Why students lie!

After the last blog, I was intrigued by a short article in the New York Times that follows on well. The basic premise being that students lie to gain leverage. Not big news I grant you, but after reading about the lengths some winners will go to, it seems that lessons begin early.

The basic premise with being a teacher and indeed a parent is the willingness to believe in the best when you consider a child. By that I mean that you always try to look for the best or positive outcome, sometimes regardless of what is actually right in front of your eyes and ears. In her article Ms Konnikova believes that 
“We are so bad at spotting deception because it’s better for us to be more trusting. Trust, and not adeptness at spotting deception, is the more evolutionary beneficial path,”. 
More than once, I have seen the shocked expression on a parents face when the truth about "what is real and what is told" are completely different things. As we know, the more we trust or love someone, the harder it is to accept or even consider the fact that they would lie or try to deceive us.

The idea that telling lies is acceptable is in many ways a norm these days. I doubt whether any of us could say that we have not told a lie, and this leads us to have a "grey" approach to the whole concept of truth. It becomes increasingly difficult to criticise or judge others if we ourselves also engage in the same practises. The old expression about "apples not falling far from the tree" seems to definitely apply here. It is far to easy for us to forget that we are the role models that our children and students tend to learn from and copy behaviours. A great pity that we conveniently forget and then go about our lives. This must really confuse and amaze a teen, who as I have said before, is still developing the reasoning skills associated with social intelligence. They must think that this is typical behaviour for an adult, and they will react accordingly.

But students and teens are sometimes forced into (or at least they think they are forced into) using lies to solve problems. It is amazing as a teacher the number of times this has occurred, but unfortunately the tendency is to look at the action and sometimes we forget about the cause. Lying can be a form of acting out and simply a "cry for help", and that I'm sure we have seen. The main problem seems to be that many teachers and parents look more closely at the occurrence rather than the cause. I see the punishment dealt and then the more than common move on, and I know I have been guilty of doing the same in the past. It takes some time to sit and chat with the child to really get to the cause of the lie, and that often the reason we choose to ignore all but the incidence. Maybe we would all be better off to take the time regardless of how busy we are.

I recall a comment my father made to me in my early teens about being more concerned with not learning from the lie. He encouraged me to admit to the lie rather than try to hide it, and I think that learning from that made me rethink. I have used that tactic with students over the years and see the puzzled expression when I praise them for admitting their mistake. But I have also found that I do not seem to have too many repeat the mistake! I also find that communication between us seems to grow.