Website / Not Always Learning

Not Always Learning is a sister site of Not Always Right, added to the network in 2013. The site contains stories that take place in and around schools, featuring teachers good and bad, bullies getting owned, misadventures in test-taking, and lots more. As usual, it's best to take these stories with a grain of salt.

Note: Due to a restructuring of the entire NAR site network, the hyperlinks below may or may not work anymore.

Not Always Learning contains examples of:

Tropes A-I

• Abuse Mistake:
  • When a gym teacher finds out a student is fasting for Ramadan, he promptly excuses the student from running laps. Then the teacher happens to mention this to some other teachers, one of whom calls in the school's Child Protective Services contact, believing that the student has an eating disorder and that the student's parents either don't care about his eating disorder or are the cause of it, because he thinks Islam isn't a real religion and Ramadan is "just a made up thing that people use to not feed their family." Luckily, every other adult in the room immediately realizes the mistake.
  • When a teacher arrives at school with a black eye and bruised face, she tells her class that she fell on the stairs at home. One of the toughest guys in the class responds, "Are you sure that's what happened? Or do you have a boyfriend the guys and I need to talk to?"^note It was just a fall.
  • This substitute teacher believes and outright states that the submitter is an abuse survivor solely on the logic that he writes with his left hand.
  • This woman sees what she thinks is a homeless man being harassed by the submitter and another man filming them. She rushes in, threatening to "smack the stupid right outta [the submitter]" if they don't leave him alone and repeatedly interrupts the submitter and the cameraman before they can finally explain that the "homeless man" is actually an actor and they are filming a drama for a college film project.
• Abusive Parents: While it's not the focal point of this story, the submitter mentions that the reason she was delayed in coming to the school to handle an incident was because she was busy giving a seven-year-old stitches after he was beaten by his mother with a metal ladle.
• Accent Depundent:
  • This story works best with a West Texas accent, as the writer notes at the end. invoked
  • This story involves a student from the Thames Valley area misinterpreting her teacher's instructions thanks to her teacher's thick Somerset accent.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • When the two finalists in a class competition both have the first name "Jack", the teacher announces "Let's have a Jack-Off."invoked
  • A teacher puts up a billboard intended to highlight students' efforts at the school and entitles it...."The Mile-High Club". It doesn't take long before the school administration takes her aside and suggests she come up with a different name.
  • After some prankster starts stealing balls from computer mice in the school library, this principal makes an announcement that has the entire school doubling over in laughter.
    “Someone is stealing mouse balls in the library. The theft of the mouse balls is a serious matter, and will NOT be tolerated. If anyone has any information on who’s stealing the mouse balls, please report it right away. And to the rest of the student body, the mouse balls are to be LEFT ALONE…”
• Accidental Public Confession:
  • This example doubles up with Tomato in the Mirror; not only did the class not know that the submitter was adopted, neither did the submitter.
  • Inverted here, where the teacher thinks they are in this trope before the student reveals that they already knew they were adopted.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • This girl catches an errantly thrown piece of wood. She does this right as the wood is about to hit her, in spite of not having any physical training to hone her reflexes or even knowing it was there.
  • This teacher played "spot the differences" with the class on April 1st, telling them not to look at the ceiling. Naturally, there was a change to the ceiling, but rather than guessing it was an April Fool's prank, the student hadn't been paying attention to the instructions not to check the ceiling.
• Acrofatic: This woman.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • This student got in the habit of drawing cartoons depicting his (generally disagreeable) biology teacher in humiliating situations, then throwing said cartoons in the trash after class. Said teacher revealed at the end of the year he'd actually rescued most of those drawings from the trash because he actually enjoyed them.
  • This kindergartener got bored reading Dick and Jane, so he convinced the class that Spot has rabies. According to the quip at the end, the teacher and the principal thought it was pretty amusing.
  • This teacher's assistant once answered the phone using "Captain Redbeard's room", referring to the teacher who, true to the name, had a red beard and was once the captain of the football team. Given the reaction of the teacher's assistant to the caller, it's implied that the caller was the teacher himself (certainly someone she didn't want to hear that), and the laughter on the line—and the fact that the staff called the teacher "Captain Redbeard" for the rest of the year—further implies this trope.
  • This law teacher made and used an exam using the students' names for Dumb Crooks or other silly situations, as a way to vent stress from putting up with them in class. The students loved it.
    Friend #1: I went skydiving and said I was 100 lbs lighter than my actual weight and exploded into a pile of blood when I hit the ground.
    Submitter: That's a lot better than what I got. I thought it would be a great idea to clean out a loaded gun with my tongue.
    Friend #2: I beat both of you. Apparently I'm married to [Other Student] and I murdered her because she wouldn't give me the remote.
    Friend #3: Okay, you obviously don't remember my question. I joined a terrorist organization as a suicide bomber and tried to blow up the lake.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: All the alternate religion-themed drug-use slogans proposed here use it.
• Adults Are Useless:
  • This principal really misses the point of bullying, to the point that two parents watching a demonstration of the brilliant counter-strategy call the principal out on it. He could probably learn a great deal from this teacher.
    • This principal is even worse: he actually threatens to punish the one teacher who is actually trying to help a victim of bullying.
    • This entire school takes the cake; because they have a zero-tolerance policy on fights between the students, anybody who was involved gets the same punishment regardless of whether they were the bully or the victim or whether or not the incident in question met any reasonable person's definition of a fight. Needless to say, this moronic policy does precisely the opposite of stopping fights, since bullying victims would rather defend themselves and be punished for something they actually did than take it and be punished for something that happened to them.
  • Here most of the adults involved are useless.
  • This seven-year-old OP is the Only Sane Man on a school fire drill.
  • A student tattles on the submitter for supposedly using a Dr. Seuss book for a Spanish assignment (which are not allowed for it). The teacher takes one look at the Beginner Books symbol on the book's cover (which has The Cat in the Hat on it) and immediately forces the submitter to choose another book without looking at anything else or listening to the submitter when they point out the blatantly female author name on the book's cover^note the book in question is almost certainly It's Not Easy Being a Bunny by Marilyn Sadler given the description shown in the story.
  • In this story, the submitter reports to the teacher that another student is threatening to punch her in the nuts every time she tries to speak up during a group project. The teacher's response is to ineffectually shout at the bully from across the room, embarrassing the submitter and accomplishing nothing. The submitter stops telling adults after that.
  • This kid gets heatstroke while on a summer program field trip and the teachers do absolutely nothing to help them nor get them medical attention (the kid's six-year-old cousin is more helpful), opting to focus on comforting and distancing the other students when the kid suddenly starts throwing up uncontrollably on the bus. Fortunately, the kid recovers, and then the faculty at the school is somehow utterly shocked when the kid's parents unsurprisingly call to unenroll the kid and their brother from the program afterward.
    • This unfortunately is the first of two parts of a Trauma Conga Line for the kid, who previously submitted another story; in this one, on another trip at the end of the following school year, they and their friend are stranded on a ski lift while the rest of the students eat their lunch because none of the adults think to do a headcount or even look up. The worst part is that their parents were never told about this, only finding out about it when the submitter reminisced twenty years later.
• All Germans Are Nazis: Assumed by this seven-year-old.
