If you’re expecting the usual lamentations about student behavior, you may be disappointed. Instead of disparaging “students today,” etc., etc., I invite you to join me in third grade.
My teacher was Mrs. Wooley. I’m not making this up: her name actually was Mrs. Wooley, which I viewed as a gift from the gods of comedy. When I found out a couple of weeks before school started, I longed for the moment that some classmate would complain about her, so I could say, “Yep. She’s a woolly booger.”
In fairness, Mrs. Wooley was a great teacher: She told us the truth when we didn’t know what we were doing, and she was not especially kind, but she was committed to doing whatever it took to equip us to meet her expectations. And that commitment included keeping me in relative solitary confinement, in my own desk at the front of the room, right next to hers.
Also, Mrs. Wooley gave a lot of quizzes.
One late fall day on the playground during recess, I listened as some of my classmates complained about a recent geography quiz. I had made 100% on the quiz, and I motioned for my comrades to huddle together so I could share a secret: I had found a way to cheat and get away clean, without detection. Even better, I was willing to share my fool-proof method with them.
The next opportunity — which, given the placement of my desk, had to be another playground rendezvous — they brought me their quiz papers, and I brought the geography textbook. I showed them what I’d noticed: Each and every term on the last several quizzes, I pointed out, appeared in the textbook in bold type. Mrs. Wooley was foolishly selecting these bold terms — most likely through laziness, I speculated — for no good reason other than the fact that they stood out. Low-hanging fruit, in an otherwise busy teacher’s life.
Once I had discovered this secret, I told them, I always knew — in advance — which terms she would pick, and in two months, I had never been wrong. Sure, I had learned a few extra terms — she didn’t use all of them — but what a small price to pay for quiz prescience! I invited my comrades, in the most conspiratorial tone I could whisper, to perform an experiment. When each had nodded solemnly enough to satisfy me, and I had looked around us for witnesses, I ceremoniously pulled out a list of terms that, I predicted, would appear on the very next quiz. We were in this conspiracy together, and they all copied my list.
Imagine the looks we exchanged when Mrs. Wooley, handing back the next quizzes, commented on the vast and unexpected improvement many members of the class had managed, even singling out some of my comrades for special commendation. She gave me a knowing nod as she joined me at the front of the room, and I blushed with guilt.
Soon my list was no longer necessary, and in time, my secret passed around the entire class. I never confessed to Mrs. Wooley, and I admit that I carried a bit of that guilt as I progressed. At least, until several years later, when, with the maturity that only junior high school can give you, I realized that, in fact, I wasn’t cheating. I was — well, not to put too fine a point on it — using the resources of a textbook to study.
Yes, by seventh grade, I’d seen a lot more textbooks, and each time, I would look for clues and stratagems, like those bold terms that turned up on Mrs. Wooly’s geography quizzes. And I’d discovered other things about books: The secret meaning of a table of contents, for instance, and the utter magic of an index at the back. I loved index entries with multiple page numbers: the more page numbers, the more magic could be worked. Some textbooks, I found, even had chapter summaries, which made my hunt for bold terms in the chapter seem quaint.
One day in a seventh grade French class (Thanks again, Madam Wheeler!), I was the first to come up with an unusual conjugation by consulting an irregular verb chart on the inside back cover of our textbook. It dawned on me that these sacred objects were not handed down off some Mt. Sinai of Textbooks, but were actually written by people who had at least some interest in student learning. Hence all those study tools. You know, for learning things.
This little story raises an interesting question. It’s certainly possible that I was too busy instigating trouble to absorb my teachers’ instruction about study tools embedded in textbooks. But it’s also possible — I prefer this explanation — that it simply didn’t occur to anyone to explain how to use a book. It’s like indoor plumbing: you’re expected to catch on as you go.
After that French class I took a more mature view of the teleology of textbooks, but I never left behind the value of cheating. When I got to university, I made a bit of a name for myself as a tutor — music theory, languages, math — you name it, I could help. My 100% never-fail approach? “Cheat.”
Note the quotation marks.
Let’s say you’re facing a big exam. Your grade is riding on it, so the stakes are high: Pretend you’re going to cheat. Really, like, get committed to cheating. What will you put on your cheat sheet? First, you have to know what’s available, so you’re going to have a hard look at the material. Efficiency (and size) will compel you to ask what the professor is likely to put on the exam, so you’re going to have to select, as efficiently as possible, the key pieces of information that will do you the most good. And of course, you’re going to organize your cheat sheet so it’s easy to follow. What’s the point of cheating if your own cheat sheet is confusing and disorganized?
If you really take this seriously, you’ll be totally ready to cheat, and you won’t need to. Nothing helped me anticipate exams like planning to cheat.
It’s peculiar, isn’t it? The more I connived to “cheat” on an exam, the more I started to think exactly like — a professor.
