Alex Sink, the former Democrat candidate for governor in Florida, is now blaming the White House for her election loss to Rick Scott. Although she makes some good points, ultimately Sink might have been the one who sunk her own campaign. It was getting caught with a cheat sheet during a debate with Scott that might have been instrumental in her loss. More specifically it was the modern version of the cheat sheet in the form of getting debate tips via her cell phone although this was forbidden by the debate rules. Using cheat sheets is an old tradition with school students but the one hazard in using them, as Sink found out, is getting caught. Perhaps Sink needed instruction on the fine art of cheating.
My alma mater, North Miami High School, was once the center for one of the most overlooked art forms of our era—cheating on tests. Cheating in fact is still as much a public school institution as football, truancy, and low quality cafeterias. It must be remembered that cheating comes in many different forms and styles depending on the situation.
The basic style of cheating is to merely look for the answers on someone else’s test paper. This “peek-a-boo” style was quite popular with the hoods of North Miami High who tended to all sit in back of the smart guys during an exam.
Should the smart guy’s shoulder interfere with the hood’s field of vision, the hood used his powers of persuasion to get the shoulder out of the way by advising the smart guy: “Hey, move your shoulder or I’m gonna stomp ya!”
Of course, this method of cheating was not without its drawbacks. For one thing, practitioners of the peek-a-boo style often acquired a bad case of nearsightedness from peeking at tests from great distances. Also it was too easy to get caught. Frequently during a test, the teacher was heard to shout: “Keep your eyes on your own paper!”
A dozen pairs of eyes would then snap back to their desks only to drift slowly in other directions a few minutes later.
The peek-a-boo method of cheating was generally practiced by the lower strata of high school society and we members of the higher castes looked down condescendingly upon such primitive tactics.
A more sophisticated method was to have informers tell you what was on the test. Often the same test was given to all the classes of a particular teacher. As a result, the students taking a civics exam in the eight o’clock class were able to tell the nine o’clock class what the test questions were. Intensive but rapid research was then undertaken to find the correct answers. Because of this, the last period class usually had an amazingly high grade average on the exam when compared to the first period class.
The most valuable tool among the connoisseurs of cheating was the cheat sheet. The cheat sheet was truly a miracle of miniaturization. Upon its two-by-three inch area could be recorded the entire history of England, including the Magna Carta, should it be necessary to have this information for a history test. Unlike Alex Sink’s modern cell phone “cheat sheet,” ours were easy to hide and could be hidden in a variety of sleeves, pockets, and socks.
The main defect with cheat sheets, as Sink found out, was that they could be damning evidence against you if you were ever caught with them by a teacher…or your debate opponent. One time this guy in Mrs. Hand’s Spanish class was caught pulling a cheat sheet out of his left sock. Mrs. Hand made him take off his sock and out dropped a dozen cheat sheets containing the conjugations of just about every verb in the Spanish language. I guess the poor fellow figured that since he was caught anyway he might as well reveal the whole extent of his crime because he opened up his right sock and pulled out several more cheat sheets containing the English translation of the Spanish verbs in his left sock.
So perhaps the best advice for Alex Sink in her next campaign would be to avoid cheating via cell phone and go back to the traditional time-tested cheat sheets.