• Almighty Janitor: Discussed in this story, when two students come across a man cleaning up a spill. One calls him "just a janitor", while the other points out that since they're next to a disease research lab, said janitor probably had to study more than they had to be even allowed to clean up there. The man turns out to be a PhD student who was just cleaning up some coffee he spilled, but the thought was nice.
• Alpha Bitch: This sorority sister Mugs the Monster, and eventually gets kicked out for her behavior.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: This professor challenges the interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew as misogynistic, in favor of suggesting that Kate is actually into BDSM. invoked
• Analogy Backfire:
  • In this class, the teacher tries to get across the meaning of a tragic World War II poem by comparing it to bombs falling on their school. Unfortunately for the teacher, bombs falling on their school is something the students want.
  • This high school basketball coach tells his team – behind by only a few points – to "turn the tables 360 degrees," which prompts one of the players to point out that if they turned around 360 degrees, they'd be going in the same direction and lose even more.
• Answers to the Name of God:
  • This teacher retorts with a "Smith-Will-Suffice" type line.
  • This professor introduces himself as such.
• Anti-Education Mama: This student's father has this belief, feeling that school didn't do him any good, so it's a waste of time. Sadly, despite the son showing promise, he agrees with his father, who takes his family out on holiday… when the son's supposed to take his GCSEs. When the son's teacher tries to get him to get the son over to take them, the father refuses to listen. In the end, the son fails his GCSEs due to his absence.
  Father: “Oh, so bloody what?! School never did nothing for me, and it won’t do nothing for him, either! The whole thing is just a f*** waste of time! I left school with nothing, and I turned out all right! He’s not coming back from holiday, and that’s final!”
• Apathetic Teacher:
  • This teacher finds that the equipment and curriculum in his IT class is functionally useless and woefully outdated. After a few feeble attempts, he gives up on teaching the class entirely, and tells his students to “do whatever you want; I still get paid.” Three months into the school year, he's started drinking in class, which leaves him so inebriated he doesn't notice when bored students start throwing chairs around. The incident has him fired in seconds and dragged out by police as he was too drunk to stand. The IT class would subsequently be revamped with new staff and equipment.
  • This teacher's aide accidentally marks part of the submitter's project incorrectly until they realize they miscounted the number of planets in The Solar System and backtrack.
    That was the point where I stopped expecting my work (other than essays) to be read.
  • This professor hates his job so much he sub-lets it, paying another guy to come in and teach his classes for him.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "Are (your parents) racist, too?"
• Artistic License – Biology: "[Boy] has something stuck in his fallopian tubes!"
  • "Wait! Wisdom teeth are actual teeth?!"
• Artistic License – Geography/Global Ignorance:
  • "I am going to tell my professor you guys are giving out maps of Colombia!" Note that the map in question is a map of the District of Columbia — Washington, D.C.
  • This math teacher doesn't seem to realize the impossibility of driving from Japan to China. (Japan is a set of islands.)^note It's technically possible to drive from Japan to China, but it would involve taking a car ferry to either Vladivostok in Russia or Busan in South Korea first in order to get around both the whole water thing and North Korea, with the latter involving a second car ferry from Incheon to get to China. Since you still have to ride boats across water, calling it "driving" from one to the other is something of a stretch.
  • Here's a case, with the entire class calling out the ignorant student. invoked
  • "The continent of Africa just elected their first woman president." Doubles as Comically Missing the Point.
  • Here's one by a teacher who's supposed to be teaching the subject: The capital of California is Los Angeles.
  • This teacher went to Australia, thinking it was actually Austria and being confused when nobody he met there spoke German.
  • This receptionist tries to turn an exchange student from the UK away from an international dorm, reasoning that she can't be an international student because she's white.
  • This student. Her team was supposed to make a presentation about black women in South Africa during the 1960s... but she instead makes a biography about Oprah Winfrey. When her teammates point out that Oprah is African-American and not South African, her response is "You can't say South African! It's racist! It's African-American!" It gets worse once the rest of the class point this out.
  • Here we have an absolute train wreck of poor geography knowledge: "Oh yeah, Paris. Isn't that the country in England, shaped like a shoe?"
  • Not one, but two university/college students do not understand how hemispheres work. Specifically, they confuse the east/west divide with the north/south divide and believe that it's winter in Germany when it's summer in North America.
  • This university secretary insists a student who was born in England but lived in America his whole life needs to take an English-language proficiency test despite the student speaking perfect English. Even worse, she doesn't believe his explanation that England is part of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, one of the countries exempt from the test, because England is not in the name of the country. Thankfully, her supervisor is smarter and makes sure to educate her staff better about the UK so nothing like that will happen again.
  • Three students who have no idea where Egypt is.
  • This American teacher arrogantly claims Mexico is located in South America when it's actually in North America. When one student points out the mistake, he sends the student to the principal for "disrupting the class," only to learn later to his anger and embarrassment that not only did the principal agree that the student was correct and did nothing wrong, but he was going to have a talk with the teacher later.
  • Maybe, like this student, the above teacher mistakenly thought Mexico was part of the US.
    How did I get to seventh grade without knowing that?!
  • A student accuses the submitter of being racist because the latter called a fellow co-worker's race as African rather than "African American", despite both the submitter and co-worker pointing out he's from Ghana, which is in Africa.
  • In this story, a seventh-grade teacher insists the only correct answer to the question "What country is London in?" is "the UK", not "England". Two years later, the class' new geography teacher starts off by asking who had [Seventh-Grade Teacher] (almost half of them did), then informs them, "Right. I'm going to tell you this now. The United Kingdom is not a country. I know what she told you, but she's wrong. Please do not write down the UK as a country on tests."^note  They're both wrong. The United Kingdom is a sovereign country made up of four constituent countries, one of which is England. It's perfectly valid to describe either one as a country.
  • A teacher chastises a fourth-grade student for supposedly choosing "south Africa" rather than a specific country for a school project about the countries of Africa, prompting the student to wordlessly point out the country of South Africa on a map.
  • A friend of the submitter scolds them for saying one of their friend's race is black and the correct term is African-American. The problem is, all three of them are British and the black friend is actually Caribbean British and isn't offended of being called black.
  • "Hmm… well, I'm half German and half Irish, so I don't think I have much European in me." Cue most of the class bursting out in laughter.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Stories named "Every School Needs An Animus", in which students believe the Assassin's Creed series is true to history.
  • World War I: the war where we prevented Saddam Hussein from obtaining WMDs by freeing the slaves. After which Rosa Parks became the President, which caused Hitler to lead the South in secession.
  • One student thought Julius Caesar was a fictional character while another thought Caesar was a woman.
  • This senile history teacher has the events of World War 2's Pacific Theater in reverse, believing that Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in response to the US atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
• Artistic License – Statistics: "So I read this thing on the Internet that said that one in four girls will turn out to be a lesbian. ...That means one of us here has got to be gay!"
• Asian and Nerdy: Here's one guy who seems to think this is the norm.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: This teacher gives a sarcastic response to why she'll be on leave for the next month and a half. At least one student is Sarcasm-Blind, and the rest don't seem to know how to respond.
• Asshole Victim: This horrifying story had an unreliable teacher, whom the school was attempting to memorialize after his death. When it quickly came to light that he had committed suicide after murdering his mother, the student body lost all sympathy for him, and even the school stopped trying to give him a memorial.
