1 Hour Of The Greatest School Stories Of r/AskReddit

teachers professors of reddit what's the worst thing you have ever had a student unironically turn in as a university i had the joy of marking an in-class essay that started out as a normal one but turned into pages of rap lyrics it was all written out and structured so that if you didn't read the words it looked like a proper essay another favorite was a student who just wrote no as their essay the entire test was an essay so all they turned in was one word and no it wasn't a witty answer to the question and finally i marked a test that was covered in red ink drawings of middle fingers and this class is stupid the funny part was they did okay on the test last kid sounds like the greaser punk from shawshank redemption trying to get his get i used to teach computer science in university i had a number of co-submissions where the student just wrote pseudocode if you aren't familiar with programming think literally writing something like add two and two together then show the result i think they had someone else try and help them so they put step-by-step instructions in comments then tried to just uncomment that and turn it in worse one student i had actually said it worked on their machine no jared no it did not you probably just forgot the dart pie extension for the file for the first major research project in college i had to work with a randomly assigned student she didn't participate in any of the data collection or even really understand the protocol we were using but the icing on the cake was that she word-for-word plagiarize her section of our paper from the example our professor had given us which was an article he had written no surprise he noticed i had a kid turn in a wikipedia article as a research paper he wrote the intro and conclusion but the rest of it still had footnote numbers and somehow a slightly shaded background these people doing a 30 minute group presentation copy pasted all their slides you could tell because they had that gray background highlight on all the text and a mess of different fonts within the same slides it also ended up being like 5 minutes instead of 30 so they didn't even copy paste enough an essay completed by his mom who had done his written work for years according to other teachers in the parent teacher interview i told her i believe the essay was likely plagiarized as it did not match the level of work that her son completed in class however the essay itself was so poorly written that there was no point in pursuing a lower grade than he had already received her husband gave her an all-knowing side eye grimace and she turned bright red kid went on to fail my exam with a four percent it takes a lot of freaking work to get a four percent on an exam savage i like your style had a student while student teaching i suspected of having a parent over help with the work but never had to escalate it that far students literally plagiarized about two pages of the book i had written as if i wouldn't notice one of my friends in grad school had sold her papers to an online paper mill as an undergrad to make ends meet one of her students in grad school bought one of her papers and turned it into her during student presentations once i had to stop class to pull aside one of the students for mocking a dyslexic classmate for his spelling errors then my random name picker selected rude student next he plugs his computer into the projector and starts presenting and the rest of the class immediately starts snickering rude student hadn't done the assignment at all he had copied another student's file off of the lab computers and hoped i wouldn't notice he had copied his dyslexic classmates file spelling errors and all he got a zero and a discipline referral this is on me and i know it i teach sixth grade and had taught about citing sources but not about reliability had a student turn in a science paper whose entire source list was phineas and ferb episodes my favorite was a research paper about black panthers literal four-legged black panthers for a paper about the color of water a book that touches on family education and race including the black panther political group apparently the student did not read the book or pay much attention to the classroom discussions i also especially like it when they copy and paste from different websites without changing the fonts native to the land of wakanda i'll always remember the time students had the assignment to write something creative we'd covered poems short stories stuff like that even a diary or journal entry would have worked it was a real soft bowl of a homework assignment a couple kids clearly folded in and that's annoying but one kid decided to plagiarize bob marley lyrics as an original poem dude you could have written two paragraphs about how you like that song and we're all good now i have to drag you out in the hall because plagiarizing is a big deal and can get him in trouble with administration that's over my head just felt bad all around and i was a new teacher at the time and had never had to deal with it before seriously people just half bust your homework or take the zero if you don't want to do it don't cheat once you cheat stuff is out of my hands and there's no way it's worth it on a dumb one-off assignment i proofread a paper when i was a tutor where the author claimed that the song abc by the jackson 5 was educational she argued that the whole purpose of the song was to teach children their abcs and 123 s purely because it had the letters abc and numbers 123 in it i made her listen to the song twice and tried to strongly convince her otherwise but she kept insisting it was educational so she turned it in that way a student handed in an assignment for french class that he had used google translate for except he made a mistake when selecting the language to translate from english the assignment he handed in was in finnish why for the professor college kids being unable to distinguish between the atlantic and pacific oceans on a map quiz man did you know chicago was one of the original 13 colonies reminds me of sixth grade we had a forced quiet reading time and teachers use that to grade homework and the geography teacher in the middle just randomly slammed his table and started yelling about how could anyone on a map of north and south america think the india ocean was there i'm family and consumer science teacher homek i had a student staple together their sewing project they had actually completed a beautifully constructed pencil pouch seventh grade but was too lazy to empty out the pencil pouch because i had already started using it i give one homework assignment in my eighth grade course make a meal at home or sign up to make one for a few teachers after school this kid signs up to make one after school gives me an ingredient list it's just packs of ramen no other ingredients he promised it would be the best thing we ever would eat i was grading anatomy papers once and a male college student mislabeled the tea as a dong i had someone else call the pectoralis major muscle that goes over the chest area of the titimus major that same kid also called the quadriceps the quadricycle i had one male student mislabel appendix as the clitoris so many good jokes came from this one also i should point out that all of these were on accurate anatomical models so these were especially bad mistakes titimus major had me dying the students were asked to create a video for their final assignment talking about global warming or something related to it they were promised extra credit if they got a lot of people to watch the video the idea behind this was to spread awareness and to incentivize high quality work one student created a black screen video put it on youtube with a clickbait title and spammed it around the internet he ended up with enough extra credit to get an a in the class he will probably be more successful because he knows how to market i coach for academic decathlon a test taking extracurricular i had one student that hadn't studied the regional test at all marked all c these are on scantrons and wrote his name as animateds told him he's lucky it was me grading it literally anyone else would have thrown his butt out man i wish there had been a testing extracurricular activity when i was in school i just couldn't get enough of those sweet sweet tests i had a student say something about how jewish people wanted to end up in the terrors in concentration camp because it made them feel comfortable and nice my english professor has a copy of a paper turned in by a student a few years back all the professors got copies saying how ee cummings got his name because he said ee ee before well coming no one was sure if the kid was serious but apparently the professor was sad to have to fail the paper ee cummings in her face now that's poetry in motion not a teacher but i remember my ninth grade english teacher was returning essays we had written when she got to the student behind me she handed his back with a posted note attached that had a web address written on it in front of the entire class she looks at this kid and says this is the website you copied your entire essay from only time i ever enjoyed that class a mostly blank final exam with a poem on the back about how they were worthless under failure yep i've turned in a blank exam once or twice during my college career it's the most debilitating feeling one could ever feel especially after studying for several days for it my husband is a professor he had a student would consistently turn in papers covered in coffee stains the last um straw was when the student turned in another coffee coated assignment with the pages all stuck together and kind of lumpy on prying the pages apart it was discovered a coffee stirrer had somehow gotten sandwiched in there the assignment was returned ungraded i taught technical drawing one of the kids was getting suspended for a week he asked me for work he could take home since he couldn't do work using the software at home because he didn't have a computer i gave him a stack of worksheets pertaining to the autocad software and told him to take a book off the shelf the guy came