MONTCLAIR, N.J. — MONTCLAIR, N.J. - It's rare these days to read a newspaper or watch the evening news without hearing about an athlete who used steroids, a team that spied on another team's training camp, or kids who cheated on a standardized test, sometimes with the aid of teachers trying desperately to meet their No Child Left Behind benchmarks.
According to one survey, 60 percent of high school students admitted to cheating on a test over the past year. We're swimming in a sea of cheating - so I decided recently that I'd better talk to my kids about it, before they get the idea that everyone in the world cheats and it's pointless to resist.
I had a fair amount of confidence going into the discussion, because I'd written a book about cheating. In my novel, a good kid gets sucked into a ring of high-tech cheaters in high school. I had already thought my way through the ethical questions. I knew that the commonplace arguments against cheating - You're only cheating yourself; it's not fair to everyone around you - have no power to dissuade anyone.
Instead, the simple argument I planned to use was that cheating is sleazy. Do you want to be sneaky and dishonest, always looking for an unfair advantage or a slimy short cut? If that didn't seem to be working, I could tell them true stories about people who didn't get to go to the elite colleges that had accepted them, because they cheated and got caught.
To start us off, I asked what they thought about people who cheat. Alex, a fourth-grader, said it had made him "sort of sad" to learn that Jason Giambi had taken steroids. Mr. Giambi had impressed us both by hitting three home runs at Alex's first visit to Yankee Stadium; when I asked Alex why it had made him sad, he answered, "Because those home runs didn't really count."
I couldn't have asked for a better lead-in - that is, until Alex admitted that he sometimes exaggerated his injuries during soccer games in order to get a penalty kick.
"Please don't ever do that again," I said, jumping the gun a bit.
Helen, who's 13, said that cheating always creeps up on the cheater in the end. She was trying to help me out - but then she remembered actual cases she had witnessed, and added ruefully, "But it doesn't always creep up on them in the end." Also, she empathized with professional athletes who cheat. "There's so much pressure on them to get those home runs and touchdowns and goals."
