'AITA for telling my son I'm not proud of him for helping his teacher bust his classmates?'
"AITA for telling my son I'm not proud of him for helping his teacher bust his classmates?"
My wife and I have two sons 15 and 9, this relates to the older one. He does pretty good in school, and most of teachers have nothing but good things to say about him. Apparently one of his teachers asked him for help catching some kids cheating.
The teacher left some fake test answers on his desk, and pretended to go to the bathroom. Our son then showed as many people the answers as possible, before the teacher came back in. Then he helped the teacher identify who had looked at the answers.
We only heard about this a couple weeks after the fact. Apparently, said teacher got into some trouble, because more than half your students failing an exam looks bad for you as well as them. It was only then that our son revealed the part he played, and that some kids at school are angry at him for helping the teacher.
I told him that, while kids shouldn't be giving him trouble about that, and I'd help stop it if need be, he shouldn't be surprised. I told him he doesn't always need to suck up to authority, and 5 extra points on the test wasn't worth getting 16 other people in trouble. He argued they got themselves in trouble, but I still said he didn't need to help.
I basically explained that, to the other kids, including his friends, he's saying that he respects the teacher more than he respects them. Nobody will ever trust him after he lied like that. He thought I'd be proud of him, but not for that. All he did was lie to sell out his friends.
My wife is on his side, and thinks we should be happy he helped enforce the rules. She argues the kids are solely at fault for looking at the answers, and we should be proud our son helped get some troublemakers in trouble. She also thinks I'm teaching him not to respect authority, and that I am going to make him think breaking the rules is right.
Here were the top comments form readers:
The real a-hole in this story is the teacher. What a terrible position she put your son in.
Not to mention the son was proactively showing the answers around himself, they hardly hatched some sneaky plot to outfox the system.
Teacher should be disciplined.
I came here thinking it was just the son dobbing in some cheating he witnessed. But he and the teacher actively sold the set up to other kids.
So this terrible teacher enlisted your son to help 'catch' cheaters by having him SHOW THEM the answers? Hell, she made HIM a cheater, too. I hope she gets fired.
I'm going with NTA, because of how it was done. Your son should know it's okay to tell an authority figure about anything, but this was entrapment. If the police did what that teacher did, their case would be thrown out of court.
NTA. Totally entrapment, and the teacher was absolutely wrong in getting one student to help set up the others. I'd be talking to the principal.
I think you're right here, but it would've been hard for a teenager to stand up to the teacher and say this is wrong. This is a tough lesson. Your wife should be upset with the teacher as well.