• Assimilation Academy: The teacher from this story sends a student to the office for coloring dinosaurs imaginatively rather than what color they "really" were. The student's mom calls the teacher (and principal, who sides with the teacher) on their idiocy before pulling the student out of that school entirely.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!:
  • A rare teacher example.
  • A group of kindergarten students pass by a castle on a class field trip (note this story takes place in Kentucky). While they wonder what a castle is doing there for a second, the topic quickly changes over to wishing that they could be Transformers.
  • This college student uses non-sequiturs and random trivia to distract their irritable classmate from whatever's frustrating them, so they can calm down and work on the assignments.
• Attention Whore: The girl this story calls "Problem Girl" is notorious for going to great lengths to get attention and is unpopular because of it. Judging by the fact students don't seem to blame her apparent learning disability for her actions, not even the other special needs students like her. If students don't shower her with attention, she's prone to do "some pretty crazy things to make sure [they] will", and she attempts a Wounded Gazelle Gambit (that thankfully fails due to her incompetence) on the poor girl that makes the mistake of calling her out.
• Awkward Poetry Reading: In this story, the OP reads a poem to their English class, and it's about a boy eating himself. The OP and the teacher are practically dying of laughter while the students look weirded out.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • This student was planning to shoot his teacher because the teacher stopped him from trying to pick a fight with another student.
  • This EBD school student tries to strangle another student out of boredom.
• Badass Bookworm / Genius Bruiser: This security guard and self-taught electrical engineer.
• Bait-and-Switch: A teacher discovers that the submitter has managed to get past the school's internet firewall and is surfing Reddit, and this exchange happens:
  Teacher: Is that Reddit?!
  Submitter: (panicking) Um, yeah.
  Teacher: How the hell did you get around the firewall? I swear, I've been trying to do that all year.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: This poster's college friend liked watching live football, but the student section of the stadium was stuck in a corner with lousy sight lines so the (overpriced) good seats could be saved for wealthy alumni. The friend was also a hobbyist photographer, and quickly learned that all he had to do was show up with two cameras (one with a zoom lens) and he could watch the whole game from the sidelines, no questions asked.
• Beast in the Building: Despite the actors' best efforts, this school play wound up being gate-crashed by an errant bat.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • "What exactly are you looking to get out of this class?" "Oh, a passing grade." Come end of semester, the smart-mouthed and class-cutting student gets exactly that: a passing grade... two letters below the one they'd actually earned (by doing the assignments).
  • This choir director demanded nothing less than a personally-delivered doctor's note as proof that his star student was sick the week of a concert. The student turned out to have severe influenza, but delivered the note anyway in the middle of their normal class, prompting the director to freak out when he realized the student was not only really sick but contagious.
  • This computer studies teacher advertised that any student who successfully hacked the school's internet filters would get an A for the year. When one did, the school district investigated the hack, found out she'd invited the students to do so, and fired her for the security breach.
  • This drunk roommate asks the submitter to fight him to release tension between them. The submitter doesn't want to fight him… until the roommate attacks his kitten, whereupon the submitter beats him to a pulp with his desk.
• Belief Makes You Stupid:
  • This woman.
  • "You don't need freedom of speech if you let Jesus think for you."
  • This college student thinks an Irish man will come to her in the US because she made a deal with Jesus.
  • A story about the often-heard argument against evolution.
  • Also occasionally inverted, as seen here. One guy is like "You're wearing a cross necklace? You're probably a homophobic racist like the rest of them!"
  • This mad mom thinks that the science teacher is an atheist teaching their kids about Satan... because she doesn't think volcanoes are real. In Washington, the location of five active volcanoes (Mt. Adams, Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier), one of which (Mt. St. Helens) erupted quite famously in 1980.
• Berserk Button: For this Sigmund Freud fangirl professor, Carl Jung is this.
• Big Brother Instinct: "Because that's my little sister, and she has standards."
• Big Stupid Doo Doo Head: "COO-COO CRAZY STUPID FARTY BUM-HEAD!"
• Big "YES!" and Big "NO!": This kid yells both in sequence at a fire alarm that turns out to be a false alarm.
• Bilingual Backfire:
  • Subverted here, when this French teacher expects a backfire but none occurs, because the student in question was the only one in the entire class who actually learned French, instead of cheating by using translators.
  • A kid here tries to insult another student in Spanish, thinking that they didn't understand the language. Too bad for him the student did.
• *Bleep*-dammit!: An unintentional meta example with this story, where the word "wieners" is censored but the word "wank" (in the title) is not.
• Boarding School of Horrors: This school is implied to be one, given how heavily the rules are enforced, as drinking alcohol is an expellable offense. However, they made an exception for the captain of the lacrosse team.
• Bowdlerization: According to the student (and the professor!) in this quote, they actually changed it from "My handwriting is like a drunk epileptic spider that fell in an inkpot and had a seizure on the page" to "My handwriting is like a drunk spider that fell in an inkpot and tried to walk on the page."
• Brand Name Takeover: Even extends into the animal kingdom. According to one student, a certain species of small green lizard is known as a GEICO, not a gecko.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: "...we have the printmaking studio! This is the largest studio space in the building and includes two etching presses, two lithography presses, and... and various medieval torture devices."
• Brick Joke:
  • A student asks their teacher about his habit of bringing a Wiffle bat to class, and the teacher will only say that it "comes in handy every now and then". Three months later, the student learns the answer firsthand.
  • Nickelback.
  • This student asks the teacher if she gets a joke involving a time traveler a couple of minutes before telling the joke.
• Brilliant, but Lazy:
  • This college student, who showed up late to math class, fell asleep, and only woke up to correct a mistake in the teacher's example.
  • "I don't think I've ever seen (Name) actually awake in this class, but they have an A."
• Bullying a Dragon: This one student who lunged after another kid, knowing full well that he studied martial arts. The other kid knocked the wind out of him with one kick.
• Bullying the Disabled: In this story, two of the OP's special needs students were harassed by the cafeteria staff. In the first story, a lunch lady yelled at an autistic girl for only putting cheese on her hot dog due to the school's nonsensical rule that you can only get cheese if you also get chili. In the second story, a different worker mocked an autistic boy with OCD who put back food that an adult gave him because he's self-sufficient, and when the OP pointed this out, she continued to make fun of him.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • This teacher may be nuts, but he uses his eccentricity to make a point.
  • A student who signs his tests "Megapenis" has the highest grades in the class.
• By the Power of Grayskull!: Invoked but subverted by this professor.
• Calling Me a Logarithm: This woman takes offense to her daughter's teacher referring to the human species as homo sapiens.
  Angry parent: Most people in the world identify as hetero sapiens, thank you very much. We don't like being lumped together with f***!
• Camping a Crapper: This student will never forget what the most common place for medieval assassination was.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • The teacher here continually calls the submitter "Ellie," laughing when the submitter tells the teacher that her name is Aileen, believing that the student is merely joking. This continues for the entire semester, culminating in the teacher failing Aileen for having never showed up. The subsequent meeting with Aileen, her counselor, and the teacher revealed she wrongly failed and confused Aileen for another student that actually was named Ellie (who had never attended the class).
  • This substitute refuses to believe the submitter when they explain that they have a condition that makes it impossible for them to run. To his credit, he apologizes profusely after the poor kid collapses.
• Chain of Corrections: A lesson gets sidetracked by one of these.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: A very common theme.
