheat because I B because there's also like a thing where if you can tell that some, like I'm one of the smart, I'm one of the smart kids, I'm sorry I'm a smart kid and I've known so. Yeah. And I've never really had a need to ever cheat. I'm kind of the person who kids might want to cheat on who might want to have cheat off of. Yeah. I'm sorry. Can't speak today
Speaker 4:cause you're not giving the test. Right. So they can't cheat on you.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, and I've actually heard that some people who know that someone else is cheating law for them. They put all the wrong answers and once they turn and once the person who's using them to cheat, um, turns, um, their paper and they go back and correct all their answers so they got up. Well, it's kind of what they deserve. I mean, we're going to go in a little later about all the punishments that it could have, but
Speaker 4:so you bring up, bring up an interesting point there about, about other people cheating on other people, targets of, of cheating. Has anyone ever approached you and asked if they could cheat on a task cheat and use your answers or could you help them on a task? Have you ever been approached to collaborate with someone who needs to cheat or wants to cheat?
Speaker 5:Well, I mean, there are students who like come up and ask'em what they missed, but that's not really a form of cheating. It's honestly like whenever they miss a day and it's like, for example, we have a calendar that's um, doing music and we have like this day in music where we, um, put a specific date and what happened on that date, um, for the day, um, today that that day was, sorry. It's hard to say. Um, and if you miss a day, well once you turn it in at the end of the cycle, it's a, um, test grade. It's supposed to be an easy test grade, but if you miss a day then um, you basically have to go to someone else. And that's basically kind of what's been going on. Like if someone misses a day and they need, um, information, they normally come to'em one of the other students and asks and asks for that information. But that's not necessarily cheating, it's just they missed a day and they need the information.
Speaker 4:So that information, when, when the kids are doing this, is that information given during class or is that something where you had to take the initiative and go look that information up to fill that in? Like a homework assignment?
Speaker 5:It's actually the information that's given in class. And even like the teachers, so teachers say like, if you ever missed a day or you have a blank, like, um, go ask another student because they're not going to repeat it.
Speaker 4:So then they, you
Speaker 5:the kids to do that who miss a day. So then that's, that's really not a case of cheating. What I'm talking about is you sit down in a classroom to take a test and you might have a kid looking over your shoulder or glancing from the desk next to you trying to write down your answers or they ask if they can do that. Has that ever happened to you? Not that I know of. No. We, uh, we started, we've been using dividers for a while now where like it divides the vision from anyone else. Um, and like you can't really look off the answers. Um, so I don't think I've ever had that kind of case. I mean, I might've had it when I was younger, but I don't know.
Speaker 4:I see. Interesting. So it sounds like you've really haven't been exposed to cheating all that much. Um, but it also sounds like your school takes precautions against that, which wasn't the case when I was in school. Um, cheating was pretty rampant when I was in school and, and you know, you had kids that were paying people to cheat off of them. Um, which I thought was kind of interesting. So we'll come back and we'll talk about how do people cheat and, uh, some of the implications of winning a cheat. So there's a number of different ways that you can cheat. And we talked about a few of them already. I'm sneaking answers to a test. Um, you know, I've seen situations where kids have come in with, uh, uh, answers written on their Palm and they would look at their Palm. Like there was one situation in high school where, uh, this one kid who was kind of a troubled kid, um, and he was having difficulty in his history class and he knew it was a multiple, multiple choice test. And, uh, he got a hand hand his hands on the answers and it was a, through D was the answers for each of those multiple choice. And he wrote them down on his, on the Palm of his hand, and he came in and he would look at his hand and he'd write the answers down all the way down. Um, so that's one way to sneak answers on a test. Um, another one is literally to look over someone's shoulder to get those answers. Um, another form of cheating is breaking the rules in a game or a contest. For instance. Um, one thing that I was exposed to in the past, not that I participated in, um, there are random drawings for instance, and you know, it's a 50, 50 chance. You pay a dollar and you get your name or your, your not your ticket put into a basket and it's picked out randomly. Well, eh, it, in this one particular instance, someone had decided that they were going to pick the name of their friend and they decided that we taking a little piece of tape, putting it on their friend's ticket that was handed in and taping that to the bottom. So they made a very good show of ruffling around in that Bo randomly, quote unquote randomly to pick it out. And they, in doing all that, they wound up finding the taped one at the bottom and pulling it out and got their friend's ticket number and the two of them then split the prize money in it. You know, they found out later on that they had cheated to do that and they wound up getting in trouble for another form of cheating is uh, pretending something is yours when it isn't. Um, and this is sort of plagiarism, right? So nowadays if with the internet you can go out there and, and since most courses, you know, K through 12 are standardized. Now there's a lot of people that publish their work. You know, if you read a term paper for instance, and you're very proud of it, you may publish it on a blog or put it out there for your family to read or something like that. And it gets out to the internet. Well, when it gets out to the internet, it's out there forever. And if the courses don't change from year to year, someone can go look up what the subject matter was for that term paper, find your term paper and basically copy the whole thing and hand it in and say that they wrote it, especially if it was a very good one. So that's another form of, of, of cheating there. Now, based on these examples, have you ever seen anything along these lines?
