With December comes the cheaters.

It’s the end of the semester at my school and that means testing. Testing in Ukraine has its faults. The biggest of these is the cheating.

Ukrainian pupils are the worst cheaters I have ever seen. And I mean worst in two ways.

1. They cheat unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They open their books, they turn in their desks, they shout across the room. I give them a warning and they talk over me. It’s almost as though they’re incapable of taking a test without cheating.

2. They aren’t good at cheating. They’re anything but covert about it. Like I said, they yell across the room. They get out of their seats and walk over to someone else. They flip through their books. They act like I’m not even in the room.

And throughout it all, I feel powerless. I’ve moved pupils. I’ve made them sit one by one. I’ve made them stack their books on my desk. I’ve even taken tests away. Nothing seems to faze them. They just keep cheating.

Funny thing is, though, they still get poor grades on their tests. They copy and cheat off of the pupils who don’t really know what they’re talking about. So, the way I look at it, it’s actually going to hurt their scores if they cheat. Meh.

Shifting gears.

I was involved in a hit-and-run last weekend. And by involved, I mean that I was sitting on a bus when it clipped a car it was passing.

It gets dark at about 4pm here, so at 5pm (when I was on the bus) it was really dark. We passed a car and cut it off as we merged back into our lane. There was an audible crash as the bus clipped the front of the car, but we kept driving. In fact, only one woman reacted by saying “I think you hit a car.”

Maybe 5 miles down the road, the car we’d hit caught up with us. It was driving really fast and had its hazard lights blinking. It swerved in front of us and forced us to pull over.

Five men piled out of the car and ran at our bus. They were mad. Really mad. The sight of them, illuminated only by our headlights, running at the bus was frightening. Two men banged at the driver’s door and tried to open it. It didn’t open. The other men came to the passenger door and opened it.

Suddenly, five angry men, clad in leather jackets, were on our bus. They stank like vodka. They were yelling accusations and swearing at the driver. The first man onto the bus threw a punch at the driver. He threw up his hands and yelled that he didn’t know we had hit their car. He said he hadn’t heard anything. Two men tried to pull him from his seat, but they couldn’t because there is a railing that divides the driver’s seat from the passengers. Maybe it’s there for this very situation. Everyone continued to shout.

A woman stood and yelled at the five men. She told them to get off of the bus, that they couldn’t so anything because there were women and children on the bus.

Go figure, but the five men listened to her. They got out. But they yelled that the driver must get off too. That he must see all of the damage he’d caused. Another woman told the driver to stay put. She wanted him to call the police and wait for them to arrive. But no one really wanted to wait for the police to arrive and make things worse. The driver exited, despite the woman’s pleas.

All of the other male passengers on the bus got out. They lit cigarettes and went to the bathroom in the ditch. They surveyed the side of the bus.

I got out too, because it seemed like the thing to do.

The side of the bus was fine. There was no visible damage, at least none that could be seen from the light of a cell phone or a lighter. The driver was standing near the car and was surrounded by the five drunken men. In the light from the headlights, I could see that several of the men from the bus had walked over to the car. I guessed they were there to make sure nothing really happened to the driver.

I got back on the bus.

After about 10 minutes, the passengers and driver got back on the bus. The driver was ok. I’m sure he paid the owners of the car some money and they let him go.

The rest of the ride was completely uneventful.

I go home (for Christmas) in just 5 days. That’s great.

Happy winter holidays!