Suspended for somebody else stealing 40 dollars from a teacher and then using 20 of it to buy snacks from me. :)
Making a fireball with the schools powdered coffee creamer.
Telling other kids to stop talking because, if they didn’t, they’d get in trouble.
Putting my arm around my girlfriend’s shoulder while we were sitting at an assembly. I wasn’t doing anything inappropriate, we were just sitting there. But the principal took me aside at one point and told me to stop.
When I was in second grade, my teacher saw me bend a paperclip once. For the rest of the year she would scream my name every time she found a bent paperclip and insist I must have bent it. One time she took away a snack I had because there was a twist tie on the bag and she insisted it was one of her paperclips I stole and bent.
Another time she got mad at me and insisted I was chewing gum when I was actually just eating graphite from my mechanical pencil. I don’t think I can really blame her for that one though
The mental image of a kid explaining they were just eating graphite with stained teeth made me giggle, thank you
Smoking. Dumbest fuckin thing…
I didn’t know schools ever allowed that.
We had a smoking area at my highschool. Granted, we are kind of hicks down here.
For calling myself gay. My teacher just assumed I was using it as an insult and referring to myself as being terrible. It took a visit to the principals office with the teacher and going “No. Seriously. I am an out of the closet homosexual. Ask anyone in that class.” They ended up apologizing but I was just kinda pleased they were taking it that seriously in the first place.
I got in trouble for not singing during rehearsal for our 2nd grade Christmas concert. I remember this because I was definitely singing and it’s the first time I can remember getting in trouble for something I didn’t do and having no power to do anything about it. I actually love singing so much that I ended up singing in any group I could join in highschool and college. Really though, that teacher just didn’t like me very much 🫤
Getting a 99% grade, proof I don’t care about education and don’t pay attention to anything other than stupid video games. How hard is it to Just Follow Directions? I am so glad I’m not a child anymore.
One day at 5th grade recess I was just walking by myself when some kid jumps on my back and starts choking me. I reflexively bent forward causing him to fall. I was suspended for a week. He got nothing
I got jumped and I yelled back “effing assholes” just like that. We all got the same punishment, them for beating me up and me for “profanity”.
Fuck that school lol
Not doing the Hokey Pokey correctly. Yes, corporal punishment was still a thing. Yes, it mentally scarred me.
Using an unabridged dictionary instead of my 4th-grade textbook’s glossary.
Every new unit in social studies had a vocabulary box with about a dozen “new” words. The teacher’s first assignment in each unit was to write out each word, then the complete definition of that word from the glossary. Each assignment was worth 10 points. Anyone who “failed” the assignment (less than 7 out of 10 points) was given a lunch detention: no recess.
Some units had only a handful of words; the assignment would end up being 2 or 3 pages. Some units had a lot more. They would end up being 5 or 6 pages.
She took off points for each misspelled word, missed punctuation, bad handwriting. The assignment had to be completed in ink, and she prohibited corrections of any sort. No erasable ink: If you made any error anywhere on the page, she expected you to rewrite the entire page. If the ink stopped flowing in your pen, and it produced an interrupted line, that was a point off.
It had to be turned in on standard ruled paper. Using college rule was an instant failure.
Once, I found a nice pen. It was a 1mm ballpoint. It produced nice, thick, clean, dark lines. It wrote smoothly. It was the first pen I found that I actually liked writing with.
Points knocked off immediately: she called it a “marker”, and the assignment was supposed to be completed with a “pen”.
One night, I had forgotten my social studies textbook at school. I decided against even attempting the assignment, and resigned myself to another lunch detention. Dad had other ideas. He insisted that I was exaggerating; the the teacher would be reasonable and accommodating. He said that she would appreciate the effort, and might even give me extra credit for going above and beyond.
He called around, and got the vocabulary list for me. He sat me down with the list and his big, unabridged dictionary, and told me to start writing. I remember that I filled two whole pages with the definition of a single word, and that I turned in 15 pages.