Speaker 5:I mean, I've never really seen anyone else do it. Um, most of the times when I was younger we were just like, have our story and we were just get quotes from there when we had to like cite evidence and now, and then when we started doing our argumentative essay, we would have to find an article online or on paper we have to cite the author and um, cite where we got it from and then we can put the quote and then we have to explain why the quote is important for the certain subject.
Speaker 4:Okay. Well how about with games and contests, you know, in recess or gym class or anything like that. Do you have any kids that are cheating or breaking the rules with daiquiris you tend to have a lot more formal rules, right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Um, I can definitely say, um, in gym class I could just see like how, like, how some of the kids would cheat. And it was mainly, let me just say, I'm not trying to point fingers the eighth grade and seventh grade boys. Okay. I just, yeah,
Speaker 4:I was not pointing a finger that was pouring in entire hands.
Speaker 5:It's just, I don't get it. They're so competitive and sometimes when they realize they're not going to win, they decide they're gonna cheat. And
Speaker 4:give me an example of when they cheat.
Speaker 5:Alrighty. Um, let's say,
Speaker 4:what sport were they typically cheated?
Speaker 7:Mmm.
Speaker 4:Is this a team sport thing? Is this a individual competition?
Speaker 5:I think it's mainly like, I think it would, Oh, I'll give you an example from today. Um, we were playing four squares. I'm in gym and the two bore the, well, the one way they do so for,
Speaker 4:remember change the names and protect the innocent.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, um, we were playing four squares and um, it's basically every man for himself. Um, you basically after there were four squares and you have any usable, you have to try to keep the ball out of your area. You can't let it bounce in your area twice. Um, you can't, you can't, um, hit it and have it go out of the um, um, area that you're playing in and you can hit it in the air and it can't hit it more than once. Um, so yeah, and there were two boys we were playing with and it was just clear that they, like they decided to team up basically that's a way that they can cheat. Um, an individual games team ups, that's a way you can cheat. And the two boys were just going at it and hitting the balls really hard and the way. And when one of them would be, um, let's just say they're in box one, which is the one where they serve. Like they would serve two box three really hard and it would cause the box three person to get out to because of how hard they didn't. And I could just tell that they, that was their intention.
Speaker 4:So, so they're kind of uh, cheating through collusion at this point where they're colluding together to work together in an event where they're not supposed to be teaming up.
Speaker 5:I know. Yeah. Okay. And it seemed for some reason that they were just aiming for the girls and honestly why? Like they were literally just telling each other like go for blank, like seriously. And it was normally the girl's name.
Speaker 4:So how does that make you feel, especially if you're on the receiving end of that, if you're a victim of it, how does it make you feel as an individual?
Speaker 5:It makes me feel like are jokes, like not only are they teaming up, hitting the ball really hard to try to get everyone else out just to show that they're the vectors of the game. Right. But they're also kind of being sexist at the same time.
