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.