3 Hours of the Best Teacher Stories (Reddit Compilation)

art teachers over at it what's you draw anything you want story not my story but seems to fit here when i was in school to certify to become a teacher we had a former principal as a professor for one of our courses who was trying to illustrate how difficult it can be to manage parent complaints and how to approach those situations with administration his example was how he had been called into a conference once with an angry mom and the elementary school art teacher the mom was furious because the teacher had asked the children to close their eyes and draw whatever came into their imagination his assumption was that a student had drawn something inappropriate nope the mom was mad because summoning an image in one's mind was witchcraft summoners images i've had some really funny ones but this one is not and reminds me whenever i think of it to consider kids circumstances i worked in a low-income high immigrant population school this girl was amazing outspoken kind great grasp of english she drew a picture of her brother and her i asked her who else was in the picture since there appeared to be part of a third person she calmly replied that's my brother's head he was killed in our village right before we went to the refugee camp i looked her up and down and say something sympathetic masking my horror yeah they came into my village grabbed all the boys and were going to take them away my brother and his friend tried to run so they cut off his head i was standing right there would you like me to draw you a picture i said no thank you i asked where her little brother also in art class was when this happened oh we dressed him up like a girl he makes a cute girl i should mention before the above exchange we were talking about one direction or something totally banal i was a k-12 esl teacher and worked in schools with high refugee populations it was heartbreaking to hear some of the stories of the traumas they experienced and like yours it would come out at the most innocuous times usually through drawing or writing it's not drawing but i gave my high school kids a poetry assignment they could write about anything that was school appropriate and have one curse word that wasn't a slur of the f-bomb it had to include so much figurative language act girl turns in me's my name is a bee a poem about how she's tired of writing poems and that she's annoyed with me for assigning so many includes all requirements i have her a 96 a few errors and the next poem she writes is mis my name is a cool bee about how she was sorry she was mean solid response sometimes the only way kids feel comfortable airing their grievances is through their creativity i just remembered a poor little guy who drew a self-portrait he drew with meticulous detail and when it came down to drawing his pants he drew the zipper so carefully but it looked like a penis i was flummoxed about how to tell him that people might see something there that he didn't intend i got in trouble once for drawing a pooping butt little did my teacher know but the drawing was actually a poorly drawn butterfly that ended up looking like a hairy pooping butt and when asked why i put the details i did like the legs and antenna and probability are coming off the segmented body i said i dunno don't they all look like that i saw one a recess and thought it was pretty and wanted to draw it thinking of the butterfly of course a nope i ended up having to see the school counselor never assume what kids are trying to draw always ask high school 1977 not a teacher while everyone else was drawing pink floyd rainbows and peace signs all over everything the biggest burnout in the class made a wide metal bracelet with intricate triangular designs cut out of it he turned it in and got a great grade for the first project he ever bothered finishing and some well deserved praise for his effort teacher handed our work back and first thing he did was grab a pair of pliers and bent all the triangles outward making it a thick metal spiked bracelet i found that devilishly disturbingly clever a lone punk rocker in a sea of hippies i have a design your own monster halloween lesson most kids draw cute ghosts or cool vampires one seventh grader drew a sad clown hanging by a belt from a ceiling fan he had issues student here my art teacher was somewhat crazy she let us draw anything we wanted to get 100 all you had to do was tell her it had a deep connection to the earth or some other nonsense i drew a jellyfish and told her it represented wisdom because it was immortal i like to imagine one day she will just see a documentary on jellyfish and learn that they can't really learn or have wisdom and just have this epiphany the kid was just making crap up one kid had to have a meeting with the principal her parents and the art teacher because the art teacher decided that because this second grade girl only drew people without hands the little girl felt powerless all these adults question this child about the meaning of her drawings she tells them hands are too hard to draw i wanna see this artich's psychotherapy degree parent here not an art teacher in kindergarten my son came home with a packet of finished assignments he got back from the teacher one was a paper having them draw a body part with the prompt here are my example given was feet what did my kid draw butt cheeks drawing of the back of a person with two giant well drawn i might add cheeks my husband and i laughed our own box cheeks off when we saw it we kept the paper for posteriority i laughed at the posteriority joke clever when i was in second grade our teacher told us to doodle on the back of a quiz if we finished early i decided to draw a house high in the sky with a long staircase leading to it to emphasize its height i drew clouds but it needed more i decided to add in an airplane later my teacher called me to her desk and i got in trouble because the plane looked like it was heading towards the house and this was right after 9 11 happened still have no idea what i was thinking i ran arts and craft classes at a youth group for disadvantaged kids decided one day to give them total freedom i just put out all the supplies we had and let them go crazy kids made some really cool works of art all very colorful and creative i was talking to one kid when another asked me to help him spell things for his artwork i go over to his table with him and he's been making a card for a boy in his class at school he tells me his friend's mum had just died from cancer and he wanted to make a card for him to cheer him up but he couldn't spell anything he wanted to write he was 13 years old and i had to help him spell out something like dear i am so sorry about your mum but i will always be your friend and here for you live i had to help him spell his own name he made the card totally unprompted i feel for the guy he was totally sweet and caring for his friend and really smart he'd just not got the help he needed went home after and had a little sob thanks for being a light in this world i'm a teacher but i don't teach art i was teaching a class of seven-year-olds who are usually a blessing but there's just one kid who has some real problems he can't speak english at all even after me spending a year trying to teach him and all his classmates progressing well he just refuses to engage with any teacher and is extremely disruptive often crying and screaming i think he has special needs but that's not handled well in china anyway after battling and battling with him to no avail assigning him class police roles everything i just gave up this one day and gave him some paper to draw on whilst the rest of the kids learned without him distracting them he drew a picture of me with a large pp and lots of knives in me with blood and wrote my name in perfect english it was eerie but i just felt sad and concerned what had happened to this boy the school gave him no support and i only saw him for about an hour a week i left the school shortly after unrelated and wonder how he is now wonder how he is now probably in prison that's where and supported special needs children usually end up throughout the world it shouldn't be that way but it is unless he got the help he needed then he's probably doing just fine former student here we were supposed to do a bit of abstract artwork for a course assignment my work was a framed square cut out from an old t-shirt i had previously used to help ray stain an old table not only did i get an a on the assignment but i entered it into a silent auction later that semester and someone bought it also former student 10th grade art teacher told us to draw the city 50 years from now i drew flying buildings and she threw it back at me because flying buildings are impossible when i was around eight or nine i got into drawing cars and simultaneously into drawing tribal decorations probably not pc but you know the type a lot of people get as a tattoo so i drew a car with tribal decal and because of the hook like shapes in the tribal decal i in appropriately named the car the h when she was done laughing my mom took the time to explain the world's oldest profession reminds me of that time i got suspended in kindergarten for drawing a crappy stick figure gun i tried to save myself that day by saying it was a water gun since it was so crappy you couldn't tell the difference but they weren't having it and littleplather27 went home that day that's a strange thing to get detention for not that i particularly approve that way of raising boys but when i was a kid lots of boys would play with toy guns action men figures and stuff in them drawing guns and scenes with fights was like a normal occurrence we had three lessons for it i spent two and a half messing around in the last half copying an existing bauhaus painting in chalk that was the only good grade i got in art class not a teacher but in middle school we got an assignment in art class to draw a still life of fruit i thought the idea was totally boring and decided to put a creative spin on it i drew a bunch of different fruits all sitting in the seats of a colosseum watching an apple kill an orange in the center ring i failed the assignment and my teacher even pulled me out into the hallway to tell me directly that she didn't like me or the work that i produced i didn't let that crush my dream though and i kept making my assignments weirder and weirder to pee her off as someone who wished to do art art therapy with kids i would have given you an 100 any subject can be boring for some as long as you followed the guidelines and put the effort in then it should have been a pass the whole point of art is pretty much creativity and weirdness not an art teacher however i used to grade the weekly sketchbooks for my art class as a senior one week my teacher gave the prompt something with wings so i'm grading all these sketchbooks that are 80 stick figures from kids that just took out to get an easy fine art credit lots of planes and birds a few angels then i get to this one sketchbook that i know dang well belongs to a dude that's just coasting for the easy credit i open it up expecting another stick bird and instead i'm surprised with this crude but identifiable bucket of kfc wings i lost my crap and cackled as i gave him a 100 knowing my cranky butt teacher would have instantly failed him if she'd seen it in ninth grade as an end of the year project we could basically draw whatever we wanted and we had a week to do it me being the little car nerd i am drew the entire drivetrain and suspension of a chevy k5 blazer in junior high my art teacher pulled me aside to tell me that she was really impressed because i could draw better than her after that she pretty much let me have free reign as long as what i was drawing work towards the lesson goal such as shading perspective etc for the end of year project i did a robert h very tech fighter and stipple drawn only using dots the next year when i would have had her again for art she paid out of pocket for me to take an art course at the community college across the street she was an absolutely amazing teacher why yes sss robotics i'm a art teacher but this story is about my substitute teacher i asked my students what they had been drawing when i was gone the class was absolutely silent apart from some boys that were giggling they were 13 years old i asked what what was so funny and they said the substitute was great at the same time the girls seemed as they wanted to disappear from the classroom so i asked why the teacher was great and the boys just exploded he told us to draw flying dongs well i don't have to say more than that substitute teacher never come to our school again poor daryl tried to leave his poultry farming life behind when he became a teacher but as they say you can take the farmer out of the farm but you can't take out his dong when i was in the seventh grade our art teacher had us do whatever we wanted to be entered in the school art fair i was really lazy and decided to just use every color of pastel that was available to draw a rainbow of sorts on a piece of construction paper then i tore it all into pieces and glued them all together again randomly i called the piece life and argued that it was supposed to represent the chaos and uncertainty that is life it ended up winning first place in my grades part of the art fair and i ended up getting a cool art set but really it was just me being lazy and feeding some bulls about a deeper meaning that's pretty ironic for all the people that spend countless hours planning their project and then poured their hearts and souls into it their parents told them it was the best art project they had ever seen and then life serves up as it always does and the person who didn't care and was lazy about it wins nice fresh out of college i got a job working with first and second graders at an after school program my kids had journals that they wrote and drew in every day once i had my first graders draw a picture of what they'd like to eat and write a sentence to go along with it i was walking around the tables to check their work as they were finishing up and saw that one little boy drew a big brown phallic object with the word dong written across the front underneath in proud bold letters he had written i like dong i pulled him aside and asked him to tell me about what he wrote coke is my favorite drink he told me i had to explain to him that it's very important to spell it coke not dong tldr boy says he likes to eat dong i was an art teacher for four years and have so many stories so many stories one that comes to mind is a drawing this strange little child who was oddly obsessed with me made me as a gift now for context my personal aesthetic is what my friends affectionately call adult tomboy goth which is to say i wear all black somewhat androgynous clothing and have a pawn shot for the dark and absurd of course in work environments i dress more professionally but my kids all knew i was a dark humored little oddball and they loved me for it so this girl is doing free draw and every time i walk over she covers up the paper with her arm and hisses at me like a cat as she was wound to do after about an hour she scurries over to me with this huge grin on her face and announces baba yagatram baba yagatron i made you a thicke ing and my lord oh boy was it the best gift i have ever received from a child the drawing was of a skeleton beckoning a crying girl with no eyes into a pre-dug grave the grave site was elaborately mapped out with a whole underground portion where the coffin would be a tombstone and little flowers around the tombstone i laminated it and to this day it is still on my bedroom door even after three moves around the country i freaking miss teaching not a teacher but when i was in seventh grade i drew a picture in my art class sketchbook of barney and elmo smoking pot and drinking booze drawn with colored pencils and all i showed it to my friends and they thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen the art teacher however was not pleased and sent me to the principal's office the principal then looked through my sketchbook and ripped out all the drawings she deemed as inappropriate it shattered my soul that day and i cried for some time afterwards in fact i think that's what ended my dream of becoming an artist frick you mrs bano and mrs mckeon for robbing me of a better future you can still be an artist now the internet would love your particular brand of social commentary my art teacher's story about me is that i spent an entire school year drawing and painting planes must have been strange as an art teacher and former goth teen nothing my kids have drawn has really shocked me i've had to make kids change things that are inappropriate one time a high school girl drew a hand giving the middle finger and chalk when we were drawing outside so we changed it to a peace sign i did have to call home for two first graders who were drawing pooping butts while i was giving instructions their moms and i laughed through the entire phone call i rarely let them draw whatever because they inevitably would raw predictable cliches eighth grade boys would draw knives with blood dripping or an eye and girls a unicorn but trying to get them to draw from life was tough obligatory not an art teacher but i got a call about something like this from my kid's art teacher she was 13 and in eighth grade art where she was told to do a pencil sketch of whatever she could think of we had just moved so the class had been working on this for a week and she had about a day the teacher made sure the kid knew she would be getting an a just for turning something in but because it was a new school they were not yet aware that my kid has a morbid sense of humor and a fair amount of artistic talent that she built over the years two days later the art teacher calls me to make sure that everything is okay with kid because her sketch was of a live hamster in an electric coffee pot it's one of my favorite pieces of her work i had a fifth grade student who was very shy hesitant to start her work the project was on identity and kids were supposed to draw things about themselves inside a silhouette of their heads that we had traced she was almost in tears because she was very insecure and couldn't think of what to draw i was trying to help her out by asking easy questions like what's your favorite animal what's your favorite tv show to watch on netflix finally at what's your favorite food she perked up left my desk and got to work a few minutes later she proudly brings her drawing to me i did it i did it i drew a taco and i also made it pink because pink is my favorite color i know tacos aren't pink but in art things can be any color right do you like my pink takomies pier took everything in me to stifle my giggles and i reassured her her taco was beautiful and that yes it could be any color she wanted she then proudly showed everyone in the room her pink taco thank god she was not a 7th or 8th grader it went over all of their sweet innocent heads and they all praised and encouraged her great day student here pulled up pictures of severe frostbite to draw on a piece of paper in sixth grade i wasn't allowed to do that what in the frick made you do that in the first place when i was a sophomore in high school my art final was a paint anything you want assignment so me being the creative mind that i am i painted a fatalistic octopus that may have resembled my art teacher teaching an art class underwater scene super duper trippy probably my best single piece of artwork i've made up to that point well long story short my teacher didn't like the route i went and gave me a c on my final when my art class found out about this it was almost an absolute riot because they thought i turned in one of the best finals of the year fast forward to the art show on the final day of school and my octopus was awarded a best-in-class robin an amazing take that moment for me against that teacher also taught me a valuable lesson that everyone judges out differently and i just need to keep doing my own thing not an art teacher but my daughter in first grade was given an assignment to write a story in draw she wrote and drew a story about frisky the rhino please tell me that saved somewhere in the second grade my sister wrote a story about a possum that dated grandma and her grandson it ended with the boy said to his grandma let's bounce this possum and they did she's 31 now and we still crack up about it not an art teacher but when i was in late elementary early junior high my art teacher at the time gave us free reign i had just learned what fairies and pokemovs jojinkus i think were at the time my art teacher thankfully just thought i couldn't draw werewolves for crap my brother and his friend were five and attended an art class club they got to draw anything they wanted our dog had just died so my brother drew