Speaker 4:Yes, they are indeed.
Speaker 5:Like, literally, they're just, there was another boy who was playing who was not part of them. And like he was never really aimed for like for some reason it was just the girls. And whenever one of the girls got out, that would just keep repeating you're out, you're out, you're out and tease them, which honestly, it just,
Speaker 4:yeah. And that's the thing, like at that age you think they'd be a little bit more mature. Um, but yeah, the boys aren't. Um, so that's one of the consequences. So when, when people cheat, it's not fair to the other people. Right. And you know, kids who studied for a test, for instance, uh, who were the true or, or who were the true wears of the game, who abided by the rules. Um, those kids are the ones that wind up, you know, getting the short end of the stick proverbially. Um, so you as a good student who gets straight A's and you work hard and you study, you don't take shortcuts. And that's really what cheating is, is it's kind of a shortcut. It's the easy way to try to get ahead.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, basically, I'm going to throw in an example. Um, you have a reading assignment and you like have an entire month to get her done. Well, you wait until the final week. If you read the book and then you just basically write down like you do that and you're basically done with it. Like, well that's one of the shortcuts of it. But like how you said before and I, um, um, last podcast, I think you, there were like little, um, what were they cliff notes and um, you add the whole summer to read the book and then you'd have questions the next, um, year and what you did, you didn't, um, you and your friends didn't read the book and you just, you use, um, new the cliff notes and you use that to[inaudible] on the 10th.
Speaker 4:That's kind of a form of cheating. Um, you know, it's, it's tempting to cheat because it makes difficult. Things seem easy. Um, you know, getting all the right answers on a task. You know, you feel good when you get all the right answers on a test. Um, but it doesn't solve the problem because you still need to know the answers because you may take that test now and have all the answers. Well, chances are that subject matter is going to come up later in the year, right. And you're going to have to pass it and you're not going to necessarily have all the answers then because you cheat at this time.
Speaker 8:Mmm.
Speaker 4:And otherwise you have to cheat again. And if you cheat all the way through school, what happens? You get out of school and you don't know anything. Um, and, and there are people who cheat all the way through school and that's how they have to get through school. And when they get out into the real world and they find out that, you know, you don't have that smart student that you can go copy their answers from or get them to do your homework. You know, you realize at some point in time you're going to be a productive member of society. You need to know something. You need to have some scale or some knowledge. And that's how I ended up working at McDonald's. Well and I don't, I don't want to knock people that work at McDonald's, they work very hard there. But you know, there, if you're happy with that, then more power to you. That's wonderful. But there, it's a limited career path, right? I know you're only ever going to go so far it at a company like McDonald's and if that suits your lifestyle, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But if you want to do more ambitious things and make more money or do something that's, you know, working at McDonald's is hard work. You know, the people that work there, they work very hard, they earn their money. Um, but that's difficult work to do for long periods of time. Um, so skilled labor is something that one, a lot of people have a passion for. You know, I work with computers, I work in technology and management and I very much enjoy what I do and the company that I work for. Um, and it's not that I don't work hard. I work this week, I wanted very hard. Um, but it's not manual labor. You know, I'm out not out digging ditches. So like your body can only do that kind of work for so long before it just doesn't work anymore. Um, so if you want to be able to get a job that you can do longterm and that you enjoy and it's, it's something that you're proud of, you need that, develop those skills and if you cheat through school, it's going to set you up for a pattern of failure moving through school. Is that something that you agree with?
Speaker 5:Uh, yeah, I definitely agree with it. Like if you don't put in the hard work and effort that it takes to be a good student, then you really don't deserve to have any of the credit. Especially since if you can even like if wa at one point you're like almost through school and you cheat on the final exam, well if you're caught and then they learn that you've been cheating this entire time, you're, the consequences are going to be plentiful. Like even if you cheat once, the consequences are like terrible in my school. Like I can't stress this enough. Cheating is terrible. If he ever tried cheating, don't, I mean, some people on occasions do it. Unconventionally like plagiarizing, um, that's been tossed around on how, not to plagiarize for a while now, but like, just even having the nerve to cheat. I mean, I can understand some students who want to pass, but if you want to pass dual, the actual work don't have, don't like take the credit away from someone else. They deserve that. You need to work on trying to deserve it for yourself.
