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A week ago today, the lovely Ms. L got a rather nasty email from a student:

lol Ms. L you are an ugly teacher you are a fukin bitch

The email came from the account of Abdul, a student who never so much as sets a toe out of line, so we doubted it was from him. The next day my AP cornered him, showed him the email, and asked who else knows his password. Abdul basically peed himself, and instantly gave up the name of Saeed, a somewhat nasty kid who had been mad at Ms. L on the day in question over a low paycheck. When we asked Saeed if he knew anyone else’s email password, he freaked out and asked, “WHY WOULD I SEND EMAILS FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S ACCOUNT?!?!” So, he did it.

Anyways, we decided to have some fun with the situation. We looked up Saeed’s address, and put the Google streetview picture of his apartment building up on a SMARTboard. We also got some latex gloves and tweezers from the science lab, printed out a copy of the email, and put it in a manila envelope labeled in giant letters, “CONFIDENTIAL.” With the stage set, we called Saeed up at lunch time and staged our own little courtroom scene. We started by asking him if the picture on the board looked familiar, since we had traced the origin of the offending message to an IP address in that building. The climax was when my AP used the tweezers to remove the email from the CONFIDENTIAL envelope and confront Saeed with it. We were all biting our lips to keep from laughing.
Despite all of our theatrics, Saeed managed to last the entire lunch period without cracking. Disappointed, the teachers had to go pick up our classes from the cafeteria while my AP kept working on Saeed. About halfway through the next period, however, he poked his head into my classroom to let me know “Mission accomplished.” Apparently Saeed will be joining us again at lunch tomorrow, to apologize to Ms. L and all of us for wasting our time by lying to us for an hour.

I wish I knew how to type the Law and Order “dun dun” noise.