the dog with angel wings a pretty good one for a five-year-old the friend who was a wild kid the kind that always got detention later in his school years drew a large wave and people escaping it he explained that it was the tsunami of 2004 which had just happened the moms of the boys and the teacher were swallowing tears when they saw the drawings i don't see any issue with an angel dog seems like a pretty nice memorial for a well-loved papa but i can see why that tsunami got them worrying this was when i was at a last summer it was for youth art classes at a very nice art museum and i was helping out with the group of five eight-year-olds there was this one six-year-old student who would act up a lot during class always talk over the teacher but then produce really beautiful and detailed drawings the only issue was that they were always monsters from the godzilla movies no matter what the students were assigned to do he managed to make these monsters the main image this would be fine if i were the teacher my main goal was for the kids to finish the day wanting to keep making art but the actual teachers i worked with were a lot more rigid the student gained a bit of a reputation for being difficult to work with and not respecting the teachers i was essentially tasked with handling this student and making sure he stays on task what i soon realized was this kid was insanely talented he had an advanced grasp on animal anatomy visual storytelling and composition after working with him for a month it became clear that he only acted up when the art being taught was something he was already skilled at which was most of time since it was a beginner's class he would quickly finish the assignments and get bored then add godzilla to them whenever he was learning a new technique or using new materials he wouldn't do this he was also very book smart and very nice once he saw i wouldn't get mad at him for his art i ended up talking to his mom after class one day and explained why he would often get in trouble i then told her that the class was honestly too entry-level for him and that she should see about him getting private lessons she was extremely happy to hear this and was thrilled that her son actually liked me he had a rough time with school teachers too the summer program ended soon after and i haven't seen him since i'll bet he never forgot you oh i'm not a teacher but every year in my art class our teacher would give the assignment to draw santa claus in an unexpected place on year my classmate drew a very realistic and very detailed picture of santa claus in the strip club throwing cookies to the strippers smoking a blunt it was good like really really good but he was still suspended i will ho ho ho this hoe reposting myself a girl nine years was doodling and looking at the drawing afterwards i could immediately see her process one she drew a little dancing dude arms and legs apart two she drew hill a little weiner three she freaked out upon seeing the wiener her first idea to fix it add more wieners four she must have really freaked once she saw the penis utter frankenstein she had created so she switched to a marker and drew a skirt over the wiener added a girly hairdo to the head and added some eyelashes teachers have read it what's the worst fight you had to break up the worst fight i broke up wasn't because of students getting hurt but because of how lame it was first off i teach middle school which is just one awkward moment after another these two kids were arguing over a pencil because one kid supposedly broke the other kids pencil they were bickering back and forth like two old men and then they just broke out in really mediocre wrestling it was embarrassing to watch because neither boy could even wrestle and i was able to just tell them to stop and send them to the office with no other issues another reason it was the lamest fight ever was because all the other students who were working at other tables went about their work and talking to each other and didn't even notice usually they would be chanting fight fight over and over and crowding around trying to film for world star i remember a fight of two guys on a bouncy castle around 12 14 age don't remember i mean it's a bouncy castle they were just sort of rolling around a bit and from a distance it just looked kinda gay like they were making out or something i taught adults at a vocational school mostly from rough neighborhoods we had been warned to never try to break up a fight as many of these students carry knives and so forth but some woman had a bad falling out with her group of friends and was sitting separated from them but they were talking back and forth very loudly very aggressively across the room i couldn't control them and went to get a supervisor with me and the supervisor guy there one of the girls from the group came across the room at the odd one out she is big six feet and 250 pounds and charges across the room at the odd one out who is maybe five feet two inches supervisor gets in between them they fight around him for a second then smaller woman slashes the face of bigger woman with a razor or something that pretty much ended it other than a few thrown things and tussle but a lot of hair and braids were ripped out and there was blood everywhere supervisor was lucky they literally fought around him and the smaller one whipped that blade over his right shoulder to slash the other one's face this was on a tuesday and they were too effectively graduate on thursday insane i am an english teacher in france this happened in the classroom next door to mine and i just witnessed the aftermath and heard the gossip from my friend who did break it up and was there to hear the story when they got hauled into the admins office one of my male students was named timothy who was dating a girl named anna a year under him one day last year he apparently left his phone unattended and unlocked and she picked it up and started searching through it what are found was his very male best friend louis sexting and sending him nudes and talking about how much he loved him and tim was texting back and being equally enthusiastic about the two of them being together out in the open once they finished school and were in university as she proceeded to screenshot and send all those texts sexts and nudes to her boyfriend's parents before replacing his phone so he wouldn't know tim's parents are very conservative and when i say very i mean very his mother once called me to complain about his grade in english and it evolved into a rant about foreign students that would make marine le pen proud and darla knew so that's why she went this revenge route this kid went home to be blindsided thanks to her and apparently he had to basically flee the house because he was afraid of his father literally killing him louis turned up to school the next day calmly entered anna's first period class and beat the ever-loving crap out of her just wailed on her he was skinny thing but knew what he was doing and she was super tiny and it was not a fair fight at all and he just obliterated her i just heard him screaming after he had been restrained which is when i went to go check she had a black eye and a broken eye socket and there was blood everywhere from her mouth and nose louie was borderline hysterical and screaming about her being a bee who ruined tim's life it was bad i am not a teacher but i have worked in k-12it for 10 years so i have been in a lot of classrooms teachers aren't supposed to break up fights and usually get hurt trying to do so that being said the worst fight i saw was in a science lab i was in the back of the lab installing some software to go with a digital microscope and a large eighth grade girl was singing disrespectfully while the teacher was talking tiny eighth grade girl behind her was getting p and telling her to shut up because she couldn't hear what the teacher was saying big girl continued to sing tiny girl says for the last time shut the frick up i'm trying to learn then proceeds to leap over the lab table between them grabs the big girl's hair and proceeds to bash her face into the table over and over again screaming at her to shut the frick up they had to get a very large male administrator in there to pull her off the teacher got elbowed in the face when she tried to step in said screw it and ran out into the hall to get an admin fun times holy crap i can just imagine that my dad is a five feet six inches hispanic dude gentlest person you can imagine his first teaching job was at a rough high school two guys both much bigger than him got into it but security was nowhere to be found so he tackled them both in a bear hug so all they could do was stare at each other and rage while my dad waited for reinforcements literally dad power hug attack was effective enemies disabled substitute teacher here i was randomly assigned for the very last period of the day to a difficult class all of these kids were enormous like maybe they were football kids all i know is my petite self wasn't even shoulder level with these kids so in a classroom full of enormous dudes a few in the back kept picking on one kid in the front the seriously huge kid stood up and charged at the super big kids in the back who all stood up ready to fight my super lame reaction was to slam my tiny hands on the desk and yell excuse me back in your seats please they all just sort of stopped and looked confused and then sat back down no fight no problem nobody was more surprised than me i ended up leaving them some good notes for their teacher because honestly any enormous guys who stop their big butt fight just because some tiny lady in a cardigan asks them to sit down well they can't be all bad i taught english to adults older than me and they got salty for the tiniest freaking reasons it never evolved to be a physical fight but holy crap i'd rather teach children they can be way more mature i used to teach high school in rural georgia i had to break up a fight between two girls and a heavily pregnant girl i never taught these girls and it happened between classes in the hallway in front of my room the pregnant girl was on the floor screaming and crying while one girl was kicking her in the head and one kicking her in the stomach i grabbed each of them by their upper arms and hauled them away very hard one fell back on her butt and the other nearly fell the one on her butt started crying about how i'd hurt her the other girl acted like she was going to rush me or the pregnant girl i grabbed her held her back and told her that if she tried it again i'd make her wish she hadn't she tried to hit me and i twisted her arm until she was on the floor kneeling and screaming meanwhile one of the other teachers helped the pregnant girl and another called the nurse principal i was the only one to act for a good 30 40 seconds i had a student who fought a few times in my class and was one of those blind rage type fighters who would just swing at anyone until he got back under control he was manageable in my class but he was sent to homeschooling after a fight he got into in the hallways and something stupid set him off and he punched the other kid a few times before being restrained by one of the security guards who he also punched in the face during the same fight a teacher was trying to separate the two students and he accidentally bit still broke two of her fingers it dawned on me that day why they tell us to not get between students fighting she was lucky that one she wasn't hurt worse and two that she wasn't written up on disciplinary charges for breaking that rule i've only broken up a few fights and they were pretty mundane but if there is one thing i know is that girls fights are worse than boys girls will go for your eyes but boys typically stick to an honor code no hits below the belt and all that to add to that most guys i've seen fight tend to walk away from it with respect for each other girls tend to drag that grudge to the grave i had two girls fighting in my classroom it turned into a hair pulling contest and my skeleton dr kelsey ian life drawing class wore one of their weaves for the rest of the school year i like that skeleton's name not a teacher but in my low-income urban public school we had an actual riot with students punching police officers tripping the fire alarm damaging property and screaming obscenities school was cancelled for two days as teachers reviewed security footage and suspended kids of course it was a doozy to break up a lot of dissatisfied kids in the cities i'm not a teacher but my high school put a jukebox in our cafeteria one year and for a dollar you could play three songs so these three girls put in like five books and played 50 cents in the club on repeat after the fourth or so repeat of the same song some girl had had enough and went to unplug the jukebox the three girls literally jumped her right there punches and hair flying everywhere i'll give the the one girl credit she was holding her own against the three of them this is all going on and that freaking song was still playing everybody is watching them kick the crap out of each other after about a minute in some guy strolls over all casual like and unplugs the jukebox they stopped fighting after that and that song was never played again the end would be real funny if all four pounce on the guy for interfering actual teacher here it was after school and i was headed to the copy room on the way to the cafeteria which had been cleared of all the tables and was basically just one big empty area except for the huge mass of students that had developed i rushed into the massive crowd where two different circles had formed it was literally like being at a metal concert with two mosh pits at least 16 kids were fighting when i broke through one kid fell in front of me and the guy who pushed him ran up and did a yanakovsky kick to his head all metal moshing instincts kicked in where my main goal was to basically push away as many people as possible and keep them away from each other until more aps officers could arrive to help it was chaos so i don't remember much after that to this day i don't even know why they were fighting once everything was settled i picked my paper back up and went back to making copies if you just change a few nouns this could be a scene in a western i taught for two years in a very rough boys school where i had to break up fights almost daily i'll share three stories the first fight was when two students started fighting because of well i can't quite remember to be honest it probably started as an argument over which one's mother is a bigger w or maybe who owed who drug money the fighters were grade nine aged it took four staff members to break the two apart and even more to keep them separated after the initial blows at the height of the chaos both were throwing chairs tables and whatever else they could get their hands on the end result was damaged windows broken doors and quite a few staff members that had cut scrapes bruises from trying to keep the two away from each other i'm pretty sure they met up outside school to settle their differences later that week the second story is a bit more light-hearted in my first few months of teaching at the school i rewarded a group for good behavior by taking them to play soccer on their small hard court area when i say good behavior i mean they hadn't assaulted or verbally abused each other in my class all week even though i was still new i felt like i could trust them since they had been relatively well behaved and they were a small group in the middle of the game which was going great by the way two players from opposite teams had a moment of frustration and started swinging haymakers they both got a few good shots in and by the time i was able to get in between them the fight was over we took a five-minute break they shook hands and we continued the game i didn't write them up for that one the last story is one of the few times where i legitimately thought i would have to defend myself i was on duty at the hardcore during break and i challenged a student on his behavior he had been picking on a younger student and all i had asked for him to do a stop when he kept doing it i approached and told him that he had to leave the hardcore area once i was within five meters or so he turned on me he started telling me to frick off and cursing at me with every word in his vocabulary everything seemed to slow down at this point as he started to walk towards me with what i could feel was an intent to hurt at the same time though i could sense the other students watching and starting to move closer towards us i began stepping back while talking to him trying to describe the situation and i even outstretched my arm towards him to try to keep space between us before the student was able to fully reach me he was turned and escorted away by three other students as crappy of a situation as that was to me that incident had a silver lining even though at times i'm sure they all had their differences with me that day i felt lucky to have those boys as my students i'm not sure what would have happened if they hadn't stepped in but i do know it would not have been a positive outcome commerce i began stepping back while talking to him trying to de-skull of the situation hold your ground with both bears and teenage boys i'm a school bus driver my first year driving i got the bad school kids living i am houses with boarded up windows kind of neighbor i picks up in but i was the only ride these kids had and i love them a few small fights in the afternoon but nothing really bad all year till mid-june i pull up to my first stop and there's tommy on top of his sister jane tommy was in grade one jane in grade two their older brother billy was yelling at them i saw this from afar i sped up slammed on the brakes amd flew out of my bus without thinking ripped tommy off of jane he still had the wire in his hand he was trying to kill her now being in the neighborhood i was in i couldn't send him home so i threw him on the bus cannot really and made him sit up front with all other kids at least three rows away took him into the school i held his hand and his sisters and we walked into the principal's office the principal seemed like he didn't care and i didn't see tommy the rest of the year no one told me what happened that was over five years ago we lost the run to another company so i don't know how he's doing just a quick note jane could breathe no marks on her neck and she was okay physically clear airway and all older brother billy said it happened as i turned around the corner i still think if i had a cell radio i would've called 9-1-1 whoa this could have ended way worse if you hadn't been there you did great in de-escalating the situation and taking care of the kiddos when i was teaching high school in baltimore i was walking down the hall during my plan time when i heard the sounds of fighting in a classroom i poked my head in and saw sam this big sweet kid who i taught with another kid pinned to the floor flat laying on top of him hands pinned etc sam is so big that this other kid is totally immobilized sam isn't doing anything to him i think i can talk sam into letting the kid go i didn't know the other kid so i bend down next to him and talk to him for a minute i finally convince him to sit up as soon as he starts to push back the other kid gets his arm free and swipes at sam with a knife none of us knew he was holding except sam sam had special needs and i'm not sure if he just didn't think to tell us about the knife or if he was trying not to snitch narrowly missed my face neck and sam had him pinned back to the ground before any further attempts could be made we let him stay that way until the police arrived i don't get involved in fights anymore not a teacher but saw the craziest fight when i was in high school there was girl i'll call a girl a who was mentally challenged rumors where she was a preemie born addicted to drugs crappy home life in foster care just all around crappy situation for her she was about four minutes and 10 seconds in high school just a really little person well this one girl girl b thought she was the prime target to bully and well she picked the freaking wrong person to bully b messes with a for a few weeks until the day snaps here's the thing in our high school we had the gates that dropped down to close off corridors you just hit the emergency release and the gate slam down and there's no leaving that corridor until the on-campus police officer comes to unlock it with a key never had these gates been used until be messed with a for the last time remember a is mentally challenged and special needs b is messing with a and all of a sudden a runs for the emergency release button for these gates to drop gates drop its a and b and a few bystanders stuck in the corridor uh beats the ever loving crap out of b remember how the on campus police officer has