back later after his suspension was over and turned in some of the craziest worksheets i'd ever seen i told him not one of these answers is right the kid got all upset he said they all came straight out of the book then he showed me the book it was norton's anthology of english literature i had a student in a graduate physics course turn in all the printed solutions with his name on it he had the audacity to ask for a plus so he didn't get kicked out of his program lol on my high school physics final i just wrote down every formula i could think of the teacher gave me one point per which brought me to around 30 with a curve that was a solid b not a teacher but once a teacher told me about a student plagiarizing pose the raven [Music] this gave me a flashback to fourth or fifth grade music class we had some recital but i was going to miss it because i had a baseball game that night teacher said to make up the points i had to write a paper about a musician copy and pasted the entire wikipedia page about beethoven including citations and pictures teacher must not have cared because i got full points i cringe just thinking about it i once had a student who misspelled his own name as an english teacher i had a child turn in a creative writing piece that was pretty much the entire plot of alien when confronted with his plagiarism he said he'd thought i wouldn't realize because it was a really old movie and women don't watch movies like that go in the other room woman the men are watching alien s senior students were asked to submit a creative response to a prompt the prompt was an image of a group of people collaborating over a map i expected stories in the vein of treasure hunting since we were reading short stories with that as the theme one student turned in a four-page creative essay about bestiality and gang violation because that's what they were plotting needless to say he was sent to the counselor's office we all have to admit that was a very creative response disturbing but creative during standardized testing mcas classmate of mine was asked to write an essay on a piece of literature he read that talked about war he made up a story called the big war and he wrote down a different classmate's name as the author surprisingly he didn't get caught a student was absent on the day a worksheet was due i graded and returned the worksheets pretty quickly when the student in question returned she turned in another student's already graded worksheet how you might ask did she hope to pull this off she tore off the original student's name wrote her own name elsewhere on the paper and then used black ink to scribble over all the red ink on the worksheet underlining circles x's the grade in hopes that i wouldn't notice i already graded it sadly she was a dim enough bulb that the resultant zero had negligible effect on her grade straight up pages long plagiarism from the internet always comes off as pretty stupid why does this keep happening are kids brain damaged the kids are either that stupid that lazy or think that their teachers are that stupid i had a student i was desperately trying not to fail who still owed me two two thousand word papers towards the end of the semester i had a couple of conversations and multiple rounds of email with him after a month plus of this i received an email with the subject line here are both papers or words to that effect i opened it and was confused because there were no attachments eventually i figured out that he had typed the contents of the papers into the email not standard practice but i would have let it go out of mercy the reason it took me so long to figure this out was that i literally skimmed over the contents of each paper thinking they were part of the email header and indented text in the reply he had written one sentence for each paper the two sentences were 14 words in total that person is not in college anymore i've told this one before in a similar thread but i was at a computer science lab had a student turn in a program that wouldn't compile why because when they copied and pasted the program they also included the email header at the top so they accidentally ratted out themselves to other students the program was emailed to and the guy who sent it to them the thing was i was there to give the students any help they needed i would have helped them line by line oh well in high school the administration came up with some stupid senior assignment and forced all 12th grade english teachers to assign it my teacher thought it was dumb too so he gave everyone an a well everyone but me because i didn't do it a week after it was due he was like just turn something in so i did less than ten percent of it and turned it in he gave me a b-plus i am a spanish teacher and one kid was supposed to write a large paragraph describing his school schedule he turned in one sentence that was written in english not a teacher but a girl i knew in high school had to do a report on the framers of the constitution came back with a research paper on farmers of the constitution literally wrote about farming in that time period seems like farmers were a harder subject than framers if you really did research i hope she didn't fail immediately i'm an earth science teacher last year i assigned a project about careers in earth science it was a pretty simple project where they had to make a powerpoint or brochure about a career with information like salary what education is required what does a typical day look like etc a few kids did earth science teacher and most did a pretty good job with it except tony first he said that the hours that a science teacher works was 2 p.m to 8 p.m i have no idea why he even put that considering he goes to school and knows what time teachers work he said the salary was seven thousand dollars a year and my favorite he said to be honest a science teacher has it pretty easy they just show movies all day and talk about science i showed one movie the entire year and it was right before christmas break i pulled him aside the next day and said tony let's talk about your presentation he was like it was great right and i just said no it was terrible seriously what were you thinking he went on to explain that he completely forgot it was due until 10 p.m the night before and bullshitted the whole thing which i can believe but even so it's the one job on the list where he sees someone in that career every day how could he possibly be so wrong i also had a girl do marine biologist for the same project and she sent me slides about different branches of marine science and some basic information about it it did not match what i asked for at all and even included discussion questions at the end this was not something that was getting presented in class i googled some of the info and quickly found the same exact powerpoint that was used for a college intro to marine biology class it wasn't even about the career not sure how she thought she was going to get away with that [Music] copied papers with the advertisements still in them plagiarized paper and pair and said so i don't see the big deal a plagiarized and wiki article including the citation needed link my ex-wife received a research paper 100 copy and paste from the internet including all the underlined hype links and claimed it was all original even though she found the original website and presented it to the student he claimed his computer was hacked and someone posted his essay to the site and was highly offended to the accusation i was the student here but sophomore year of high school i took ap world history and at the end of the year on the ap exam there was an essay question asking you to detail some great migration in history like the irish to america because of the famine or slavery etc etc now the question did not give those examples and i left it for last and it did not state human migrations when i got to it i have 15 minutes left and drew a complete mental blank i couldn't think of anything so i wrote a two-page essay about bird migrations and how they flew south for the winter or whatever a lot of it was bs because i didn't know anything really about bird migration after the exam i told my teacher and she whacked me over the head she had a jovial relationship with all of us everyone loved her results came and i still passed with a three i assume i got to zero on that essay but secretly hope the grader had a sense of humor absolute mad lord in art class turned in everything sonic the hedgehog final project we had to do a stained glass for a church catholic school and he literally painted sonic on the cross while tales knelt and wept the best part was the teacher tried to fail him but the principal got the teacher to pass him in the comment sheet at end of year said unhealthy obsession with sonic i used to be a special education teacher i told the student to sign here after the iep meeting after the student and parent left i gathered the papers he literally signed here student had an iq of low eighties and was not aware of such things being funny he tried his best i was tutoring in a master's degree capstone subject that students complete at the end of the degree to graduate international student of mine submitted a paper that was filled with photos of cats as part of the assignment i had a student turn in a paper on jim crow laws that used the n-word several times i had to explain why that word wasn't appropriate for a school paper serious teachers have read it when have you met the parents of a student and suddenly understood their behavior cce teacher here if you know anything about young kids it's that their personality and behavior is heavily influenced by the kids around them no matter how good bad serious or rowdy they are sit six on them on a table with one or two rowdy kids and the whole table will become one big rowdy mess 100 of the time well 99.9 of the time i had this girl completely serious rarely laughed always willing to help and usually more mature than anyone else in her table or classroom she was impervious to rowdy influences to the point where i was actually concerned that there was something serious going on in the household had a general parent meeting with her parents