As part of the “engagement” curriculum in my Honors English I class in high school, the teacher roped us into a discussion of the short story “The Scarlet Ibis“. However, instead of extensive discussions of the white patriarchal hegemony’s oppression of the differently-abled which a true “college prep” curriculum would have enjoyed, we got to do a mock trial that prosecuted the narrator of the story in Doodle’s death.
I got to play the defendant, which sucked because my public-defender quality lawyer didn’t object enough. The prosecutor kept pulling out information from within the story that only the defendant would know. As a seasoned veteran of many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, I knew how to expose “player knowledge” from “character knowledge” in other players while masking my own exploitation of this systemic flaw. So, to make a short story long, the defendant was convicted.
So what’s my point? (Ahh….here…it….comes….) That although the Internet has made cheating easier, as early as seventeen years ago, public schools were formally teaching
Play Jurism
(Ahhhhh…..compulsion….relieved……)