to unlock the gate with a key yeah well that took a solid five six minutes to go get the key and get back to the corridor and by this time there's students on each end of the corridor pressed against the gates to watch the butt kicking that's happening b ended up going to the hospital and never came back to school rumor was she was in alternative school for all the bullying and i ended up in a state psych ward i had to tackle a sixth grade boy that had a fifth grade girl by her hair on her knees pounding her face in with brass knuckles he broke her face in several places and knocked out most of her front teeth because he had asked her out and she said she was too young to date the kid fought me like crazy while i had him pinned kicking pushing us across the grass so that my face is digging a trough into the field trying to bite me spitting on me all while i'm thinking i just bum rushed and tackled a student i'm going to get fired i laid on top of him until the cops got there they investigated what happened and i wasn't in any trouble because the general consensus was that he could have killed her and i went with the least violent way to subdue him and i didn't injure him the fifth grade girl spent some time in the hospital and had to have some mild facial reconstruction surgery the boy went to juvenile hall that's horrible i bet that girl got some pretty bad emotional scars from that one my first year teaching i had to break up a bunch of typical middle school fights hair pulling fighting over boys weak punches when boys were involved seventh grade we had a bit of a gang problem so it was fairly common two still really stand out to me though the first involved two girls fighting over a boy who had been sent to juvie i walked out of a classroom where i was observing and one was already being held back by our seven foot tall social studies teacher the other girl was ripping fistfuls of the other girl's hair out and screaming b he's my man get the frick out of my hall other girl who had her hair ripped out was an eighth grader and eighth graders were supposed to stay out of the seventh grade hall the screaming one was a student of mine so i just walked in asked her calmly to let go or be picked up and picked her up to take her to the office while she screamed and clawed at me at one point she promised to calm down and i fell for it she immediately ran back and began fighting again so i had to carry her to the office later they asked if i wanted to press charges for the kicking and scratching i literally laughed in the deputy's face how vindictive are people that they have to ask if you want to ruin a 12 year old's life there was one even worse than that though i had one student who was a gang leader in my class but he was always respectful with me and worked hard in class so i just sort of chalked it up to rumors one day near the end of the year i turned around to write something on the board and heard a girl scream i turned around and the quiet respectful kid had ripped one of my loud mouths out of his seat and was kicking him with precision directly in the kidneys while bellowing think you gonna jump one of my boys frick you b i was horrified this kid was a weightlifter and prying him off of the other kid who was curled up in the fetal position was nearly impossible once i did get him off i screamed at the other kid to get the next door teacher being the antagonizing bud that he was he stood there and called the kid from the gang of pea the kid from the gang escaped and chased the other kid around the school throwing furniture at the instigator and screaming it took me five minutes of chasing them through the halls while the other teacher watched my classroom to get admin or the deputy to help it was then that i decided not to teach middle school anymore i teach high school now and see my old seventh graders a lot including fighters one even apologized to me most of them want me to teach them when they reach the grade i teach i just really hope they have chilled out with time obligatory not a teacher but my high school has had some fights here's a few stories one one day a small skinny kid incited a fight with an extremely large 300 pounds of pure muscle kid after picking on him all day so after a single punch is thrown the giant picks up the small one puts him over his head and then smashes him down into the ground faster first there was blood everywhere on the floor on the walls and especially on the kid's face too as the entire school exited a pep rally a fight between two girls breaks out in the middle of a large crowd of students weaves flew it took several teachers to finally stop the fight also a security guard decided it would be a great idea to use pepper spray on said fighters despite literally the entire school was all crowded around in this small area as expected several students were hit with minor injuries but one teacher got a direct hit to the face 300 pounds kid was a young thanos young female high school teacher here worst fight i've broken up a 250 pound kid pushed a 90 pound girl from behind sending her skidding about eight feet down the hallway on her stomach she jumped up and shoulder checked him into the lockers and just started beating the crap out of this guy punch after punch right into his face i walked up behind her grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off of him as she continued to punch him as i walked them to the office she looked at me and said i don't even freaking know who this guy is worst fight i refuse to step in and break up the two largest toughest guys in our school got into it in the hallway right in front of my classroom these were the kind of boys that were already pretty much grown men and each had around 100 pounds of muscle on me i heard yelling in the hallway and turned around just in time to witness one punch the other square in the teeth he hit him so hard that ice where i could feel the vibrations in the air like i felt the punch it was so hard and oh my god the sound of it they then started punching at each other as they rolled around the ground in a huge pile of blood that had come from the one's mouth after the first punch i would have gotten hurt breaking it up i internally said frick that and called the office to tell them to send out police resource officer and admins down there asap to break up the fight of the decade there really is a unique and scary sound to hearing two people hitting each other much more so when they're big teachers of reddit what is the best plot twist you didn't see coming in your students writing teaching 8th grade english a student was writing about a supernatural investigator about two-thirds through the story the narrator is listing all the greatest horrors he had seen the list ended i once saw an english teacher named emma my name slough off his skin and devour a classroom of students komori was a great surprise and story i had a student who was obsessed with silverback gorillas i mean everything he wrote was about silverbacks even further most random question for example about shakespeare's sonnets and his answer would somehow quite logically twist around to his gorillas after a while he added a character the queen of sansiba she controlled this wild and often violent band of guerrillas at the end of that year i ended up moving away and at my farewell lunch he gave me a card which says there will never be another story about the silverback gorillas of sansiba because the queen of sanzibar is moving to australia blew me away i never thought his stories were analogies of our school students or that i had made that much of an impact on his life humbling this makes me laugh i used to have an obsession with bees and i would do stuff like this as a kid when my nephew was six or seven or so they had to write a description of how to make a sandwich my nephew proceeded to write a detailed account of how to make a sandwich which includes getting a mold of a witch and putting wet sand into it you get the idea the teacher said in all her years of teaching that no kid had ever done that she asked to keep a copy because she thought it was so funny i love it give a high five to your nephew for me please i had a second language learner who wrote about the death of a close relative he talked about feelings of extreme sadness and then said i have come to know that this feeling is called grief it was the most heartbreaking thing i've ever read it is so sad teaching middle school gave an about me essay early in the year one student wrote about how they had a rough home life parents divorcing etc it was very well written and heartbreaking until the last paragraph where he talked about finding religion in the past year i've learned not to judge people who do wrong because only god can judge and they will burn either way you got a paladin on your hands question is broken or not one of my kids got a writing assignment to write a new ending to her story it was a classic star-crossed lover's narrative so i figured they'd do a happily ever after nope the female protagonist ended up using the dude for his night status to escape the thumb of her father then killed him and went out on her own i taught in english 101 where i had a very open-ended writing assignment to gauge where the students were it was a long time ago but if i remember correctly it was to write about something that happened in your life that was memorable like i said very vague one student wrote about how his friend had run away from home and asked to stay in his tree house okay mild enough then it turned pretty dark when the student wrote that he was woken up by fire sirens only to find the treehouse was completely engulfed in flames of course no one realized it was occupied that was 25 years ago and i still remember the chill i got when i read it i was picking up recycled paper for my students with severe disabilities to shred using our machine the essay we found was about some kid that is going through abuse i made a report and student is now doing better man most adults i know with office jobs love using the shredder i bet it made your students day a student once wrote a story under the assigned heading of all that glitters is not gold it was a first-person narration told as a comedy about a mother telling her daughter on her 21st birthday about the night she brought her home from the hospital the twist was that the mother was talking to herself in what was due to by the child's bedroom her child had actually died the night they brought her home this floored me row that is dark af really kind of annoying kid good person but too much charisma and used it to goof off during class regularly pooled 70s as a result of not paying attention held a poetry workshop he opted into wrote a poem about his dead parents i knew he lived with grandma but not why the last line was i laugh so i don't cry shattered my heart jesus that sentence hit me like a train one of my middle school students in korea ended a story about his family with it raining alcohol and snowing sea everyone freaked out and murdered one another i think that was just a horror story written by quentin tarantino i teach high school maths so the opportunities for stories are more limited i set an extended assignment on mathematically evaluating what would happen in a zombie outbreak looking at what happens to the human population based on how fast zombies can turn them if there's a cure if zombies can raise the dead from graves etc the last part of the assignment was to model a zombie situation of your choice come up with some survival strategies and show mathematically how they helped humans most students pick a pop culture zombie style and used that as their inspiration no problems at the time there was a big election going on so one student decided that anyone under the sway of a particular political party must be a mindless zombie and recreated the events of the entire election in his mathematical equations it was a fantastic spin on it that made marking much more fun i worked at a bookstore that had a spooky story contest for halloween and i had to read a lot of stories by elementary students they were stories by elementary students but there was this one on the first pass i guess i didn't like it but when it came back from another reviewer i happened to read it again the plot wasn't astounding it was actually kind of a bad story as far as that goes what was amazing was that the student changed her vernacular depending on whether the speech was spoken by a character or part of the narration this is not elementary stuff it was really incredible and such a small thing that i was so surprised that i even noticed it it is literally a technique that was considered groundbreaking when zora neale hurston did it and she's one of the greatest american writers ever there's no way this little fourth grade girl knew about hurston she was just doing it naturally i was blown away i tried my best to advocate for that story even suggested a special prize my boss would not give i hope that little girl is still writing i know there's already a lot of i'm actually a student takes here but damn it i want to share mine we were assigned to write a full length poem in a creative writing class our instructor constantly reminded us to avoid cliche symbolism and metaphor the example he kept bringing up was not to write about wearing all black in a cemetery now i'm terrible with symbolism and metaphor every time i try to write symbolically it always reads back to me as forced or cliche i wrote and threw out three poems and accepted my fate on the day it was due but that morning i took out another sheet of paper and titled it wearing all black in a cemetery but it wasn't about death and sadness rather the main character was dressed in all black because he was a grave robber the poem had him getting caught and sentenced to life in prison my instructor loved it i love this when i was in writing class it seemed like my mind would get stuck on whatever our instructor said not to do like somehow his mentioning of what to avoid just looped in my head until that was all i was throwing on the page i'm glad you found a clever way around this i had a student write an amazing argumentative essay he was a shy kid and we had been working on building his confidence and taking risks in his writing i get to the end of the paper and he notes i always wanted to include this argument but i just wasn't sure he leaves a citation i go to his works cited and see a proper citation along with a hyperlink i click it rick astley begins to sing i wipe away a tear well done kid well done i had a student write that she flew to california to see post malone because he's so hot she got a henna tattoo on her chest of him before the concert unfortunately it turned out she's allergic to henna and it turned into a terrible rash she still has the scar plot twist it turned out to be a permanent tattoo did not expect to see post malone and hot in the same sentence in that order not a teacher but in high school my class was tasked with writing a one-two page essay about an unpleasant experience in our lives so i wrote a 12-ish page third-person narrative about myself writing the essay power move not a teacher but one time in middle school i wrote about a story called i flaps the story takes place in a society where people can't blink and this scientist discovers blinking serum and is so happy he blinks his eyelids off and dies of sleep exhaustion years later my mom told me that the teacher really enjoyed the story and said it had great twist at the end still proud of that story to this day reminds me of janji ito for some reason i had to write new ending to a story about how a white boy true son was adopted by an indian tribe after a raid on his family the white settlers attacked the indian tribe years later found the white kid and brought him back to live with them in my new ending true son considered the tribe to be his real family and escape to rejoin with the survivors shortly after the tribe along with true son ambushed the settlers and slaughtered them in revenge all seemed well and the tribe were grateful to have true son back with them that was until they all started getting an odd rash and dying as it turns out true son had unknowingly brought back smallpox with him and spread it among the tribe i ended with some deep to me as a 12 yo lying about how war is stupid nobody wins and everyone loses in the end fun note my teacher actually thanked me for putting so much thought into the assignment and i got an a plus ultimately i failed her class because that was legit the only time i ever applied myself and actually turned an assignment in very nice i once had an elementary student write a story where john cena randomly busted into the house about three stroke four of the way into the story truly wonderful the mind of a child is not me but my dad he teaches engineering and he was talking to his students about the meaning of different lights in the car he said that if the check engine light lights up you are probably freaked flash forward to the exam a student had to recognize the check engine light he wrote next to its picture you are probably freaked not a teacher but a student we were set a challenge in english lit at high school to rewrite the ending to of mice and men can't remember all the details bid by ending change was that george shoots lenny then turns the gun on himself out of guilt i then detail the final scene where a small mouse scurries along the floor and settles in lenny's hand i was made to read out the two three-page ending to the class and it got used as an example for the next few years in other classes i think my teacher was surprised that i wrote something with so much thought in detail and actually read the book i wasn't known for my soft side i was a bit of a class joker my only ever a work at school a kindergartener taught in korea last year wrote this awesome story about a dragon who terrorized all the forest animals they all worked together to defeat him and had a big party to celebrate in a true show of forgiveness the animals even invited the dragon to the party since he apologized for hurting them but they didn't invite one animal can't remember which one because he was japanese at the time there was a huge political movement in korea to boycott japan because of tensions over their refusal to acknowledge the use of korean comfort women read the forced prostitution of colonized people before and during world war ii i just didn't expect that out of the blue and from a five-year-old the japanese terrorized many in cruel ways during the war and even on the younger hatred still burns my korean friends hate to be called japanese rasris ra even i half blooded as i may i'm still sore over the war my teacher was surprised when we were given a short story assignment what happened was the assignment stated we had to write a story it didn't say how long it could be it just had a minimum so i wrote a long but book full of plot twist character development specific explained setting a theme moral a cliffhanger and just good stuff it was obviously not the greatest thing ever it was eighth grade but i think i did well i actually became dedicated to it so the next school year i memorized my old teacher's birthday and spent a long book time writing a book on google docs printed it bought a blank book cover and gave her the second volume of the first book with an ending this time the book was about a group of arctic explorers who found a caveman of sorts in the ice and when they let it out it released a disease onto the explorers and then they spread it across the world in accident the cliffhanger is hard to explain once for a three five page essay in eighth grade my friend wrote 56 pages i remember she tried changing the 12 point font to eight points as if that would help get within range but yes so the teacher stopped reading after five not a teacher but a student we had to write an ending to a story about a man driving home to his wife somewhere in the story i saw short mention of the character almost getting into an accident so i played with that and made it into a paranormal story where the main character did get into the accident but his body didn't know it yet so he got home to his wife who was just watching the news report his death and then he stood in their bedroom with a hole in his body i was proud of that one that sounds like a legitimately awesome read my teacher marked exams for the whole country and she was just responsible for what they only called the pit aka ones that had been flagged for social services she had all sorts from abuse one student had written about her sister's court case to religious fanatics she had one that was entirely ala akbar that is just so heartbreaking for everyone involved the story itself was fine but i really didn't expect the giant penis drawing at the end which turned out to be a picture of three grassy mountains that were