It's Not Cheating

It’s Not Cheating (And Neither Is Getting Help)

By Kristi Cruise

For the last week Nate has been failing at some geometry concepts. Literally. 40%. Big fat F. 

And more than the math, he was collapsing inside himself.

You could see it in his shoulders, in his confidence. It's crushing as a mother to watch your children suffer in this way. 

We sat down together last night for about an hour and a half.
An hour and a half of 30-60-90 triangles and square roots and formulas I haven’t touched in over thirty years.

It was work.

For him.
For me.

At first, his nervous system was lit up.

Fast breathing.
Tight jaw.
That glassy “I’m bad at this” look.

And here’s the thing we don’t talk about enough:

Most academic struggle isn’t intellectual.
It’s physiological.

When the body feels unsafe, the brain goes offline.

So before we even mastered the math, we had to settle the body.

We slowed down.
We did the steps slowly.
We repeated them.

Repetition is regulation.

Something shifted.

His shoulders dropped.
His eyes softened.
The panic drained.

Then the formulas started to stick.

We kept retaking the assignment.

By the end, he didn’t even need to write all the steps.

He could see the answer before he even did the equation because he knew the pattern.

I would quietly work it out beside him just to confirm what I already knew. Triple checked online.

He had it.

That last submission?
20 out of 20. 100% Phew!

But the grade wasn’t the miracle.

The regulation was.

He looked at me and said, “I didn’t cheat, right?”

And I said,

“No. Getting help is not cheating.”

Copying answers is cheating.
Outsourcing understanding is cheating.

But co-regulating your nervous system while you ACTUALLY learn?

That’s mastery.

The knowledge isn’t just in his head now.

It’s in his bones.

And that’s a somatic thing. One that doesn't leave. 

When learning moves from panic to pattern, from chaos to clarity, the body remembers it.

That’s what confidence actually is.

Not hype.
Not ego.

Embodied competence.

I told him:

“No topic is too hard to learn. No mountain is too big to climb. But you have to stay in your body while you do it. If you slow down and take the time. Spend the 90 minutes doing something hard. Almost nothing can seem hard.”

Because when we bolt at the first sign of discomfort, we never give our nervous systems the chance to adapt.

Learning is exposure therapy for the brain.

You sit with the hard thing.
You survive it.
You repeat.
You master.

This is Somatic Literacy in disguise.

Reading is somatic.
Math is somatic.
Life is somatic.

When the body feels safe, the mind can stretch.

When the breath slows, insight accelerates.

Maybe the mountain isn’t too tall.

Maybe we just haven’t regulated long enough to climb it.

What I love the most about last night was seeing him move from depleted to confident in mastery, and knowing I played a part in that. 

Today, when he came home from school, he told me he taught his friend Wes how to do the equations today. 

I told always feel like a good mom. But right now I do. And that for today is enough.