as i do with all the kids i found out why i have never dealt with more polite and solemn people in my whole life i attempted to fail safe jokes to warm up the mood and they failed so bad i had to pretend to write notes for almost a minute to regain my composure not rude or cold just polite and solemn is the only way to describe them like they were at a funeral esl teacher here you'd be surprised by how much the way you talk influence your kids i haven't had any particular horror story but i've had plenty of students that talked very slowly or very loud or very softly or with arrogance etc each and every time i've met their parents i've noticed their voices exactly the same worst part is a lot of them weren't aware of this and said their children had a problem with the way they talk and i should help them with that parenting life pro tip kids are like sponges they absorb everything they see the older people around them do especially their parents act like you want them to act literally just posted about this but i work at an after-school program and we have all k5 kids there is a fourth grader who has to be the center of attention he has to win every game he will fake an injury to avoid losing being it he says and does pretty nasty things to kids he sees as less than him he's a bigger kid so he easily overpowers a lot of kids his age and when we would go to his mother about his actions she would say that we lied and he would never do whatever he did it didn't matter how many adults and students saw him do it she denied denied denied and would then get upset with us she'd say we're picking on him because he stands out he echoes these words whenever he's in trouble and it's a never-ending cycle that we can really do nothing about because there's nothing being done at home sorry we hold your child to a high standard sorry we expect your child to follow the rules sorry your child cannot do what is asked and is picked on for real this drives me nuts i worked as a teaching assistant at a school last year one eight-year-old kid was incredibly competitive and would threaten other students who were in second or third place in competitions to stay in their place so that he could win something and he would become incredibly red-faced and stressed he would literally threaten his peers he even threatened to kill other students over a competition of who could make this little robot move within tape lines on the floor he would become completely irrational during competitions it was crazy then his parents came in for school sports day and had a full meltdown when they didn't win the jokey parent race we do at the end of the day they accused other parents of cheating because they had sports shoes on whereas other parents had just come from work so they just did the race barefoot but the dad went as far as demanding a rematch on a more level surface other parents just did a funny pose at the start line to make the kids laugh ran the race and freaking went home this is not as sad and horrible as the others but crap i can't imagine the very high levels of stress that kid is gonna go through for the rest of his life had a kid who would struggle to listen to anything or follow directions when told what to do he would break down eventually got him to start listening a little bit met his mom she lets him do whatever he wants even right on the walls in their house she's too scared to tell her own child no small kid in grade four nine years old threatened another kid on the playground with a jackknife and said i am gonna kill you called in his mother who was quite appalled and then warned us about his father exactly as she said the man was unhinged within a few minutes he was raging angry and threatening the administrators he was escorted off campus later he threatened to come back and the campus was locked down for the only time i remember in its history and police were alerted that poor kid has no chance of growing up normal his dad is a bomb with an extremely short fuse the apple doesn't fall far from the tree is so very true there's a boy in my class who hits children and laughs about it most often with small disturbing smile as the other kid freaks out we've told his parent repeatedly and she stands there with her arms crossed looking at us like we should go die then she smiles at her son and asks in an overly cheerful voice if he wants to get ice cream go to the movies play mini golf essentially rewarding him for this behavior it's so freaking infuriating but it makes sense because it's right there i've met a lot of parents of great kids and it totally makes sense that their kid is great because they're super nice and polite and normal but i know people are here for the horror stories i taught kindergarten for the first part of my career my last year in ki had a girl who was possibly the brattiest child i ever met she had no qualms telling me no when i'd ask her to do something totally reasonable was mean and nasty to the other kids just a total nightmare admit the teacher night she came with her mum despite me asking parents to leave their children at home unless absolutely necessary and was totally disruptive and noisy and mom said nothing mum stuck around to ask me a question at the end and her daughter was covering her mouth as she was trying to speak the mother just eventually gave up trying to ask me anything i was so shocked i didn't even know what to do a kid i had the year before was another hot mess i had a really small class that year which never happens in an urban public school and it was so great for their social development except this kid he didn't want to learn his classmates names and didn't want to play with them fair enough but he would also interrupt them when it was their turn to talk because he wanted it to be his turn everything had to be about him or he'd throw a fit he did no work and was well behind all of the other kids i met with the parents about his progress and they just laughed and shrugged that's just his personality he's the star they also didn't make him do any of the extra work i sent him to help him catch up because he didn't feel like it i was so happy to watch him walk out of my door on the last day of school i had this student who was so down on himself his intuition for math was great and he would understand everything in class but then there was no follow-through no effort on homework or anything at parent-teacher conferences he had almost failed my class but i'll let him do makeup work and he just barely made it i spoke to him in front of his father and i said i think he can do better than this the father looked at him and said i don't think he can i think this is your best i'm not supposed to contradict parents but i said i think he will prove you wrong i realized his father constantly shoots on him so he has no motivation a kid ended up getting expelled shortly after for something unrelated some parents live in fear that their kids will do better in life than they did and will get stuck up i had an extremely self-absorbed and arrogant student the only person in real life i've ever heard use the phrase do you know who i am apparently he had won some local sports contest and he really wanted to impress this younger student he harassed every girl in the school the first conversation i had with his mother she sniffled you do know this is a sports school right not an academic school click i am at education program tear i a low paying education job there was this girl let's call her tamara a junior she was an overall decent kid that has some issues with attendance she's been known to skip classes and occasionally has a bit of a temper with some of her teachers but i knew how to defuse her and get her back focused on the task at hand she responded well to me but when she is here she likes staying after as long as possible and has fallen asleep in my room waiting for a ride after a string of absences or her mother called us in for a parent teacher conference now we do this as a group of her teachers and administration instead of singling it down to just one-on-one we get in there with tamara make some small talk as we get our grade books ready to discuss her work enter tamara's mother she immediately starts yelling at the poor girl and laying into her about how much of a w she is and how she's been sneaking off campus to get into trap houses drug houses in the area she goes on to explain that she's not actually tamara's mom but a friend of her original parents who died about two years ago since then she graciously took in the girl and her three siblings into her home she also goes on to explain how one of the older boys had physically abused tamara's younger sister and was in jail for it i was disturbed at the level of emotional abuse and how she wanted us to rally with her against her daughter how shaming her would fix the situation in any way tamara shrunk down her fire was all gone her anger diminished she clearly wanted nothing more than to be free of this woman her behavior of skipping trying to get high spending as much time as possible away from home all made sense it also explains why she had a much better affiliations with male teacher as opposed to female teachers because female authority figures have all but been destroyed in her eyes she was much more retreated after that and clearly had been taking more abuse we contacted dfacs after that meeting and that horrible encounter we worried for her safety and those of her siblings i know they followed up but i never found out the full details because it was dealt with by our social worker tamara said that her mother calmed down a lot and eased off her and her siblings but i could still see the lingering fear in her eyes the damage was done two years later i was happy to see her graduate i actually saw her a few weeks ago at chipotle she was on a short leave from the army and was taking her girlfriend out for a quick bite to eat i realized then she was also undergoing pressure for her guardian shaming her for being gay i was so happy to see her smile a real smile a couple years ago when i taught eighth grade social studies this one female student a real nice girl and somewhat quiet and reserved but she had a