What once was lost...

I lost my USB stick yesterday. I was really annoyed at myself because I'm normally so careful with it. At first I assumed that Gary must have it, but when I asked him he swore he gave it back to me. I remember using it before a class 7 lesson but since then we'd had two other classes and it was only later in the afternoon that I realised it had gone missing.

There was an instant temptation to say: someone's nicked it. It feels like it's every other day that the boys are given a lecture about stealing (or rather, not stealing) so it wasn't a huge leap of logic to think that a boy had slipped it into his pocket during class. However, I didn't want to begin accusing anyone before I was 100% sure that I hadn't just misplaced it.

By the evening I had looked everywhere for it and was by then pretty certain that someone had walked off with it during class. I didn't want to make a song or dance about it, but I thought I'd mention it to class 7 the following morning before their computer lesson.

Having made a brief announcement at the start of the lesson, a couple of names were given to me which turned out to be false leads. I tried my best not to make false accusations against anyone, but instead chose to go down the line of 'Someone mentioned that you might know where my USB stick is. Now, why might he be saying that?'

Since Monday I've been helping out one of the older boys with reading and writing in English (I suspect that he may be dislexic but that's a story for another time...). As we parted when we were heading for supper, I remembered that he was also in class 7 and asked if he'd heard anything about my USB stick. 'Oh, you still haven't got that back?' said another boy who was passing. 'So-and-so's got it.'

'Ah, so-and-so!' my tutee said. 'Don't worry. I'll get it back for you.' And ran off without listening to my pleas to not make a big deal of it.

Straight after supper, my tutee jogged up to me. 'Good news! Here you go,' as he handed me my USB. 'So-and-so had it. He didn't admit it at first, but I slapped him round and then he gave it to me...'

I did my best to explain that I hadn't wanted the guy beaten up, I just wanted my USB back. But still, I thanked him very much and was very happy to have it back in my pocket again.

To an extent, I couldn't really blame so-and-so for pinching it as it was partly my fault for leaving my USB around the students' computers and it was clearly just an act of opportunism.It makes me happy to think, though, that the majority (at least) of the boys here would, in the same position, not steal it like so-and-so did, but instead leave it, tell me or Gary or at worst fiddle around with it until the end of the class...