not once mentioned in the story also did a story circle with a kindy kid that told a very usual story of her going to get ice cream with mummy and daddy etc which suddenly ended in and then i took all my fingers off and threw them in the air i throw my fingers in the air sometimes saying hee-eo go to leo go not a teacher bill would have been interested to ask my english lit teacher what he thought about my writing when i was studying the subjects years ago at school very much against my will i didn't believe that he read my work and just put a few ticks here and there so i had the idea of making my handwriting increasingly illegible to see if was actually reading anything by the end of term i was still getting the same old tics and he couldn't have read a word of it plot twist his eyesight had been deteriorating for years but he was trying to bluff his way through teaching english while no longer being able to read nat but when my son was in second grade his teacher gave out the usual coloring page and writing prompt it was a halloween theme there was a smiling child in a costume holding a bag and the prompt was when i looked inside my trick or treat bag i found my child wrote a human head seven years old and already a master of the horror plot twist while writing about the magic tree house tonight on the titanic one of my students was writing about the people once they got into the water and wrote the people in the water looked up and saw an incredible sight and i was expecting it to proceed with how the boat was sitting out of the water at a steep angle or how the propellers were visible as the book describes no the band was still playing was what followed i don't get many big twists since i teach little ones but that's the one i still like to think about sometimes because it would have been an incredible sight for sure our freshman teacher asked us to write a continuation to of mice and men so i turned it into a ghost story the setting is crooks and candy having a conversation in the barn they're talking about george and wondering why he hasn't moved on and why he goes off alone every night candy thinks george is paying lenny's ghost to visit out of the spot where he died crooks confesses that he can't sleep at night because he feels like the ghost of curly's wife is haunting the barn my teacher asked to keep the essay my freshman english teacher had us write a brief continuation of rules of the game by amitan she really wasn't expecting me to turn eight pages detailing the main character sneaking out to goal liver life on the streets being mented by a homeless person and then getting brutally murdered on a park bench i still got a 98 i had a year six student write a multi-chapter love story with a thinly disguised version of herself as the protagonist who wins the love of her best female friend who was also a thinly disguised version of the writer's bff it was so tender and wistful and sweet that it made me teary i showed it in confidence to an older teacher who was mentoring me at the time i felt as though the student was coming out to me and i was unsure what to do if anything a few days later she came out to her family who were very supportive i don't know how the situation went with the crush on the bff they both went off to high school shortly after so i don't know if anything eventuated oh man i read all that wondering how a six-year-old could write so well and have such complicated feelings ha not a teacher but in middle school seventh or eighth grade for our final exam we were given a choice of essays all the topics were extremely boring and i hated all of them but the last one was a picture of a carnival and my mind fixated on that for some reason we were supposed to look at the picture and write an essay on it of any kind obviously they were looking for something lame and family friendly and my edgy self would not let that fly so i went full psycho and wrote a carnival of horrors type macabre tale full of screaming kids and psycho clowns i think the end of the story had kids flying from the roller coaster into never-ending darkness and i remember describing in graphic detail the fear that these kids had now this was the final exam so we never got our papers back for final exams just the scores and it was highly unusual to ever receive any kind of critique on your work because we had already moved on to the next grade by the time the results were out this is in india suffice to say i was shocked to hear that my old english teacher wanted to meet me obviously walk to her office in trepidation expecting a reprimanding for the story instead was met with a smile and my teacher saying that it was simultaneously the most horrifying and the best short story she had read in a while a long story short she ended up recommending me for essay contests and i fell in love with writing still super grateful for the opportunity she gave me colder been a real bad ending to this story student wrote a fairly dark short story about being stabbed and lying on her floor bleeding out while the police came in to arrest her dad or something like that she wrote it with a fountain pen it's a thing we do in my classes and used this really weird ink when i asked her about the ink she said it was blood she had collected from when she was actually stabbed she wrote the whole dang story in her own blood teaching english to a class of three-year-old thai children one boy was particularly bright and was managing to write cvc and cvcc words consonant vowel consonant and consonant vowel consonant consonant words he calls me over and says look i can write he proceeds to write see well done you great n hum t what does it say teacher the student here i once was assigned a really dang boring essay write a letter to your english friend about your summer holidays and a friend you met the teacher handed it back to me with an a-plus the essay was how about i met a shadow demon named mermack the destroyer and how about we went to shark infested waters and stole a guy's wallet i'm a teacher and if it was a well-written story i'd give you an a as well not a teacher but a former student who didn't try it was my senior year my body had crap on me a bit and i had my gallbladder removed my first semester in school so i didn't try much for the rest of the year at the same time i had gotten depressed a lot of different things fed into it but i had written a paper we were tasked with doing about my demons the teacher said that we could cut in it or whatever and that there would be no consequences so i unleashed my mind onto the paper instead of blowing my brains out onto it i wrote all of my thoughts i've since been diagnosed with chronic depression so i like dark jokes to cope with my inability to feel true happiness longer than a few moments the teacher broke down crying while writing it i broke down crying as silently as possible and then fell asleep after turning it in so after everyone had left she woke me up and we talked for a few minutes about it she said that the way my mind worked was beautiful and that it was amazing to see but that i need to distract my depressed bits so that i don't get brought down by it so yeah i like this one a lot hope you're doing well i teach english honors and one story really stuck with me it was written by a quiet asian kid back in 2006. the story was told in first person and the way the atmosphere setting and imagery was conveyed made you feel demoralized lonely saddened etc it one sentence went something like october wind encapsulates my body as if searching for the last trace of warmth at this point i began to worry that this story was sort of cry for help but it was in the last sentence that captured the moment and twist despite the depressing setting he was actually writing the slow and agonizing moments of which your inner child no longer becomes a part of you but only a memory pixar would like to know your location i gave my research student a day to think of something to research with more likely a plan to come up with btw i'm a pharmacologist and the next day she came up saying professor i read a newspaper and found one interesting thing that i want to try i was like great what is it it talked about mixing vinyl with soda i want to incorporate two receptor with one enzyme to see the outcome i'm not gonna lie how vinyl and soda mix can bring such an idea was twisting when i was a teacher's aide in hs english one of the best things i ever graded was this amazing poem about a tiny dancer the writer's little girl but he was 17 and didn't have any kids the assignment was to take a popular song and write about it i still have a copy because i legit cried when i read it i never knew he had such depth inside him charlie if you see this you are a brilliant bastard because i'm old and the teacher who got this is extremely unlikely to be a redditor i wrote a story in third fifth grade it was a first-person prospective story about a boy who is sent by his mother to the hardware store to pick some stuff up the leftover money was enough to buy the last few components to a time machine he'd built and he completed the machine soon after coming home he went to the future where he saw a red sky and floating buildings that would move across the city he landed the machine on top of a building and went out exploring the wonders of the future interestingly in my story it wasn't the grand vision of a prosperous and peaceful future presented in star trek but i hadn't yet started watching tng so my reference for the future was it is sci-fi like the terminator total recall or running man at some point in the story the boy came across a man assaulting a woman in an alley he looked and the alley was none other than that of the hardware store where he'd purchased his time machine parts he ran in the store and got a bat and came out fighting off the man and saving the woman immediately after he saw a wanted poster on the wall with a man's picture on it shocking twist the man was the boy in the fu there was a bit after about trying to find his time machine after getting to it and realizing he'd parked on one of the flying buildings but i don't recall many specifics anymore i'm still just shocked i came up with that story so young i'm not that smart what did a teacher do that made you automatically gain respect for them i went to a small charter school for middle school our english literature teacher was brand new to teaching if i remember correctly she was only 22 which seemed old at the time she always did her best to be so cheerful and make learning fun but the thing that truly solidified her spot as my favorite teacher was that for every student's birthday she would give you a personalized mini notebook it was just a simple small composition notebook but she had filled the first couple pages telling me how much she loved having me as a student how far she knew i would go and other affirmations it seemed small but as a 13 year old who had a crappy home life it made all the difference in how i acted the rest of the year i've never wanted to do something for students so much i had a physical education teacher who organized basketball volleyball handball and football tournaments organized olympic games for the local kids and taught us dancing on weekends on his own just for us kids because we lived in a remote place without many activities and things going on he was more than a simple teacher when i was in the first grade my mother gave me one of many really awful haircuts the first day back at school afterward the kids picked on me horribly so much that i ran out and hid the principal found me and we went back to the classroom and he asked me to wait outside for a minute while he talked to the class he then walked me to his office and bought me a coke the next day first thing in the morning we had an assembly with the entire school and he walked up on stage with his head shaved completely bald and talked about bullying and the like some 20 years down the road he had retired and i ran into him at the local college s hooked his hand and said you probably don't remember me but yes i do he interrupted and said my name in the event the man was and is a hero in my eyes mad respect to him when i was a kid we had to purchase these red punch cards to get lunch at school unfortunately we didn't have that much money so there were times where my punch card would run out and i wasn't able to eat for a while until we got enough money to repurchase another one why nobody in my family applied for assistance was beyond me full stop i had one teacher who noticed i wasn't eating every day and she would bring an extra sandwich and offer it to me whenever she saw that i really didn't understand how kind that was when i was a kid but obviously as an adult that was such an amazing gesture of kindness not take my crap i was a pretty decent writer in school able to pop stuff out pretty quickly that was superficial but sounded good the first time i had a teacher hand my work back pointing out that i managed to compellingly fail to say anything was sort of a slap in the face that i didn't realize i needed same here i've been able to bulls my way through most english classes but i'll never forget the professor that told me she knew i could do better and give more than i was this will probably get lost but i want to shout out this teacher of mine she was our ap english language teacher for our senior year of high school on one of the first days in her class she explained how she went from being a kindergarten teacher to a high school senior teacher she always saw of her cute and happy kindergarten kids but as they grew up and they came back to visit her a lot of them came to her troubled and dissatisfied with their lives it made her real emotional about how people had treated these kids she loved so much how she couldn't afford to see kids so disconnected with life and how she didn't want them to suffer as they headed out towards college and their adult lives so she changed curriculums and started teaching seniors if i remember right it always came down to sending her kids off with a smile prepping them for the real world i respect the heck out of her and she'll always be one of my favorites truly like a mother to all her students i'm epileptic and had a large set of seizures not long before finals in high school chemistry my seizures tend to mess with my memory and those multiple seizures had devastated my memory of everything i'd learned in class that semester i was doing reasonably well in class but absolutely bombed the test after the failed test i ended up just shy of passing the class and he decided to give me a bonus question that passed me i didn't expect that but the empathy was nice to see from a teacher even still the whole situation sucked my math teacher told me i should have studied better he then offered for me to retake the test which seems reasonable enough but there was no point as it was just all gone i've only had one since that was worse than that but fortunately i've got an understanding employer it doesn't hurt that i've got a union rep as well i had a professor once state that she doesn't believe in trick questions students trick themselves up enough without the professor helping that along she never did put trick questions junior year of high school english class we were discussing a story we had read one student let's call him carl made a point the teacher was dismissive and basically said cole was wrong the next day after we took our seats the teacher said before we begin i was thinking about what carl said yesterday i was wrong to dismiss it so quickly let's take a look at that again he then went on to repeat carl's point and initiate a conversation with the entire class after the conversation it became apparent carl's point was indeed off base but i was impressed the teacher publicly owned his mistake and went down the path he should have a math teacher went to the hospital several times to visit a student who had been seriously injured in an accident the teacher offered companionship free tutoring and genuine encouragement math teacher i don't care if you have good grades or bad grades if you work hard i will work harder to make you pass he worked hard for me i passed told us a joke about his name before we could and allowed us to eat during his classes because kids your age can't help being hungry all the time as long as we did it quietly great guy his whole attitude made all of us actually pay attention and do our best instead of shouting at my loud class 4 not shutting up before the lesson began my history teacher decided to quietly tell the story of a pink elephant that wanted to be an astronaut after a few seconds people started to shut up and listen about the pink elephant when everyone was quiet and listening he stopped mid-story as much as it made me respect him why didn't you finish the story ffs that cliffhanger it was a professor but she said she wasn't going to have a textbook for the class basically she didn't respect the textbook representatives trying to take the pharma approach to force kids to buy an 170 dollar access code instant respect you just had to show up to the lectures and she teach you what you needed to know i had a professor who legit said i don't require a textbook because i think their scams much appreciated english teacher in high school asked where my homework was responded i forgot to do it and he said to the rest of the class why can't you guys be like scratch that he doesn't come up with some excuse he just tells me he didn't do it lol i would always tell my teachers i didn't finish it sounds a bit better than i didn't do it i had a business studies teacher who used to be a mental health professional so she knew the signs when my depression was particularly bad for example submitting work at 3am and would always make sure i had eaten and offered me coffee and generally made her classroom a safe space for anyone cesteen if you're reading this you're amazing i moved out of home during high school it was stressful to say the least i started to fall behind in assignments i would be absent for days at time i missed tests etc i ended up explaining the bare minimum of my situation to my english teacher and their response always stuck with me just do what you can it may not seem like much but right then and there for 16 year old kid who felt like simply living was a burden it was everything treated kids with autism and asperger's like actual human beings in my school i was in a special needs unit for kids with aspergers and autism called the cdu communication disorder unit the kids and their ranged from having mild asperger's to full on severe autism and as such most teachers treated everyone from there like they had severe mental health problems just because they were labeled as having autism or asperger's even if it was very mild but there was one support teacher in the cdu who was genuinely just a nice dude whether he was talking to kids who had severe autism or just some mild social anxiety he wouldn't talk extra slowly or call you bud or pal at the end of a sentence he would talk to everyone like they were real human beings it might seem like a small thing but when that's how pretty much all teachers talk to you and treated you in every class it was very refreshing to talk to someone who would talk to you based on who you were as a person rather than treating someone differently for being labeled as autistic thankfully this program didn't exist at my school aspies had 504s and more severe cases had ieps and certain classes were done by special teachers or with an extra teacher nobody was made to feel stupid or less than other students that teacher is the kind that all neurodivergent students love my band director he laughed with us he talked to us like people instead of lowly teenage students and he read to us the power of positive thinking he saw a need for it some of the kids were bored out of their skulls and thought it was stupid but some of us listened personally i love that he recognized a problem and took action i've been out of high school for wow 30 years this year i'm still in touch with him he's the most influential person in my life that is not related to me and it's because he chose to invest and do more than bare minimum as a teacher it's really interesting how a teacher can be so influential for one student while another student may hate them because they were bored out of their skulls i always hope that a student can connect with at least one teacher during secondary school in my first year of high school my class decided to play a simple prank on our english soas teacher by all laughing when he faced the board and then stopping every time he turned around to face us after a few minutes of this he just left the classroom without a word we all sat there confused until a few minutes later the assistant principal comes in and explains that we've really upset our teacher he made us believe we'd