huge attendance problem a good week would be her showing up twice to her credit when she came back she would at least make an attempt to make up the work but when you miss 3-4 days a week it's a crap ton of work to make up she had already failed the eighth grade once and apparently sixth grade two and the school actually wasn't afraid to hold her back again so during may with about one month left we started having parent conferences for those who have students in danger of not moving to ninth grade mom comes in wearing pajamas her gut sticking out of her shirt carrying nothing but her phone and her newport cigs we start explaining the situation to mom and she couldn't care less she told us she's probably off with her boyfriend at 21 year old actually a former student of mine as well mom kept paying her cell phone bill let the 21 year old boyfriend crash their house occasionally etc i'd show mom examples of the work her daughter was capable of and was completely indifference to it everything clicked to me upon meeting mom she was essentially encouraging her daughter not to care about school it's a shame because a student was really bright and a sweet kid and had so much potential with even mediocre support at home mum was probably raised the same way and just everything made sense to me i had a student who was a low-level rebel i taught an elective but i'm sure he was put in my class because it seemed low effort at the time he was sulky had issues with authority didn't turn in his homework etc i dealt with him the same way that i deal with all my kids and we slowly started to develop some fragile rapport at parent teacher conferences his mom brought him along he looked trapped and defensive and she looked irritated by that point in the year he was passing my class so i started off by reviewing his grades and the events that were coming up in my class she interrupted me near the end to say yeah yeah but what is his behavior in class like how badly is he behaving for you poor kid slides lower in his chair and i can tell that his mom brought him along as an exercise and shaming her kid i didn't feel like playing that game so i brightly laid out every possible positive interaction i had with him during the year the conversations he had with me about career aspirations the times he showed up on time to class whatever i could throw at her she left still looking irritated but her kid left looking a little better sure there were things i wished he would improve on but that's a conversation for me and him to work out not something to pile on in an evening of lectures from other teachers pretty much every time there's a parent teacher conference yeah the kid who doesn't do his or her work there's a good chance that the parents too busy on their phone to actually pay attention to what's going on the kid who acts out in class parents either spend the whole meeting screaming at the kid or they spend it screaming at the teacher i do remember one specific conference when i was a student teacher though a kid had been having trouble with another student and had been escalating things pretty aggressively when we talked to mom about it mom responded with something very close to well i told her that she ought to slap that little bee in the mouth gee i wonder where the kid got it from i was tutoring three kids in the same family all of them were way behind from where they should be in school barely reading terrible atmosph etc i would work with them in their living room when grandpa walks by and says i don't know why you bother with that crap i never learned to read and it never slowed me down i quit shortly after that that's so sad i'll never understand people who have that kind of a disconnect of like but my experience is fine so it must be that way everyone exclamation point one inches hopefully those kids got the help they needed one had one kid seventh grader selling and smoking pot on campus this is before it was legal even now you still can't have it on campus told the mom the kid had pot and she said i know i gave them to him it's his medicine too had another kid who would freak out whenever asked to do something he didn't want to he'd scream throw things cry and he's in 10th grade once he punched through a glass trophy case met the mom and explained that her son seriously needed an environment with more one-on-one support she said he was just dehydrated and we shouldn't be so hard on him three final one is more sad had a kid that was constantly getting into fights for no apparent reason would inappropriately touch girls then vehemently deny it because he's not a monster found out from his mom that his dad was shot on his front lawn when he was six he was bullied ruthlessly since third grade now he's in high school at 14 he's the oldest of four and expected to be the man of the house his family had recently been evicted when his mom was in jail he saw his mom's then boyfriend inappropriately touch his little sister and once getting out of jail his mom was diagnosed with diabetes if that was my life i'd probably want to take it out on everyone else too had one kid seventh grader selling and smoking pot on campus this is before it was legal even now you still can't have it on campus i should legalization doesn't extend to seventh graders this one is more about privilege than behavior i'm a college professor and i had a student who put in minimal effort into everything he did just barely enough to pass his classes over the course of four years i get to know many of my students fairly well and i'm obviously very interested in their careers and immediate work plans after graduation this particular student always humble bragged about how he'd get a great job and amazingly a few months before graduation he informed everyone that he already had a fantastic job lined up in a major metro area a couple states away i found this astounding because not only was the job in our field which was surprising enough it was with a good size company i'd actually heard of the student acted like he got the job due purely to his skills and efforts throughout college and since i knew neither of those was true i had huge doubts he even had the job at all a week or two before graduation we have a showcase where students show off their work and parents and others are invited at this showcase this student's parents came to see his work and i found out that both of them worked high up one as an attorney the other in management in a different large company located within blocks of the place where the student got his job i heard them mentioning to their son in an offhanded way as if this were totally normal that they had spoken again with their friend at the other company and everything was good to go for him to start after graduation his real struggle will be keeping the job since he was never interested in any of the classes or anything in college maybe his parents have enough connections to keep him there for a while but in the long term it might not work i was a tutor working for a charity who helped children who were not doing well in school we helped with their numeracy literacy and social skills as an after-school program we had a child there who treated it like a joke always saying that reading and maths were not worth it in the long run the mother would always arrive after we had finished with the children and whisk them away without talking to anyone took us all a long time to get the child warmed up to the idea that reading could be fun one day his parents arrived and it all made sense to put it nicely they were dumber than a box of rocks poor grasp of english in general no interest in their child's progress and maintained that their child only needed basic levels of literacy and numeracy it was incredibly sad to witness especially since their child quickly developed a voracious love of reading he very rapidly gained a reading level several years above the one he was in second grade watching him progress so rapidly warmed me but it also makes me sad that he is not getting the academic support he needs from his parents when i left the charity a couple of years after first meeting the parents he had just started reading adult novels and was surprising me with his insight on relatively complex topics he was a particularly smart kid and i truly wish him the best in life that's a bit like a real life matilda i hope he got enough support from the outside as a high school senior i was at a for a fifth period eighth grade english class for kids who weren't special education but were troubled and did not want to learn kids who would yell frick you when the teacher would have a pop quiz and then turn in an empty page there was one kid who was incredibly hard to deal with he would get in daily shouting matches with the teacher he would run out the door when her back was turned and try to scale the fence things like that one day after the class had had a particularly good week the teacher rewarded them by checking out princess monarchy from the library i'd never seen the kid so quiet he was absolutely entranced and then a character said dang or bled and the teacher freaked out and turned it off the kid responded by throwing his chair at the whiteboard he was suspended for a week and his parents were called to pick him up they answered their house phone acknowledged that they understood the situation said they were on their way but they never came to pick him up i ended up driving the kid home and he told me that both of the cars in his driveway were his parents cars they just didn't bother the next day his parents dropped him off at school again despite the suspension he sat in the office all day his parents not responding to calls to pick him up a parent-teacher meeting was scheduled with the parents but they didn't show this happened about three times before the teacher gave up on having one we never actually met the parents face to face but at that point both the teacher and i understood exactly what kind of parents they were and why the kid was the way he was dang that's heartbreaking teachers have read it what is your this student is so smart it's scary story one of my kindergartners just knows multiplication and not just the