Daily writing prompt

What is the best excuse you have heard lately?

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As a teacher, I hear a lot of excuses.

Some are ordinary. “My Internet was down.”

Some are dramatic. “My bookbag was stolen.”

Some are wonderfully vague. “I got confused about the assignment.”

And some require the student to forget that every student in the school has been issued a laptop. “We only have one computer at home.”

That one might have worked better in 1997.

I have always believed there is usually a reason for something, but rarely a genuine excuse. A reason explains what happened. An excuse tries to make sure none of it was your fault.

• The sun got in my eyes.
• The dog ate my homework.
• The power went out.
• My alarm didn’t go off.
• My mother forgot to wake me up.
• The assignment disappeared.
• Canvas deleted it.
• Focus deleted it.
• Microsoft Word deleted it.

Technology, apparently, spends most evenings plotting against eighth- and ninth-grade students. Somewhere, deep inside a server farm, a computer is whispering, “Let’s ruin Tyler’s English grade.”

Of course, strange things really do happen. Internet service fails. Power goes out. Bags get stolen. Files become corrupted. Dogs, while probably less interested in eating homework than previous generations claimed, remain unpredictable creatures.

But the problem with excuses is that they usually arrive in large families.

The Internet went down, the charger disappeared, the laptop froze, the student forgot the password, and then the entire household was suddenly called away for an emergency that lasted until two minutes before class began. That isn’t an excuse anymore. That’s a limited series on Netflix.

Last year, I had one student who took a different approach. Whenever I asked why he had not completed an assignment, he would say, “I won’t make up a story. I just didn’t do it.”

It was refreshing.

There was no stolen bookbag. No power outage. No mysterious technological catastrophe. No cousin who accidentally submitted the wrong file from another state. He simply had not done it.

The only problem was that he gave me this refreshingly honest answer almost every day. He may have completed one or two homework assignments all year. Honesty is admirable, but eventually even honesty needs to pick up a pencil. Still, I respected the fact that he did not point toward the heavens and blame a satellite.

There is something appealing about a person who simply says, “I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.” Most of us are not very good at that. Adults may not blame the dog, but we have more sophisticated excuses.

• “I’ve been busy.”
• “I’ve had a lot going on.”
• “I haven’t had time.”
• “I was waiting for the right moment.”
• “I didn’t see the message.”

That last one is especially impressive when the message has two blue check marks underneath it.

“I didn’t have time” is probably the adult version of “My Internet was down.” Sometimes it is completely true. Other times, it means, “I had time, but I used it for eleven other things I preferred.”

That sounds worse, so we clean it up.

We do not say, “I forgot.” We say, “It slipped my mind.”

We do not say, “I chose not to do it.” We say, “I wasn’t able to get to it.”

We do not say, “I was wrong.” We say, “Mistakes were made.”

That is a beautiful phrase because it allows mistakes to exist without requiring anyone to have made them. They simply appeared. Like mold.

The Bible contains some first-rate excuses.

• Adam blamed Eve.
• Eve blamed the serpent.
• Moses said he was not a good speaker.
• Gideon said his family was too weak and he was the least important person in it.
• Jonah apparently decided that getting on a boat headed in the opposite direction was a reasonable response to a direct command from God.

Human beings have been explaining themselves for a very long time. And God has never seemed especially impressed. He listens to our reasons, but He also sees through our excuses.

That may be why confession is so difficult. Confession requires us to stop polishing the story. It asks us to remove the weather, the technology, the other people and the unfortunate timing. It asks us to say, “I did it.” Or, in some cases, “I didn’t do it.”

No stolen bookbag. No power outage. No solar interference. Just the truth.

So what is the best excuse I have heard lately? I am not sure. There are so many strong contenders. But I still admire the student who refused to invent one.

“I won’t make up a story,” he said. “I just didn’t do it.”

Not a great academic strategy. But as excuses go, it was perfect.