Speaker 4:I agree. So we'll come back. I, we'll talk about why the students cheat and we'll give you a chance to take a breath and calm down a little bit there.
Speaker 5:Cool.
Speaker 4:So some kids cheat because they're busy, right? Or they're lazy.
Speaker 9:Mmm.
Speaker 4:You know, you have a lot of kids to get tied down today with a lot of extracurricular activity. You know, I want to go to soccer and I want to go to the dance and I want to go hang out with my friends. Um, so they may not have time to do their homework. Um, they might just be lazy. They might just want to come home and watch TV. Uh, so that's one reason that kids tend to cheat. Uh, other kids might feel they can't pass the test without cheating. Maybe they just don't understand the work. They don't understand the subject matter.
Speaker 5:And at that point, I think you should just try to at least talk to the teacher unless you're like me and you're, for some reason you can't ask the teacher because you don't feel like bothering them, even though you know, that's their job.
Speaker 4:Right. And like, you know, there are situations where maybe you were sick, maybe you had a couple of days where you was sick and you came back and there was a test, uh, or maybe there was a test and the teacher said, you know, we're going to have a quiz tomorrow and go home and study and you go home and you know, maybe you eat something for dinner. It doesn't make you feel very good and you can't study afterwards. Um, and you come in the next day and you didn't study for whatever reason.
Speaker 9:Mmm.
Speaker 4:It would be easier to just talk to the teacher. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean like then you, most teachers are pretty flexible and they can like have you take the test another day, like the next day and that's um, a good thing. Um, because like some kids don't have, didn't have the timeness study, didn't know they had to study, were sick and couldn't go. Like if you miss a test day, like you can like ask the teacher and you can take it the next day.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean your teachers are not there to be disciplinarians and crack down on you and make your life miserable. They're there to teach you, you know, they're there to ensure that you learn and, and they're trying to help you. So if you have extenuating circumstances that you come in and you couldn't, you know, study for whatever reason, what's the worst they can do? If you ask if you can hold off taking test, say no, you know, they're not going to yell at you or anything. So it's better to go that route and be honest and ask for maybe additional help. Just like, if you don't think you can pass the test, maybe you're, you're taking, you know, I'll throw one out there. I always had trouble with, uh, trigonometry. Okay. I always had trouble with math and, uh, I just, some math I just didn't get, I couldn't wrap my brain around it and you know, I would, I would go to, you know, take extra time with the teacher. You know, I'd, I'd stop in after school and stuff and my, my one math teacher was exceptionally forgiving with that and really went out of his way to help me out. And that stuck with me and the rest of my life, it gave me a sense of, uh, compassion and charity because he was willing to do that for me. Um, and as a result, I passed that on to other people. You know, even with this podcast, you know, with us trying to help people with this podcast. So if you have trouble with stuff like that, don't be afraid to ask your teacher or your parents, your parents. Although I'm not very helpful with, you know, math today because someone decided to completely reinvented. But you know, I don't want to go off on a tangent with that, but you know, your parents can help and if they can't help you understand, then they can probably get you the help that you need. They can contact the school, they can talk to the teacher, they can maybe see if there are straight a students out there that, that are willing to tutor you too. Um, that's certainly another option is that you can get peer tutoring in most cases too. Um, so I, I guess the bottom line is there's a lot of options out there before you, you should feel that you need to resort to cheating. Yeah. Um, Patty, you think cheating would make you feel if you, you did cheat, let's say you, you cheated on a task that you knew you weren't gonna pants cause you didn't study. How do you think that would make you feel?