basic 5s or 10s in the beginning when his parents told me i played along with 2x2 or 10x10 but you can tell him 17x14 and he knows it instantly so cool to watch i had a student ask for an extension on their paper because they were representing our nation in the world science festival they came in third and the paper was an a-plus now i don't have an excuse to keep putting off my research revisions i was doing a 500 piece puzzle with some kids i was a preschool teacher we finished the puzzle except for one piece which was nowhere to be found kid comes and takes one look at the puzzle on the table says oh are you missing that i know where it is reaches into another completely different 500 piece puzzle rummages for like 10 seconds pulls the piece out fits it in i asked him how he knew it was there he said he had done the other puzzle for a bit and noticed it i asked him how long ago christmas he says it was february at the time kid was maybe five at the time might be more memory than intelligence but that was crazy to see such a great kid in somewhat dire circumstance i hope he's gotten all the opportunities he deserved five-year-old memory is the best memory i'm at the point where if i forget something in class where i put my keys what page we were on yesterday what color james colored his duck i just asked them they always know i once had a pre-kindergartener who could read and cried because he was so upset with how dumb the rest of the kids were my mom would write little notes for preschool me and stick them in my lunchbox my teacher noticed i could read them and would have me read them to the class every day after that i cried but from embarrassment lol i work with 18-24 month old and we have an 18 month old who can have little conversations perfect sentence structures perfect verb conjugation perfect pronunciation even l and r knows all the alphabets numbers colors shapes by sight some of the others know some of those things but i've never seen a baby this advanced i sometimes forget she's only one year old because she seems more like 3.5 just tiny like a one-year-old her dad brought her back from a well baby checkup telling us that the doctor asked does she say any words yet and we all lold cause she has full conversations my son spoke in full sentences by 18 months reading by 2.5 could add subtract and multiply etc before preschool he's now 21 unemployed and spends all day playing games online still smart as though are just lazy had a first grader figure out exponents on his own that's just the way he was raised [Music] we had a four-year-old in preschool he was sitting under the table writing down numbers for a long time he had no time to talk to us when he came out and we looked at what he had been doing he said he wrote down all the multiplications it turns out he's brother in five grade was learning the multiplication table and this little brother really wanted to do the same but did not have a multiplication table he counted on his fingers to add each column and got the table right a few days later he knew multiplication he would also comment on dates if someone told they had their birthday on the 12th of june he would say that is in 184 days almost immediately on an excursion we passed some statues with birth and death dates and he would casually sum up he was 78 years and 110 days old she was born 33 years and 120 days before him etc i think he was maybe more focused and willing to understand than necessarily so smart if he was right about the days that's definitely very smart for a four-year-old i'm 26 and can't even do that i taught high school math one of my freshman students divided 1134 by 63 in his head in less than a second i let him finish the problem and then after he arrived at his answer i asked him how did you do that he looked at me with this blank stare as if he was thinking you can't do that he proceeded to say well i doubled 63 and then multiplied that by 10 and then i saw that 1134 was just the difference of those two numbers so 18 looked at me like it was nothing i told him good work and moved on i'm only above average at a few things but one of them is mental math when i saw that this kid could do this calculation that i couldn't i was so happy it was one of my happiest moments as a teacher i didn't help him in that moment but to know i played a small part in his math education felt so good well i doubled 63 and then multiplied that by 10 and then i saw that 1134 was just the difference of those two numbers so 18 i feel so stupid because i can't even wrap my head around the explanation not a teacher but a proud big brother my baby sister was five when i came home from college for the summer after actually figuring out calculus and i explained it to her and she wrote it down in her journal yes she kept one from the time she was about four fast forward after she skipped a few grades in elementary school and she was taking calculus in high school and could not understand why it was so easy and reread her journal figured it out and called me laughing she has a phd in high energy physics and does research at cern yeah that stuff desperately proud of her you did her one of the best kindnesses you could have made happen early stimulation of the brain really can have a kid go places later not a teacher but a kid in my grade ended up taking courses two years ahead of the rest of us advanced kids the funny part was that he skipped his own mother's class and wrote novels during middle school math he's published three books and currently has over 95 in every class i have a five-year-old this year who has stolen my wallet more times than i'd like to admit from my pocket without me knowing i now wear a wallet chain like i don't remember what decade it is he still tries but he hasn't figured out her work around yet now man he is even smarter than that now that he's trained you to be obsessed with the wallet and you think that's all he cares about too he's in the clear to start stealing other things check your desk i'm a piano teacher on the side teaching a four-year-old how to read sheet music before she can read books i ask her to find the season she will point then out on the page act she can also do math really well and understands the concept of multiplication also another student that just started and plays by ear and composes her own pieces at eight she also speaks five languages which i didn't find out until i told her i was learning german after teaching her for three months she's already to the point where i had to send her to a better teacher kudos to you for recognizing that she needs a better teacher not many teachers do have an upvote not a teacher there was once a kid in the grade above me in middle school that hacked the school database and deleted everyone's grades he was expelled when i was in sixth grade a kid took down the school internet using a school administered laptop kid took the fat highlighters cut them open and removed the insides and replaced it with weed sold them at school he was caught but only because a kid snitched after they were caught getting high absolutely brilliant hi lighters it's right there in the name my mom was a student teacher in the early 1970s she recounts the story of a gifted first grader that nobody really knew how to handle every day her mentor would give the child a copy of the new york times and let him read during her class much later my mom was working as a speech therapist and had a severely autistic child that would come in daily after their lessons he would spend his free time drawing elaborate and accurate city maps on the whiteboard it was fascinating [Music] worked at a special purpose preschool designed for kids on the autism spectrum did an intake day with a kiddo 4yo where i was just trying to have fun and see what kind of things he liked i did some time on the computer where we surfed around youtube a bit he searched up a video about our solar system and began to explain to me the difference between the inner solar system and the outer solar system what they're made of sizes electromagnetic fields to compensate for distance from the sun etc i had to google everything he ws saying because i had no idea if it was true spoiler alert it was my seven-year-old son is on the autism spectrum and this is him with weather and sports i stopped questioning him because he was right and i wasn't for christmas we bought him a bunch of books on weather and climate by new year's he had memorized them all yet we can't get him to sew his math homework a student at my school had ocd so just memorized the textbook and wrote out the correct chapter for each question also their handwriting was so neat that it looked like it had been typed out with a typewriter i have mild ocd and all it helps me do is constantly reminding me that i forgot to lock the front door even though i remembered not a teacher but had a classmate who was and still is a genius i distinctly remember him asking very complex questions on the current reading literature and making constructive arguments it was over my head but our teacher was offended and argued back that he didn't understand anything and or an overachiever i think they were over her head as well she screamed at him and stormed out of class a number of times there was a time she asked him to leave as well i never felt so bad for a classmate he didn't deserve to be yelled like that i believe he's now a mathematician with published works and awards as well as a successful musician my mother told me a story once of a kid she went to high school with this kid was the local stoner but incredibly smart he was talking college courses way before everyone else saying they like ran out of math for me dog i have a student who is an immigrant that speaks fluent english i assume that she grew up in the usa she told me she had been here for a year and knew zero english before coming i was amazed i have another student who just does calculations instantly in his head he doesn't have to think when he learns more math it just becomes automatic he explained that numbers just make sense the english thing is surprisingly easy as long as you take the right approach i came to the us in the same situation as a 12 year