We’re already five weeks into the semester. Frankly, this blows my mind. In a good way, mostly. Up to now, things have gone very smoothly. (I’m vigorously knocking on wood.) I’m getting used to rising at 5:30 a.m. every day, and am delighted to be done with teaching by 10. I’m more or less on top of the marking, and am not panicked about the places where I’m falling behind. Yesterday I thought I might be getting a cold, but a 3-hour afternoon nap banished my symptoms, so I’m hoping it was sleep deprivation and not illness that was making me sluggish.

I’m not taking anything for granted, though. It’s true that so far, there have been few blatant issues, but there are still a couple of things that have pricked at my antennae, and today, one of them is on my mind.

Last week, I returned some in-class essays to my Child Studies students. These in-class assignments were meant to be the first drafts of a more elaborate at-home literary analysis that they were to hand in today. On the day I returned the first drafts, I asked them to sign up for personal appointments, so that they could look over their first drafts and my evaluations, think about their improvements and their questions, and then sit down with me for ten minutes or so, so we could discuss their next steps together.

Everyone signed up diligently on the appointment schedule. Over the two days of personal appointments, almost everyone showed up, and what’s more, they were almost all punctual. (I go through this process every semester a couple of times with all my classes, and this sort of consideration and seriousness is not my usual experience.)

However, something odd happened on the second afternoon. One young woman, Marisol, appeared, announcing that she had some questions, but she was not the person I was expecting. I told her that I couldn’t see her right then, because I was waiting for one of her classmates, Chiara, who had an appointment at that time. “But I signed up for this time,” Marisol said. She consulted her agenda. “Yes, it’s right here.” I handed her the appointment sheet, where Chiara’s name was clearly written in the 2:10 spot. Marisol looked at the sheet, and then bent in to inspect it more closely. “Right here,” she said. “Look. Someone erased my name and wrote her own over it.”

I looked. This did indeed seem to be the case. I could see the faint “B” of Marisol’s last name.

“Wow,” I said.

“Well,” said Marisol, “that’s not very nice.”

Chiara was nowhere to be seen, so Marisol and I sat down and went over her essay together. I then had a bit of a break, and so closed my door to give this event some thought.

What does a teacher do in such a situation? It wasn’t something I’d encountered before.

On the first day of class, as we were going over the guidelines for classroom conduct, I told my students that my bottom-line rule of thumb is, “Don’t be a jerk.” I then detailed for them what I mean by this. “Show consideration for other people. Don’t behave as though you are the only one who matters. Be polite, don’t distract, don’t disrupt. THINK OF OTHERS, and that includes me and everyone else in the room.”

This seemed to me to be a clear-cut case of someone being a jerk. What did she think was going to happen when she and another student showed up at the same time? Did she believe that if she erased the other student’s name, that student would cease to exist? Was there some other possible explanation for this that I was missing?

A colleague stopped into my office to say hello, and I told her the story. “What do I do?” I asked. “Do I pull her aside and ask her what the hell this was about? If she’s the sort of person who would do this, will that kind of intervention do any good? Or…”

I stopped, remembering something that had struck me a few days before. I had been watching my favorite pundits, Mark Shields and David Brooks, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, as they commented on the billions of dollars given out in Wall Street bonuses while the whole country is in the middle of financial collapse. Brooks distinguished “amoral capitalism” from capitalism “surrounded by social understandings, by a set of norms that we all adhere to or that are enforced by shame.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said to my colleague. “I’m thinking that next class, I’ll go in and commend them for their consideration, their punctuality, their preparedness, etc. where these appointments are concerned. But I’ll mention that something strange happened. I’ll explain, without mentioning names, that it seems that someone erased someone else’s name and wrote her own in. And I’ll say that I want to give that person the opportunity to come forward later, in private, and either give some sort of explanation, or to apologize to me and to the person whose name she removed. I’m thinking that just hearing this from me might not have any real impact, but that seeing the reactions of other people in the class, seeing that such actions affect everyone, might bring about some productive shame.”

“Do it,” the colleague said. “Do it, and tell me how it goes.”

So I spent some time preparing a little speech in my head before the next class, the class when their essays were due, but of course, when class time came, Chiara didn’t show up.

By now, I was kind of looking forward to dropping this bomb on the class and seeing how they, and Chiara, reacted. In particular, I wanted Marisol to know that I was not ignoring the incident. So I did give a small speech in which I thanked them for their responsible and considerate approach to the appointments, and mentioned that “something strange” had happened with the appointment sheets. I told them that maybe we’d discuss it at another time. Then we moved on to other things. The students looked a bit puzzled, but Marisol nodded, and so I hoped I had at least assured her that the incident had been noted.

After class, I returned to my office to find an email from Chiara. She was writing on her friend’s Blackberry, she had been in a car accident, she would be at my office soon with her essay. My inclination was, of course, to disbelieve all of this, but it wasn’t a serious issue at this point. It did seem, however, that this meant I would have to address the appointment sheet issue with Chiara alone.

She appeared at the door with a friend from the class. She produced her essay, and I asked her friend to step outside while I spoke to Chiara in private. I placed the appointment sheet in front of Chiara, explained what had happened on the afternoon of her appointment, and asked if she had any explanation.

She didn’t pause. She didn’t blanch. She didn’t seem at all surprised that I was asking her these questions. She also didn’t get angry. She said, “I could have come at any time during those four hours.” I waited for more. “I definitely didn’t erase somebody’s name. I would never do that. I wrote my own name, but then I erased it and changed it, and then wrote it back there again. But that space was blank. And then I was sick all week so I didn’t come anyway.”

Now, of course I was doing my best to stay open to the possibility that there had been some sort of misunderstanding. But Chiara’s glib delivery, her lack of surprise, and her failure to provide explanation for why a perfectly responsible student like Marisol would believe she had an appointment when she did not, left no doubt in my mind that she was lying. Bald-facedly, remorselessly lying, and there was simply nothing I could do about it. There had been no disastrous consequences, there was no concrete evidence of wrongdoing, and it was not within my power to punish her. She had done something mean and selfish and she was going to get away with it. And although I was furious, I couldn’t think of anything I could say to her about it. So I simply replied, “All right then,” took the sheet from her, and let her go.

What would you have done? Was I right to want to address this with the class as a whole, and let her feel the shock and wrath of her peers (as I expect she would have) if I had had the opportunity? Was there a way I could have addressed her in private that would have made her feel a stronger reprimand? Have I now been put in the unpleasant position of knowing that one of my students is dishonest and without conscience, and that I am going to have to examine everything she produces, from doctor’s notes to written work to verbal excuses, to be sure that she is not cheating and getting away with it? Is there anything a teacher can do to impress upon dishonest students that they will not prosper, at least not in her classroom?