I have a confession to make. In high school, I was an amazing cheater. Although my abilities could certainly be questioned as immoral, I justified them by telling myself that I was being creative by developing new, and exciting methods of getting away with it, and then saying to myself that this was "true studying," and that I was actually learning the material better this way! This brings me to a little story, that poses a whole new question that isn't related to cheating at all...stay with me... (this reminds me, if anyone needs help recognizing when a student is cheating, I know all the tricks!).

I am terrible at languages, I hit the barrier as soon as someone has so much as a slight accent when speaking English. With this in mind, imagine how I struggled with learning French, especially in high school where, of course, I believed that I would "never have to use this."

It was grade 11 French class with a teacher I just couldn't tolerate, she drove me to sign out to the bathroom a good 5 times a class (and my addiction to coffee is only recent). Obviously, my visits to the urinal were not in all honesty, as I found myself meandering the halls in search of friends and better things to do than play "Simon says" in a language that I understood as gibberish...Didn't matter, I was the first one out anyway for touching my knee instead of my nose. During my strolls, I usually ended up in a computers class where I had a bunch of friends (don't worry, the cheating thing comes back soon) who were being taught by what we thought was a "cool" young, new teacher.

Well, one day, I had an final oral examination for French that included presenting a topic en francais (not bad heh?) to the entire class. I really wanted to do well, and show my teacher that I had worked very hard in order to meet the course requirements and basically get the hell out of there with a passing grade.

A couple days earlier my friends and I bought these pretty sweet two-way radios that we figured would be good to throw in the car and stay in touch (how cool were we?). These radios however soon proved to assist me in another way, especially when considering you could attach an ear jack to them and wire it up my sleeves into my long hair without anyone having the slightest clue about it. I had a "eureka moment," and realized that I could have someone outside feed me my French presentation word for word.

Now, my best friends who would help me were in the computers class with that "cool" teacher I referred to earlier, who we thought would totally let them out of class to pay me a visit as I did to them so often. Well, this teacher got word of my plan through a friend and approached me about it. I was screwed, not only was he going to inform my teacher, but now I had done absolutely no memorizing of my lines. This, was not the case. That teacher thought my idea was so hilarious and impressive that he not only allowed it, but he actually read out a couple lines of my presentation to help me get an A!

So, if you have been able to slog yourself through my story, here is the question I have. If you are a teacher and you feel that a colleague of yours has a very unprofessional relationship with a student(s), what do you do about it? If you were a teacher and you saw this occurring in your school, how would you address the situation, because that situation was obviously unethical (which I knew then, but KNOW now)? Should you stay out of it and believe that it will all get back to him/her, or would you get involved to not only protect that colleague in the future, but to keep the school in environment free of such behavior? Would you get the administration involved, or would that create a tension that would end up jeopardizing your career and/or relationship with other staff members? My example is a pretty odd one, but I think there will be times when you question your colleagues behavior(s) and be confused as to handle or possibly ignore the situation...