From what I have read from Freakonomics the most controversial topic to me would be how some teachers cheat. Before reading the chapter about how some teachers cheat, I never suspected that teachers actually cheat in order to help themselves. If they ever cheated, I thought they would do it to help the student, but not to help themselves. I realized that the teachers that cheat can be very selfish as they are cheating because they have incentives. The incentives usually involve money or keeping their job. This topic really opened my mind to reality.
If a teacher cheated I thought it would involve giving the students hints to the correct answers, but I never realized or thought that a teacher would go into a students test and erase the wrong answers and substitute them with the correct answers. This is not only cheating, but it is fooling the students and their parents into thinking that they did well on the test when they actually did poorly.
I found it very interesting in determining if a teacher has cheated or not in the book. They took a look at the answer string and they found that a majority of the students in the class with a cheating teacher all got the same questions right. What that meant was that the teacher went into the students tests and changed about a string of 15 questions to the correct answers as it would be to suspicious if he changed all the answers. This chapter definitely opened my mind to things that could actually happen in the real world.
I thought the same thing as I read this chapter. Teachers cheating was looked at in a new perspective and showed that while helping themselves, they were even more corruptly cheating their students. The teachers helped themselves not only by gaining the incentives of having their students score well but also by fooling the students and their parents into believing the teacher was actually a good one. It's surprising that teachers, who students are supposed to rely on and trust, can easily be the ones to take advantage of them. This chapter also made me wonder how many teachers and schools are doing this and have not been caught if so many in just the Chicago school system were found guilty.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this chapter, it really does open up a new perspective like Eva said. It shows that these things do happen in our country, and in doing so, it not only gives the teachers a bad name, but the school they taught at as well. A parent doesn't want to send their kid to a school that a teacher got cheating in. What if they weren't the only teacher cheating and the others just haven't been caught yet? It also affects the students because they trust the teachers and if one is caught cheating, then they lose that trust, and they might also realize that they aren't that smart because those 100's they been getting all year weren't actually hundreds. This chapter did open your eyes to the world around you.
ReplyDeleteI was also very surprised at teachers cheating. Like you said giving students clues to answers would be the way I would expect a teacher to cheat. But the way that they changed answers on tests was something I never thought would happen. It just shows you that some people will do anything to get more money.
ReplyDeleteReading each chapter in Freakonomics opens my eyes to the layer under the world of today. Teacher cheating seems highly improbable because teachers are the ones who instill the fact that cheating is morally wrong. In the past I have had only great teachers who will make the class take a hard test to weed out those who new the material and those who didn't. The grades were earned ourselves and the teacher did nothing to change them but use them as pieces of evidence to motivate us further on.
ReplyDeleteGoing on to what Michael said teacher cheating can inflict the trust factor for students. How does a student know he is doing well enough in class if his ability is being changed by the one who is teaching him?
I think it's kind of sickening to think that these people, who are in positions of trust and respect would do this. I think this spike in teacher cheating highlights the problems with high-stakes testing since it seems to bring out the worst in some people because of the prospect of financial gain, or the fear of losing their job that drives them to cheat.
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