Cheating In 5th Grade

When I was a student in fifth grade at Morgan Elementary School in Morgan, Kentucky, 1954-55, the students were taking a spelling test on Friday, which was a weekly event. We all had spelling pads, small tablets we used to take our tests. On this particular day I could not find my spelling pad, so I asked another student if I could borrow a piece of paper to take my test.

Mrs. McCandless, our teacher, always walked around the room during the tests. On this day she came by my desk, as usual, and she said to me, "Ronnie, are you cheating?" For some reason I looked down on the floor under my desk, and there sat my spelling pad. In the pad were the words that I had written for practice. The evidence was so overwhelming that I thought if I told the truth Mrs. McCandless would think I was lying to her. In my momentary confusion, I said, "Yes." It just seemed so obvious to me.

At lunch time, Mrs. McCandless told me to stay in the room rather than going into the lunch room. All the other students went on to lunch. Mrs. McCandless sat me down beside her desk, she sat at the her desk in her desk chair, and she began to "preach" to me about how Jesus does not like for boys to cheat. I wish she had given me a whipping. It reminded me of my mother, who always "preached" to us about Jesus every time we did something bad. After Mrs. McCandless's lecture, I felt really bad for two reasons: first, because I had actually told a lie, and second, because I got "preached to" as a result.

Through the years I kept thinking that I would one day tell Mrs. McCandless the truth of the matter, so one day, while I was pastor of Riverview Baptist Church in Berry, Kentucky, just down the road from where Mrs. McCandless lived, I decided one day to stop in and see her. I was a little beyond 30 years of age at the time. I stopped at her house, went to the door, and knocked on her door. She came to the door, and I went into her house. We shared some niceties, and then I got right to work doing what I had come to do.

I told her that, when I was in her fifth-grade class, she had thought that I was cheating on a spelling test, that I had admitted to it, and that she had scolded me for it. I was so relieved that I had finally told the truth about the matter. I thought my life would be completely different from now on.

I really do not know what I expected her to say, but I actually did not expect what she did say. She looked at me, smiled, and said, "You know, I don't even remember that."  I actually did not know what to say. Now I have to live with the fact that Mrs. McCandless will never know that I was innocent of what I had admitted, but now she doesn't even remember it.  She is gone now, and this still stays in my head. The only consolation that I have now is that I know that I did not cheat on my spelling test no matter what anyone else may think. Amen.