Ha! All It Took Was Five Hours of Carefully Prepared Cheating and Now I Don’t Have to Study for Your Stupid Vocabulary Quiz

By Charles Kowalski

Beaver County School District

You must be delighting in tonight’s darkness, Señor Warner. Bathing in it even. No doubt it helps you late at night—what need of sleep for a monster, after all—when you plot new, perverse means of torture for your students fit to raise the hackles on a draconian warlord.

I bet your black, withered heart would burst from your chest, though, if you knew I’ve already won fifth period tomorrow with the faintest of effort. That’s right, viejo diablo (I Googled it), it only took five hours of careful, well-thought out academic dishonesty, and now I don’t need to waste a single moment preparing for the paper instrument of concentrated evil you’ve named “a quick, 20-point vocab quiz.” Be gone!

Oh, I can already imagine what you’d say first, if you ever found out, letting the words drip like bile: Your generation can’t spell. You’ll surely fail the spelling section!

Wrong, father of simulated conversation sin! 120 minutes of copying every word to a 3×3” bit of index card, done again and again to ensure flawless precision at a size barely perceptible to the human eye, have freed me from expending even one stray thought on your labyrinth of vowels and consonants. The additional half-hour of YouTube videos showing me how to stitch it onto the inside of my hoodie sleeve will only have you reeling further, as you futilely call out to your dark overlords for help discovering how I mastered your pitiful quiz without so much as an idle wink of studying. 

But…but…there’s the written section! you’d plead next. There’s no way you could avoid devious traps like, “What would you like for dinner?” or “What do you think of the salad?” without dedicating weeks to master them!

Ha, you’ve erred again! An hour and a half of cross-referencing Google results, texting my older brother who’s taking Spanish in college, and frantic posting on language forums full of native speakers guarantees I’ll have no problems seeing through whatever vicious prompts you have waiting in ambush. I just needed a few measly seconds to peruse your treacherous “study guide”—surely itself some other scheme to lead your faithful class astray—and, maybe, 45 minutes or so to find a website whose users didn’t think I had joined only to cheat.

Anyway, with my triumph all but confirmed, I better head to bed: we just read an article in health that said you do better on quizzes after a full night’s sleep…well, at least somebody told me that’s what it said. Like I have any time to waste on that.