Speaker 5:Um, I can definitely sense that afterwards. I would just feel like constant guilt for it. Um, because even like figuratively speaking, I would never have the nerve to even do it. Like I couldn't like talk back to the teacher. It's like the same nerve that I couldn't have talking back to a teacher. Like I don't even have that kind of strength did do it. And like cheating's the same thing. Like I know I've been taught that cheating is bad along with like a bunch of other things that are bad and I've never had the nerve to try to do it. Like I'm not like that one kid who's always disciplined and, um, is like the juvenile delinquent guy. I'll just say I have always tried to follow the rules and even if I accidentally broke some, I always try to fix my mistakes. Like you always say daddy. Um, and I've never really ever wanted to do anything bad. Like I honestly have never tried to be that kind of student who would constantly cheat is always rude to others. I don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to be the one who's always talking back to the teachers. I don't want to be that kind of person who is failing because they don't really care about this, about the material. I do care about the material and I do care about my future and I also care about, I'm also caring and considerate of other's feelings and I would never have the nerve to try to take someone else's hard work that they earned and try to pass it off as my own. I would never want to do that to someone else because not only are you, when you're cheating, you're not only going to be hurting yourself if you're caught, but you're also going to be hurting the person who you're cheating off of the one who did all the hard work, the one who is actually the better student than you, the one who, who gets straight A's, the one who would never want to cheat because they don't have to and I don't and I do. If I ever needed, if I have, if there was ever an instance where I could have cheated, I wouldn't. I would try to go and get help and if I ever did cheat, I would just probably feel as though I would have the sense of guilt almost my entire life. Like yeah, you kind of have like have your few memories of cheating in school. Like sometimes when you cheat and you're like a straight a student and you cheat wants it, probably don't need to stick with you for the rest of your life and you're going to be guilty for it.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. So we will come back and we will talk about what can happen if you cheat. Many kids feel tempted to cheat once in a while. Most resist and do the work. Some kids cheat once and feel so bad that they never do it again. Like you said, others get caught and decide it wasn't worth it. Unfortunately, some kids start cheating and feel like they can't stop. They, they get this victorious feel that they've gotten one over on the system or they've gotten one over on the adults and stuff and they feel proud about, um, and others, you know, to them, cheating is kind of like lying, right. Once you do it once, it's kinda hard to stop. You know, if you tell a lie, you don't want people to find out that you lied. And as a result you often wind up telling another lie to cover that one up and another lie to cover that one up. And cheating works the same way. If you cheat and you don't learn the subject matter, then the next time that comes up on a test you have to cheat again. And then again, and then you have to cheat bigger and you have to cheat more often. And it's sort of this spiraling downward hole that if you don't ever take the time to learn either the material that you're cheating about or the lessons of cheating, then it's one of those things that sticks with you forever. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. And you'll just end up keep going down the staircase until there's no stopping you anymore. You get out of school and you realize you know nothing and you basically are just kicked in that hole.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And you know, kids who cheat, maybe worried about getting caught and whether they're called or not, they meet, may feel guilty or embarrassed or ashamed at having to resort to cheating. Um, even if they feel fine and don't get caught, it doesn't mean it's okay. Just because you got away with it doesn't mean it's okay to do it. Um, and if you see someone cheating or someone asked to copy your work, you know, you need to tell the teacher because if you don't, then you're an accessory to it. You're an accomplice. Um, no, no one ever came to me to cheat. I was never, you know, a straight a student. Um, but I saw what happened in school and a lot of times, uh, it was, it was usually kids who were trying to fit in. You know, a lot of times a straight a students aren't, the smart ones don't socialize as well sometimes as right as, as like the athletic kids. Right. You know, the athletic kids tend to have their little cliques and they're more friendly and they do more fun things. And the kids who want to learn and are there to learn, which all kids should be tend to be a little less social. So what happens is as these who are the fun kids go out and have fun, they don't want to do the work. So they cheat and they sort of lure the smart kids in by giving them that false impression of of being social with them and being friends with them and being liked. And that's kind of like thinking it was a bribe. You know, if they're not outright paying you to cheat off of you, then they're, they're falsely giving you this friendship and trying to make you feel good and be part of the in crowd so that they can cheat off of you.