old i just kept rewatching movies and series i had seen in my original language and was fluent two years later i'm not a teacher i'm a student but one of my classmates just has so much random crap memorized ask him about anything like the crimean war how to build a combustion engine random useful bits of information about bands from the 70s as well as being an excellent student in every single subject he's also managed to teach himself cyrillics or whatever that russian alphabet thing is and can speak russian pretty well despite never having taken a class of it in his life idk it's just nuts he's so good at so many random things i had a kid who could take one look at a national flag and then point to the corresponding country on an unlabeled world map instantly now i think that kids spend too many hours playing grand strategy games i teach kids with autism that learn on the alternate curriculum usually lower level academics and have cognitive delays i'm always amazed that while they might struggle in one area the strength they have i had one girl who knew everyone's birthday everyone she met day month year and age she could also do crazy math in her head i have another kid who is minimally verbal but knows every locker combination in the school two others who are amazing artists another who could tell you what 8 is movie icon shared a birthday with you i love my kids a kid's work kept deleting itself on a computer every few minutes he was having a meltdown and i saw it happen it was impossible to explain the phantom deleting that was going on fast forward to the end of the class and there's one kid remaining that was sitting at the opposite computer from the kid who lost all his work he looks at me and says you wanna know how i did sir he had put in a usb keyboard into the back of the computer and had it set up so he could hit the delete key with his big toe it was the funniest stealth attack i'd seen in a long time being the teacher i should have done something but it was too funny and smart [Music] former school aide here i once had a very tiny lad surprise me for typical development would be learning basic alphabet recognition and first sounds towards word forming however he took some play clay and made her and pan planned plain planet planets across the table and wandered off again my friend took the act when we were in seventh grade and got a 31. i don't know how because they don't teach you half of that material until high school heck of a guy though would intentionally get questions wrong on really difficult tests so he wouldn't kill the curve for the rest of us wish the smart dudes in my classes were like that not a teacher but had a classmates in my american government class in a community college about nine stroke ten years ago our teacher gives three questions for you to pick one of them to write about for the test in essay format you get the question about a week or so to prepare you to study your subject question most people write an average of 5-8 pages during the test this guy writes around 20 pages give or take even the teacher was dumbfounded he did this for every test and this is a three-term class you don't have to take all terms or even take it order if you happen to do all three yes he got a's he wanted to get into politics i heard of overachievers but wtf who does that i'm not a teacher either my mom was a very average student didn't try very hard and was not planning to go to college back when she was in school they used to administer iq tests a couple of months after she takes an iq test the school calls my grandparents and says we need to talk about your daughter everyone is like oh lord what did she do now they both go to the school and the principal sits them down your daughter has an iq of 140 but she's failing algebra we think you should send her to a psychiatrist my grandfather was livid he took off work for this no she never saw a psychiatrist and she didn't go to college but she's pretty smart iq doesn't exactly measure how smart you are but your capacity to learn i had a first grader with a speech impediment who was asking for a type of book his peers and i couldn't understand him no matter how hard we tried finally he gave up and without any frustration he found a picture book with someone stirring a pot on the cover he opened the book and skimmed through words until he found what he was looking for the word cooking he showed me the book and pointed telling me that was the word he had been trying to say he wanted a cookbook this was a six year old six dang kids can be freaky when they memorize specific stuff but that kind of thinking is incredibly intelligent [Music] my mom had a special needs student who went on some field trip to one of the nasa centers i don't remember where his dad was an i.t guy i think and had been teaching this kid around 10 years old i think stuff on the side because he was all about computers kid wandered off and apparently found some office or computer lab or something unlocked walked in sat down at a computer figured out how to unlock that terminal and started browsing through their internal stuff for a while before someone caught him he got in big trouble for that one but i don't know if it even registered in his mind what a huge issue that cold will be he would do it at school and nobody cared too much so i don't think he saw an issue doing it out in the real world he came to my mom the next year or the year after that when his family moved and my mom was warned not to leave her personal electronics unattended because he would figure out how to get in my mom had a second grader who skipped the knowledge dump stage and listened better than a grown batman for example when other boys would tell you all their dinosaur facts he would ask her i am curious miz slatter what do you think caused the extinction of the dinosaurs his emotional intelligence was through the roof i had a student maybe 5-6 years ago i teach social studies do didn't come in direct contact with her areas she was truly special but anyway she could speak five languages pretty fluently english is a native she learned french in middle school taught herself russian and italian for the sake of reading and learned indonesian from being around kids in the school and wanting to pick it up she could write music just from hearing it then reproduce it with essentially no time i don't know if this is common or not but it absolutely shocked me she's bar none the best student i've seen as a teacher with regards to conveying herself through written work she graduated just a few weeks after turning 16 one of those kids who effortlessly glides to top of her class last i heard she was about to graduate in something related to archaeology hs junior could do spoil geometry in his head but oddly struggled writing the steps on paper i was a student teacher at the time completing my education degree i taught eighth grade there was this one girl who was your typical edgy angsty 13 year old who was too cool for everything when we went through our poetry unit we gave a project in which the kids had to write their own freeform poem and put it to some sort of video or slideshow this girl wrote a poem about how the united states education system as it is stifles creativity and destroys students joy of learning i always remember this one line from her poem i learned more from an evening watching hamilton on stage than an entire year in a united states history class the video was your typical angsty black and white shots of her friends standing solemnly in front of or behind chain link fences and signs that say no trespassing the next day she showed up with a gigantic biography of alexander hamilton it was bigger than most bibles it only took her a week to read it my mentor teacher hated her because she thought the student thought she was smarter than everyone else and was arrogant maybe she did think that maybe she thought we were annoying simpletons but i just thought she was dope as frick this kid didn't particularly like or dislike me hated my mentor teacher and disliked anyone except a couple friends she was sassy she was smart she had a finely tuned bulls meter she had a huge vocabulary and an obvious love of learning she'd grill out book after book and where my mentor teacher saw arrogant in her poem project i just saw a girl who was desperately bored and was asking for a challenge i tried my best to give her extra more challenging options in the future for her assignments she never said anything to me but i got the feeling she appreciated it or i hope she did that biography would be alexander hamilton by ron chino it is big and it is wonderful my son has a fascination with nuclear physics and science he's collected commonly found radioactive minerals that i made him get rid of so the whole house doesn't get cancer he's researching a way to build a miniature thorium reactor and insists the only reason it doesn't exist now is because people have given up on it he's 15. my oldest daughter is an incredible artist but she's got that attitude like her poop doesn't smell bad she's always made incredible drawings with simple pencils and paper since she was a child she could capture your likeness in her mind with a glance and draw you out with a piece of standard white typing paper and an office number two she's now 18. my youngest daughter watches death metal goats on youtube she's about to turn 14. the death metal one is the real genius living the dream my twin brother who we just recently found out that he is on the spectrum for asperger's when we were three he would read the old-fashioned maps to my mother and tell her where to go fast forward to eight years old he would read at college level now we're 16 he's still very smart but very auto-tune my mother calls it this due to the fact that he always had different levels of sensitivity attuned to certain things but when i was three i was just learning how to eat on my own due to medical problems that i still have to this day i'm not sure what auto-tune means serious teachers have read it what is the surprisingly smartest thing your stupidest student has ever said just this past tuesday i had a student struggling with science homework