There’s a lot of temptation in the world today to do things to advance yourself. There’s a lot of temptation in academia to do whatever it takes to succeed. I told my class last night about cheating, about how students have cheated and about how they have cheated each other, as I warned them about allowing cheaters to get away with it. And then I told them a story about one of my proudest moments about cheating. You see today, it seems that morality and virtue and ethics and propriety are to be discarded at any time if you can justify it to advance yourself. One day, years ago, a student tried the trope on me.
Back in 2015, I was teaching all the same lecture and lab classes. I had all the same students which was good for continuity and familiarity. Unfortunately, familiarity brings its own risks. One night during lab, after I’d given a particularly tough exam earlier that week, one of my female students approached me. She told me that she would do “anything” to get an A in my class. I said, “Anything eh?” as I rubbed my beard. “Anything” she responded, seductively. “Then why don’t you do the homework I assign?” You see, by this point, she had failed to submit any work for three homework assignments, totalling 75 points of the total score, bringing her down nearly an entire letter grade. She said anything, but not that.
We all know what she wanted. Even her lab partner, a female herself, laughed as this student stared at me in stunned silence. She had no idea what had just happened because the conversation didn’t go as she foresaw it in her head. The partner told me later that this student had been sleeping her way through college and that I was probably the first instructor on whom she’d tried this where it didn’t work. I knew this young lady didn’t want me, and truth is I didn’t really want her either, so what she was clandestinely and suggestively offering didn’t interest me one bit.
The other girl let me mention her name when I self reported the event. Of course the student claimed that I made HER the offer to give her an A if she performed some acts. The investigation ended quietly and I was cleared, but I think back on that girl who was shocked when a man she viewed as beneath her rejected her ovations. It is not the first time, and it will sadly probably not be the last.
I have plenty of weaknesses and weak moments. Ask my summer class this term and they’ll tell you I make at least one mistake in class each time we meet. Sometimes I’m very lonely, and given my state of mind at the time, I would have been about as vulnerable to this then as I ever have been. For some reason, I made the right call, and I made it in a way that made everyone except her laugh. I get some smug satisfaction out of knowing that a below average guy turned down an above average girl. In truth though I knew she wasn’t really interested in me, and if you’re not interested in me it won’t be enjoyable for either of us.
People sell themselves short sometimes. You are worth more than you think you are. It’s not your education or your wealth or your looks or your “confidence”. It’s your identity as a child of God, and I wasn’t about to go back before the judgement bar of the great Jehovah and have to recall that I took advantage of a young lady once in return for lying about her score. Sounds like two sins to me. It’s hard sometimes to resist, but when you realize that people are not tempting you because they care about YOU it gets easier, and I’m old enough to know when someone is really interested or just pulling my chain. Of course, I hope one day a young lady who is pretty WILL take interest in me. Until then, I can proudly preen about how, once I find her, I respected her and myself and that student by not falling prey to sophistry.
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