1980 to present, Morton, Tacoma, and Spokane, Washington

By Terry Bain

I cheated. I admit it. In high school, in college, in graduate school…. I was always cheating. Oh, not in your traditional sense. I didn’t have cheat sheets. I didn’t lean across the aisles to see if Larry had marked B or D (you really couldn’t trust Larry to know if it was B or D anyway). No, it was far more complicated than that, and I never really knew I was doing it, or why I was doing it, until much later. Almost 20 years later I’m starting to get it figured out.

To tell you about how I cheated, I probably need to tell you a little about myself.

I’m a relatively intelligent guy, and I don’t take criticism or failure very well. I can, in fact, be crushed by failure. But I was hindered in school by an inability to concentrate. The teacher would talk, and I thought I was listening, but unless it was something new and different and interesting to me, I found myself not really paying much attention. In fact, I found myself not paying attention at all. There are entire swaths of my high school education during which I know I was sitting in class, but I have no idea what I was supposed to be learning, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn it.

Did I do my homework? Sometimes. I’d start to read what the textbook had to say about the Revolutionary War, for instance, but then I would realize that I was following the words and not understanding anything from them. I could hear the words inside my head, but unless they were drawing concrete pictures for me, with people moving around and bumping into one another (that is, unless they were telling a story), I immediately forgot everything I was supposed to be learning.

I used to blame the textbooks. But I can’t really lay all the blame at their door. I have no doubt that some of the students in class were learning something. (Maybe not Larry, but he might have been struggling with the same problem I was.) Sometimes I would blame my teachers, but I also have no doubt that some of these people were good teachers — maybe even excellent teachers. I have a memory of some of them being excellent, and they seemed to actively pursue my learning. For that I am forever grateful, even if I wasn’t at the time.

What I was at the time was frustrated. After several minutes of reading the same paragraph again and again, and still not actually knowing much of what I’d just read, I started to get sleepy. Sometimes this meant I would pick up a more interesting book. Something with scantily clad slave girls from counter-earth or a magical world that looked strikingly like a map of Florida. That would keep my interest for awhile, but you know what? I don’t remember much about those books, either.

I did learn something from those books, though. I learned to use my own language. It took a lot of time to learn it, but eventually I started to get the impression that language itself was more flexible than I could have possibly guessed without those books. That I might write a perfectly good, straightforward sentence and be misunderstood, or I might write a grammatically bogus sentence that made perfect sense. Just like that.

And I learned (often through my manipulation of the language) how to become the teacher’s pet. You know me now, don’t you? I volunteered to take the roll at the beginning of class? I asked the teacher for a list of books outside the class that would be worth reading? I checked out the hardest books from the library and carried them around as if I had been reading them just moments before, books by Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce.

I asked to sit at the front of the classroom, if possible, so I could be seen and could absorb as much of what the teacher had to say as possible (just in case she said something important). I arrived at school a half hour early and asked a particularly easy-to-please teacher if she wanted me to go to the bakery for her and get some doughnuts. Yes, in fact, she did. And I went. Not fair of me, I know, but I did it.

By the time I finished high school, I was getting straight A’s, not on merit, but on kiss-ass. Oh, I know I did some work. I turned in assignments, and did most of the regular stuff you have to do to get through high school, but I also never read most of the books and stories and histories we were supposed to read. I might read a few pages, but even if I read the whole thing, I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was about, what had happened in the pages I’d just read. Instead I learned to extrapolate most of the facts from the first few pages of a book, from the smallest smattering of material. A lot of what needed to be learned could either be learned by memorization, or by being the most interesting student in the classroom. I did it. I crashed the party. I was a spectacular success at cheating my way through school.

Then college. I had to learn a whole new set of rules. In college I found that I might actually have to read the books. I might actually have to learn something in class. I still sat as close to the front of the classroom as possible whenever I could. I tried to listen very carefully. I tried to read what was assigned, but everything seemed utterly inaccessible, in part because I had picked up all the wrong skills in high school. So, as a freshman, I was swimming. One of my professors (an art history professor, no less, but extremely difficult to ignore when he’s threatening to fail you in your first semester of college) told me that I clearly had a learning disability because I could not write.

This was the very first time anybody had ever mentioned a learning disability in reference to me. I was mortified. Surely he was reading it wrong. Surely I was just sloppy and lazy and I procrastinated too long before writing my essay (and yes, admittedly, I was guilty of all three). He didn’t really mean that I had a disability, did he? I’d show him. I’d become the best damn writer I could be.

And that’s pretty much what I did. Despite the fact that I was a computer science major and really couldn’t afford to be taking a number of classes outside my major, I tossed myself headlong into becoming a writer. And for awhile, that worked fine. I learned even more about sentences and bendable words and creation of language, and I astounded myself. I probably didn’t astound anybody else, because everyone thought I was brilliant to begin with, having all those fabulous grades from high school. But I knew I was a cheater. And I began right there to learn that I could also be a learner.

I still wasn’t reading the books I was supposed to be reading, but I found that through careful selection of my classes, and through guestimation of plotline and importance, I could bullshit most of my way through college as well. (It almost didn’t work when I couldn’t quite bullshit my way through my computer science classes, and I almost failed my last, critical course before graduation, but ended up getting out of there by the skin of my coffee-stained teeth, telling the instructor that I promised never to practice computer science again if he just passed me in this one, measly class. And he did.)

So what’s the trouble? Does it sound like I’m complaining? Does it sound, instead, like I’m bragging?

I hope not, because once I was out in the regular world, no longer confined to a regular schedule of “learning” and “education,” I began to realize that my methods of misdirection weren’t going to serve me well anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there are some methods of misdirection that work quite well in the world. I just never happened to be much good at those, and I really don’t want to be a cheater anymore.

But here’s another thing. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve been diagnosed with ADD. This was a bit of a shock at first. ADD? Really? But I don’t bounce off the walls. Sometimes I watch SpongeBob, but that doesn’t make me prone to ADD, does it?

If you’ve read this far, you can probably tell that I likely had ADD all along, it just wasn’t noticed until I was an adult. I was able to adapt to ADD, to make it work for me for a whole lot of years. I learned how to be a creative cheater.

Sometimes I get angry now that people let me cheat for so long. I get angry that nobody caught me cheating sooner. I’m angry that, when my art-history professor told me I had a learning disability, I didn’t take a good, grand look at myself and say, “Well, yeah, you do sort of have a problem, don’t you?”

Yeah. A bit of a problem. But hopefully one I can master. It’s been about five years since I was diagnosed with ADD. And I can’t remember the last time I cheated.

Terry Bain is the author of the books You Are a Dog and We Are the Cat, and he sometimes talks about himself on the interwebs at http://bainbooks.com. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife, three children, two dogs, and one cat. In his spare time, he is teaching himself to play the ukulele.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 12:02 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.