Speaker 5:Honestly, if anyone would ever do that to me, I would just like, I wouldn't really socialize with like those athletic kids cause I can kind of tell how they are. If they're asking you, like, if they're telling you like, you can be friends with me, if you let me copy your homework, I'm just going to be like, why would I want to be friends with someone who only wants to use me so they can actually pass the classes? Honestly, I don't even want to be friends with those kinds of people, let alone allowing them to even cheat off me
Speaker 4:and, well, and, and that's a very good point. And I think it's good that you, you identify, you know, bad elements like that and stay away from them.
Speaker 5:Unfortunately it's not the same for everyone.
Speaker 4:No, it's not. And you know, one of the other things that kids who cheat might run into was F you know, this feeling of disappointing someone else, you know, your parents find out that you're cheating. How do you think mommy and daddy would feel profound? Not that you are cheating to get the grades you do.
Speaker 5:You'd be definitely disappointed.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we'd be very disappointed. And, and you know, your teachers would be disappointed. Uh, your teacher speak very highly of you because of how, how well you do in school and how dedicated you order your work. Um, and if you were discovered to be a cheater, people might not trust you anymore. And if there's one thing you need to get through life, it's trust and reputation. And if you wind up getting a reputation as a cheater or a liar in this case, you know, you're lying about cheating at this point. It does a number on your reputation and that really sticks with you through life.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And people will end up disrespecting you, will respect you less. Like we had a whole podcast on respect and like as we said before, the example of basically you're think of respect as money. Yeah. If you are a good person and are helpful to others and show that you genuinely care about others and your own future, you are in more money. But if you only care about yourself and you don't and you don't and you become a basically a cheater in school, um, and you just become a complete jerk and have a really bad attitude, you lose more money. A K a, you lose more respect. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, respect, like we said in the past, respect is like currency. It's very difficult to earn, but it's very easy to squander and cheating and lying are very quick way to squander any respect that you've earned from people. Um, but another consequence of cheating is cheaters really cheat themselves, don't they? You know, because they don't make an honest attempt to learn as much as they can. Um, like if they cheat their way through a spelling test, for instance, you won't learn how to spell. Um, and that catches up with you when you get older. Like by the, if you cheat your way through high school, cause you start early on by the time you graduate, you know, a lot of kids want to go to college. Well, in order to go to college you need to take standardized test SATs or whatever you taking. Um, those tests are very difficult to cheat on the conditions under which you take them, make them very difficult to cheat on. So if you've never learned any of the material or you cheated on, on certain subjects, it, it comes due when you have to take these tests to get into college. If you want to go to college, um, or if you don't want to go to college, if you want to do a trade craft, if you want to be an electrician where you want to be a carpenter, you know, say you want to be a carpenter. Old carpenters have a lot of skills that they have to learn through school. Um, math is one of them. You know you don't learn proper math and you go out and get a job as a carpenter and you're building a deck for instance, and you don't calculate the weight that that can handle or how you're cutting certain angles and you build a deck and you give it to someone and turn it over to them and get paid for that job and that deck fails because you didn't know what you were doing at that point in time. You're liable for that. It comes back to haunt you in a way that getting caught in school for cheating. You never consider.
Speaker 5:Yeah, like that's basically an act of karma. Like if you do get caught cheating, which at some point you are going to get caught, like it's basically button you in the back.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well I mean you cheated through high school because you didn't feel like doing the math cause it was too hard to do. So you cheated your way through. So you don't know how to do math. But you happen to get a job as a carpenter. You build this deck, the deck falls in, somebody gets hurt or God forbid someone gets killed. That's on you at that point for, for cheating your way through. And that failure, I can guarantee you, you never thought about that 10 years earlier when you, you cheated that first time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like if you cotton height, if you're caught in school you're lucky. But if you get caught in a drop like Thad, you could be the cause of someone having a permanent injury or even someone's death. Right.
