Poor lesson

To the editor:

I was saddened to read in Thursday’s Journal-World of a Piper High School biology teacher who resigned after the school board forced her to change the grades of students she suspected of plagiarizing a class project. After the incident, the article quotes the teacher as saying, “I went to my class and tried to teach the kids, but they were whooping and hollering and saying, ‘We don’t have to listen to you any more.'”

We, as parents and community leaders, do a tremendous disservice to our young people when we condone sloppy, if not dishonest, academic work. One can imagine what goes on in the minds of parents in these sorts of situations: “If Johnny fails biology, his GPA will be ruined and he won’t get that scholarship to that prestigious university.”

In this case, the parents complained to the school board, and the school board, probably afraid of upsetting parents, reversed the teacher’s decision to fail the students. (It is interesting here to note that the school board decided to give the students partial credit for the assignment. This would seem to indicate that the board thought the teacher’s suspicions were at least somewhat on target.)

What appears to be the lesson here for students? It is that you can not only get away with substandard, dishonest work but that if you call on your connections (in this case, parents) you can actually mock the person who exposed your fraudulent work in the first place. Unfortunately, a similar pattern often continues when students graduate from high school and enroll in our universities. There they are likely to find research-focused professors and administrators overly concerned about tuition money who are loath to spend time making waves to slow down students on their great march to graduation. This culture of placation really runs amuck when outrageously abrasive misdeeds, like those at Enron, are perpetrated. Later we are eager to point fingers at government leaders and heads of major corporations and ask, “How could they have become so arrogant and dishonest?”

Doug Nickel, instructor,

Baker University,

Baldwin