Back in my teaching days, in year one, I had a student who was single handedly responsible for many of the rules I developed for semester projects, exams and class attendance in the years that followed. This student never disrupted class and, for that reason alone, seemed to be a model student in the eyes of most teachers. However, towards the end of the school year, she was absent on her day to present her semester project to the class.

This does not sound like a big deal, but the semester projects were scheduled in such a way that each day for the rest of the school year there was a student scheduled to give a presentation to the class. When this student missed her day to present, it threw everything into disarray (I had not yet learned the importance of contingency plans). I rearranged, with the help of some other students who were accommodating, the schedule and gave this student a new presentation date for one week after her original date.

She was absent that day, too.

Needless to say, I was upset. Absences happen, but these were major inconveniences for me and the other students. I checked my records, and in the days leading up to and following each missed due date, this student was present and in class each and every day. The only days she was absent were the two days she happened to be scheduled to give her presentation to the class. How suspiciously convenient.

Long before I began teaching, I looked at things in life with a detective’s eye. “Which is more likely…” was an expression I thought to myself quite often. In this case, “which is more likely,” I asked a fellow teacher. “That she just happened to be sick on the two days she was scheduled to present a project worth a huge chunk of her semester grade, or that she pretended to be sick on those days to buy herself more time?”

This student had signed letters from her mother saying she was “sick” for each day in question. For that reason, regardless of my suspicions, I had to take her and her mother at their word and allow the student to makeup the presentation. However, before talking to her about it, I did a little research and discovered that this student has been absent on exam dates throughout the year in my class. This practice of skipping school to buy herself more time, a practice enabled by her mother, likely went on in her other classes, too.

Our conversation, with a witness in the room, gives a good indication as to why I was both loved and loathed by students (depending on who you asked). Since this conversation happened several years ago and I did not have a tape recorder with me, I am paraphrasing:

“Your mother dropped off the letter saying you were sick,” I remarked. “We’ll reschedule your presentation for Tuesday.”

“Alright,” the student responded.

“But for the record,” I said after filing away her mother’s letter, “you and I both know you weren’t really sick.”

Taken aback, the student coldly responded, “well, even if that were true, there’s no way to prove it.”

“That is true,” I said. “But I want you to know that I know. I did not want you to go all through high school without someone calling you on it. This habit, if you keep it up, will come back to bite you one day. It might be in college or it might be at a future job, but someday you’ll be in a situation where a person doesn’t need ‘proof’ to hold you accountable. And when that happens, no note from your mom will be able to help you.”

“Best to get it out of your system now.”

Like most policies and rules I followed as a teacher, the above conversation was a result of my own experiences as a student. I understood the need for “more time” because, as a procrastinator most of my life, I always needed more time. Whether it was a test, a research paper, a project or whatever, I would put off working on something until the last minute and then have to stay up all night in order to get in the needed work.

I pegged this student as a procrastinator, too. She didn’t set out to skip tests and projects. She just put off doing the work and then, to buy herself more time, pretended to be sick as a last resort. Was she the only student in my classes to ever do such a thing? Very unlikely. But she was the only student to do it frequently enough that I was able to pick up on the pattern, and she was the only student to inconvenience other students (not to mention me) by her actions.

She was also the only student to see me at my most blunt.