So Much Unfairness of Things Blog

I actually enjoyed reading this short story a lot. I think it made the point that the punishment for cheating could be terrible. People think that cheating isn’t such a big deal, that they wont get caught. But it does happen, and the consequences can be getting suspended or even expelled. It can completely ruin your future. The story talked about a boy named P.S. who is a popular kid at a prep school called V.P.S. This school is very exclusive and the boy’s family had a tradition of going there and getting good grades. P.S., however, was failing Latin. He had to take the final test and needed a certain amount of points to pass. He had copied the notes and put them in his desk, not even on purpose, and realized that they were in there when having trouble with one specific passage. He finally decided after a long battle with himself that he would cheat, and that it would be very easy to get away with, as long as nobody saw him. The guilt tears away at him for the rest of the day, and he goes into the bathroom and thinks and thinks about why he had cheated. He thought about turning himself in, and that maybe the honor council would give him a break for being so honest. Unfortunately, his friend Jumbo saw him cheating before he had the chance, and the honor code at V.P.S. stated that if a student saw another student cheating, he would turn the cheater in. He was expelled from his school as the consequence. I felt sorry for P.S. because in the story it talks about his father being very strict and not showing much emotion. P.S. thought that if he didn’t pass the Latin test, his father would pretty much disown him because he would be breaking a family tradition and would be punished by not being able to go to a dude ranch with his best friend Charlie. However, at the end, when P.S. is about to go home, his father starts talking to him about how he felt bad for P.S. because he had pressured him into cheating. I felt sorry because I know how hard it is to have a father who isn’t very close to you. My father does care about me, but he doesn’t show it. I felt that that was a big connection between me and P.S. because I feel like sometimes I know that I can’t impress my father. P.S. only wanted his father to be proud of him, and he cheated because he wanted to impress his father. I think that if his father had been more accepting and less strict, P.S. probably wouldn’t have cheated and gotten kicked out of V.P.S. The disaster could have potentially been avoided if either his father had not sent him to V.P.S. and expected so much of him or if he had spent more time with him and been more fatherly towards him.

Facebook Monitoring

I think that Facebook and other similar social networking sites should be able to be monitored by sports coaches, teachers, and administrators and consequences should be given to those who are not representing the schools the correct way. People who put things that are inappropriate not only for school, but anytime, should not be able to go on with their lives as if they never did anything and be let off the hook because it was on a social networking site that is “private.” If someone says something racially discriminatory or posts an explicit or inappropriate picture, there should be consequences because in most cases, the name of the school that the person is attending is on the site, and this can lead to the school being branded with a scarlet letter of bad students or being racially or ethnically or even sexual-orientation-ally (?) discriminatory. The entire school could have to take the blame for something that one person does on a website that could be accessed by almost anyone in the world rather easily. If a person uploads a picture of himself or herself smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or other material deemed inappropriate, the school’s administrators or sports teams’ senior leaders should be allowed to monitor their account because their actions can not only affect the person’s life, but also the entire school’s donated funds, student population, and even state status. Such illegal activities could in real life lead to the arrest of the person and should not be taken lightly just because he or she was not caught in the action of doing these inappropriate things, only viewed in a picture or wall post. People could be put in jail or prison if they were actually seen doing these things, and for such substantial offences they cannot be trusted not to do it again. If the person who uploaded the picture or posted something harassing was on a sports team, they should be removed from the sports team or suspended from several games. I can see how people would think that Facebook is a private place where people cannot see unless given access, but the fact is, it isn’t. It is a very public place, where any hacker could see anything and where every picture you post is put on the news feed. These people do not realize that what they do on a social network can and most likely will affect other people, their school, and their own lives. The person should also have a suspension from school for a few days and their actions on such sites should be monitored more than those of others. It isn’t a matter of being able to have privacy as much as one of being cruel or discriminatory towards others or even doing things that hurt one’s own self. It can hurt more than just one person, as the harassed person’s friends, parents, and loved ones can be offended from someone’s hurtful posts. These are a few of my reasons that schools should be able to monitor Facebook accounts.