seriously fricked up then our teacher walked in and pretty much went gotcha that son of a b had our respect from the non my high school science teacher paused class to rip a student apart for bullying another student called it out as soon as it happened in front of everyone and that bully never went near that other kid again we'll always remember that meanwhile my elementary school teacher blamed a bullied kid for being bullied we had a pretty cool and badass teacher in fifth grade he was cool made jokes made lessons fun but at the same time didn't take crap we had these really naughty boys in our class like they pulled pranks skipped class bullied other kids never turned in assignments or projects one day they did something really bad don't remember what it was and it made our teacher really really mad i was like this is it we all about to be a bunch of witnesses i thought he was about to put hands on these kids this man was livid he called the main instigator to the front of the class and just stared at him for what seemed like forever and this kid was just like not bothered had an attitude this teacher then starts talking cool and calm lecturing this kid about all the bad choices he's making about how he needs to think about if those choices are going to get him anywhere in life stuff like that he brought that kid to tears this kid who thought he was the crap oh so cool untouchable will never have to face the music kind of kid he stood there in tears the teacher wasn't rude or disrespect didn't like hit the kid or scream and shout at the kid simply spoke to him about making better choices teacher said the lecture we a lesson to all of us i just think it was so cool the way the teacher handled it spoke to him all of us in a way that made us think about our future for the first time make good choices it was small but he told us he was going to be in a bad mood that day because someone stole his bike just treating us like people was something that was rare in that school i love honesty like this i remember my first math class in college i didn't take any math my senior year of high school because i finished my math requirements my junior year anyway the first math test hit me like a truck after never having to try in high school and i scored in the low 60s the next three tests i learned to study and got 398s in a row the last week of class the professor who was a hard boss by the way and would kick you out for having your phone out called me up to her desk after class and said clearly you were having a bad day that first exam so don't worry about that grade because i won't count it it really changed my view of that professor i had an english teacher back in high school that offered a mercy to everyone in the class you could drop one assignment or test for the year as someone who has blacked out when doing a speech two years before i just told her to remove me from the speech list i remember my fifth grade teacher had every student circle one book from the scholastic book fairflyer when the day came for the fair if you didn't go to the library to purchase that book for yourself she will buy it with her own money to make sure every student got to take a book home i wouldn't have had any books of my own if it weren't for her i had a teacher like that i would have hand me downs from the 50s if i didn't get books like that and i love that she did that i had a principal in a new school i hadn't met yet because the first day of school at my new high school was my dad's funeral he had no idea what i looked like but he sought me out in the really crowded hallways and gave me a hug and his condolences never felt creepy only cared about he went on to local politics and became our mayor only time i have truly voted for the best person for the job and not the least objectionable your principal is good man ego heaven i had a teacher in elementary school who was prone to outbursts he had a short fuse at least compared to every other adult i knew at the time for instance when several of us in class weren't listening he'd throw a piece of chalk against the wall to get our attention honestly we just thought he was crazy a year or maybe two years later the school had a talent show like a big one in the gym in front of everyone one of my classmates was really into music and wanted to play a drum solo our teacher had mentioned offhand that he used to be in a band and played drums so my classmate asked him sort of dared like kids often do with adults to play a solo in front of the school and he did he freaking rocked it but that's not what made me respect him turns out the band he played for was a very successful and at the time quite popular arc band he left just before they became popular because he wanted to be a teacher he chose teaching kids over the chance at fame and fortune and didn't regret it edit decided to look him up and he's still a teacher and doing very well made me smile you can't post that without telling us the name of the band i had a professor that made it crystal clear that if we ever made an appointment and didn't show up he'd take five points off of our final grade i tried to find him during office hours and he wasn't available i told him that i deserved an extra five points because he wasn't available when he said he would be and he gave it to me in the interest of fairness people who stay true to their teachings are always great provided that their teachings are moral i had a professor in college who was five minutes late to the start of an 8 a.m lecture and clearly distraught she started by apologizing for the delay and explaining that she just got off the phone with her sister telling her that her mother just died of cancer the remainder of her lectures for the day were cancelled but she was going to try to keep it together enough to do ours since we were already there so early in the morning i respected that she decided to give us the lecture we had come for despite being in the immediate shock of mourning a loved one and being vulnerable enough to tell us i had a teacher in the sixth grade who gave me a c-plus on a poster project that i turned in when he saw my disappointment he asked what grade do you think you should have gotten i thought for a second and said a b-plus he immediately scratched out the grade and gave me a b-plus tragically i saw in the news a few years later that he drowned while on a fishing trip that got to me had an extremely zany teacher who taught psychology and had the last name ward psycho personality in the best way possible to fit her name and job never met someone who fit their name and job description so well worse she taught driver's ed too on the side she was the type whose any personality was a big plus most of her kids loved her but if you left around in her class she'd eject you from it with extreme prejudice she still teaches and she teaches very well as an aside there was also this middle-aged woman who was basically a hall monitor and filled in any other position she could think of as well as handing out the intentions or suspensions if she caught you effing around instead of being where you were supposed to be small lady absolutely no nonsense and tough as nails she wouldn't take crap from you but also incredibly fair overall i realized she knew when to bend my older two siblings hated her because she always caught them skipping class smoking or worse i got along with her very well and never caused her any trouble i asked her once about my little brother and she said he was a good kid and while she had to give him detention a few times she was also proud of him because when he got into a fight he did it for the right reasons my little bros are very tall hulking guy and never hesitated to defend someone from a bully it got him a few detentions for fighting but apparently she made it clear she was proud of him for standing up for others nonetheless i repeated this later to my brother and he said she was a very good woman very fair and that he'd liked her for that fairness and her sheer guts my astronomy teacher in high school was a textbook nerd glasses bowtie mustache pocket protector the whole deal there was a group of senior girls that would mock him mercilessly one day he noticed a pack of cigarettes hanging out of one of their purses as he walked by during his lecture he reached down and pulled one cigarette out of the box he proceeded to insert the tip of the cigarette into his nose and continued the lesson like nothing was wrong this dude must have kept that cigarette hanging in his nose for 30 minutes without mentioning it once at the end of class he casually walked back to the girl's desk grabbed the pack out of her purse inserted the nose cigarette then shook the pack and handed it back to the girl without a word it was such a baller move rock on mr keith holy crap that's freaking hilarious mr keith is a genius i had been put in a lower set due to class capacity issues he started off with a sph around what we would be learning this year and then assigned work to the class after that he walked up to me and gave me a big book with the syllabus and told me he knew i'm too smart for this class and instead of following what the class does he wants me to work through the syllabus at my pace faster than others being implied and he would come and check on me after assigning work to everyone else he said i could do lots of little each class but i needed to finish the book by the end of the year super duper motivated me to smash his class i had a principal in high school that was extremely strict and was always looking to get people in trouble it got to the point where everyone knew that even the teachers hated him but none of them ever said anything about it because they didn't want to lose their jobs well there was this one kid that was being accused of something he didn't actually do and one teacher decided she'd had enough of the principal's bulls and stood up for the kid she was an amazing teacher and of course he fired her at the end of the school year that didn't stop her from coming to my classes graduation the next year though there was one other teacher that would make comments about the principal in class and insinuated his hatred toward him nobody snitched and at the end of the school year on his last day of teaching he wrote a note saying he quits because of the principle and left it on his desk and never returned love that man mr deonofrio who will probably never see this our middle school's first lockdown drill came without warning like we and the teachers had gone over how to do a lockdown drill and new one would be coming in the next month but the school decided authenticity would be the best for preparation one day in seventh grade science class the nun principal got on the pa and announced lockdown and we all panicked but knew what to do mr dunofrio ushered us into the coat room and told us to sit as far away from the windows as possible and be silent he locked the door and pushed the file cabinets against it we heard banging on the doors and first floor windows some footsteps in the hallway we were silent and terrified i remember two sports ball guys standing up and holding their arms out in front of us like we were in a car about to crash when the banging started the banging was just the hall monitors and the lockdown was just a drill this was in 2007 before school shootings were an epidemic and it was my first lockdown when it was over mr d shed a few real tears while we helped him move the desks and cabinets back for the rest of the class less than 10 minutes he told us each how he loved us all and would do anything to protect every one of us no matter what he was really shaken just like we were but he never tried to hide it nobody in the class made any jokes about him being gay for crying or telling us he loved us we all saw a grown man experience real fear and courage and every one of us respected him for it after that nobody ever was disrespectful or talked over him in class i was in college and my teacher ran in about 10 minutes late his excuse went something like this him sorry i'm late guys i was it's not really important ah yeah just that me a smartus godzilla him without missing a beat nope mothra a small thing like a sense of humor is nice had a science teacher he was absolutely terrific a great teacher a great everything so one day his class was going one when i felt like i was getting my periods but within a few minutes it was clear that i was getting them because of the cramps now i didn't want to ask him because i had to tell him but i also needed to go to the bathroom he noticed said i could leave the class whenever i wanted to without me asking and continued to teach still one of the best teachers i've had my fourth grade teacher would have a classroom yard sale every year after she did her annual spring cleaning her daughter was about 13 so the things she'd recently outgrown would be age appropriate for us i'm aware this wouldn't work out every year and i'm not sure how long she taught at our school but she told us it was a regular thing we didn't have to pay for them if we needed or wanted something we could have it there was some sort of lesson incorporated into the yard sale how to trade or value money or something like that so we didn't feel embarrassed if we needed a few more things than the other kids did i wish i could remember exactly how it worked but this happened in 1994 she was an all-around great teacher thanks miss farrell whose name i've probably misspelled your class was fun he admitted that he didn't particularly want to be a teacher but did it for a stable career the type of guy who should have been an english phd but didn't have the money to chase an academic career like that he was way too good to be teaching high school english probably a teacher you guys deserved my teacher was asking a student in the hallway to quiet down as they were disrupting her class the student proceeds to not quiet down and begins bombarding the teacher with teenage insults the teacher who if you can imagine is a shortish hippie lady in her late 50s one of the nicest people i know and would always have time to help you with an assignment regardless what she was currently doing anyway the student who is still raging starts walking away from my teacher and the first words my teacher says to him after asking him to quiet down is i'm sorry have a good rest of your day it took me some time to understand what she did that day she knew that the student wasn't angry at her for asking him to be quiet he was angry due to personal reasons and he was just lashing out and she let the student release some of that anger towards her and when it was done she responded with only kindness after hearing hate for minutes i have a solid amount of respect for almost all teachers but for her i have the most she taught me that kindness can only be spread through kindness dang i think i have only seen two teachers professors ever to have such understanding compassion teachers and or college board graders what is the funniest response you got on a test when the student didn't know the answer i graded ap exams this summer for one essay question i got an awesome barbecue sauce recipe from a kid in tennessee i've made it a couple times and it's excellent i was marking a final year engineering test a nod lecturer and instead of answering the last question some guy drew an incredibly detailed portrait of himself serving fries at a mcdonald's with the caption me if i fail this i still had to fail him but i did feel bad about it some say he's serving fries till this day it wasn't for a test but a large portion of the class didn't do an assignment so the teacher decided to assign a makeup assignment he wasn't planning on assigning anything so he asked the class for ideas someone said an essay about procrastination and he said i like that idea and the conversation ended with that next class rolls around and someone turns in an essay titled the importance of effective communication because he never actually assigned the essay i was helping a teacher grade back in high school and i was grading a kids geometry quiz the question was a two-column proof and it asked him to prove that one side was congruent to another based off of two triangles being congruent how to prove the two triangles were congruent first this was his whole answer triangle abc is congruent to triangle bcd because they kinda look the same side lab equal side db because they're both three eraser lengths long frick proofs so much those things were impossible just another student we had a test which involved a sex education part the question was what are two causes of infertility in males his response lack of penis he tried to argue that he wasn't wrong and somehow got a mark college level physics exam asked for a brief description of maxwell's theory the instructor shamed the student by reading aloud his answer good to the last drop as a teacher's assistant in my high school grading chemistry tests for one question which read convert one meter into mm one student had converted meters to yards to feet two inches to centimeters to millimeters rather than just multiply by one thousand my high school teacher would always encourage us to write funny answers down if we didn't know anything she found marking tests extremely boring so if we could make her laugh we'd at least get point five of a mark on it same but without the points for a wrong answer that is actually what prompted this question my ap euro hist teacher encourages funny wrong answers go to come up with substitutions for a lot of wrong answers the student knew the answer just didn't know how to spell it i taught history and showed a video clip of ronald reagan's famous mr gorbachev tear down this wall in a later quiz i asked students to write down this quote with my favorite response starting mr guberk i had one esl student who couldn't quite get the hang of changing singular nouns into plurals i have a pen got him full marks on the unit test i have two penis did not double don dude has really crappy grammar it wasn't an answer it was a proposition saw the post on reddit where someone drew a picture and got credit for it for a test answer so i did the same thing on my next science test teach told me that my drawing of a giraffe was garbage and gave me nothing should have told him his test was garbage i was student teaching first grade and was quizzing a student on sight words the word was horse and he said w w w i'm a teacher that hasn't gotten any super funny answers yet but when i was a student my philosophy class did a group thing about a test our professor had told us at the start of the quarter that when we did the final if every single person turned in the test that is blank except for a name we would all get an a apparently he had made this offer to every class for years well of the 20 or so of us in the class only one person was passing we all thought the teacher was a dong so when it came time for the final he passed out the test and left to go to his office after he was gone we all talked about it and those of us who had bad grades said we have nothing to lose by turning in a blank paper we are failing anyway and then we looked at the one guy who was passing he said i'm a philosopher major so i just want to find out if he means it or not let's do it so we all wrote down our names on our individual tests then we lined up and went to his office and one by one handed him our blank tests he was shocked we were the first class to pull it off he made us promise not to tell anyone and he did give us all 100 on the final i clearly did not keep my promise about not talking about it i'm a philosopher major so i just want to find out if he means it or not let's do it rock on philosophy dude one time a kid in my latin class started sneezing out various denominations of bills when turning in his test the total added up to 75 i think he dropped the class well we know the money was green when my wife and i were tas in grad school we proctored and then graded an essay exam we had a student write i don't know so here's a picture of a puppy he then drew a beautiful picture of a puppy it took him nearly an hour to complete it to this day when i ask my wife a question and she doesn't know the answer she just says puppy what is this day because i think it may mean something different to what i am used to well i'm not a grader but i've got one an old teacher of mine used to grade ap stats tests and he said a student once drew an elaborate rube goldberg chain reaction type thing across two pages for a short answer meanwhile every other student is internally panicking at what calculations require two pages not me but a classmate of mine in my eighth grade social studies class the teacher offhandedly mentioned necessity is the mother of invention on the test one question was is the mother of comma my classmates wrote mary as the mother of jesus we were all really upset