Reaction Paper On Students Cheating Essay, Research Paper

While reading Generation What? Connecting with Today’s Youth I found myself disagreeing with some of the points made by author Carol Tell. I am a mix between a Generation X-er and this new un-name generation. However, I did agree with a few ideas. I mostly definitely disagree with the statistics stating, “9 out of 10 teachers say that cheating is a problem.”

Here is my argument, if they knew effective teaching methods, we wouldn’t cheat. To back this up, I have a great example. In high school, I chose to take Italian as my language, being that I am Italian and come from a background where a dialect is used on a daily basis. My teacher (who I had for Italian I, II and III) never taught the class well. She would yell at us constantly for not understanding what she was instructing. And then she would wonder why no one did well on exams. I do admit to making a cheat sheet for a few of her tests and quizzes, I did this after seeking help and tutoring from my parents. So, in rebut to this argument, I can clearly state that if a teacher wanted to feel that cheating wasn’t a problem in the classroom, they would have to understand and meet the needs of their students.

But, a point that I can understand is when Tell states that “youth are less violent, take better care of themselves…etc.” The only time one hears of a violent teen is in the rarely occurring school shootings, in which adults classify us as being violent. If society looked at our population as a whole, they would see that juvenile crime and teen pregnancy have both dropped and that teen drug use has declined.

We are being judged for events caused by a small amount of the teen population. For instance, two teens rampage through a school killing 14 of their classmates, now the whole teen population is looked at as horrible people. Some, like I, just want to get through life without having a label stapled to their shirt. The bad seeds, if you will, are the ones that rain on our parade.