Teachers are often tasked with the responsibility of “shaping the next generation,” however, as these teachers share on an AskReddit thread, our youth are still prone to doing some pretty still stuff. Check out these hilarious stories about students who did technically “misbehave,” and how their teachers handled it.
Source available at the end.
My very first week student teaching, I was shadowing the guy who recommended the position for me as an English teacher.
During a particularly boring class, where the only event going on was the students reading passages from “The Canterbury Tales” silently, a notorious troublemaker from the third row started tossing pencils, pens, erasers, basically whatever the child could get his hands on at the back of a well-behaved, albeit, quiet student’s head.
I would have put a stop to the act if I had seen it take place, but I was occupied with reviewing worksheets and lesson plans as part of my education. I did notice the last thing to fly though.
Plain as day, the little kid rocketed one of those soft pencil erasers at full force, pegging the kid by his earlobe with an audible “thwap!”
Before I even had the chance to say a word, ready to discipline the boy, the quiet kid stands up, turns around, looks at the kid, walks back to him, and squarely lands his knuckles right in his eye socket. The kid starts screaming. The class is in shock and murmuring fills the room.
I had to reevaluate my life after that following event. The quiet kid, very aware of what he had just done, walks to the front of the room, and before the teacher can say anything, he holds his hands up and says something along the lines of:
“Yeah, yeah! YOU NEED TO GO SEE THE PRINCIPAL to talk about your ATTITUDE. You just make sure that when he calls asking for your account, you explain to him that [blank] was being a consistent distraction and jeopardizing my ability to succeed in an academic setting.”
He closed the door behind him, and I had to wait 5 minutes for him to be gone so that I could step out into the hallway and laugh.
I wish I had the poignance and grace that kid had when I was his age.
AeonOdin
I once had a high school student who consistently wore a large pop tart box on his head and proclaimed himself as the “Pop Tart King.”
VegetableBeard
This really shy 6-year-old girl, who never participated in anything and always kept to herself, worked up the courage one day to get in this ridiculously long line to play Box Ball with the big kids. Keep in mind, I’ve barely heard this girl utter three words in total.
She waited for about 20 minutes until she was finally up. The kid in box four checks it to her, she checks it back, he spikes it right on her foot, and it goes flying off. She is now out. She leans her head back and screams, “OH GODDAMMIT!”
I had to let the other counselor take care of the situation. I ran away so the kids couldn’t see me hysterically laughing.
casualdelirium
My students all say, “He/she is fingering me” instead of “He/she is flipping me off.” It’s a battle every single time.
why_you_always_lie
I had a two hour study hall with 40 kids. The study hall monitor demanded complete silence. Two students would always talk quietly. After the third or forth time of being told to stop, they got split up.
They then spent the next month or so learning sign language and would sign to each other across the room. This absolutely pissed the monitor off. I could tell she was impressed, yet, furious that her power had been so creatively undermined.
Her reaction was nothing short of wow. “These two actually learned sign language just to spite me for two hours out of the day.”
She ended up not allowing signing between students, which was upheld by the administration after that kind of blew up a bit.
ta58s
I’m a martial arts instructor. One day, I was having the kids work on a drill involving back fist punches with their partners. Now, this has never been an issue because we always make sure to tell the kids that this is just for them to practice and not to make any contact with. So, this one kid is really having a tough time with his punches. I go over to him, give him a few pointers, and walk over to the next team. I hear his partner say, “Why are you so bad at this? This is the most basic drill.” So, the kid punches him in the face. The reason I was happy about this is: One, I don’t accept bullies in my classes, and two, he had perfect technique on that punch.
NeptuneField
My students played an April Fools’ joke on me where they borrowed timers from all of the other teachers, set them for different times, and then hid them around the classroom. We got them back though when the principal came in and yelled at the main culprits, making them almost cry, then said April Fools’! It was great.
clownharp
I’m a school psychologist, and the kids have to walk by my office to get to lunch. One day, I heard a kindergartner say to his teacher,”My daddy taught me what the b-words are and you’re one of them.” I died laughing. I wouldn’t have been able to discipline that kid. While I did find the comment extremely hilarious, it was also kind of sad.
LegendofShaina
Kindergarten teacher here. Last year, I had a 5-year-old run up to me and very emphatically tell me that “Billy said the f-word!” I suppressed the urge to smirk and tell him, “Well, now you’ve also said it. So, lets all just make a promise that, from now on, no one will say any bad words.” He looked at my rather perplexed and with the utmost sincerity goes, “But I didn’t say beep, billy said beep.” I had to look away to hide my laugh.
youreNEXTbubbles
Teacher here. The school was next to a supermarket, and some kids stole a huge industrial size bag of onions and pelted each other with them on the tennis courts. The smell was so bad, we had to evacuate the whole block. The headmaster called an emergency meeting and declared, “I need to know WHO ARE THE ONION THROWERS? Thanks to their actions, the school now BANS ONIONS ON THE PREMISES.” I had to hide my face. I was crying, and it wasn’t from the onions.
Brummiediv
Everyone in my class would always steal each other’s pens and stuff whenever someone had to go up to do an exercise on the board. Our physics teacher was kind of annoyed by this because it was really childish and stupid, plus we were all over 18.
One fateful day, a student had to go to the blackboard, but after a few steps, he turned back and said something along the lines of “not this time” and took everything on his desk up with him (all of his pens, notebooks, etc). Our teacher was kind of rolling his eyes but whatever. Now, we were not this easily outdone, and as he was doing whatever calculation he was supposed to be doing, the front row of students tilted his chair backwards so the row behind could catch it with their feet, to avoid making a sound, and drag it backwards.
