In our school, we have some values that we need to obey. One of them is to be an honest person. which is related to managing character building in our curricula. As a teacher, we do not only transfer knowledge, but also manage the character of the students. In this term, we try to determine the students’ characters by creating the value of honesty, and we attempt to build an understanding of this value .For example, we ask students not to cheat on their exams and they have to obey it.
However, we still encounter difficulties to ascertain the values internalized and practiced by some students because they are originally from many different schools that seem to not care about the value of honesty. Due to the permissions of those schools, the students have already got into the habit of cheating without any punishment. So, that is why sometimes it is difficult for them to accept the punishment if they suddenly disobey the value of honesty in our school.
On the other hand, the school and education offices which seems to not really care about honesty, treat us as the enemy, because they really disagree with our rule to punish the students who disobey the rules. For example, in 2012 we eliminated twelve students who cheated on the national exam. at the time, the people and education offices in our district fought our school. They could not accept the decision of our school to dismiss some students because of their misconduct. They even blamed our school as being a the school that enforced distressing punishment on students, and they did not know that the student had signed the agreement that they would not be allowed to do any form of cheating or they would be dismissed from the school.
Even though we face many obstacles to determine honesty, we will not abandon this value as essential student conduct, because as we know, the improvement of a country depends on future generations. If during their childhood, children become accustomed to lying, they would easily repeat the same behavior in other terms. For example, if the student has cheated once, they will become accustomed to doing it, and try to do it on another occasion. Then they reinforce this behavior on that habit and other problems arise such as corruption.
Therefore, as teachers, we need to realize that we can try to build student character beginning from our lesson, even though the school where we work does not really care the value of honesty. In the words, we still can begin ourselves by asking students not to cheat during our lesson. Maybe at first, it will be difficult, but later if they become accustomed to it, they will be aware of the value of honesty and they will adopt this value in their life