Author's note: All characters present for or witnessing any sexual encounters are 18+.
Part One: Behavioral Intervention Plan
"This is bullshit, Mr. Canon." Taylor Stern slapped her essay down on my desk. Behind her, her peers looked up from their own freshly returned papers, no doubt to see how I'd react to Taylor's latest outburst.
I decided to keep it lowkey from the outset. No sense escalating things preemptively. Not when this young woman already practically lived on an escalator. "Language. And what seems to be the problem?" I looked up at her as nonchalantly as I could.
Taylor briefly removed one of the hands from her hips to flip her hair back over her shoulder. Naturally. Twice as uncomfortable for me with her big tits thrust out and unobstructed, daring me to break eye contact. To give her something else to try to accuse me of.
"This." She pointed to the paper. "What the hell is
this
."
"Your paper."
"It says I cheated."
"It says you violated the school's code of conduct in regards to plagiarism. Which you did."
Again
, I added to myself. This had to be the fifth time in these past two interminable years during which I'd been stuck with her in my class that she'd done so. More than anything, it was disappointing she hadn't learned to cheat less obviously.
"No, I didn't. You can't prove it."
I spun the paper so it was right side up for her and gestured to my hand-written comment. "If you look here, I cited the URL for the site from which you lifted portions of your paper. Verbatim."
"I did not!" She stamped her foot this time. My peripheral vision insisted I notice the way it made her breasts bounce in her top, the neckline of which trampled over the school's dress code the way her essay trampled the school's academic honesty policy. "This is
my
work,
my
words! I don't know what you think you found, but I worked hard on this, and I want a grade for it!"
I kept my voice down, but by now, the confrontation overbrimming in hers had done more than enough to call attention to our quarrel. "Taylor, you lifted whole paragraphs from the site. If you'd taken a sentence or two, I might have left it at a reprimand, but easily half of your essay constitutes someone else's work."
"It's
my
work," she insisted. "You just don't like me so you're going out of your way to punish me by saying I cheated. It's not fair!"
By now, the class had split into its usual two factions, the same ones her outbursts usually brought out. The first, comprised Taylor's friends and my detractors, watching with interest to see if she'd get away with it or at least enjoying seeing her make an awkward scene for their teacher. The second, and thankfully the larger, who were talking to friends or on their phones, thoroughly bored by the latest show of disrespect from their classmate. This was a marginally louder tantrum than the last one, but that was about all that seemed distinct about it.
For my part, I was once more at an impasse. I could validate her accusation of bias by disregarding her protest like it deserved to be. My alternative was to let her once more waste her peers' time by publicly cementing the proof. Classes were a scant fifty minutes long, and wasting five of them on Taylor's antics -- again -- always cut other things from the lesson. There was no sense to her outburst to begin with. She
had
cheated. She almost always cheated, at least on anything that took any time or effort outside of class. But then again, she was one of the brightest students in the class, and most opinionated, so why she'd cheat on an opinion essay in the first place when a topic that had clearly intrigued her during class was equally perplexing.
The assignment had practically been a softball to her personally: identify a solution to a societal ill that is inadequate or flawed. They didn't need to propose alternatives necessarily, though many had. Popular targets included big issues like the response to climate change, the drug war, or our Middle East policy, though some had gone deep with niche issues. Zhaniece had gone after student lunch debt here at our own school, and we were working on getting it published as a letter to the editor in the local paper. I'd learned more than a few things from my students, as often happened, and I hoped it provided a little kindling for their critical awareness.
Taylor had ostensibly taken on the Common Core standards, perhaps thinking she'd get a rise out of me by going after my curriculum, but I granted she might genuinely have grievances with it. I'd surprised her by cheering her on, helping steer her to authentic sources that weren't just whiny rants by parents who couldn't help their fourth-grader with math any more. After a well-written and sincere introductory paragraph following my guidance to outline the problem, the solution, and the problem with the solution, I caught the casual inclusion of the word "pedagogically," and a few keystrokes later, had the source URL on my screen. I confirmed the extent of the plagiarism, gave her her zero, and moved on.
She took advantage of my brief moment of consideration to press her attack. "Look, you guys. He doesn't even have a response. He knows he made it up!"
So be it.
It only took a few more minutes to resolve it. With her paper displayed on the front board via the document camera, I steered my computer to the address on her paper, then turned my back from the wall and read from the site. Those paying attention to the charade snickered openly, though whether it was at Taylor's antics or at me for being baited into responding to them, I couldn't have said.
