Detective Evans

So if this teaching gig doesn't work out, I could always be a cop.

As the saying goes, where there's smoke, there's fire. There's A LOT of smoke in one of my classes. I just haven't found exactly where the fire is at - yet.

One of the things I tell my students on the first day of school is that I always find out everything they do wrong - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. I aim to keep my word as the investigation into who vandalized my car enters its third day of intense drama.

I quashed the story for the first two days this week, wanting to give the guilty party or parties some breathing room. I wanted them to think that nothing was going to happen, let them feel comfortable, maybe brag to a few of their buddies. Simultaneously, I was parking away from campus. I didn't want anyone to see the damage to my car. I wanted only the guilty party and their friends to know about it.

On Wednesday, the investigation was launched. One by one, students were pulled from my class and asked a very simple, open ended question: What do you know about Mr. Evans's car? The question was a loaded trap. Innocent kids would say something like "What do you mean?" or "Well, I know it's silver" with a quizzical look on their faces. The guilty ones would say "I heard it got scratched" or "I didn't do nothing!"

The question did its job. Only one kid mentioned the scratches, and he was my prime suspect anyway (the F.S. from the previous blog). When our dean asked him how he knew about the scratches, he said he had seen my car in the parking lot that morning. Of course, my car was a couple streets away, not in the parking lot. When confronted with that fact, he changed his story to say actually now he remembered he had seen it on Monday on the street.

Another kid, who is now Suspect #2, when asked the same question blurted out, "I don't know nothing about the scr-... I don't know nothing about his car."

Today, I had my kids write down what they had heard or what they knew about my car. Kids said they had heard my car was scratched AND TAGGED. Nobody had ever mentioned my car was tagged - that's a detail only the guilty parties would know. Also, kids gave me three names over and over again, two of whom were the kids mentioned above. One girl wrote that she had overheard one of the suspects talking to another suspect yesterday during math class. Suspect #2, pretending to sharpen his pencil, told Suspect #3 under his breath, "I'm not gonna pay for Mr. Evans's car."

Now, if you were the principal, what would you do?

A) Call those boys in, ask them some softball questions, conclude there's not enough evidence to do anything and admit defeat, telling your victimized teacher (in this case, me) that he has to be ok with the possibility of never knowing who did it.
B) Call the police right away and get an officer to come to school. Have the officer come to the teacher's classroom and, in dramatic fashion, call those boys out. Get that officer to interrogate those boys and find out the truth. Have them come in one by one and tell them their "friends" ratted on them and let them all tattletale on each other until the truth is out.

I can guess which one you chose. Now guess which one my principal chose.