It was bound to happen. Today, I didn\u2019t get to a computer before midnight. I thought about turning back the clock on my blog post, pretending that it had been posted before the clock struck 12, but that\u2019d be deceptive and unnecessary. After all, this experiment, this writing project is really about writing one short entry each day. And a day starts when I get out of bed and ends when I get back into it.<\/p>\n
Midnight is just a scientific construct to demarcate what society considers a day. So, it\u2019s no big deal that I missed the midnight \u201cdeadline,\u201d right? Besides, setting the clock to a time other than the actual time I wrote the post would be cheating. No one might ever know about it or find out, but it would reside in my heart as a shameful mark in this yearlong write-a-thon.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember ever having cheated in school, although I don\u2019t know if this is actually something extraordinary or not. I always thought that there must be schoolmates of mine that did cheat (in ways both large and small), but I would be hard-pressed to come up with any actual percentage.<\/p>\n
And what constitutes cheating? Besides the obvious infractions of secretly getting test answers early or copying off of another student, where is the line drawn?<\/p>\n
When I was younger, it wasn\u2019t always be clear when working with other students was mere collaboration, and when it had turned into something more sinister. Likewise with that naughty p-word: plagiarism.<\/p>\n
Sure, copying direct passages from a library book into your paper was obviously wrong. But what about rephrasing an idea that wasn\u2019t originally yours? What about letting a book do the critical thinking on a situation for you?<\/p>\n
Of course, you don\u2019t really think about this when you\u2019re a kid. Not that much, anyway. As an adult, you realize that cheating surrounds you. It\u2019s not just restricted to those classroom questions of morality. It\u2019s about whether or not you eat that extra donut, whether or not you go to sleep when you told yourself you would, what you write in your self evaluation.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019m not perfect. I don\u2019t always turn off my console after just one more level. I don\u2019t always wake up in time to do the chores I said I\u2019d do the night before. But you have to draw the line somewhere. And forging blog post times to make it look like you wrote something before midnight? That\u2019s just fucked up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was bound to happen. Today, I didn\u2019t get to a computer before midnight. I thought about turning back the clock on my blog post, pretending that it had been posted before the clock struck 12, but that\u2019d be deceptive and unnecessary. After all, this experiment, this writing project is really about writing one short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[260,200,233,67],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-blogging","tag-childhood","tag-morality","tag-time","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}