actually math skills but for my science class he was almost mute about what he needed what he didn't understand no matter how much i tried to guide him through unit conversions the study period was ending and i had to let him go with little progress made as he was packing up he told me i'll try it again after art class i'm usually smarter at this after i do some art i thought that was an interesting observation and i asked him why he thought that might be the case he said i'm pretty good at art it's easier to try hard stuff while i still feel like i'm good at something because i want to keep feeling like that that's the entire educational psychology argument for fostering a sense of competency in the support of intrinsic motivation in the fewest words possible i actually think he's one of my smartest students really he just struggles to make it show on paper i'm glad he recognized that makes him learn better and acted on it i did pee poor in math through high school and college until my last year when i said frick it to the way i was taught spent way more time than normal trying to find a way to study that works for me and managed to pass scout leader doing first aid with some cubs i ask one lad how do you treat a burn and he replies with respect when i was in first grade we were being taught a bit about first aid we got to the point about sterile bandages and such and they asked if anyone knew what sterile meant i raised my hand and said in a puzzled tone it means you can't make babies i had a band-aid on my elbow one of the big ones and my student was trying to work out what it was it was a drunken full i said ninjas had got me he said it sounded like an injury i laughed out loud while in reality it was a gin jury this kid isn't dumb but most of the things he says are just because he talks a lot and likes to argue this kid goes to her private school which is open for 11 hours every day even though the school day runs for seven hours if parents need to drop their kids off early or pick them up late they have that option he told me that he really wanted to get a dog but his parents won't do it because there would be no one home to take care of the dog most of the time the rest of the conversation went like this me that makes sense puppies and dogs need lots of attention it wouldn't be nice to leave them home alone all day kid well we could bring it to doggy day care me every day if someone is taking care of your dog for eight hours every day is that even your dog him well that's what they do with kids so real and so sad that moment has stayed with me for a few years now i think about this a lot my son spends 40 waking hours week at school and only about 50 waking hours a week with me my husband it reminds me to make those hours count when i was teaching subtracting across zero 507-254 to second graders one kid said it's like when your mom needs milk and you go to your neighbor and no one is there so you go to the next door me how do you know if something is alive them if you can kill it technically not wrong [Music] i don't know if this counts but i was teaching a public speaking class it was mostly ninth grade they were all nervous about their first big speech and i tried to ease their nerves by saying i promise giving a speech won't kill you then some kid shouted do you know how many people in history have died while giving a speech i mean he had a point probably my favorite answer in the thread i was on lunch duty one day and a middle school boy jokingly said mr original sanitizer you wanna buy me an extra i replied with do i look like your daddy he replied straight faced i don't know you might i ain't never met him i bought him an extra comma frick hum i hate the word in describing this kiddo and it wasn't so much what she said but did she certainly wasn't stupid but as an at-risk youth counselor i can say she was very low functioning she went a wall one night out of the blue not one staff saw her leave usually when this happens kids go do dumb kids stuff like going to a park to drink and smoke teenage crap well we didn't see her for two days we finally got a phone call from a person who had taken her in 400 some miles away when she got back to our facility she had this nervous look knowing i was gonna scold her i didn't i was too freaking impressed i asked her how she did it and she said she kept hopping buses i guess none of the drivers had the heart to kick her off so there she went i took a very big risk in the fact that i congratulated her on her journey her eyes lit up when i told her she had managed to travel farther than any kid that had ever gone a wall she never did it again and actually graduated the program with susis still a booger but i'll always remember that booga dang that reminds me of the time a kid in my crappy christian school decided she was [ __ ] done with it all and disappeared for two weeks she would later call her family from freaking mexico we lived in virginia i teach esl i had a student about seven and we were all doing the workbook the lesson revolved around things like big and small old and new clean and dirty as well as toys like dolls balls yo-yos and this that these those it is easily one of my least favorite lessons because it really is a lot for the young students to understand the photo was a boy pointing to her desk with a few small round objects on it the girl was taking forever but she always seemed a bit slower in class and so i wasn't too shocked i was checking the other students work and figured she would finish in time and i would help her at the correction stage finally she makes it up to my desk and i get to the picture the obvious answer was these are small balls what did she have though these are marbles the kids hadn't even learned that word how she came up with it left me absolutely baffled bit from that point on i never questioned her intelligence i figured she just knew different things but it didn't mean she didn't understand she clearly just spent 30 minutes racking her brain for the best word for small balls esl every day is a surprise i think this is exactly what op was looking for i teach first grade so many not as dramatic as other replies i had a kid who is kind of never quite paying attentions we read a dinosaur book and were answering very basic first grade questions in the back of the book it literally had a brachiosaurus and said the dinosaur's legs are long b short he pretty much got stuck here and didn't move on to me it was the easiest question in the book but some of the students are low-level english learners so it is possible he just couldn't understand the words long or short after like seven minutes of doing my rounds and assisting other students i came back to him he had written in c long and short are both opinion words i'm a lawyer and so is this kid when i was teaching grade 5 a few years back i had a student who really struggled academically and misbehaved a lot during one of his punishments which was washing dishes with me from our morning breakfast time i straight up asked him why he kept getting into trouble the boy admitting that he just knew that if he misbehaved he would get to spend time with me one one and we would talk about life and his hobbies and such i found out later on that his father had been incarcerated for pretty much the entirety of the boy's life so the stupidest and most misbehaved kid in the class was actually just playing the system the whole time and really just needed a positive male role model in his life after that i told him he didn't need to act up in order to spend time with me he could just ask for extra responsibility and i would give it to him he was mostly better behaved after that i miss him a lot thank you for being that guy i grew up with a rotating door of abusive male role models and the teachers who found that responsibility in their laps are the only reason i made it i made sure to tell them that i hope your kid does the same someday used to teach chess to elementary level kids would run chess camp over the summer 20-40 kids come in every day for a full school day but every period is basically a chess class lasts a week on the first day i would tell kids they need to lose to get better which is true in a game like chess especially in the beginning i would tell them you have to lose 50 games before you can improve in chess well on about day 3 i'm walking from the field to the class and see one of my students second grader walking the other direction and ask him off hand how's chess going and he responds well i've lost all of my games so i guess i'm doing great that's true in a lot of games one thing that separates an average player from a really great player for any sort of game is the ability to analyze why they lost and view what they did objectively learning should be the goal winning is just the fruit of your labors i'm teaching english as a foreign language and one of my students hasn't been attending for a year when he finally came i gave him an essay to write he wrote it in perfect german because he thought that we were studying german the guy had been learning german all year long only to learn that we were studying english this is both the smartest and the stupidest thing i can imagine elementary school i worked in the school admin office for a while we had the cop come in to speak to the kids basically to warn them on the dangers of strangers and random people speaking to them in the street the cop was great and told the kids how they should always be careful and that some bad men might take them away from their mummies and daddies one kid puts his hand up and asks a question so what will happen if we go with one of these stranger men the cop wasn't prepared for that question and just said how sad it would be and how his parents would miss him a few days later a new buzzword was going around the school which phonetically sounded like pete or file the kid had looked up online or spoke to someone and then told the other kids in schools about what pedophiles do it scared the heck out of some of the kids and the principal had to come to each class to calm the kids down that kids probably did more to make sure no one left the school with a stranger than the cops