Hello Family,
Blessings, love, and peace to you and your family.
Blessings, love, and peace to you and your family.
Once upon a time, when I was a child at the age of eleven or twelve, living in Erie, PA , going to McKinley Elementary School, this is what happened.
I believe it was on Fridays that my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. McClean would give us a math quiz. On that day he wanted us to put on our math thinking caps and get busy to solve about 40 to 50 math problems. After taking the quiz, if you were in the top two to finish first, you would get a prize, which was a nice sized chocolate candy bar. We were handed a piece of yellow paper, perforated at the top with the green lines, then instructed to turn to the back of the math book and copy down the practice quiz. Well, time after time, we had these quizzes: addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. Time after time, I wasn’t a part of the winner’s circle to get one of the coveted chocolate candy bars. I don’t know, if they was coveted by my fellow students, but they were by me. After every quiz the coveted chocolate candy bars went to Linda and to Margret. Not only were Linda and Margret the smartest kids in the class; they were pretty, popular and in charge of stuff. Plus, they were white girls. Being poor, black, feeling ugly and worthless, I thought that made them better than me. I couldn’t do anything about them being white, smart, popular and pretty, but I came up with a way to win. (Oh, I just remembered, the teacher was giving away Nestle Crunch candy bars as the prize for being the first or second to complete the math quiz). This was my plan. I took my math book home and copied down the practice quiz on a piece of that perforated at the top, yellow paper with the green lines. The next quiz was coming up soon, which was multiplication. I wrote down all of the problems, then the answers. I put the completed sheet with all of the answers in my math book and geared up to win one of those Nestle Crunch bars. It was the day of the quiz. After the teacher passed out the paper, I wrote down all of the quiz problems on that paper. After some time had passed, I took out my sheet, that I had prepared at home ahead of time with all of the problems and the answers to the problems and switched them. Bam, I raised my hand. I was finished before Linda and before Margret. To the teacher’s surprise and probably to Linda and Margret’s too, I was finished, and I finished before Linda and before Margaret. I was happy! I finally got one of those Nestle Crunch bars. I was good! Time for the next quiz rolled around. Since my little deceitful plan worked so well, I thought I would try it again. I wrote down all of the problems and answers at home, ahead of time, as before. I slipped the golden ticket to my next Nestle Crunch candy bar into my math book. This time it was division, but that didn’t matter, because I was prepared. Well, things didn’t go quite as I had planned. When the class was away from the classroom, we were probably all lined up going to the lavatory, the teacher went in my desk. He looked in my math book and found my golden ticket for the next prize. When the class came back from the lavatory, he called me to his desk. He questioned me about the already completed math quiz. I told him that that was the sheet that I was practicing on at home. I never confessed to him and I don’t recall ever telling anyone about this cheating scandal until now. I never thought about honesty being the best policy, in this situation, until now. Now, it makes me wonder how things would have turned out, if I had confessed to my teacher and told him that I had lied and cheated? I cheated and I lied. Even though I finally got one of those Nestle Crunch candy bars, did I really win?
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