  • This bully tries to cheat the protagonist, but said protagonist feeds her bad info that the cheater accepts without question. "El burro sabe más que tú^note The donkey knows more than you", indeed.
  • This student apparently has a habit of copying the answers from other students. It backfires when said student copies the answers off a classmate who doesn't have the same copy of the test that the cheater does.
  • "During the test, [other student] was asking me for the answers. ...So I gave him the wrong answers."
  • This student is accused of copying off another pair of students by a teacher that doesn't like him/her. Said student then, as part of an agreement with the teacher, deliberately fails the next test to catch the real cheaters. Sadly, the cheaters were never punished because they were the teacher's favorite students.
  • Another student writing down the wrong answers to catch cheaters. In this case, the teacher knows that the student knows better, and is puzzled until the student lets the teacher know why it was done. Next day, both cheaters are ridiculed, then moved to different parts of the classroom where they couldn't cheat off anyone.
  • This student admits to attempting to cheat at a physics exam by writing down formulas on the desk. The teacher catches this and orders everyone to change seats for the exam.
  • Double whammy here. Not only is a student about to get another student in trouble by taking money to write an essay for him, he isn't even competent in grammar. Bonus points for the submitter (who's a teacher) being asked to check the essay-writer's work — which allowed her to report both students.
  • What's the result of three students handing in the exact same essay? This.
  • Another student deliberately puts down wrong answers to trap a cheater — then surreptitiously changes them all to the proper answers afterwards before handing in the test.
  • Here, a student who's better at French gets a Jerk Jock to say he has a Teeny Weenie.
  • Ignorance is when you get the answers wrong on a test. Stupidity is copying the ignorant student's wrong answers on your own.
  • "Practices improved when doctors realized they needed to stop copying my work."
  • "This test is rigged." "No, you just suck at cheating."
  • "You bitch! I'm going to fail!"
  • This cheater copies another student's answers, but fails the test because the student from whom he copied actually wrote wrong answers down before switching them out with the right answers.
    Teacher: Yep, [Classmate] is right! By the way: Santa Claus did not lead the first North Pole expedition, and its territory is not divided between Gondor, Mordor, Valinor, Numenor, and Fartland. At least try reading what you copy!
  • When a student learns his classmates have been copying his work to pass, during the final exam, he submits an exam paper with wrong answers for the cheaters to copy before switching it with the real one with correct answers.
  • The coach of this baseball team had been paying off umpires to call things in his favor. They were found out after another team protested an umpire making a blatantly illegal call (mercy rule in the top of the first, before their opponents even got a chance to bat) in favor of that coach's team. The coach was fired and charged with bribery, and his team forfeited their entire schedule and was banned from postseason play for three seasons.
  • In this story a professor had slipped into the habit of setting the exact same exam questions year after year, which led to the students preparing the answers for the following years. This eventually falls apart when the professor is replaced and the exam questions change but some of the students fail to notice and dutifully copy down the answers to the old questions.
• Chirping Crickets: Invoked by the author here.
• Clark Kenting: This student discovers how Superman does it when they switch from glasses to contacts.
  Teacher: Are you a new student? I wasn't aware we were getting one.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: "I thought about how it should really be 'im-grapefruit-ment' because grapefruits are sour and getting impeached would be a sour experience." Er, okay then.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • Well, that certainly answers the teacher's question.
  • It certainly does.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • We're not poor, we're middle class!
  • In this story, a student's partner asks if Mexico's official language is Mexican. The student assumes that he's joking and says yes, since it's not like they're doing this in a Spanish class, to which the partner replies with surprise at being right.
  • After a teacher calls Ernest Hemingway a "lefty", referring to his political views, this student wonders what being left-handed has to do with anything.
  • This student wants his teacher to check a problem for him. Normally, this is good behavior... but he asks during an exam. He can't understand why the teacher can't just give him the answer.
  • In this story, a student teacher asks for a response, and after getting nothing, says that he'll start calling out names. He begins with "Bueller? Bueller?" and a girl replies, "Is the answer Bueller?!"
  • This kid thinks he got in trouble for saying the word "gob" — as in, telling his teacher to "shut her fucking gob".
  • Courtesy of the language barrier: this teacher scolds her Japanese student for his rudeness after he tells her to "go to hell." The student promptly looks horrified.
    Student: Sorry, sorry, sorry! Umm. Let's go to Hell together!^note The student’s confusion actually makes sense if you understand Japanese. The Japanese language does not have swears as English does; instead, Japanese distinguishes between plain speech and polite speech, the former which you NEVER use with a teacher. In this example, the student’s first statement is in a good English rendering of plain speech; his corrected statement is in a good English rendering of polite speech.
  • This class asks a student why she made a biography on Oprah when it was supposed to be about South African women. She calls everyone racist for saying "South African", as opposed to "African-American".
  • Wait. Did slaves get paid?
  • This student is stated in the beginning of the story to have not once turned in any work for a class — and then he expects the teacher to tell a potential employer that he is a hard worker.
  • "Does this really mean 'I bought my girlfriend in Amsterdam'?" I had a look and told her, "No. It means 'I bought ‘a' girlfriend in Amsterdam'."
  • This teacher and principal can't seem to grasp that the submitter only uses their left hand to write since the right hand was amputated long ago and are more interested on how to make a defiant student use their right hand that doesn't exist.
  • These boys complain about a soccer game where the girls only passed to other girls… in a girls vs. boys match.
• Conversational Troping: "No breaking the fourth wall!"
• Conviction by Counterfactual Clue: These criminal law students are given an exercise to see how well they can spot a lie. Only one student is shown to take a guess — and he's always wrong, because his logic is always "you're a girl".
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • Using a cell phone in the library with a "no phones" policy? Snap!
  • One girl gets into a fight to defend a disabled friend. Her "punishment" (given out only because it was required by the rules)? Write an essay about how to win a fight.
  • Fail to hand in your work on time, and this teacher might announce it over the intercom... or worse, sing.
  • This professor will utterly humiliate anyone who has a cell phone ring in his class.
  • Insulting the French, in front of your French professor? He assigns the guilty student an essay on France-USA relations.
  • This teacher throws plush cows at misbehaving students.
• Corpsing: An In-Universe example here when a student playing the titular Julius Caesar is visibly struggling to not break out laughing from under the sheet due to the teacher's theatrics. The teacher notices and rolls with it, causing everyone to break down laughing.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: An umpire in a school baseball game calls the Mercy Rule in the top of the first inning (i.e., he was declaring that the home team could not possibly win the game before he even saw them bat). Naturally, the losing team protests his decision, and the ensuing investigation reveals that the winning team's coach had been bribing umpires to call games in their favor. A Humiliation Conga promptly ensues — first, the cheating coach and several umpires are fired and charged with bribery. Second, the coach's team is not only forced to forfeit the protested game as well as their entire season's schedule, but is also banned from postseason play for three seasons. The kicker? The cheater's team was winning the game that was protested, having scored twelve runs in the short time that it ran. Had the umpire not called a blatantly illegal mercy rule, no investigation would have ever been launched, and the coach and his team might have potentially walked away with a legitimate win and both their previous record and postseason eligibility intact.
• Crazy-Prepared: This student is so used to people thinking her red hair is artificial because of her mixed Japanese-Irish heritage. When a teacher accuses her of breaking the school dress code, she pulls out a DNA test and detailed explanation of how her genes produce her hair colour. Apparently this has happened a lot.
