Cutting her Losses

I was taking roll by seating chart.

"Where's Sarah?"

A girl raised her hand. She was sitting three seats behind and three seats over from where she should have been. But, was the seating chart accurate or had she been recently moved? I decided I wasn't in the mood to fight the battle.

I updated the seating chart and continued checking for missing students.

"Where's Angel?"

No one replied.

I knew Brian was absent; I remember him. By my head count, everyone else should have been there.

"Okay, so Brian and Angel are absent..."

No one corrected me. This is usually where someone chimes in with "I'm over here" so they don't get marked absent. Especially during summer school where they only get three before being dropped from the class.

Sarah had moved to sit beside a boy. I removed the phone they had been giggling over. The giggling continued. As the boy was in his assigned seat, it was the girl who needed to move.

I directed her to a seat at the front of the room (near where her assigned seat was). She agreed with no fuss. She packed up her stuff. Then she walked out of the room.

Um, I wasn't kicking her out. Just adjusting her seat.

Okay. Fine. It's summer school. She's absent. I noted this and wrote a note to the teacher about Sarah.

The rest of the class went smoothly. As I collected work from them at the end of the period, I glanced to make sure their names were on their papers.

That was when I saw "Sarah" at the top of a paper.

And suddenly I understood. "Sarah" was Angel. (Sarah was in her proper seat. But because Angel wasn't in hers, the whole row was in question, hence why I called Sarah's name even though she was where she was supposed to be.)

I guess Angel wasn't thinking through the whole lying-about-her-name thing. And she hadn't conferred with Sarah about swapping names. (It must have been the boy. Apparently she couldn't resist getting a chance to flirt with him.)

So, when I asked her to move, Angel must have figured she had nothing to lose by just leaving. She was already marked absent.

Although, why Sarah didn't speak up...

Once I discovered my mistake, it was easy enough to fix Sarah so she was marked present and change my note to reflect the correct name. And all it needed was one more tweak where I mentioned that Angel had lied about her name.

Freshmen...