Patricia Grisafi
Teachers of the world! Has a student ever gotten in trouble but in such a way that you had no choice but to commend them while also dishing out the consequences? The student might have pulled an elaborate prank that technically broke the rules but was actually pretty harmless and also hysterical. Or maybe you had a student who finally stood up to their bully in an epic way; you were cheering him on the whole time but still had to sit down and have a serious talk later?
On Reddit, teachers are sharing memories of troublemaking students who still managed to get their respect—and let’s just say one student set up an entire bar in some empty lockers and who knows how long he was selling booze?
Not ideal, but skillful for sure.
1.
“First 6 months of teaching. Grade 8 English. Kid did a 360 on one leg of his chair. I was impressed but gave him a time-out because it was dangerous. Part of the requirement for time out was that students identify what got them sent out in the first place. ‘I did a mad 360 on my chair but Miss said it wasn’t safe.’ I’ve still got that time out sheet on my desk 2.5 years later. Yes, Ethan, it was a mad 360. But it was still dangerous.” — eternallasting_
2.
“A student in one of the schools I work at had as close to a full service bar and smoke shop set up in a couple of lockers as you can get. The lockers were located in a corner of the hallway that is easily obscured and difficult to monitor. The kid just slapped his own locks on there and nobody noticed. When he was caught, the lockers were found to have several makeshift shelves in them, and contained several bottles of hard liquor, some solo cups, and paper shot glasses in one of them. The other contained a backpack containing some weed and various other drug paraphernalia for sale. The kid had quite the little enterprise going and god knows how much money he made before he got caught. I was shown pictures of what was in the locker, and I had to admit…given what he had to work with, it was quite an impressive setup.” — NightwingDragon
3.
“Teach a tech certification class here for a local non-profit. Just a week or so ago I was walking the students through using Task Scheduler in Windows when my phone started to blow up with emails. Turns out one of the students created a dozen scheduled tasks to send me an email every five minutes.
Title: CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS
Body: CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS …….
You get the picture.
Needless to say, his punishment came in the form of a scheduled task running as a service on his PC that randomly ejects the optical drive at different intervals. He has not figured out why this is happening yet, and it’s forcing him to learn how to troubleshoot an issue, so I see it as a win.” – TheOnlyVertigo
4.
“I’m an art teacher. Had a student submit his art book with a great variety of different dick drawings. One was an impressive ‘concoction’ of two cat heads as the testicles and a detailed ‘furry’ shaft. As it was assessment I had to ring his mother to let her know. Me: your son has handed in his assessment and it has penises drawn all over it Mother: I’m sorry you find my son’s style of art offensive Me: personally I am not offended, however it does go against our school’s graffiti policy…” — Littlelamb_5
5.
“My coworker and I discovered that one of our students was running an underground crime syndicate selling individual Icebreaker mints for 50 cents a pop. We agreed not to punish him or inform the administration, but we did confront him privately and told him he needed to stop before it got him in trouble. He had about a half dozen employees and was selling at every grade level by the time we put an end to it. Kid was a C student at best, but he’s definitely going places.” — mgraunk
6.
“My husband used to work in after school care. One time he saw two kids starting to fight in the sandpit. He headed over to try to calm them down, but while he was on his way, one kid ran at the other, who just calmly flipped the first kid over his head like a textbook martial arts move. My husband said he had to stop himself from shouting ‘Wow! Great job!’” — the_procrastinata
7.
“Had a classmate jump on the teachers computer and visit a website that would go full screen and make it seem like it was a Mac now instead of a PC. It was April’s fools day and this was his prank. This was in like 2003, so security wasn’t the conversation it is today. Anyway, he still got in trouble. The teacher got really angry and kind of yelled at him to sit down in the corner. She called in the vice principle, then the principle… then the on campus police office, and then when he was good and terrified; all four turned to him and said ‘April Fools’ and let let him off the hook. He got his punishment though. He was TERRIFIED.” — jdbrew
8.
“The first time I caught students cheating it was two 8th grade girls that had all of the same wrong answers on a vocabulary matching test. I pulled the girls aside after class to ask about it, and after some sheepish grins they both admitted that a third girl (their friend who was an A+ student) had fed them both incorrect answers on purpose. She screwed over her friends because she was pissed they were mooching! For punishment, the first two girls got to keep their very poor test grades. The mastermind got ‘your friends are mad at you’ as her punishment. Natural consequences.” — squeakyshoe89
9.
“So I teach high school ESL class where most of my students either don’t speak any English or they speak very little. I had a student in there who was constantly disruptive and liked to bully the other kids to ‘establish his manliness.’ One day, the disruptive kid is doing his normal annoying shtick and out of nowhere, my quiet little Latina in the corner of the room, in the clearest pronounced English I’ve ever heard her speak, said, ‘you stupid motherfucker.’ I had to hold in a laugh. I then had a quick convo with her and congratulated her on the clear pronunciation but also told her she couldn’t say that in class.” — hansol1986
10.
“I can’t remember the question that was asked of my niece (about six at the time), but she stood up in the class and said, ‘Sister Bernadette’s a bitch’ (sister as in a nun). The teacher told my sister (normal sister, not a nun) that whilst she couldn’t condone the behaviour, Sister Bernadette was in fact a total bitch. They had a good laugh about it.” — sionnach
