"But we didn't DO it"

“It wasn’t us…” is not a convincing argument for most teachers. The other day something happened that made me really appreciate how well the teachers I work with know their students and understand what is going on between them. It’s actually kind of creepy sometimes; I remember one morning meeting when a teacher reported to the school that two students ( who up until that point had been best friends) had got into the text message fight the night before, were no longer speaking, and that the class was likely to be tense and divided. How on earth had he heard about it by 8 am the next morning?! Anyway, back to the story. Three boys had been studying and eating at MacDonald's. They were there for about three hours wearing their school basketball club uniforms. Sometime after they left, staff found three names graffitied where the boys had been sitting. The restaurant manager called the school, and the school confirmed that the three names were the names of boys from our basketball club. This is where it gets good. 
The basketball coach asked the boys about it. They reported that they had been at the McDonald’s but said that they hadn’t done the graffiti. The coach believed them. Here’s how he reported it at the staff meeting: “Not only do I believe that they wouldn’t lie to me, I also don’t believe that they would be stupid enough to write their full names somewhere they had been sitting for three hours in their uniforms.” So what do you think happened next? It turns out that the boys in question had recently had a falling out with some other boys. After a bit of investigation, it turned out that these boys had gone into the McDonald’s, waited for the basketball players to leave and done the graffiti to get them into trouble. An ingenious evil plot, foiled only by a teacher willing to believe his students when they said “we didn't do it”.