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?
As I was leaving my doctor’s session today, he brought up a very interesting point. He mentioned that what I was doing, it was similar to what my mother does.
See, I’ve always kind of looked down upon my mother’s actions to exploit and to get as much as she can. She always signs up for those Christmas toy drives in order to get the free clothes and return them at the stores for credit/money. She somehow got me a full year bus pass without having to pay a penny. She always signed my siblings and I up for the free lunches at school when we could afford it, and she knew it. When I got caught shoplifting, she just wanted to sweep it under the rug since I know she does it too.
What brought this comparison up is that right now, I’m not registered at UC Berkeley, so I’m losing out on a few benefits such as the gym and well, the wonderful bus pass that would have given me free rides until the end of August. My initial plan was to buy the bus pass from someone else for about the same price that they would pay for it through the registration fees, which is about $60. When I pitched that plan to a friend of mine, he told me that when he had lost his ID last semester, he ended up copying someone else’s pass and taped it onto his.
Now, to me, that sounds like a brilliant idea, right? I’m saving myself $60 and to me at least, I don’t feel as if I’m taking from someone else’s benefit. It kind of ties into the idea of Pareto efficiency where in order to make one person better off, another is worse off. To me, I don’t see that I’m making someone else worse off. In my eyes, I see that my mother is making someone else worse off. When she gets money from the government, it’s money that could have been used for someone else. When she goes to those Christmas toy donations, there’s another family more deserving than ours. When we get our free lunches, someone else has to pay for that.
I know that you eventually learn and pick up a few things from your parents, but I thought this was the one thing that I could run away from. Or am I just making excuses for all my actions so I don’t feel bad about it? So I can mask the fact that maybe I am becoming a bit like my mother? That I am picking up on the things that I once looked down upon?
Edit: I will not allow you to call my mother names, so refrain from doing so unless you really want to set me off. Yes, what she does isn’t the greatest thing, but that doesn’t give you the right to talk about my mother like so.
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