My cousin sent me this article to read. To summarize, it’s about a teacher who was illiterate up to the age of 48. He had graduated high school and college through cheating and working the system. He taught his students through oral and visual exercises and if anything needed to be read, he’d get other people to do it.
This level of deceit is quote despicable, in my opinion. How can you call yourself a teacher when you can barely do what your students are doing? I really don’t have many words for this kind of behavior other than words of disgust, really. I know that he shaped up and started taking literacy courses, but to fool people for that long? It really despises me.
What do you make of this? How would you feel if this was your teacher? I mean, you go to school with the assumption that your teachers know so much more about a topic than you do and they have done so by studying, by research, by gaining knowledge. To find out that this teacher had fooled everyone, which I suppose you can give him some credit for being able to do, it’s just really disturbing, you know?
What are your thoughts on this?
(Does not exist - for you math nerds)
So I’ve been reading Freakonomics as a class textbook (one of two, don’t worry) for a while and it got me really thinking about the things that people do.
It basically all summed down to the point where people do what they do because of the incentive. People lie because of many reasons, but it’s mostly for some sort of good result (though there are cases that would refute this statement of mine). People lie because they don’t want to hurt anybody, they lie because what they are doing will hurt somebody, they lie because they don’t have the heart to tell the person what is really going on.
I remember as a child, I would try and disobey my father by being sneaky. Well, he was sneaky too because he would always find out, but he would wait for the right time to catch me in the act instead of confront me. I always remembered that although what I was doing was a bad thing (or something that he didn’t want me to do), he was more disappointed at the fact that I had to lie. That was my father, always ashamed that I had to resort to such things.
What I remember most about what I’ve read so far is how far people go for incentives. Teachers have been known to cheat, sumo wrestlers included. Real Estate agents have been known to use their expertise to their advantage, withholding information that might be valuable to a potential buyer or purposely creating manipulative ads.
People do so much to lie, but is it really worth it in the end? Now, I’m not saying that there’s someone out there that doesn’t lie and I have been known to do my fair share of distorting or bending the truth, but there are just some things that a person should not withhold from another, you know? But how can you judge or measure the severity of a lie? Does it depend on how upset it makes you feel? Does it depend on the act that was covered up? Or is it just the lie in general that is awfully damaging?
Either way, I think that although it may hurt the person to tell the truth, it’s better to say it upfront and from you than for the person to find out from another person or through another means. It always hurts more when the person or people you care about are lying to you.
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