There
was a process of correcting papers in our physics class that saved
our teacher even the precious little effort required of her. We would
take our tests, homework, or quizzes and pass them to a fellow
student who would write CB -meaning 'Checked By'- and then their name
at the top so there was a chain of custody so that if there was a
mistake the offender could be sought out and beaten. Actually it was
just a ruse on the part of our lazy teacher to scare us into honesty
and it did not work on me. When I had not done homework I would
pretend to pass my undone worksheet to the left and right and then
switch my neighbor's papers and as she read the answers I would fill
them in give myself a 100% and then write CB James at the top and
turn it in with the rest. James had a well earned immaculate
reputation and wholly unimpeachable character so that is why I
employed his name in my ruse. It was the fact that I used James's
name that ultimately foiled my plans for world domination. One day
when our sluggard teacher was feeling particularly lazy she told us
to read quietly while she talked on the phone in her office. She
asked James to come up and take the huge pile of unrecorded homework
and input it into the grading program because she had some urgent
shirking to do before her dereliction appointment later that day. He
must have been surprised to learn that he had corrected each and
every one of my homework worksheets, returned a perfect score on each
and then crudely forged his own name at the top after CB. He was so
interested in this strange phenomenon that he brought it to our
teacher's attention. She called me to the front of the class and
asked how such a strange thing came to happen. It was one of those
cases in which the idea of being caught never crossed my mind so when
I was interrogated I went blank and was at a loss for words, which
for me was a pretty big deal. The traitorous bullshit center of my
brain displayed cowardice most unseemly and deserted in the face of
the enemy leaving me to stammer something about it being a joke. She
was mostly uninterested so she decided to give me a trial by ordeal
to see if I had cheated and wrote three problems from the homework on
the board and then asked me to work them in front of the class. Oh,
the physics gods were kind that day and had muddled her mind into
making a classic blunder, I loved nothing more than displaying my
intelligence for an audience and you would not believe how hard it
was to get a captive audience in the wild to observe physics and
calculus. Chalk in hand I deftly worked every problem to perfection
because I hated worksheets not physics and I had this stuff down
cold. She was irritated that her plan didn't work and gave me credit
for all my cheating which propelled me to the top five in the class. The lesson I learned here, years before Lance Armstrong made it popular was 'Cheat to Win'.
