Am I still a goody-goody?

So, I thought I shed all that was unneededly goodygoodyness about me until this afternoon.

The kids are striking again so the teachers are just hanging out in the staffroom. They started talking about cheating on tests, not how it was a problem here but how they all used to do it. Especially in chemistry and math, while in university. They all shared stories how they got away with it and essentially were patting each other on the back, for a job well cheated. The cheaters were not looked upon as dishonest but as clever. I got really peed off, I never ever cheated, not even once and to hear that I was the only person in the room who hadnt, was very shocking. When they asked me if I had cheated and I replied that no I hadnt, they didnt look at me as a honest person but as a dumb blond, like what kind of idiot doesnt cheat, its the only way to get ahead, duh.

I am looking back to chem at Acadia and thinking how much less stressful, my courses would have been had I just had formulas jotted away somewhere. But no, I took the moral highroad and toughed it out. What is this world coming to when even the educators themselves cheated their way through school. It makes me wonder how many people in my uni classes were secretly cheating, if the ratio is anything like here at this highschool in france, there were probably alot.

Sigh...

Grrrrrrrrrrrr, sometimes life is just so unfair!!!!!!

One of the assistants, an Italian girl was saying that she was invited to present her honors thesis at a conference and that she was very nervous etc. I asked her if she already had her PPT made and she explained that in Europe people dont use PPTs for arts course lectures. I was trying to explain to her how you could in fact use a PPT for a literature presentation (the conference is intl) when this jackass german started going off that no no its not like that here. I explained how every single course at acadia has some sort of PPT used and he started to talk to me like I was a know-it-all American. It turns out, they both thought that to do a ppt presentation, you need to put every single word on the slides. I told them that its really just the skeleton that you post on the slides and they rest is verbally elaborated. The Italian girl was like ahhh, well someday we will advance with the technology, but the german guy, who is shorter than me and has shortman syndrome (tho we have secretely nicknamed him Big John, since his name is john), said no no, europe will never do that. Its so annoying cuz I wasnt even talking to him and its not like I was preaching North American technological superiority, I was only trying to help the girl.

This is what it turns in to soo often here, Us vs Them. I dont think like that so I find it really annoying when I am forced to either agree, that yes, you are better or that no we are better. Nobody is better, we all have our strengths and weeknesses and that is the same for countries. I know its just cause they associate Canada with the US and they have an inferiority complex against the US but still leave me alone; Im just sitting here, trying to plan my next school holiday trip, a tour of central Europe of all things...