"That's only part of my paper," she insisted once my point was made, leaning over my desk from the far side as if she were the aggrieved teacher and I the misbehaving pupil. One last chance to try to throw me off my game with her cleavage, though, and it was a good try. "You're cherry-picking. I just used a source. That's not cheating. You're--"
"Taylor, you plagiarized. You were caught. You lied about it, and were caught in that, too. If you persist in this behavior, I'm going to have to send you to the office. I believe next time you're up for a Saturday class. Now you can take your seat and let me get on with class, or... see you tomorrow for the Saturday class." It wasn't the most productive punishment, that
Breakfast Club
-esque tradition of stuffing a bunch of angry and unruly kids in a room for Super Detention, but it was five hours of easy money for me. I got to mostly sit back and grade, plan and otherwise do the work I would be doing anyway, and looked up every so often to nudge them awake or keep them off their devices. I doubted it had any corrective effect -- the students got enough tedium during the week already -- but the Principal Horen believed in it, and I wasn't so opposed I was unwilling to cash in.
There was a tense moment with a truly malevolent glare, and she drew it out long enough that I began to think she really might force my hand. Finally, as I snapped my laptop shut and made for the pad of referral slips on my desk, she growled in bestial aggravation and stalked to her seat, her matching dress-code-defying skirt twitching with each stride so violently that anyone looking learned the color of her underwear.
Red. It was red. So very red.
With that image as far toward the back of my mind as I could push it, I began class.
Taylor Stern. Three years into my teaching career, she was hands down my greatest challenge. There were other discipline problems, and many of them were easier to empathize with. Students with absentee parents, substance abuse in their households, a host of other problems. There were brighter students, too, if not an abundance. She didn't like to give evidence of it -- a special combination of too lazy, too disaffected, too self-righteous -- but she could be a straight A student if she wanted. Her other teachers had said as much to me, too.
But are there
hotter
students?
my subconscious pressed. Maybe one or two. It wasn't something we were supposed to notice, but I had eyes. That was about all it took with her. And Taylor liked to press the envelope there, too, showing herself off like a trophy in a display case. Like a lot of my colleagues, I had issues with the existence of a dress code. What could be more sexist than punishing females for male failings? Many teachers, most really, ignored the policy, to our Mr. Horen's irritation. Yet Taylor made it a game, seeing how much of a distraction she could make herself. Today's display had been above average, but hardly novel. She'd friended me on facebook, as a lot of my students did. I had no idea why, given her transparent contempt, but I wasn't about to invite a debate about favoritism by blocking her. No matter how many of her bikini pics flooded my stream.
(Yes, I could hide her posts. I know. And I would, someday, if she crossed whatever line I hadn't yet identified.)
My classroom had no seating code, and if a student wanted to sit on the windowsill, on the floor, hell, even at my desk, I didn't care. But Taylor? Not two months ago I'd had to almost physically push her off the stool in the front of the room because her skirt was so short it was flashing the whole class.
But why?!
she'd whined a hundred times as I insisted, defying me to say I'd noticed, to admit in front of God and everyone that I'd seen my student's panties. Which I couldn't, of course. At that point, the war would be over, my waving flag as white as the panties she'd worn that day. None of these insecure kids were going to take my side and admit they'd been looking too, had had no choice but to look considering how flagrant she'd been about it. That meant her feigned outrage would paint me as a lecherous pervert rather than conveying the truth, that she was a shameless flirt. Or maybe an exhibitionist. Truth be told, I had no idea what she got out of it all, what psychological issues fed into her behavior. I doubted I ever would.
In any event, I did my best with her, engaged her in the lesson when I could and minimized her detriment to the class when I couldn't. She was a chore to deal with and a tragic waste of potential, but if she kept doing the minimum to scrape by, I wasn't going to ruin her future by getting her suspended over and over until she got expelled simply because she enjoyed causing a scene and flaunting a set of objectively breathtaking teen tits. So even if she got on my nerves to no end, I put up with it. She got her daily warning, and we both moved on. Soon she'd graduate, or not, and I could go back to dreading the presence of her younger sister in my senior English class next year.
(My department head swore that Abbie was twice the handful Taylor was. From what I'd seen in the halls, I could attest that this was absolutely true, at least in a literal sense.)
