The Teacher Solved For X And Left Out The Y

When textbooks were still widely used, I checked out an Algebra textbook to each student on my roster — all ninth-graders except for one tenth-grade boy. I also assigned lockers and gave out combinations to their locks. The tenth-grader had been misassigned to my class and was quickly promoted to Geometry.

At the end of the year, I was collecting textbooks. I got them all back, except one — the one I’d given the tenth-grader. I went to his classroom to talk to him about returning it. He insisted he’d turned it in, even though this was the first I’d approached him about turning it in.

On a whim, I looked up the locker that I’d assigned to him. (Most kids had quit using the lockers, preferring to carry all their books in their backpacks.) It was around the corner from my classroom. I opened it with the combination, and there was the missing textbook, sitting at the bottom of the locker with a light coating of a year’s worth of dust. (Obviously, he hadn’t used the locker all year.) I took the book and finished my book turn-in.

Me: “I resolved my missing book problem.”

Department Head: “How?”

Me: “I opened [Kid]’s assigned locker and retrieved the book from there.”

Department Head: *Shocked* “You could get in serious trouble for opening a student’s locker without a documented cause.”

Me: “Admin would’ve probably asked if [Kid] had put it in his locker. He would’ve possibly said yes, but that he’d forgotten his combination. Then, they would’ve had to contact me to find out what locker I’d assigned to him and its combination. So, I just basically saved someone a whole week of back-and-forth actions to get the book back.”