greatest teaching moment ever

having taught college students for about 10 years now, i have grown accustomed to being lied to. in fact, i think that lies are a central part of a professor's relationship with their students.  when you're in contact with one another, your relations are constituted by the idea that that class is the most important thing going on in both parties' lives, which of course cannot always be true.  when love life, or consciousness experimentation, or sleep deprivation get in the way of my students' work in my classes, i don't hold that against them, but i do expect them to not insult me by telling me some cliché or something totally transparent.  if they're going to lie, i expect it to be good, so that i can pretend to believe them and then we can move on with the consequences (which are spelled out ahead of time, and which they should of course be ready to accept, and often are).

and so recently i was grading a batch of papers that had been handed in to me in my mailbox rather than collected in class as usual.  and one was missing.  the student had it saved on their computer and gave me a copy, but we had to deal with the fact that it was officially late and how and whether this student was going to get credit for having it done on time.  given what i understand about the professor/student relationship built upon lying, i of course assumed it *hadn't* been done on time and needed to figure out how to balance the grade.  i asked the student to email me the paper to check the properties and history, and took it to our department IT person for further investigation.  and you know what?  not only had the student completed the paper on time, but the student had worked on it on several occasions, for several hours.  and THAT, my friends, is my own personal greatest teaching moment ever:  ascertaining that i had not been lied to!  can it possibly get any better than this??!!