• Crime of Self-Defense:
  • This story has a girl get in trouble for decking a boy after he undid her bra.
  • Exaggerated here, where a kid gets in trouble just for being choked out by the vice-principal's son.
  • Likewise here, where the submitter is suspended for three days for getting slugged and kicked out of the blue because the incident, which any sane person would describe as an assault, counted as a fight under the school's zero-tolerance policy. She notes that the policy only served to make fights messier, since the victims knew they were getting in trouble either way and so were encouraged to fight back and actually "earn" the punishment they'll get.
  • In this story, the submitter's daughter is suspended for a month for elbowing a boy and punching his teeth out... after he groped her. The principal declines to punish the boy, citing the tired old "boys will be boys" excuse. Fortunately, the submitter gets the police involved; the principal is fired, the suspension is revoked, the boy is expelled and given a five-year suspended sentence and a restraining order, and the daughter is homeschooled for the rest of the year.
• Crossdresser: This professor, during one Halloween.
• Crowd Song:
  • Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
  • These theater students get bored in the dressing room and start singing "Take Me or Leave Me".
  • Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more!
• Crying Wolf:
  • This kid falls afoul of it, but not for the usual reason—it wasn't so much that the teacher didn't believe him, but that the teacher was so sick and tired of him pulling that stunt that she looked the other way when it happened for real.
  • A variant of it here; nobody at the submitter's high school had made it onto the honor roll in years, so the administration just stopped checking to see if anybody qualified for it.
  • This school has a lot of fire alarms triggered by pranksters to the point that when a real fire occurs, multiple classes don't even react to it.
• Cute Bruiser: This first grade girl.
• Cute Kitten: When this submitter has a depression-induced tantrum in class, a friend distracts and calms them with cat photos on their phone. Even after starting therapy, the submitter uses cat photos as a pick-me-up on bad days.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Played for laughs in this story. A four-year-old student tells the submitter she loves them more than cake. When asked if she loves cake, she admits she doesn't.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: This student body president who works part time at a fast food restaurant runs headlong into this trope while making a school announcement.
  “Welcome to [Fast Food Chain]! May I— OH, MY GOSH!”
• Dark Is Not Evil: One new clerk calls the police on a guy with tattoos and piercings for taking one little girl after school. Had she bothered to check the school's files before calling, she would have realized that he was the girl's uncle and was registered to pick her up if her father wasn't available. The file even had his picture. She didn't last for very long.
• Deadly Prank: While nobody actually died, a prank some camp counselors pulled on a group of elementary-aged girls in this story ("accidentally" leading them down a path meant for older campers during a nightly walk in the woods while saying things meant to rile the girls up) ends up leaving all of the campers with a fear of the dark that persists into adulthood.
• Deadpan Snarker: In response to a drama queen playing up a case of asthma (if she even has asthma) and claiming she could die if she doesn't get a drink of water, this teacher responds: "I think we can live with that."
• Delayed Reaction:
  • This girl has one to a teacher's Stealth Insult.
  • This is how these two students became friends.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: To this teacher's surprise, both his male and female students agree that the male protagonist in a Chinese story they were studying was a jerk. Possibly due to different cultural values, the teacher expected some students to side with the protagonist.
• Delicious Distraction: During a lockdown drill (in which a police dog was simply allowed to run though the halls with his handler, instead of being given orders), the dog went into full alert... over a ham sandwich in a student's locker.
  • This student had cookies on the brain during a test about the types of sentences.
• Deus Angst Machina: This security guard was rendered homeless three times by the time he was 22 due to faulty wiring. So he teaches himself electrical work (very well)... and his house burns down due to a drunk driver when he is 23.
  So I gave up and moved to America.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • What this student was likely thinking when they made a snarky remark when the teacher commented about a news article about lewd websites.
  • All but outright stated after the student makes a joke insulting the band director. Luckily the director had a sense of humor.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • This teacher should have thought twice before giving a five-year-old A Series of Unfortunate Events to read.
  • In this story, a serial Attention Whore's attempt to falsely accuse the submitter of cyberbullying her falls apart in spectacular fashion when she sends more bullying texts and bursts into the office of the teacher she talked to while the submitter doesn't have access to her phone because she's in his office about to be punished for the "bullying".
  • This principal of a language school promised his daughter a lavish wedding and honeymoon, but realized they wouldn't be able to afford it. Thankfully, he came up with a genius plan to get the needed money: just ask the teachers to generously give up two months of their pay. It's not like working for two months for free is a huge personal sacrifice that not everyone will be able or willing to make. The teachers just refuse, quit their job, and the school ends up closing down, among other things, see Humiliation Conga below.
• Dirty Old Man: This teacher is a massive creep who leans a little too close to female students, and nearly gets fired after a student sees him watching explicit material on his computer. Unfortunately, a combination of him covering up his tracks and the school district not caring means there's insufficient evidence to dismiss him. Ten years later, he tries to hit up the submitter's mother on social media.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: This student with severe mobility issues^note he could get around with only crutches on a good day, but needed a wheelchair on bad days would challenge other students to fight for any or no reason, knowing he was safe because no one would want to be known as the person who fought a little boy in a wheelchair. Until one day the disabled student challenged a student known for not taking crap from anyone. The other student held the disabled student in the air by his collar while delivering a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, then shoved him back into his seat. That was the last time the poster ever heard of the disabled student challenging anyone to fight.
• Disabled Means Helpless:
  • This mother who insists her son shouldn't be allowed to fail maths because he's in a wheelchair, much to the student's own discomfort.
  • This teacher assumes this of a student who is on an Individualized Education Program, explaining to them in a soothing tone how to hold a pencil. When said student (who actually has high-functioning autism) angrily replies that they are on the school's robotics team, the teacher, astonished, exclaims "You can speak?! But you’re supposed to be r***d!" Unsurprisingly, this gets her fired.
• Dismotivation: These students aren't stupid, despite completely failing a very easy multiple choice test.
  Teacher: I'll make a deal with everyone: if you come to class every day, listen, take notes, and study one hour before the test, I'll make the next test easy.
  Student: If we do that, OF COURSE it will be easy!
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • This teacher forced the submitter, then a first grader, to stand facing a chain-link fence, then after five minutes, shouted at them and forced them to stand silently in a corner long enough to not only miss lunch, but for another teacher to declare them missing. What did they do to deserve that? For the former punishment, they hopped down two steps, which apparently was enough to make them a "demented animal" in that teacher's mind, and for the latter punishment, they sneezed and banged their head on the fence, which apparently equaled "making a commotion". Needless to say, that teacher was removed from supervisory duties.
  • This teacher drags the submitter (then a first grader on the first day of school) to the principal's office in tears because he's "too immature" and "obviously not ready" for school, which she has decided because he won't demonstrate sign language for the class. The principal has to reveal to her what was clearly in the submitter's file... that the submitter doesn't know sign language because he's blind.
  • Why did this horrible girl attempt to accuse another girl, the submitter, of cyberbullying her, which would have resulted in criminal prosecution if Problem Girl hadn't got herself caught in her own lies? Because the submitter had called Problem Girl out for pretending to be pregnant.
  • A group of kids are banned from recess for the day for the heinous crime of coloring Santa Claus's suit a color other than red on their Christmas coloring pages. (Or, in the case of one poor kid, coloring Santa's suit red, but coloring his gloves green.)