When she was grading my assignment, she called me up, and asked me what I had done. I explained that I had used a dictionary. She pulled out a big red marker, wrote a giant “F” across the first page, and gave me two lunch detentions for my obstinance.
She fucked me up for a few years. I learned that if I couldn’t achieve perfection, it was better to learn to accept the consequences of failure than to waste my time trying.
There’s a unique trauma that comes from watching your parents be wrong like this. If your teacher were a normal person, your dad could have been correct. A normal teacher may have said, “this wasn’t the assignment, but good effort, good proactive problem solving, good teamwork with your dad”. Instead, your dad, who you trusted, who you looked up to as brilliant and infallible (I’m generalizing here, abt kids and parents, maybe not your relationship specifically), convinced you to think outside the box and then you were punished for it.
My mom had a typewriter and then we were one of the first families to have a computer and a printer among my classmates, and my mom always made me type my homework because she thought it would impress the teacher. I got in trouble because I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. The teacher never told my mom tho, so i was made to type at home every night. And then I’d just re-write it on the bus in the morning. And it would look bad because the bus was moving haha! And now I have TERRIBLE handwriting!
That souds so horrid I would claim it was unrealistic if this was the first time I heard of a teacher behaving unfairly.
Unfairly? You’re being too nice.
That teacher is a bitch and should be no where near children.
This is correct. This person was not a teacher and makes everything worse for all of us who actually want to encourage and educate young people. I rarely feel anger, but this kind of thing absolutely enrages me. Why would you do this to a child??
As a dad I am feeling anger towards the dad as well, though. If you don’t believe your child (happens) and be proven wrong you have to at least try to make things right. I would definitely be at school the next day and have a chat with the teacher. Which very likely would lead to nothing but give me a cause to go to the administration the very next day and unleash hell there.
I got suspended for getting punched after a kid kicked my lunch down a hall and called me a retard.
I got suspended for a week for getting my ass pulverized by an older, bigger kid. With no warning, he punched me in the back of the head, then twice in the nose when I turned around to see what happened.
The principal apologized and claimed the school had a zero tolerance fight policy, so anyone involved in a fight ended up with mandatory suspension. Total bullshit.
That’s when you slap the principal and tell him you’re suspended now too.
To be fair my parents were poor, I did have a paper sack instead of a proper lunch box, and I was in special education so I had it coming.
I hate the way soany schools interpret their zero tolerance policies. It just serves to reinforce the fact that those policies exist to limit their liability, not protect the vulnerable.
Changing the CRT resolution from 1024x768 to something actually useful. They made us walk back to the computer lab to switch it back.
Actually useful?
Dude, I feel this. We had these nice NEC AccuSync CRTs that could so 1280x1024 @ 85Hz or 1024x768 @ 100Hz. Guess what they were all set to? 800x600 @ 60Hz. Not only could you not see a damn thing, but the flicker from the slow refresh rate would give you a headache. Teacher said it was normal and the flicker was in my head.
We weren’t allowed to use USB flash drives because they we’re an up and coming technology that they figured would give them viruses, but we were encouraged to have our own floppy disks to save our work on. Not only does this not make any sense, but now your homework could just corrupt on a whim. Anyway, I had a special floppy disk that I loaded with utilities that could bypass the lockouts and allow me to change the resolution to something sensible.
They also had an HP Laserjet with an IR port and in my last year I was one of the first students to have my own laptop (very lucky). I would take notes in class on it and then print them in the computer lab. One day a teacher caught me and I was lectured because it was against policy to plug personal things into their network. I explained that there was no networking involved, it was a local device to device print job, but she wouldn’t have it. Viruses you know. The next day they had covered the IR port of the printer with whiteout to protect it.
So my options were buy and carry a USB floppy drive, write to floppy, log into a school computer, print from there or… put a tiny little scratch in the whiteout. Which do you think I did?
All in all it was fine. The good old days of early computers where everyone was just figuring things out. Tech was a lot more interesting then and I don’t fault the teachers for not knowing and trying to protect their systems. It was just annoying when you knew more but still had to follow their nonsensical rules.
