Blatant Lying

So I've been working with one of my students a lot in the past week to get him caught up. He's failing my course, and he's behind on a lot of his work. So he's been seeing me before and after school to get back on track.

I'm mostly really proud of him, except we've had a few unfortunate moments of lying/cheating. One of the first things he did to try and catch up was refine one of his quizzes. I always encourage refining quizzes, so I was happy that he wanted to do it. However, I also always give out two versions of the quiz, so they have slightly different numbers, and presumably my students won't cheat. Unfortunately, this student failed to realize that there were two different versions when he copied another students' quiz responses for his quiz refinement. I was so disappointed. I only looked at the first two questions and saw the numbers were entirely copied from the second version, and I didn't give him any credit. I told him that if he expected to get caught up in this class, copying another students answers wasn't going to do him any good.

Then about a week later, I was supposed to meet him before school at 7:15am to go over some work. My mentor teacher was running late, and I didn't have a key, so I sat outside the classroom until about 7:30am until she let me in. I waited and waited, and my student finally showed up at 7:55am (right before class started at 8am). I asked, "Where have you been?" And he said, "I was here on time, but [my mentor teacher] said you weren't here yet." And I just chuckled and said, "You've got to be kidding me. You just blatantly lied to my face. I was here before her today." I don't know why I was so shocked by this, but I just couldn't believe that my student was going to tell me such an obvious lie, especially one that I could easily verify with my mentor teacher. I mean, I'm happy that he's still been coming to see me after school and everything, but I also don't understand how he scatters these little falsehoods into his makeup work. I really truly want him to do well, but it's really discouraging to me when these things happen. It makes me think he doesn't really want it. On the other hand, maybe he's just so overwhelmed by how far behind he is that he's just trying to cut some corners.

Anyway, I just hope that we can both get him caught up AND show him that honesty is always the best policy.