When he came back from the blackboard, looking super proud (because he thought he had outwitted us and not because he had solved the problem), he reached for his place and exclaimed incredulous, “What the hell guys, where is my chair?” Even the teacher smiled.
Delerien
A kid I hated was being a total jerk in class. I took him outside and shouted at him. I was a young teacher back then, and it was before I realized that losing your cool just made things worse. I accidentally spat on him as I was shouting. He calmly looked me in the eye and said, “I asked for the news, not the weather.” I couldn’t keep it together. I laughed my head off, shook his hand, and he never misbehaved again. That’s also when I learned that shouting at kids never works.
noeledmundsbeard
I taught the first grade. We had to show a mandatory YouTube video on the first day about sharing and being nice. It was very, very lame. It had really annoying puppets and just sucked. Well, once the video was done, there was a moment of complete silence in the classroom, and this adorable little boy who barely spoke English just said, “What the hell?” I had to talk to him about his language, but he seriously just voiced what we were all thinking.
YouKnowHowIBe
Not a teacher, but one my fellow classmates hadn’t done his math homework. As punishment, the teacher made him come up and solve an equation on the board. Another teacher was walking past the classroom window. He peered through, got out his marker pen, and wrote the answer backwards on the window so that we could all see it. Even the teacher ended up laughing about how random it all was.
popsickle_in_one
I teach elementary music. We were playing with maracas in one of my first grade classes. Before handing them out, I explained how to use them and under no circumstances were they to bang them on anything.
Naturally, I had them out and the first thing that they did was bang them together on the wall, on the floor, literally anywhere. This one boy hit his two maracas together and it just exploded. Tiny rocks and shrapnel flied everywhere and covered the floor, as well as, the other students. He then started crying. The class was in pandemonium, and it was a hilarious scene.
I had to pretend to be mad at him because he blatantly didn’t follow the rules, but I wasn’t too harsh on him because he was already crying so hard. He felt really horrible, and I felt like that was enough of a punishment. But man, I was dying. I just wanted to laugh so hard.
Mandiferous
A coworker of mine had students who would all turn their desks upside down while he was on hallway duty in between classes so that when he came back in they were standing around with upside down desks. He was not very happy about it, but it was so hilarious.
amahler03
I saw a group of students standing around an umbrella. I sternly asked what they were doing, and one of them said the umbrella was wet. This was the last period of the day. The owner of the umbrella had been at school all day so there was no reason for their umbrella to be wet, unless someone was up to some shenanigans.
I went over to the group and asked how the umbrella got wet. One of the students held out a plastic toilet. I frowned and told him to give it to me. He did, and I looked at it. I opened the toilet seat, and I promptly got hit in the eye by a steam of water.
My students were trying so hard to stifle their giggles because they knew they were in trouble. I couldn’t help it, but I started to laugh. My students took that as permission to laugh as well. After a few minutes, I told them I wasn’t mad about getting hit in the eye with water because I did do that to myself, but they were in trouble for playing around during instructional time.
Auvers1230
Former student here. In my eighth grade English class, we were discussing our journal entries. They were usually about how our weekends went or something. One kid got called up to talk about his, and somehow he got to comparing the size of Bass Pro shops and Dick’s stores. He started to say, “… and you know, you can fit like four Dick’s in a…” and then started cracking up. Our teacher was trying not to laugh.
kayleekinz
I was teaching students about the four theories of art criticism. Since they had a hard time remembering the process, we decided to come up with a mnemonic as a class. The letters were D, A, I, and E. As the students were passing up their anonymous index cards with their suggestions on them, I was reading a few and came upon “Dat Ass I Eat” and promptly lost it laughing. Never found out who it was, but it kept the class in a good-natured suspense when they asked what was so funny. To this day, I still crack up about it.
OccamySilver
I was actually the student. To make a long story short, a teacher with a grudge walked in on me tossing a wadded up ball of paper at my best friend. She just sort of decided that we were fighting and demanded we go to the headmaster’s office to explain ourselves. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The headmaster’s secretary put on a very stern face when we got there and told us he’d already been informed about what happened and was expecting us. The headmaster just glared when we walked in and and in his most serious voice told me, “Pyronius! You should know better than to beat up on Robert! You could have been seriously hurt if he decided to fight back!” Then he started laughing and asked us what had really happened. Once we explained ourselves, he gave us some coffee and had us sit around for about five minutes before leaving with the instruction that we should try to look “suitably chastised.”
pyronius
I’m not a teacher. In the seventh grade I was written up for saying, “This school has dollar tree internet.” The dean just laughed about it and wondered why I even got in trouble for it.
dyingpenguin09
One of my friends was being formally observed by the superintendent during a high school English class in an older school building. She was distracted because the floor was shaking and finally said something like, “Somebody is jiggling their leg and shaking the floor… please stop.” The superintendent sheepishly admitted that he was the culprit.
Swedishpunsch
Back in high school, there was this freshman kid that used to sit in the desk in front of me in my Spanish class. He’d always spin around, steal my pens, and stick them up his nose. He was always a distraction, a class clown, and irritated the hell out of the teacher.
One day, I had enough. I bought one of those electric shock prank pens (the ones that shock you when you click them). The next day, I just waited. Sure enough, he grabbed it and stuck it up his nose. click
Poor guy fell out of his desk and rolled around the floor. The teacher looked back, snapped at him for being distracting, and I never had any repercussions. He also never stole any of my pens again.
Ohanaette
I’ve had my fair share of class clowns over the years. This year, I had a student who hated that we had the last lunch in my fourth period class. So, everyday he would make up raps about being hungry and waiting for lunch while he did his artwork. At most, it was distracting but still made me laugh every time. His most recent rap was about chicken nuggets.
amahler03
Post are edited for clarity.