  • This teacher personally takes the submitter's daughter home from a trip to the zoo, because she thinks that liking snakes is an "unhealthy obsession" and "deviant behavior," and that the teacher doesn't like them. The submitter is quite angry, complains to the school, and moves their daughter to a different school. Over the next week, the teacher attempts to have the student excluded for being aggressive and physically violent with other kids, which doesn't work because other teachers vouch for the daughter. The teacher in question gets suspended and then moved to a role away from children.
  • This teacher calls the submitter because her son listens to Slipknot outside of class. The submitter doesn't see a problem with it, and the receptionist stated that no punishment would result just because a teacher doesn't like Slipknot.
  • A substitute teacher harasses another teacher who is sick at home with phone calls for the extremely petty reason of not making a big deal out of sending her sick daughter home from school several weeks before.
  • These girls started a book-burning inside the bookstore, forcing the store to be evacuated while the fire department was called, because their teacher wouldn't let them buy Fifty Shades of Grey and the books they could buy didn't have sex in them.
  • A homeroom teacher decides that the appropriate response to a student not standing up/reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is to drag him all the throughout the school by his shirt to the principal's office, while screaming incoherently at the top of her lungs.
  • This father of a taekwondo student is upset that the submitter – another, more experienced student – gave his son advice on how to perform kicks. He then tries to attack the submitter, only for the class's teacher to lay him low in an instant and then call the police. A chat between the submitter and the guy's (eerily calm) son indicates that this was not an isolated incident, and even the son agrees that he should be locked up.
    Son: “This has happened before. This was his last chance to be nice about it and not try to kill someone about something.”
  • This person goes up to the front counter of a college computer lab to ask for a pen. However, the last time he came in and got a pen, he chewed it to pieces, so the submitter doesn't let him have one. The guy leaves...and returns a short time later with an axe and starts wandering ominously around the building with it. Fortunately, no one is hurt and the guy is arrested, but the submitter (who happened to be at a restaurant having dinner when the incident took place) couldn't help wondering if the guy was sincerely out for their blood just because they wouldn't let him have a pen.
  • This teacher "only" takes five minutes off the submitter's recess because they didn't say please when they told another student grabs their computer mouse.
    Submitter: “She should have heard what [Student] said when he lost at tetherball the other day.”
• Dissonant Serenity: After this non-swimmer is thrown into a lake by a swim teacher, he later remarks that he felt strangely at peace at the bottom of the lake.
• The Ditz: But of course.
  • "K as in 'chicken'."
  • This student is studying computer science... and he doesn't even know what an internet browser is.
  • I swear I'm not dumb! I know who Tiger Woods is!
  • This student somehow confuses a paper test (from a computer screenshot) for an actual computer.
  • Here we have two college students who don't know geography or basic math.
  • "One of my M&Ms has a W on it!"
  • A series of convenient events convinces a girl that a ventilation cabinet is actually a time machine.
  • This teacher mixes up her myths and misses things in the textbook. It gets to the point where the submitter and their friend are asked for help more than her. And apparently that wasn't the only class she made that kind of blunder in.
• A Dog Ate My Homework:
  • Yes, it happens. Almost always lampshaded.
  • In this story, the submitter's homework is eaten by a cockatiel and a rabbit. Luckily, the submitter's teacher has a good sense of humor about it.
• Double Standard:
  • "Kids are allowed to have their PHONES on them^note Ostensibly to keep in touch with their parents, but this privilege is frequently abused, but HATS aren't allowed because they're a distraction?"
  • A Christian student is called out by his teacher for finding Hindu Mythology ridiculous and hard to believe, yet he has no problem believing the ridiculous parts of the Bible.
  • This teacher tells a female student to take off her Women's March hat because it 'promoted hate-speech' and implies she hates men, but lets a male student wear his Make America Great Again hat because it's 'his free speech'.
• Do Wrong, Right:
  • A teacher finds a crudely-drawn penis on the classroom whiteboard, and lectures the vandals in front of the entire class... about the incorrect anatomy.
  • This dorm resident complains about someone playing the bagpipes at 9:00 in the morning… because they're playing Scotland the Brave wrong.
• Dual Wielding: This student was apparently taught to do this in badminton, and by the time he realized his coach was wrong, he was unable to play it the regular way as he reflexively kept trying to hit the birdie with his free hand.
• Dumb Jock: This lab partner named "Bill" is assigned to the submitter, who basically has to hold his hand or do most of the work himself. It isn't until later that the submitter finds out that Bill is the college's starting quarterback and he was assigned to the submitter so that his grades would be high enough to keep him on the gridiron.
• Education Mama: This mother takes it to a concerning extreme; she constantly berates her son, puts him through every tutorial possible, takes away his privileges at home, and calls him a dropout just because he got a B, and she thought that that was "teaching him that failure is okay." Oh, and the only reason he got a B and not an A is because of a quirk in the grading system that temporarily marked an incomplete multi-stage project as a zero, which would have been remedied when the project was completed. Naturally she doesn't accept this, apparently under the impression that being anything less than a straight-A student is the same as flunking school.
• Education Through Pyrotechnics: Why one of the best jobs for a Pyromaniac is "Science Teacher".
• Eek, a Mouse!!: Somehow she didn't notice it until that afternoon.
• El Spanish "-o": This bully seems to think the Spanish language works this way.
• The End Is Nigh: Multiple students in this story don't hand in assignments because they're convinced that nuclear war between the US and an Asian country (heavily implied to be China) is imminent. Then, in 2018, when the two countries' leaders meet, one student is disappointed since now they actually have to worry about graduating.
• Enfante Terrible: Starting at age 10, this little monster would beat up other kids, including his older sister, just out of sight of the teachers, timing it so it looked like his intended victims were the ones attacking him when the teachers showed up, should his victims try to defend themselves. For an entire year, this kept escalating, with him getting away with it, claiming "self-defense" until OP catches him beating a kid to the ground and strangling him until he turned purple and went limp. At this point, OP, fearing for the victim's life, grabs the little psycho and misjudges her strength, slamming him into a pole. The teacher on site covered for OP, claiming that she saw the hellion start it and that OP was nowhere near the area.
• Entendre Failure: Biology lesson.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • In this story, the poster claimed her (visibly white) mother was African-American and a classmate accuses her of lying; it is eventually explained that she meant her mother was an American born in Africa, which her mother confirms.
  • This psychology teacher assumes that when seating is reassigned, the best students will sit at the front of the room to pay attention, and the worst students will sit at the back of the room to not get caught misbehaving. Two of the class's top students are in the back of the room, because they're tall and don't want to block any other students' view.
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • This student mistakes a narwhal for a kind of Pokémon.
  • This teacher believes that the submitter has a daughter named "Beth," who is transgender and suffering from gender dysphoria. It turns out that the submitter's son is named Seth, and writes in cursive. When the submitter reveals this, the teacher simply accuses the submitter of misgendering and trans erasure, all the while refusing to believe that Seth is a name, having possibly never heard of Seth Rogen, Seth Green, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Meyers, or Seth the son of Adam.
  • This teacher apparently believes that meerkats are a fictional animal species made up for The Lion King, and seems to still not be convinced even when she sees pictures of real life meerkats on Google.
  • Berbers are just something the professor made up to make this student look bad on the test. (The professor is a Kabyle Berber, and has been lecturing about them all month.)
