Trying to Focus

I just had a routine eye exam. Apparently I can have these each year. This was my first real one. I’ve never had glasses. Now I have to decide if I want them.

I’ve noticed that my left eye is just fine, but my right eye is blurry. It’s not enough to be bothersome or to make it so I can’t read. I don’t think I’m of the age where I have to worry about really small print just yet. My left eye can read it just fine. But like I said, it’s that right eye…

They had me read the letters on the chart like usual. He did the tests for glaucoma and dilated my eyes. I’ve had them dilated before, so I did remember my sunglasses. While I waited for the drops to take affect, I sat with my book and saw the words getting blurrier and blurrier. So much for reading while I waited.

When all was said and done, I have a choice about getting glasses. My right eye needs a +1.00 and my left needs a -0.25 lens. Apparently it’s not enough to really make a huge difference in day to day things. I wouldn’t have to wear them during normal activities. I wouldn’t really have to wear them while reading either. It just makes it easier if I do.

So off I went with my prescription in hand – that I couldn’t read. I got out to my car and was going to call my friend, Kathy, on my cell phone. Problem. I can’t read anything in my cell phone. Luckily, there were two ladies walking out to their cars. One was parked close to me, so I asked her if she could scroll through my phone book to find Kathy’s number.

I met Kathy at a local restaurant. Driving with blurry vision is a bit of a trick. I wasn’t really able to tell the difference between a person and a road sign until I was practically on top of them. I made it just fine. But it does make me realize how much I take for granted my good vision. Once at the restaurant I couldn’t read the menu. I couldn’t even look through the books about our Greece trip while I waited for her. Sit and stare. That’s about all I was good for. It took about an hour and a half for my vision to get back to semi-normal.

Before I went into the restaurant I took a picture of myself. I couldn’t focus to see my dilated eyes. So I figured if I took a photo, I could see just how dilated they were. I always think it looks funny too. I’ve got blue eyes, and from a distance they look brown since you can hardly see the blue. It has been three hours since the exam. At least now, I can focus again.

Cheaters

Cheat. To be dishonest or deceitful.

They all know what cheating is. It’s not that difficult of a concept to understand. In math, if you didn’t do the work yourself, it’s cheating. If you copy the odd answers out of the back, it’s cheating. If I’m reading off answers while we’re correcting homework and you’re writing them down instead of checking your answers, it’s cheating. If you have your eyes on someone else’s paper while we’re testing, it’s cheating.

I don’t think it is hard for a teenager to get this concept. Yet, these situations happen all the time. When I confront them about copying answers, they look at me as if I have two heads. What? Me? How could you accuse me of cheating? Well… I just saw you do it. Apparently the fact that I’m an eye-witness to the cheating doesn’t mean a thing.

Over the years, I seem to have come to accept the fact that cheating happens. I’ve even adjusted my grading scale. I don’t make homework count as much because I know that homework is the portion of the grade that is easiest for them to cheat. Tests are worth the most – almost half of the grade. The sad thing is that I’ve done this because I’m tired of arguing about cheating. Cutting corners, copying off a friend, not doing complete work – it’s a trend that is hard to combat.

The reason why I even thought about this in the first place is that one of our JROTC program teachers came by to check on a student. I said that she was passing, but I thought that was because she was copying off of another kid. When I was gone, I had given a test where she scored 97%. She was sitting next to the smartest kid in the class. But since I wasn’t there, I can’t really do anything about it. The rest of her tests have been failures. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened.

“If you think she’s cheating, let us know. That’s an integrity issue for us.”

That’s an issue for me too. But I don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe because they run their program more like the military, they have some sort of consequences that I don’t have in my bag of tricks. If I were to ask a kid to drop and give me twenty, they’d laugh at me.

My question is: How do you deal with cheating when they don’t seem to even acknowledge that it’s happening?

I originally wrote this in April. Everything in it is still true. The girl did not pass the 4th quarter of math. I have since found out that she basically missed the entire 5th grade and was probably gone for a lot of her schooling. She cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide the simplest problems in her head. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of cheating. There are many like her that will grow up with a practice of cheating, not thinking anything of it, and live there lives cheating. Now that’s scary to think about.