Blog #15: It’s Suketu’s Turn

This is NOT Hallie… THIS is Suketu, and I have to ACTUALLY use my brain. This is very new to me, so please take it easy on me.

I am going to be talking about many different things—mainly a big old TRAMA dump.

I was never good at writing. I always blame it on not being able to read until I was in 2nd grade. English is not my first language, so it just took me a lot longer to learn than most kids. I actually learned most of my English from Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales, Caillou, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and anything on PBS Kids (we didn’t have cable).

I also had to go through speech therapy and ESL (English as a Second Language)—which made me feel like a total OUTSIDER. Once I hit second grade, I finally got to the point where I could read books just like my peers. Now, it took me DOUBLE the time to read these books, but I tried my best. This was where the cheating in my life started.

Everyone was so much faster and better at reading than I was, so I had to find ways to catch up, and some of those ways involved cheating. In 6th grade, we had to read a book every month and take a test on it to make sure we understood (I had terrible reading and comprehension skills). So the best way to make sure I understood the book was to use SparkNotes. For those of you who don’t know, SparkNotes is a website that provides summaries of books.

This saved me so much time, but it was definitely frowned upon. After this, my cheating just got worse. I asked myself, “Should I put in this work, or should I just cheat and not waste so much time?” The part where I thought it was a “waste” of time to actually do the work is where I went wrong. If I thought that reading and writing were holding me back… cheating was doing FAR worse damage.

I never got called out for it until 12th grade when one of my math teachers confronted me for cheating since I had all the answers from the previous year. I did not have time to study for the upcoming exam, so I just memorized the answers from the previous year, which was probably the worst thing I could have done. The exam was completely different, and I got the test back with a BIG “D” (that’s what she said).

My teacher sent me an email saying she knew I understood all the material and was very disappointed in me for cheating, and that just ate at me for DAYS. After this experience, I started to take everything I do very seriously. NO MORE CHEATING. I began to see the effects of all the cheating I had done in the past and how much it was holding me back from truly learning.

So I guess the moral of the story is this: if you feel like you are behind, don’t take shortcuts to get ahead because that might not actually benefit you in the end.

Thank you for coming to my TED TALK. And no I did NOT use ChatGPT to write this… it’s all me.

Love you HPC

-Suketu