• Everybody Hates Mathematics: Naturally, there are a few stories about people complaining about math.
  • This student says the usual "When am I going to use this" line. Too bad he said it in a Logic class.
  • In this story a student asks how Calculus could be useful, so the teacher gives a situation, albeit a pretty unlikely one.
  • Another complaint, with an amusing response.
  • "I wish it was multiple choice. At least if there were four choices, I'd have a 50-50 chance of getting it right!"
  • "…And only 45% of your parents in this class donated! That's 65% that didn't donate!" Judging from the dead silence that followed, even the students recognized this teacher's failure to Carry the One (well, in reverse, but you get the idea). Good thing she doesn't teach math.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: invoked Here. The author disagrees.
  College Student: Our professor told us that [character]'s room being blue is a symbol of his loneliness and isolation. Is that what you meant?
  Author: No. I just like blue. You can tell your professor they're full of shit.
• Everyone Knows Morse: These two students used "random" pen tapping to pass test answers back and forth. Too bad the person proctoring that exam also knew Morse.
• Exact Words:
  • How this teacher once got away with returning home late. As he warns, however, It Only Works Once.
  • This person tries to argue against a return policy with this logic. It's not water damage, it's taco grease. Who cares if it makes the book illegible in entirely the same manner?
  • "Students are to wear bottoms high enough so that no undergarments are showing." A student tries (and fails) to get around this by not wearing underwear.
  • The class is playing an Expy of Family Feud. One team tries to call themselves the Llamas, but the professor insists it be a family name and calls them the "Lamas" (like the Dalai Lama.) The team then asks the professor to add another L, and he changes the name to the "Lamals."
  • One teacher, annoyed with her class singing "The Song That Never Ends" asked them to pick a song that actually does end. Cue Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer.
  • This student gets their stuff moved by the teacher, and the next time the student leaves the classroom, said student tells the teacher not to move their stuff. The teacher moves the desk instead.
  • This teacher tells a homophobic student he's been taught by a gay teacher for the past three years, and the student switched to another class. However the teacher himself isn't gay but the student's history teacher is, and he and his husband are going to meet the student's parents.
  • "We didn't hear anything unexpected, officer!" The science teachers were detonating unwanted sodium samples in the rain, and a neighbor had reported hearing explosions. If you know and plan the explosions, they're not unexpected...
  • When this parent demanding to have their son moved to another class because his teacher recently came out as transgender threatens to pull the kid out of the school entirely if they don't do so right this instant, the school's headmaster says "Alright, here are some recommendations:" and goes over the process of transferring the student all while the flustered parent stammers in protest. In the end, the student ultimately stayed in the teacher's class.
• Explosive Stupidity: A fortunately non-fatal example here. A student (illegally) setting off firecrackers at school realizes he's been spotted by a teacher, and tries hiding the one he just lit in the back pocket of his jeans. Three guesses what happened next.
  Obviously, we had the utmost sympathy for his plight and didn't take the mickey at all.
• Extremely Easy Exam: In this story, the submitter's professor gives a pop quiz worth 20 points (a lot in that class), with the hardest questions being "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" and "How long does it take to cook a 3-minute-egg?" It's actually for the purpose of rewarding the students who bothered to show up, as more than 30 students had cut class that day.
• Extreme Omni-Goat: Apparently, the only actual omnivore in existence.
• Facepalm:
  • Teacher: *palm meets face* "Let me stop you right there."
  • Me: *double facepalm*
• Failed a Spot Check: Now has its own page!
• "Fawlty Towers" Plot: This professor first chews out the student for using a cell phone in an empty classroom, claiming grounds for expulsion. Right on cue, the professor's own phone rings, and she answers it, talking in the classroom. When the student calls her out on the Double Standard, she claims the call was from her boss, the dean. Naturally, the dean happens to walk by the classroom, and having overheard that last comment, asks what he had allegedly done. The student reports exactly what just happened. While the professor wasn't fired, the student was compensated for a laptop the professor had damaged by spilling the student's coffee on it, and a different professor taught the course for the rest of the term.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: This teacher has a burning hatred of cell phones to the point where if a student has a phone out in the hallway, she'll confiscate it, and makes all her students sign a contract stating they won't have their phones out. After one student proves that as the students are minors, her contracts aren't legally binding, she absolutely loses it to the point where security has to herd the class out of the room while they restrain her. She would subsequently be fired and sent to anger management classes.
• Female Misogynist: This Sunday School teacher, who gives a sermon on how periods are evil, to a female student who dared to have one.
• 555: Exploited by this second grader.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: A student receives $2000 for his first term's tuition fee. One week into the semester he's asking the university for his next payment because he's spent it on: a $750 bag of pot, a $500 hot tub in his dormitory, and the remaining $750 on damages when his hot tub broke and flooded the whole floor. The kicker? He was studying Financial Management. Unsurprisingly, he flunked out soon after.
• Freudian Slip: Appropriately enough, when finishing a discussion about Freud.
• Fridge Horror: The implications for "all the kings' horses" in the old nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" are discussed in this class. invoked
• From the Mouths of Babes:
  • "Sensei! Do Americans really have giant wieners?"
  • "Trojans? Is that a condom shirt?!"
  • "So the university makes you do that so you can practice sleeping with other teachers?"
  • "My mummy died!"
• Fun with Acronyms: Somebody... Please... Enter... Respectively... Moo?
  • "Fat Bitches Get Laid!"
• Get Out!: How this class reacts to a student not knowing who Bon Jovi is.
• Getting Sick Deliberately: A variation. This student with a nut allergy tries to trigger an allergic reaction so that he'd go to the hospital and miss out on his English exam next period. Thankfully for his health (if not for his grades), he fails.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • This school's zero-tolerance policy was supposed to prevent fights between students. However, incidents where the victim doesn't fight back meet the school's definition of "fight", and the school makes no distinction between the instigator or the victim, meaning it ends up causing fights since bullying victims know they'll be punished whether they fight back or not.
  • A professor, probably jokingly, suggests to a crowd of prospective students to a graduate school that they go run the bases at the major league baseball stadium^*likely Oriole Park at Camden Yards based on the story's location while at a banquet hall connected to said stadium. He leads the students to the double doors leading to the field, expecting them to be locked and have to lead the students back to the banquet hall...but they open right up. Before he can stop them, the students stampede onto the field and start running amok. The entire banquet party is immediately kicked out of the stadium and banquet hall and nearly get banned for life (though the stadium staff later rescind the ban when the school administrators apologize for the incident) while the cocky professor is implied to get in huge trouble with his superiors.
• Gossip Evolution: A professor rescues a student who had managed to lock himself in a room by breaking through the (cheap interior) door. Over the next eight years, the story is repeatedly retold and exaggerated, including a detail about him using his physics knowledge to figure out the door's weak spot, until, one day, he's asked (to his confusion) if it's true that he used math to save a room full of students trapped in a burning building. He decides to just go with it.
• Got Volunteered: This teacher takes a field trip to a 'science and ecology center'. This turns out not to be for the sake of the pupils' education but actually free labor for the center, who are friends with the teacher, and have the students spend the whole time planting vegetables that the center (when it actually opens, because it isn't even finished being built yet) can sell. As the comments point out, it's not a bad thing that the students learn how to plant, but the parents had to pay for the field trip, and it's implied the students wouldn't have been compensated for their work. (The teacher is subsequently fired.)