if you were an inch taller you'd be round you just can't punish word play like that when learning mythology mr if centaurs have two arms and four legs does that make them insects i was making a joke about mermaids to a six-year-old if a mermaid is a person on top and a fish on the bottom is a person on bottom fish on top a mermaid two or is it something else a kid pauses and says well no it's not a mermaid because if you have a fraction like one stroke two it's not the same as two stroke one i thought that was both the cleverest answer to that question i ever heard but also made no sense mermaids aren't math i ask that question to a lot of kids that's by far my favorite answer i don't think i could declare any of my students as the stupidest but one who wasn't the best at algebra definitely got the better of me one day i was working with another teacher mr s in an incarceration setting for teenage boys these young men would often ask questions to test boundaries force reactions and see it's jail school so it's a bit less formal anyhow in a room of about 10 students my co-teacher and i would do a funny man straight man routine typically this would fall along the lines of my absolutely agreeing with anything my co-teacher said he knew about me that i had a criminal record that i used to weigh 320 pounds that i'd been married four times and see then as the straight man i'd play along and fill in details of what should have been obvious absurdities one day mr s went beyond the bounds of believability for our students when he said i had a tattoo of his name at the base of my right buttock i maintained that this was true that it was the result of a lost bet on a football season but several of the boys weren't buying it one of these said mr for real you got any tattoos nearly all of my students had several tattoos typically visible i was forced to admit i had none but chose poorly in explaining myself okay you're right i don't have any tattoos why not you have something against tattoos number no not at all i just don't think i could make a decision like that like what you know saying this is what i want for the rest of my life wait mister ain't you married raucous laughter from the class and i joined in tl dr a less than stellar student defeated my personal argument regarding tattoos by pointing out my wedding band studying gothic novels with my low ability special needs group and they were asked to say how they feel about horror films my student came out with i love horror films because they make me more aware of my surroundings i was very impressed gao it is genuinely difficult to tell who is the stupidest kids are smart some days and clueless others some grow out of it anyway we were talking about cheetahs being the fastest land mammal some inner city kid swells up and says he can beat a cheater in a race the class laughs kid doesn't let it go finally he just says i can beat a fat cheater in a race i'm just thinking maybe to be fair it depends entirely on the distance of said race in a college music history class we were discussing the differences in sound between a harpsichord from the high bar rock and today's grand piano one student who normally contributed little said the reason the two instruments sound so different is because harpsichord strings are plucked by quills whereas piano strings are struck by hammers and you'd make different sounds too if plucked or struck it's a harp liar i don't want to be dumb like my mama teacher at an inner city school for a time where almost all the students had free breakfast and lunch written about it before lots of the kids realized they knew they were in a no-win situation and a downward spiral in terms of education and situation in life quite a number of them tried their damn nest though to get out of it lots of times the kids don't know what is awaiting them at home many parents don't read to their kids or help them with homework many just can't because they themselves barely have an education or they are in just bad bad situations one student came in and said their momma chose to pay the cable tv bill over the hot water bill and another week their mom shot themselves in the hand with a gun she borrowed from some guy later the same mom chose to pay her cell phone bill over electricity and that student had enough and decided to start studying and try to climb out there is hope i have a student in my class with autism he is very high functioning but he is a couple years behind his grade level we were discussing the american revolution and one of the vocab words we had was tyrannical leader i jokingly told the class that if i was ever the leader of the country that's the kind of leader i would be and i went on to say that all of your teachers would be that way too most of the class looked at me blankly but this one kid with autism understood what i was saying and looked at me and while trying to contain his laughter says well that's because all teachers have a superiority complex i just couldn't help but laugh in front of the class for the next five minutes absolute savage i remember circumference because it sounds like circumcised this is actually how my 10th grade geometry teacher told us to remember my favorite student of all time in my nine years of teaching was a kid named logan logan was this giant kid tall as i was five feet two in the fifth grade and massive logan also had an information processing learning disability he processed information more slowly than most people he spoke very slowly and deliberately with long pauses and just saw the world differently logan had learned early on that if he played dumb people would treat him like he was stupid and do his work for him he had this look he would put on his face mouth a gape lower lip hanging down legit drooling eyes and focused and he would refuse to speak to you i figured that out really quickly and after two times of me making him talk to me at recess when he refused in class he didn't pull that look with me anymore it was a complete facade anyway because of how logan processed the world he would spend his recess slowly walking the grounds and picking up anything interesting he found he found things no one else would find coins sequins a box of sewing machine spools etc and he'd bring them to us teachers if he didn't know what they were or just wanted to share them with us so one day at recess he comes up to me and the other teacher at recess duty with me and he's holding a condom wrapper he asks us what it is and the other teacher quickly says oh logan that's just a candy wrapper for grown-ups here let me take that and throw it away and logan dead butt looks us in the face and says oh good i thought it was a condom and those shouldn't be out here on the playground and then he turned and ambled off his emotional intelligence was incredibly high i had a student with autism in class tyler tiny little guy super sweet but would have occasional severe meltdowns i will always have the image in my head of tiny little tyler mid-meltdown swinging his arms at giant logan and screaming while logan simply stood there and took it and gently patted him on the head tl dr i don't care if it's too long and no one reads it logan was one of the best people i've ever met in my life and i have so many good memories of him and logan dead but looks us in the face and says oh good i thought it was a condom and those shouldn't be out here on the playground my sides classic logan english as a second language teacher here i specifically work with new to country students who have only just arrived in the us one day a few years ago i was trying to explain to my class why we were practicing a tornado drill many had never seen heard of a tornado so i found a quick youtube clip to show what they are after we finished one girl was visibly freaked out but very clearly wanted to be prepared for this monstrosity so she took out her planner and asked me what days the tornado comes to the city i tried to be consoling but inside i was laughing so hard fifth grader gets negative for a volume answer me negative volume think about that for a minute fifth grader couldn't that be for a black hole he's incorrect ofc but based on what he knows that's his summary ira lateral thinking in that position i wouldn't really know what to do can't say he's right but i want to get the point across that he was really clever i've been teaching for 10 years either to kids about to be kicked out of the system or at a school with mostly kids with low socioeconomic status and are learning english as a second language honestly i don't even know how to gauge intelligence anymore i've had ap kids in my class that can't figure out crap unless it's spoon fed to them i've had severely handicapped kids that are doing the best work in my class i had a kid that has so low that i had to repeat the previous day's lesson to him every day and we never got very far but he could ride his bike the 15 blocks home and navigate three different gang territories without incident i've had kids that were headed to prestigious universities that couldn't figure out how to make a box of mac and cheese if they had to i told him sorry kiddo i know the struggle is real without missing a beat he replied yeah miss but we in it a real one i realize i have better chances going to a trade school college is overpriced even for the academically inclined i honestly wish someone would have said that to me straight out of high school trade schools are not pushed hard enough after hs graduation much better than wasting time and money on a degree that isn't guaranteed to land you a job you have been visited by the magical sugar jar pogo he'll only share his sweetener if you comment serga please mr papa thanks for watching if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video or don't either way have a great day you magnificent people [Music]

Channel: Updoot Everything

Views: 184,803

Rating: 4.8220501 out of 5

Keywords: school stories, school, high school, teachers, students, teachers vs students, teachers vs parents, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, 1 hour

Id: y5aeCHcmVqg

Length: 84min 5sec (5045 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020