It occurred to me today that we have a chance to move toward something better.

On Monday, I wrote about the experiences that a friend of mine in college is having with his classmates and their tendencies toward cheating. While I talked about cheating and why I think it will continue to grow as a problem –the further we get into the information age– I wanted to continue that discussion, while also branching out onto a couple of other, related topics.

As an educator, I’ve always had certain, charged feelings about cheating. There have been periods during my career when I hunted cheaters with an avarice beyond scope. For example, I used to administer a research paper in a Senior English class, and the paper was a graduation requirement; I occasionally had to keep my eyes peeled for cheating on that assignment. There have been other classes, here and there, that I’ve taught over the years where cheating flared up, from time to time. The problem with cheaters is that they don’t tend to work any harder at the cheating that they’ve decided to do than they would have needed to work to complete the assignment at hand. As such, their cheating isn’t usually very ingenious or crafty; it usually screams from the page, “I cheated on this assignment.”

These days, though, I am starting to think that it’s time for education to abandon the kinds of assessments and assignments that students are able to cheat on in the first place.

Last week, as this friend of mine and I were discussing cheating, he was very judgmental of his classmates, who would chose to take such actions as to cheat. But, when I suggested to him that his professors ought to be doing a better job of creating materials that tested students on their knowledge and understanding of the course material, without using pre-packaged assessment questions that exist, with their answers, in a dozen different places on the internet, you could tell that the thought hadn’t occurred to him that his teachers were partly responsible for the cheating problem.

If we are truly teaching students content and material in a way that they are understanding and comprehending, there are probably a couple of dozen different ways that we can assess that understanding. Of those approaches, only a small number –the least ingenious of the approaches– can be cheated on in the first place.

* * *

When the pandemic began –in Michigan, this occurred at the end of the school day on Friday, March 13th, 2020– my fellow teachers and I headed to our homes with very little certainty about what was to follow, in the days and weeks ahead. We learned many things, and many of us became better at things that we’d barely even tried before. I remember thinking to myself, on multiple occasions during those days, that I’d been relegated to the role of ‘content creator’.

I felt this because, at the time, I launched into the process of creating videos that my students would be able to watch, to get the basic information-transmission that they needed from me. These videos were shared with my students back in the spring, and I’ll be darned if they weren’t just as successful on the summative assessments, in the units that they were studying, as they would have been had they been in my presence in the classroom. That got me to thinking a lot about my role in the classroom.

If students can get content from a number of different sources these days, then what makes me think that I’m the best source from whom to receive information? Rather, if my job is not to be the ‘sage on the stage’, then my job is something else. Walking alongside my students, and assisting them in the process of understanding what they are able to get from other sources, is probably a more valuable use of my time and talents than ‘being a content creator’.

* * *

What the information age does to education is that it raises the bar by which we might measure an educational experience as being a successful one. Thirty years ago, if a biology teacher instructed students on DNA and taught the students about the four nitrogenous bases –adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine– and then gave a little formative quiz to test them on their understanding, this would have been a win.

These days, that information is readily available on the internet –> I should know, since I just looked it up to be able to write the previous sentence.

Of course, the availability of all this information, many times, leaves us with a significant need for an understanding of what makes for a good source of information. In ‘the business’, we call this “media literacy”. I’ve been teaching media literacy to my students –in ever-increasing levels of intensity, in keeping with the requirements of our increasingly digital society– for many years.

Unfortunately though, I’m afraid that we have an education gap when it comes to the list of people who are consumers of internet-based media, and the much smaller subset of that group, those individuals who understand that you can’t just assume that whatever you read on the internet is true. This disparity is causing the internet to become a place where misinformation is as readily available –maybe even more so– than good quality information is.

So, let me bring this whole big conversation finally around full circle, if I may.

We are each responsible for the information that we believe. The extent to which some people are convinced by the flimsiest of arguments, while others are skeptical unless they are confronted with a preponderance of evidence, is an illustration –many times– of the understanding that some people have, when it comes to that good, ol’ aphorism, “Consider the source.” If I tend to be the kind of person who will believe all manner of craziness from the internet, then I am not considering the source of my information much at all. When it comes to media literacy, doing the necessary research, to see whether or not we have reasons to be skeptical of what we are reading on the internet, is an appropriate first step in getting our minds right.

As the influence of the internet grows in this age of information, and in light of the fact that behavior is usually subsequent to belief, it is not a coincidence that we are noticing behavior in our society spiraling out of control, usually from people who have been drinking the wrong kind of kool-aid from the internet.