Speaker 4:So you know, it doesn't, in the long run it doesn't pay to cheat a short term that you may see. You may think that there are goals there, but there are sacrifices that you're making. You're giving up so much in order to achieve those short term goals. Yeah. You want to get home from school and go out and play with your friends or go watch TV or play video games. But what's the first thing you do when you get home from school?
Speaker 5:I do my homework
Speaker 4:exactly. And everything else comes secondary to that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And it'd be honest sometimes if I do have like a rough day, I'm kind of guilty of a little bit of overworking myself. I think it's basically like mama tells me to go sit down for a bit and like pet a cat and then go to my homework thing is I don't, I always go straight to my homework and I just say, I don't need to relax. I just need to get my homework done.
Speaker 4:You had your priorities right? You know, you work through these things and then you have recreation after that. And that's really how it is because the work that you put in today is what pays off years from now. And as a teenager, I never saw that. You know, I never envisioned that, you know, if I'm going to study extra to get this passed, this testing, get a grade, a good grade in this class, you know, it's, it's hard to conceptualize the impact that, that kind of work ethic early on at 13 1415 what that, how that pays off for you in the long run. And it does because you learn more, you learn better priority control, you learn better working ethics and everything that you learn in that process is something that pays off a D. and you know, you, you are pretty kind of psyched out going to the new school because you know, you are getting a lot of work. It was a lot harder. The teachers seemed a lot harder on you. They were a lot more expectations on you and, and all of that is a way to get you ready for real life. And my making that investment in the effort now it pays off down the line. Um, and it's hard for kids to see that, but you have to understand that it does. So the choices you make now may seem insignificant to you, but they have huge ripples throughout the rest of your life and, and the decisions you make today ultimately define the person that you become in 10 years. So it's important to keep that in mind when it comes to the temptation of cheating and everyone's tempted at some point in time to cheat. If you haven't been tempted yet, you will be eventually. But you have to understand the consequences of those decisions. Just like the consequences of coming home and doing your homework and working through whatever issues you encountered today to get your homework done and then relax and try and take it off your mind. There's consequences of that and they're positive consequences. So we will come back and we will get your closing remarks and shadows go for closing remarks.
Speaker 5:Alrighty. So to everyone watching cheating is terrible. Never do it. I'm not done. I'm elaborating on it. Thank you very much. Alrighty. So cheating. You're going to be tempted to do it at some point. Everyone is. But the important thing to know is that you don't take that temptation. Sadly, some teenagers, most teenagers, um, have tooken that temptation and there are consequences to it. I mean, heck, there are like so many consequences for whenever one of us, one of the students in my school cheats. Like even if they plagiarize on accident, like to them it's no accident. You get punished for it no matter what. Like seriously, I can't stress this enough. Cheating is terrible. Do not do it. Like if you don't get caught early on, it can have lasting effects in the future. And if you do get caught then well there could have like pretty major consequences. And even though the consequences are pretty bad now, they get worse as it goes on. So don't cheat actually do the work because it'll better benefit you in the future. Okay. That's all I had to say. No shout outs. Um, I guess we'll just give a shout out to I guess everyone who taught me not to cheat like the school system, you and mommy and my teachers, like you all showed me that cheating is terrible and how it can have consequences.
Speaker 4:Okay, good shout out. Uh, I think that is all we had today, but before we go, we do want to bug you to contact us with your feedback, suggestions, what you'd like to see on the show. You can email us@commentsandinsightsintothings.com. You can hit us on Twitter at insights underscore things. Uh, you can check out all of our video, uh, podcasts on youtube.com/insights into things. Uh, you can get our audio podcasts on podcast, on insights into teens.com. You can us out on facebook@facebookdotcomslashinsightsintothingspodcastandonthewebwhereyoucangetallofourvideoandaudioaswellastranscriptionsandshownotesatwwwdotinsightsintothings.com
Speaker 5:to watch us live on Twitch.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 5:we also have two other podcasts and to entertainment hosted by you and mommy and insight into tomorrow, a monthly podcast hosted by you and my brother, Sam. Excellent. I think that's it. Alrighty, everyone. Good night
Speaker 10:right.