that he didn't get credit eighth grade free response question explain how the united states acquired the louisiana purchase my answer the united states purchased louisiana i received full credit they paid napoleon with money got to teach a technical theatre class and gave a quiz at the beginning to see what the kids knew one of the questions was name a good conductor i was looking for a metal conductor like copper or brass ended up with several answers like leopold stakovsky leonard brierstein and several famous composers we all had a good laugh when we went over the answers you probably should have clarified in high school we had to fill out forms next to sex i wrote not yet totally forgetting they were asking for gender a bit different not quite a test class was reading a play in english lit during junior year we were rotating parts between students through the various acts point being that we did actually have parts so people weren't necessarily focusing on the story as much as they were on when it was going to be their turn some girl's line comes up and her character is mentally handicapped the line read makes horse sounds she started today i don't know about credit but we all had a good laugh i hated that crap it would become my character's line and i'd be 38 chapters ahead and no idea where the rest of the class was because they read too dang slow not me but on a sample essay i read for ap world history they were listing evidence for a question related to american indians one kid wiped his blood on the exam sheet and wrote this is a blood sacrifice to the sun god of the incas sadly he didn't get credit sun god prefers beating hearts to blood be glad that all that happened was him not getting credit the sun god could have gotten angry and left the world an eternal darkness not a teacher but in german secondary school and chemistry a student didn't know the answer for a question and wrote kp on the paper kp is short for keen plan which basically means no clue the teacher thugs it stands for koch punk which means boiling point and it was the correct answer and she even got full credits on that one i took a philosophy class in high school for the final paper we had the option to write an essay arguing to the teacher that we were not a figment of his imagination i decided to do the opposite i wrote a whole essay about how i was a figment of my teacher's imagination i ended up with a b in the course that was the only assignment i handed in for the entire course when i was a sophomore in high school i was in a biology class and the very first test i was clueless at this point in time i didn't quite know the teacher or his style or anything about him really so naturally clueless on the essay question i decided to go meet her and write a speech about how i was bombing the test i compared it to harry truman deciding to nuke japan and how that was thought to save lives by my own nuking of the test who knows maybe i could do the same i got a call from my mom later on he didn't like it in fact he decided to interpret it as a bomb threat needless to say it was a rough semester comma he decided to interpret it as a bomb threat i can't stop laughing i was one of the last classes to take a hotly contested statewide standardized exams in its dying days some big muckety muck decided it would be a great idea to add a science portion to the exam their mistake was telling my class that we were the first class to take it and therefore were simply testing if it was useful for the school board and our results on that section would have no bearing on our final test results the question was something like susie and john have a heavy box they need to put the heavy box on a shelf but it's too heavy they have several pieces of wood a handful a pulley etc etc etc design a system for moving the box to the shelf and explain why this works in scientific terms my response suzy and john could do many things they could build a lever as you're obviously suggesting they do with the boards but the box would likely slide back down the lever and kill susie and john here is a drawing of susie and john dead under a box they could build a pulley but i don't want to explain how that works and also if they're too small to reach the shelf with the box how the frick are they going to attach a pulley to the roof drawing of suzy and john looking sad as their parents yell at them for screwing around with the garage ceiling my recommendation is that susie and john open the freaking box and move everything individually like normal human beings picture of susie and jon high fiving and saying g willow wokers we did it since the test was unscored i never found out how they liked my solution but i hope i gave some old ladies a few conniption fits that science portion i was one of the lucky shoots who got to test it out on the four plus hract exam nobody had told us ahead of time and it had never been tacked onto one i'd done before i was so p they did great hours though so i couldn't just walk out not a teacher or anything but here's a related story an acquaintance of mine didn't know what to do on a spanish two-unit test so he attached a 20 bill to the test when he turned it in he never saw it again and received an f but it didn't bother him kidd was balling out in drug money hugh that's a receipt not exactly an answer to the prompt but at my high school thanks to my friend we now have the ap stats challenge get a 5 on the test while writing the entire free response portion in haikus and only haikus so far i think 510 people have pulled it off and it definitely made the test a lot more entertaining for me i use the same five haikus for every poetry assignment in all of my school classes fifth grade through college always got an a only really did work once it was glorious not a teacher but in ap physics 2 on a practice test so naturally i didn't care as much when asked to solve for the mass defect i explained how mass effect drives work in great detail as well as different uses i think my teacher liked it because he wrote this is my favorite store on the citadel instead marking it wrong funny this comes up as i am writing a year 12 physics assignment comparing mass effect to halo in terms of the how realistic their methods of travel are not a grader built on the ap exam for world history a friend of mine rather than actually write an essay on one of the assigned topics describe the plot of milan that is my second favorite story involving her for one of my ap english essays i spelled out help i'm trapped in an ap test facility down the left side of the page i received a four stroke five for the exam purposefully easy extra credit question asked who is your favorite founding father and why is it alexander hamilton i responded with aaron burr and drew a short stick figure montage of their famous duel knew the answer but decided to be flippant regardless still got full points once on an endocrinology exam i was sitting the last question required everyone to reference five rcts published in a journal in appa format no one had been told that anything like this would be on the exam and obviously no one is going to remember all the authors of a study of the top of their heads so being my frustrated self i referenced how to be an absolute be by lecturer's name two weeks later i got called into her office and was made to apologize and told not to do this again i'm sorry that you'll be there's a subject in england called general studies it's the only core subjects at a level 90 of universities don't count it towards entry and 100 of the top universities don't so it's basically a wasted two hours of your life my general studies paper consisted of me writing out the lyrics to every wwe entrance theme i could think of we don't actually do general studies anymore year 13 now i'm the student in this case i'm taking ap calculus and it's absolutely kicking my butt when i didn't know an answer i wrote a prayer to the god of math o lord of mouth grant me thy favor that i may understand this the holy work for i am as yet powerless before your tests and weaken my calculations amen i got one stroke to credit not a grader but on my ap calc test last year there was one question that i had no idea wtf they were even asking after staring at it for about 10 minutes i gave up and drew a portrait of the proctor surrounded by velociraptors and climbing up a rope from a helicopter i like to think i got at least partial credit for that i did something similar i just completely blanked on a cow question so i drew a picture of a cat and wrote i don't know what to do here so here's a kitty my professor wrote back kitty says find the derivative and expand i'm not a teach mantra of the topic here but i was taking a film history and appreciation class at college and came across this question what is a camera obscura my answer was the type of camera a hipster uses i got no points but my professor said he got a good laugh out of it biochemistry exam there was a complicated synthesis question how would you produce x that the student answered with blood magic the answer was written in blood i asked about it later the student had gotten a paper cut when taking the test apparently i have never had a paper cut that bled test included reading a map of rome and finding your way around using coordinates qn how can you get to the coliseum from the starting point plot out a root on the grid provided and i don't need the grid because i've played assassin's creed brotherhood enough to know where i'm going sai should have written back that he couldn't fast travel in spanish we were doing the food kitchen unit and basically had a question like it's what you used to wipe your mouth i knew we definitely had a napkin word of the unit last server leader but couldn't remember what it was so i wrote down lamano and it was marked wrong and the teacher just wrote number you could also say manga de la camisa shirt sleeve i got one from both sides of the spectrum once an advanced calculus the final question was something which i had no clue how to answer so i just wrote in the entire space seven turned out seven was the correct answer however i got no credit for it for not showing any working as a marker at university i was going through the tests and a question was accounting describe a transaction which causes a decrease in an asset and also equity a student's answer was a building caught on fire and got destroyed technically he was correct although it wasn't really a transaction more an event i used to compete in academic decathlon nhs and my teacher advisor was almost always selected to grade the prompted essays for the event itself she explained to us that one year about two years before i joined the team they got an essay in spanish now there were no rules at the time about in what language your essay could be written and the other graders were at a loss my teacher minored in spanish and routinely spoke it fluently so she volunteered to translate it for the graders instead of an essay about westward expansion during the 19th century or whatever that year's prompt was the kid had written a four-page essay about hooking up with various fake celebrities over his summer vacation needless to say he did not score well on that portion of the event on a quiz in bio2 it asked what group a certain organism was in i didn't know so i put blue man group my tay apparently liked to because i got the point anyways i don't know why this is so funny question what are your opinions on sex before marriage 16 marks answer i wouldn't buy a car before test driving it q what is x a it's certainly not y q state the differential and integral form of hooke's law a the differential and integral form of hooke's law full credit on each in 12th grade me and a buddy of mine let's call him tom were both in the same calculus and victor's class i had already decided to major in history at university so my mark in this class didn't mean too much to me anyways during the exam i got to a question which asked me to graph the derivative of a given function not knowing what it was i simply drew a kitty cat face on the graph cause frickit and moved on about 10 minutes later tom who was sitting beside me discreetly gets my attention and i see he's stuck on that same problem and hoping i'll help him out chuckling to myself i turned to the question on my exam and move it over slightly seeing what i had done tom shook his head quietly whispered frickit and did the same thing but suffice to say our teacher was less than happy with us after the exam i'm a student too but i generally like to answer a question with a narrative sentence based around the word or question i was asked recently there was a test i took with vocabulary on it and one of the words was ananrasis now i had forgotten what the answer to it was at the time so instead i answered anna was ignored by a girl named isis i have no idea why anna was ignored by isis anna was a pretty upstanding girl with plenty of friends and a nice personality isis was probably just being the usual bee self not sure how my teacher responded i'll find out tomorrow but yeah that's generally how i go about answering those kinds of questions back in the third grade i had a two-part written question on a science test part one if you had to change the gas nitrogen to a liquid how would you do it my answer i would change it to a liquid part two explain what would happen my answer it will change to a liquid funny thing is i actually got full credit my teacher wrote something like i can't say that this is what i was looking for but i can't say that it's wrong either k-12 teachers have read it what is a story of a student you had who went on to surprise you with how much they later succeeded or failed in life johnny depp went to my high school why a before i did but the chemistry teacher was the same guy bit much much older by the time i got there he'd always tell us how johnny was always skipping school didn't do well academically and played guitar in the halls his mom was supposedly always being called not my story but my grandma's she was a middle school english teacher and had this one student who was problematic he was well known as a troublemaker and a bully my grandma was a pretty strict teacher so she didn't take his crap she had to take disciplinary actions on multiple occasions so it's safe to say he was not a fan of her but my grandma was always able to see his potential and she didn't want him to waste his life flash forward about 35 or 40 years this student got a hold of my grandma's email address and contacted her in the email he stated how he has had a very troubled life and had passed problems with the law he then said that he remembered back to her english class and how she was the only teacher who ever pushed him to be a better student and person it ended up that those memories gave him motivation to turn his life around he cleaned up his life and was able to get and hold a job he wanted to thank my grandma for being the only person who ever believed in him and pushed him to be a better person it definitely made my grandma happy to know that even if it was decades later she was able to help give someone self-worth and a second chance at life this is why having competent teachers matters i had a student come mid-year to my eighth grade class because she was in the u.s for medical treatment following an awful pickup accident in her country where she was dragged down the road she lost most of one leg and the other from the knee down her first week she came in a wheelchair and became very popular since only she and a helper could use the school elevator the rest of the year she graduated from wheelchair to crutches with prosthetic legs then a cane then was able to walk without help she went camping with the class having no problems on uneven terrain i saw her again after she graduated from high school and she told me how she now drove her nephews and nieces to school i was so proud of her and all she had overcome this is so awesome i'm glad that she overcame her injury and was able to drive had a student who was one of the most undisciplined uncontrollable people i had ever met he probably had several undiagnosed learning disabilities and had no regard for any kind of social norms both in interactions with teachers and peers he would wander the halls barge into classes that were not his own and attempt to engage in conversation with teachers in the middle of their lessons he would have loud outbursts sometimes of song sometimes just to hear the sound of his own voice on a few occasions he would remove his shirt in class and lewdly rub his nipples this is just the stuff that immediately comes to mind every day this kid would act out in some new creative way he also happened to be an extremely talented singer and performer and last year his junior year of high school he auditioned for and got a role on a show on a streaming service i'm hoping the tutoring they provide him is more effective than traditional schooling and that he gets his behavior under control otherwise his success may not last long my neighbor taught chemistry in high school for almost 10 years in particular she recalls a student of hers who got perfect scores on almost every test she was a hard worker and could be seen constantly studying ironically despite her being a nerd she was pretty popular and had lots of people around her two years later she failed her senior year it was discovered she had multiple accounts of drug abuse and had run away from home it was a huge scandal as the school my neighbor worked in was a prestigious and highly competitive private school to everyone's surprise two years later she came back to the school after going to rehab and therapy she was a whole different person she repeated her senior year and managed to graduate with excellent grades now she's happily married after graduating from college i'm glad she got a second chance and turned her life around sucker for happy endings one of my professors is this story she is a creative writing professor she went and got her mfa in writing with a few guys who were writing this play she said that they goofed off and never took their work seriously and they asked her to write with them she figured them to be losers and turned them down so now she's a creative writing adjunct professor and her classmates those guys have their own animated series you might have heard of south park i met an older woman at a bar once when i was living in colorado she was a classmate of trey parker and matt stone she had some neat stories to share like how the school guidance counselor in south park is the exact same character as one of their teachers they had there was a kid i grew up with who was a bully crazy kid he was constantly in fights in elementary school his mom was called almost every day and he was on rittling 2x a day and he was still a handful eighth grade he suddenly decided not to be a psycho he got great grades and studied hard was a straight a student all through high school my family always joked that he was so smart he would either be a super villain or the president he had the potential for both equally now he's married with kids and helps people manage their money if you had asked me in sixth grade what his life would have been like as an adult i would say he would be in jail for aggravated assault lol i work in a delinquent youth placement we'll call this student bob for anonymity bob had problems authority issues substance abuse aggression raised in the streets in a city minority kid bob wasn't going to see the age of 30 if he didn't get arrested nothing out of the ordinary for our facility over months and months we get bob doing better sar councillors staff members teachers therapists he's working as a student worker and making money he earned his get he even enrolled in community college in his hometown we were dang proud when he left our facility and got a part-time job between classes fast forward a couple months one of our staff members does a recidivism check is bob doing okay or in jail again bob was shot by a rival of bob's former gang for being in the wrong place at the wrong time he died at the hospital he wasn't even 20 yet not a teacher but i have a relevant story you know the show scrubs well the creator of that show went to my high school and i was a big fan of the show when it was still good and i tracked down one of his teachers specifically his creative writing teacher he told me that his former student was a c student at best and was solidly mediocre so that's kind of funny not a teacher but went to school with a guy that had a 100 average because his mom baked cookies and did other things for the teachers and if he got anything less than 100 she would complain about it to the profs she also had him listed for several learning disabilities which he didn't have just so he could take like two weeks to write a one-hour test obviously went home and cheated he was on some special education plan that let him take all that time he was genuinely a really smart guy too but his mom put too much pressure on him he got into the best university with a full ride flunked out first year since then he is dropped out of like four other units after a semester in each he now works full-time at a tim hortons as a cashier it's sad but karma is a b because his mom used to always put down other kids by saying stuff like you must feel really bad son's name got the highest average and you were only second highest don't worry not everyone can win she single-handedly probably ruined his life her poor son he never had a real chance at growing up i hope he is doing okay emotionally there is a kid i taught in an english center here in south korea his name was john and it was for a debate class john was good at debating but way too cool for school he was in seventh grade or so and was getting to that age where he didn't give a crap i really really wish he actually tried and released his potential but alas wasted come a few years later and i run into him on the streets i actually didn't recognize him but he came up to me and was very excited it was kind of surreal because he was never really excited to see me he thanked me for teaching him debate and he had just won a national competition i was very proud of him sadly that's the only time i ever saw him again i'm sure he's just fine i taught at a high school i had one student who was incredible in school she had an awesome family involved in clubs and was extremely shy she was going to brown or princeton and wanted to be a civil engineer opened up p-hub the other day and i'm pretty sure she's a cam show girl if not this chick has a doppelganger this is not mine but my grandpa's i don't know if this story counts but i'll say it anyway there was this child actor who needed to act like an architect in a movie he would be in my grandpa was still teaching at the time and is an architect so he had the kid in his class for a while to learn that kid was tom cruise big if true jokes aside props to your grandpa for helping the kid pursue his dream if it weren't for him it is possible that there could have been no tom cruise movies or mission impossible out there in the limelight today not a teacher but had a guy a few years ahead of me in hs dude was the closest thing to a genius i'd ever seen total recall just absorbed information and hung onto it he got a perfect score on the act and got into a pretty prestigious midwestern university medical program last i heard he dropped out after developing a coke problem and can't hold a job down young girl very smart but no einstein they removed her from her school and put her in the center-based gifted program for the super smart the teachers there promptly ruined her as they did all the kids in that program none of them were truly challenged given a curriculum that allowed them to pick and choose what they wanted to study which taught nothing about hard work or slogging through the difficult parts and brainwashed all the kids their parents and everyone else in society were the equivalent of low iq monkeys compared to their genius and not worth their respect she graduated high school with high marks because they were pampered and indulged big college where it's actually hard and you actually have to study and people don't constantly praise you for being amazing she lost her mind couldn't keep up with the other students didn't know how to work for grades and convinced herself a high school bf would cheat on her if she didn't go home and be with him she dropped a full ride scholarship in the first year they broke up of course and she ended up managing a rap group that was going nowhere fell into drugs and a bad crowd and now works as a cashier coached a kid in football his freshman year one night at a varsity game we caught him in the women's restroom with a bottle of alcohol he's now in the nfl if i may ask who is it of course this is another one of those not a teacher posts but i do think i count as a failure story as a child i had a knack for learning things quickly and i was very passionate about reading and studying learning basically anything was exhilarating for me and i absolutely loved school in fifth grade i had an excellent teacher i got on with him well and he seemed rather proud of me he worked to get me in an advanced learning program last day of school he told me how he looked forward to seeing how far i would go and went as far as saying he wouldn't be surprised at all to see me as valedictorian someday not long after that my mother and stepfather both started heavily drinking they both were exceptionally cruel to me in their own ways and i quickly learned that nothing i did would matter to them and that they would always see me as a failure my self-esteem tanked depression settled in the sexual abuse i suffered both before and after that time really started affecting me in strange ways i quit caring my grades tanked and i was certain i would kill myself before i turned 18. so why bother i went from an honours student to barely trying in a matter of a year or two my sibling is seven years younger than me and they had the same teacher mentioned before for sixth grade homeroom i was heavily baked 24 stroke 7 at this point in my life as a means to cope with my various problems including then undiagnosed bipolar and i happen to run into that teacher at my siblings band concert he's a smart enough man to know a stoner when he sees one and i will never forget the look on his face when our eyes met he looked so disappointed in me almost crestfallen i don't even know how to describe it but i just knew that he knew i was basically white trash at this stage in my life he looked so sad he is such a kind man and i knew he genuinely believed in me and expected me to go far sometimes i want to find his email share my story of abuse and mental illness tell him how my situation and lack of mental health care swallowed me whole try to explain to him how his star pupil could be beaten down so far i can't imagine this will reach anyone so late in the thread but i guess i wanted to get this off my chest i'm doing better these days after several years of therapy and mixing and matching drugs with my doctors but i still wish i could have achieved even half of what this man saw in my future thankfully my health is improving by the year and i am in a loving stable marriage but i haven't held a job in years and only barely graduated high school in a state with the second to last worst education in the nation i do hope i can manage to go back to school and make something of the shambles my life became and it's looking more likely as i stabilize but that look it'll really stick with me maybe someday i'll have a science degree and can find him and show him how i turned my life around maybe if he was a good teacher he understand circumstances he knows something was happening in your life and that's what he was heartbroken about not you you'll steal everything he ever saw in you not a teacher but i think i'd be one of those success stories growing up my teachers all told my parents i'd never succeed or accomplish anything my music teacher told my parents to take my instrument back to the store before paying too much for it since i'd never be any good we couldn't afford private lessons in high school the vice principal told my mom i wouldn't even manage to graduate and was destined to drop out and end up in prison i did graduate on time and now i'm a prosecutor i have no criminal record except one minor speeding ticket have lived on two different continents speak several languages and i'm a soloist in a local orchestra to those rare teachers who believed in me thank you to this day i have constant feelings of inadequacy and i'm convinced i'm going to fail everything any second but thanks to a few people urging me on i dare to try to those teachers and everyone else who said i'd never succeed frick you you tried to destroy me and nearly succeeded thanks to you i spent years afraid to even talk let alone try to do things i wanted to do i'm happy i finally stopped letting my fears control me wish i could claim it but a retired colleague of mine taught some guy who only seems to come out and sing at christmas but all his albums go platinum as an adult died in a police shootout following a manhunt for murder i looked up his very distinctive name on a woman there were a few articles about him as a middle schooler he was rude ran a gang of bigger boys and was a great athlete his mom single and never came to parent teacher meetings was about my age and i was an undergrad you do the math wasn't allowed on sports teams because of his grades so i suppose could never channel that energy or get a strong authority figure the school was is in gang territory students dumbed themselves down to fit in made me think about how sometimes the odds are just so stacked against you through no fault of your own i used to work for a company that took kids on wilderness trips for three four weeks to teach them life skills as an alternative to juvenile detention overall positive experience and i really think the organization turned some kids lives around however one course i instructed was the worst terribly behaved kids terrible instructor team terrible weather events at the end i kind of feared that the kids left worse off than they arrived four months later i was in the same area finishing another course that was 100 more successful i was meeting with the local probation officer when one of the kids from the terrible course stopped in to see her unannounced he needed her to sign papers because that was the day he was getting off probation i cried on the way home knowing that he made that happen on his own because he's a good kid and that the course i instructed didn't freak him up but i know that not all the students had his success i knew this girl good grades and both parents were doctors who during her senior year was purchasing drugs from two friends and they asked her to drive them to beat a kid with a crowbar because he stole some weed from them she did and they got caught in the two girls who were in the car during the beating got eight years might be not fit in here but when my dad was young he was told by one of his teachers that he wasn't smart enough to do anything but drive a dump truck he now has a phd in chemical engineering and does research for and with companies all over the world i'm very proud of my dad i think it was my great great grandfather on my father's side he was the headmaster in a school and now poland back then germany he kicked as one student out of his school for document forgery i think report cards anyway forward a couple of decades and that student oscar schindler saves 1.200 jews from the nazis unfortunately it doesn't surprise me anymore but there are lots of stories about absolutely brilliant people with bad family situations who can't afford to go to college or other career program and have to work some entry-level job to support themselves without any help i am pretty sure uncooperative parents under fafsa has to do with some of the kids i mean it's sad for them but it's also sad for the world because we as a society are losing out on the amazing doctors and filmmakers and teachers or whatever they would have been my what would you do if you won the lottery dream is one fund my own kids college too pay off the house three create a scholarship program and track down some of my former students anyway not that i want to imply they are failures because they aren't able to yet reach their goals but it's surprising that we as a society educate these kids for 13 years and then when some of the best and brightest we have too often need to borrow a bootstrap to bring them to their full potential they find almost nothing to help them and we are fine with geniuses escaping abuse and sweeping the floor at the grocery store because reasons i guess let me tell you from experience the fafsa will completely and utterly freak over your college prospects if you don't have a good family situation not sure what a k-12 teacher is but here goes i used to teach a girl aged 13 who came from a very wild family drugs vandalism absenteeism among others not many staff predicted a great future for her as her schoolwork was being held back due to family matters skip forward about 25 years and i bump into this girl with her mother we gave each other a hug and she introduced me to her mother as the only teacher i could talk to at school she then told me she had a daughter who was at university about a graduate in law aiming to be a barrister wow what a cosmic change from her background that ranks very high in my list of fantastic changes teacher any time before university level i have a kiddo right now who surprises me every day he doesn't drop out of school keep on trucking i'm pulling for you not a teacher but a classmate of mine running back on our football team i was a marching band geek and we were in the same class so i saw basically every game of his first team varsity his freshman year lightning fast great vision elusiveness and a ton of raw power first team all county all-state by our senior year he had stacks of scholarship offers from d1 schools traditional blue bloods and newer powers two notre dame florida ohio state alabama lsu georgia usc name a school they probably offered him we were all convinced he was going to get a full ride to a big school and get drafted in the nfl before his senior year last i heard he just smokes a lot of weed and work some menial job now such an enormous waste of talent not a teacher but a guy my dad went to school with this guy was a stellar student he had a hyper ambitious and ruthless streak even from the youngest age he had a gift for ingratiating himself with authority figures also being from a very rich family people were speculating about him as being a future president of vietnam this was in saigon south vietnam before 1975. fast forward many years later he is a refugee in australia rising through the ranks of the australian labor party equivalent to the democrats in the u.s and the power brokers have huge ambitions for him they had plans in making him a member of the upper house in nsw parliament state level senator and eventually making him federal senator national level senator but he decided to have his political opponent assassinated today he sits in a prison called supermax and his mark never to be released on his files this is basically the opposite what you asked but i was the student bound to fail after a brain injury my doctors all five neurosurgeons strongly believed i'd never make it through college well i needed a lot of tutoring stretched a two-year degree into five and barely scraped by with a 2.5 but i freaking did it i did it i lost almost everything i was good at in that injury i lost most of my vision got seizures became extremely socially [ __ ] and unable to read body language still struggle used to be a swimmer and gymnast aspiring to go to the olympics but now can't stand on one leg without falling my intelligence became stunted i became very depressed and self-absorbed i later learned this is common with brain injuries to have narcissistic traits but not full-blown i was freaked i still can't work i'm honest to god a failure in almost every aspect of life except one i'm a dang good artist and a quick learner with making things i'm a freaking idiot but i know my limits i know when i can't advance so i focused on the one thing i know i can do well and that's art i was good at art before but it wasn't what i specialized in now with everything being taken in that accident and taking a year to relearn basic sentence structure another seven to be able to hold a normality conversation and a ton of gaming to get some basic hand-eye coordination down i'm good at gaming and i'm good at drawing i suck at a lot of things but i'm hoping to teach art to inmates in prison so they get a second chance like i did someone to believe in them i'm far from the best artist out there but i'm not terrible i'm proud of it and it's what made me be accepted full ride into college i have no aspirations to change the world led a big inspirational movement about breaking limitations because i was restricted i pushed but i didn't beat my head against a wall on things i was physically unable to do i'm happy being a nobody i just want to help others get that same self-satisfaction purpose teachers who quit when was the moment you realized that it wasn't for you know me but my wife she was an engineer at a good company on the east coast left because she wanted more rewarding work soon after she is doing clinicals at a school on the rough side of our hometown she was the kind of student teacher who showed up early ate lunch with the kids stayed late and followed up with parents anyway some months and she has repeatedly had trouble with some students they came from troubled homes and brought a lot with them into the class each day she tried working with them one-on-one working with the administration and the parents more than one set of parents said stop calling and the administration told her to send them to the principal's office where they could sit all day and focus on the good kids eventually the futility set in she was the only one who cared not the kids administration other teachers or even their parents she finally wore herself out after a couple years with no support at work and no one appreciating her efforts except me of course she's back in aerospace now and the administration told her to send them to the principal's office where they could sit all day and focus on the good kids that's actually better than most schools at my gf school admins response was too bad deal with it until it rose to the point of having to call police touching student sequels fired so the only recourse in fights was to call the police even on kindergartners i worked in a high needs behavior class i got hit punched scratched and spat on daily but every day i went back and did my best for those kids i was so battered and bruised that my husband wouldn't shop with me anymore because people would stare and sometimes even comments to him about his mistreating me it was sickening but i loved my job and every one of those kids one day was called to the office to talk it was christmas time and things weren't great at home and as anyone with kids knows the holidays makes children especially high strung so things were also wild in the classroom my boss said you seem awfully stressed and i thought how nice of her to notice so i agreed that yes i was struggling she said you have six weeks to sort it out or i'll have to let you go i was crushed it literally broke me six weeks to get less stressed how does that even work i found myself just showing up to show up and i realized that wasn't fair for me or for the kids six weeks later i get to call back to the office i am congratulated on the amazing turnaround and sent back to class i was baffled i was more upset and stressed than ever and they congratulate me more and more i showed up to work just for the paycheck one day i just decided screw it i wasn't a teacher anymore i was a robot fearful of showing any negativity i quit that week never went back to teaching my boss said you seem awfully stressed and i thought how nice of her to notice so i agreed that yes i was struggling she said you have six weeks to sort it out or i'll have to let you go what the frick taught at a juvenile delinquent school when the accusations of children required no proof or consistency and to be exonerated took divine intervention when a kid with a violent history a mile wrong swings a stapler at you gushing your forward because he was dead then as you restrain him until hope arrives you hurt his wrist then your school believes his story that i dropped the n bonded him which caused the outburst even though two other staff members saw the entire thing and the school called the police and tried to have me charged for assault then your school believes his story that i dropped the n-bomb to him i'm guessing the school admins don't really believe crap they just fear parental lawsuits i had a student maybe 11 or 12 sitting with me and having pizza i asked how her life was going and she says well my dad's a drug dealer so he's always got people coming over to sell or buy drugs or play cards so i can't sleep my mom's dying because she has a hole in her heart and they can't fix it and i have a boyfriend but i'm afraid to tell my mom because she'll tell my dad and he'll beat me just normal like this was everyday stuff so as a mandatory reporter i go to my dean of students and tell him all this and he just gets irritated and goes yeah but that doesn't excuse her behavior that's when i knew i was done when i realized that i was being more micro managed every year i expected a lot of oversight when i was a new teacher i actually had more people watching my every move and every word after a master's degree and 15 years experience i never had a single complaint parents and students loved me even requested me administrators needing to justify their jobs were constantly in my classroom or calling pointless meetings to discuss pointless things i spent less and less time teaching and more and more time filing out meaningless forms responding to emails and sitting through meetings two 16-year-old kids were facing each other i had the classroom seats in a u-shape and were silently challenging each other to fight while i was in the middle of a lesson they suddenly jumped up from their chairs and came at each other with eight-inch knives with me in between them i was pretty built having been a stonemason's apprentice in college to help pay my way through but these kids were both bigger than me without thinking i grabbed each by their collars and shouted sit down i didn't start shaking until that evening i was done a week later i had a six-year-old paul and i for me while screaming i will kill you this was the culmination of a lot of various incidents with the same kid what was most infuriating was the parents claiming they had the sweetest little boy in that we the school must be liars for saying otherwise eventually he was transferred to a special school after we filed a report on the various incidents i felt really bad for the kid because when he wasn't freaking out over something he would be the sweetest guy asking a ton of questions and participating in the activities but he was highly prone to snapping into hysteria the incident with a knife happened in this after-school setting where the kids go to play and have fun apparently another kid had done something he disliked so he was kicking and spitting on him when i pulled him away he ran straight to the drawer and found a little kitchen knife due to his size it was pretty easy to wrestle out of his hands though so no harm done i guess dealing with crappy parents was what made me change my career this exhausts me as a teacher no you don't know better just because you pushed a human out from between your legs teenagers can do that parents should trust trained professionals like doctors and teachers when did this shift occur because when i was a kid if my teacher told my mom i did something wrong there wasn't a question and i got punished anyway i stopped when my annual review with the new program dean focused on the 10 of student reviews that were negative rather than the 90 that were positive there are too many aggravations working against teachers at the least the administration has to have your back frick student reviews asking people who have no understanding of pedagogy to great teachers frick that crap where i realized that i couldn't even escape teaching in my dreams my life was so focused on teaching that every night i had nightmares about it followed by the pain i feel in my chest from heart palpitations my heart would constantly raise and then stop all together finally when on the last day of thanksgiving break i realized i had cried every single day because i didn't want to go back to school i was so low that i had planned my own suicide to get out of teaching but i figured life had to improve if i just quit teaching even if i'd be another unemployed millennial statistic i lasted 15 months the only thing that makes me feel a little better about the situation is that the retired cop who replaced me only lasted three he had been an officer in the same city i was teaching when the corporate job offered me three times the salary and a 12 annual bonus now my kids can afford to go to the college where dad used to teach there wasn't one defining moment that made me decide to quit but after the decision was made there was a moment that solidified it there was this kid to say he wasn't bright as an understatement he probably should have been diagnosed at some point as special education but never was he was also in butthole i taught eighth grade math and he literally couldn't even multiply so i would give him the same tests i gave my special education students he'd usually fail anyway but not as bad anyhow he never figured out he was given a different test when i made the different versions they were essentially the same questions just with much easier numbers to work with well one day i was grading his test and he missed every single question weird thing was he had all the correct answers to the normal test however he showed no work so there was literally no way with the numbers he had he could get the answers he got so i called his mom and i had to stay like an hour later than normal to meet with her i presented her the evidence which most people would find pretty convincing she just turned to him and said did you cheat he of course denies it then she looks at me and says you say he cheated he says he didn't i don't know who to believe i got up and left right then parents are the reason most teachers leave the profession they tend to make the teacher the enemy quite often plus they don't want to acknowledge that their child can be a little crap first i'll tell you the moments when i nearly quit when a kid with serious mental health issues stabbed another kid with a pencil and i was told to just keep a better eye on him when a parent complained about me but i wasn't told the nature of the complaint just reprimand it generally when 16 year old boys hit on me and i actually considered going out to drinking with them because i had no social life but the moment looking back was when i was hospitalized with exhaustion and my amazing boyfriend who had been coming over marking tests and proofing papers every evening for months lay down on the cold hard hospital floor and slept beside me in case i was upset overnight i realized that i wanted a life with him not a dull existence where i poured all of myself into my job and had nothing left for us i loved teaching but it wanted all of me dawn till midnight seven days a week prepping mocking planning i quit i got a better job i married that amazing guy and we have an amazing daughter on weekends we go to the park and play what an important moment for you when i tried to have a conversation about literature with the head of my department and got a blank stare in return i taught english doing my phd now and i'm surrounded by faculty and students who are significantly more engaged that reminds me of the time one of my friends from high school had an intense discussion with her teacher for giving the entire class zeros on a quiz because there wasn't enough time to take it he was also the math department head so many things figured i got paid nine per hour to handle special needs and the future of our country and other teachers didn't have it that much better watched an entire class plagiarize an easy essay because they couldn't fathom how to write something original turned in a girl for skipping class only to have to write a police report on why i didn't call her a stupid bee and hit her she never got punished for that observed a kid who i knew had to be a psychopath convince a freshman to steal a phone freshman got caught in 10 days in juvie psychopath walked free you're gonna have to pay teachers a lot more to deal with that crap getting just above minimum wage for teaching is bad enough having to handle special needs on top of that is unfathomable my decision to quit was a two-step process first i taught high school english in rural illinois when i wasn't debating students after class because they didn't like the b plus i gave them i was frequently given implicit instructions by the administration to pass my failing students then i moved to washington dc and taught in the dc public school system and realized that i was merely a babysitter barely any of my students could read but the goal of my school was containment priority was keeping the student in the classroom and not in the hallways i was told i couldn't assign homework because the students wouldn't do it anyway i couldn't give my students any textbooks because the students just dumped them in the trash after school if kids are seen with books in their neighborhoods they were often ridiculed and sometimes beaten by their peers parent teacher conferences often meant meeting with grandma whose parenting style was jesus will take care of it when i was in college i had dreams of teaching julius caesar to young people teaching turned out to be quite different i have huge respect for the teachers who can do it i could not it's like somebody read 1984 as an instruction manual first year and a half after i got licensed i was a substitute worked about 95 of the days available but it was pretty depressing to see that i made about 14 000 a year put out my resume and finally got an interview and offer in a small rural school district it started off well enough but a small clique of parents decided i wasn't sufficiently deferential to them or their kids and decided to make my life heck complaints to the principal and school board pretty much every day too much homework not enough homework quizzes too often tests too hard too many projects too many notes too many handouts not enough lecturing not enough book work i was mean to so and so etc the principal was in his first year after just one year as the assistant principal dude was in no way ready to handle the job and kept giving me contradictory instructions what finally did it for me was being told that i couldn't lecture had to write all the students notes up for them had to give the students the answers to the test before testing them and to stop being so hard by making them discuss the quotes i put up on the board every day the cherry on top was when he told me that no one could go scuba diving with sharks like i told students i had when asked what i'd done on a vacation as a giant frick you after i handed in my resignation i played the video of me on my second shark dive when i was getting my shark diver specialty certification and discussed some of the dies i'd done over the years the next year i went back to subbing until i was offered a full-time position working for the boy scouts of america as a district executive it never looked back now i'm a senior linux systems admin under contract to the dodd and making 2.5 times what i made as a teacher and five times what i made as a sub couldn't be happier nepotism is a major problem in smaller school districts yes men family members and friends will get hired as the school system is one of the better paying jobs in the county all of this is done in return for loyalty and not questioning if decisions are best for the kids one of the bigger nails in the coffin was when i was pepper sprayed by the school resource officer after myself and another teacher had broken up a fight and was sending students back to class he sprayed to disperse the crowd spraying myself and our female assistant principal in the face and causing three students to have asthma attacks at for as little as i was being paid i could find a safer place to work where people were less incompetent currently teaching just the sheer amount of lesson planning during the evenings and weekends definitely encroaches on your free time man i wish i had just stayed at the corporate gig not a teacher but my buddy was a teacher in the south he was teaching at a catholic school in a small but not tiny town his students were primarily poor with parents not terribly involved in their lives there were a lot of behavioral issues constant fights yelling disruptions etc the academics were predictably weak because the students largely didn't care about school at all kids were found with weapons of some kind knives shanks with some frequency but it wasn't a daily occurrence the final straw came when a particularly problematic student was causing a huge disruption in his classroom by screaming and flipping over desks which alone wasn't that big of an incident he escorted the students down to the principal's office as he had many times before except this time the student insulted my buddy the whole time he explained the situation to the administrators and returned to his class a few minutes later an announcement came over the pa system inside the school and the principal mocked and insulted my buddy for what he did the principal made a snarky comment about not being able to control your class the troublemaker then returned to class without facing any kind of discipline and tried to provoke a fight with my buddy my buddy noped right out of his classroom walked out the door and joined the military i have a real passion to teach social studies i graduated from one of the best teaching schools in my state with a 4.0 and great letters of recommendation from my student teaching supervisor my co-operating teacher and the head of the history department what no one told me was that since social studies aren't on standardized tests those jobs are seen as nice cushy jobs for people who don't really want to teach and instead want to coach i'm a small non-athletic woman who has never played sports every school i applied at ended up hiring a coach not a teacher now while those students have wonderful coaches they go on hating history and social studies because they have crap teachers who drone on and on and then give tests i substitute taught for about two years and really loved my school the students faculty and staff subbing was awesome there i had great relationships with the kids they loved to have me as a sub in any subject but it didn't pay the bills and with student loans i had to quit i basically gave up on ever working in that school that i loved or any school really now i work in private education i meet with students after school and help them catch up on things they're behind on it's solid pay and great benefits but i really miss being in a classroom edit most every school thankfully tends to have at least one really awesome social studies teacher i'm really happy so many of you had a positive experience i myself had one teacher like that in 12 years she inspired my course of study dang i'm in college now undergrad and i want to teach social studies it's what i'm passionate about but i was already on the fence since it seems like the greatest need for teachers is in primary education and math science i don't have loans which is a blessing but this whole thread has really been bad for my aspirations when i tested the reading level of a 19 year old girl and it registered at first grade since she was on frl and english language services she would ding the school in two at-risk categories for our graduation rate i told the administration this girl is illiterate in english we know this as a fact she cannot graduate no ifs ands or buts smash cut to three weeks later as she's walking across the stage in a cap and gown to receive a diploma she can't read sad at that point i knew my job wasn't serving at risk youth it was playing a numbers game to build taxpayer money to prop up a failing system no thanks late to the party but i was a teacher that taught a class that would be tested on the state level and the result of the test as well as some others would dictate our funding the principal gave me the exam in advance and asked that i quiz the students directly on the questions in the packet i was no longer teaching for knowledge but for memorization and it really deflated me i walked away that winter my administrator and instructional coach providing me with absolutely no curriculum or guidance nor observational feedback and then having the goal to tell me that i had a mediocre first year that i didn't try hard enough nor did i show ownership of my classroom and that my 110 students are unprepared for the next grade level i worked no less than 13 hours a day teaching grading and preparing they had been in my classroom perhaps twice that year and had never assessed any of my student data they wanted what was best for me but never provided it i realized then that i wasn't cut out for politicking nor was i cut out to accept the failures of another person as my own also it's mandatory that we assign no students a grade lower than 60 so in a meeting with other english teachers an admin said sixth grade will no longer be reading novels it's not statistically proven to improve test scores if reading doesn't improve testing your testing is wrong they love to find one study dismiss the quality of it and then paint everything with that brush so a while back i was a permanent sub for a german teacher in the area i lived she went on maternity leave and in this german class i'd also talk about geography and whatnot so anyway near the end of the school year i was talking about how berlin wait wait wait berlin's in germany i thought it was in europe it was at that moment that i realized i failed as a teacher comer it was at that moment that i realized i failed as a teacher that's not being fair to yourself i lived in switzerland for a year before i realized that zurich was not the capital of switzerland and i learned that canberra is the capital of australia on the flight over there some people are just bad at geography doesn't mean you failed as a teacher i toured high school for 14 years and i really enjoyed teaching the students i got good at it and i figured out how to have a productive enjoyable classroom most of the time i quit because it became a routine the same things every year the fun of learning the students didn't continue to come to balance the committees the backstabbing fellow teachers the hours of evening work and the unappreciative administration administrators talk to your teachers often and give them constructive feedback we need to feel like our efforts are noticed and appreciated i've always had this fantasy that i'd teach college after i retired or got sick of corporate life i've done a lot of public speaking and am comfortable speaking in front of large crowd so when a dean of a local university invited me to teach a class i was like cool did all class prep and whatnot and enjoyed the class but i hated having the next class hanging over my head i'm more of a bursty project person go all out accomplished goals clear your desk take a break rinse and repeat but this teaching gig felt like a grind and as i was adjunct death wasn't worth the time and energy for the crap pay so after the semester i quit the university invited me back to speak and asked what my speaking fee was my single night of speaking paid the same as being an adjunct for one semester i had an eight-year-old pulled a gun on another kid it was a co2 powered pallet gun but i challenge anyone to tell the difference without holding it i got between them and took the gun the kid's mom threatened to sue me for putting my hands on her kid i didn't hurt him in any way but he and his mom played it up she also said that since it was only a pallet gun i had no right to touch her previous baby but the kicker is that my principal backed up the mom i pulled out my phone and called the police to file a report since she threatened to lawyer up she predictably tried to backpedal but i called anyway wrote my letter of resignation the next day effective at the end of the summer so i'd still get paid and the class watched movies for the last two weeks of school would love to know the outcome of that police report thread posted at six in the morning is op a teacher who is dreading teaching this early in the morning and wants to know if it's time to quit after reading this thread probably my aunt used to teach planned a whole year's worth of lessons over the summer and then two weeks before term started said she was actually teaching completely different classes she told them to do one and quit my high school had a lot of rotation of new teachers every year they would fire the good teachers after a few years or they'd make them quit but keep the crappy ones because they were coaches more specifically they would keep our crappy religion teacher because he won a lot of state champions for our soccer teams when a student bigger than me got in my face and called me a c because i asked her to write down her answers instead of just think them when i was observed 17 times in a school year this was protocol for the teachers during their first three years when my students were tested 25 academic days during the year 10th grade was the year the state and county tested a lot when my title 1 students went from worst writing score in the county to the best and my principal was honored for the achievement if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

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Keywords: teachers, school, school stories, teacher stories, students, high school, college, learning, education, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, r/, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub, reddit stories 2021

Id: lQgo7MrxiLw

Length: 172min 52sec (10372 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021