• Groin Attack: This (female) self-defence class student apparently makes a specialty out of them.
  Girl: “Hey, I told you to wear a cup and most attackers won’t be wearing cups in real life! You have to hit them where it hurts! [Teacher] said to make the fight realistic!”
  Boy: “Well, realistically I think I won’t be able to have sex EVER AGAIN!”
• Hands Go Down:
  • These first graders all wanted milk-coated cookies.
  • This new student, after a brief self-introduction in front of the class claiming to have come from Nigeria, is greeted with fellow students raising their hands when the teacher asks if there are questions for the new student, but all hands drop when the new student makes a statement before anyone actually asks.
    [About ten hands go up]
    New student: No, I have never seen a lion outside of a zoo.
    [About ten hands go down]
• Harmful to Minors: This teacher doesn't want to give a sex education lecture to her class, and plans to force them to watch 80 minutes of animated horror-pornography instead.
• Hate Sink: This college professor. The anecdote even starts off with "We have a very important test coming up in two weeks for a class with a notoriously terrible, cruel, opinionated, self-centered, professor, who is on the verge of being kicked out of the university." You have to wonder why on Earth the professor won't let this test slide because a student needs to go in for kidney transplant surgery. It's pretty damn hard to fake that.
• Head Desk: The last line of one entry: Me: "No…" *proceeds to bang head on desk*
• Heh Heh, You Said "X":
  • "Toxic dump... Sorry. The imagery is just...."
  • I can't do PP!
  • The inevitable joke about a guitarist who forgets to take a certain string.
  • "4q…"
• Helicopter Parents: This father freely admitted to taking all of his son's tests for him ^note the class was being taught online because "He might fail, otherwise!" He also argued that his wrong answers on the tests couldn't be wrong, because the app he's using to get the answers said otherwise.
• Henpecked Husband: This young man gets an early start on this attitude.
• Heroic BSoD: For certain values of "heroic": This professor held an assembly to inform students of the dress code rules as written in the handbook, only to break down with a Thousand-Yard Stare after finding a page break at "Students may not wear clothes..." When the students start laughing at him, he runs away entirely and has to be tracked down and brought back by a teacher an hour later for the rest of the presentation.
• Heroic Sacrifice: This student fails to solve a difficult math problem in front of the class, but spares a socially-anxious classmate having to call on someone who would blame them for the embarrassment.
• History Repeats: This story opens with the submitter's Know-Nothing Know-It-All computer teacher getting hung up on terminology with them, so the submitter gets a bit of petty revenge by switching off the teacher's PSU, and the teacher – unable to diagnose the issue – has to end the class early. Years later, the submitter is an IT specialist on call for the school district and is called to the same teacher's classroom. There, he finds that another student had played the same prank on her. It turned out the student had heard the story from his father – a classmate of the submitter's – and hadn't expected her to fall for it again.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • This Bible-thumper quotes verse in laying down judgments about the students she tutors. The students revolt by Bothering By the Good Book.
  • This professor subjects herself to the same humiliation as she would have for any of her students.
  • This student attempts to get the submitter kicked off a class trip by falsely accusing him (the submitter) of touching him (the other student) during a test. It fails because other students in the class spoke up in favor of the submitter, and the other student was kicked off the trip instead.
  • One jerk student tries to humiliate a submitter's presentation file by adding pornography in their work and making it look it was his. Too bad the submitter's friend was able to show the presentation was modified by the jerk student thanks to the program's file logs, which gets the jerk an F and a detention.
  • This music teacher's harsh training which curtails freedom and creativity ends up making the students worse and got her fired.
  • This Attention Whore's attempt to escalate a Wounded Gazelle Gambit backfires because the teacher she first approached is talking to the submitter (the girl she accused of cyberbullying) and her mother about the alleged bullying and has been for several minutes, meaning the submitter had no means of bullying her at the time the new texts were sent.
  • This college professor routinely locked students out of his classroom for being five minutes late (at a university that had no formal attendance policy). Then one day he was late, and his students locked him out of the classroom for the full class session.
    He never locked the doors again.
• Honest John's Dealership: Revealed by a young lady who knows more about cars than the guy would like. His blatant Stay in the Kitchen attitude does not help his case.
• Hopeless with Tech:
  • This (adult) student in a basic computing class tries addressing an email to the recipient's home address instead of their actual email address. When questioned about it, she seems to think that sending emails sends them to the postal service, who will in turn post the message to the recipient.
    Submitter: “That’s not what email is, ma’am.”
    Student: “Can I get a better teacher?”
  • This student thinks that she can change which key on the keyboard does what by physically removing and rearranging the keys.
• How Many Fingers?: This teacher asks the question while holding up all five fingers. After insisting that the answer was "four" because the thumb doesn't count as a "finger", one student responds with the question, with the answer being "one".
• Human Sacrifice: This exchange student mistranslates "self-sacrifice" as such:
  Teacher: What do you guys think was the most important factor in winning a battle in the Civil War? ...
  Exchange Student: Human sacrifice.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • This principal attempts to use his teachers' next two months of pay to finish paying for his daughter's wedding and honeymoon without even considering the fact or even seeming to understand that the teachers kind of need that money to pay their bills and accusing them of being "jealous and greedy" for not giving up two months worth of pay when they understandably protest. What happens next is essentially the principal's life coming crashing down: Once it becomes clear that the principal will refuse to budge and won't listen to them, the teachers all tell the principal where to stick it and quit on the spot, and the entire student body walks out with them when they find out what happened, resulting in the school closing down and the principal ending up out of a job. Then his daughter severs ties with him because he couldn't pay for the rest of the wedding and her and her fiancé's honeymoon like he promised and ruined her wedding as a result. Finally, his furious wife divorces him over the ruined wedding and his scheme causing him to lose their only source of income. He may have been asking for it, but still, ouch....
  • This umpire decides to call a baseball game by illegally invoking the mercy rule in the top of the first inning with the rival team leading 12-0^note In high school baseball, the mercy rule cannot be invoked until the third or fifth inning, depending on the league. The submitter's coach immediately protests that his team was declared the loser before they even got a chance to bat, only for the umpire to claim Screw the Rules, I Make Them! and berate him and the submitter's team. While the game is initially recorded as a win for the rival school, the league quickly intervenes and declares the submitter's team the winner by forfeit, and fires the umpire for intentionally violating league rules. The umpire's actions then cause an investigation to be launched, which uncovers a massive bribery scandal involving several umpires and the rival school's coach. This results in four other umpires and the rival coach being fired, and everyone involved in the scandal facing bribery charges, as well as the rival school forfeiting their entire schedule and being banned from postseason play for three seasons.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Two students banter back and forth with cheese.
  • Here's a particularly ba-a-a-ad one.
• Hypno Fool: In this story, a hypnotist tells a group of students, "And now... I turn down the gravity!" All of them act like he's turned the gravity up.
• Hypocrite: Common enough to warrant their own page.
• I Am Not Shazam: invoked This professor who thinks Charlie Brown is called "Peanut". And she's an art appreciation teacher no less!
• I Am Not Spock: invoked A teacher makes a mistake along these lines here, confusing the commander of Apollo 13 with the actor who played him in the film.
• I Am Spartacus: After this Bible teacher states that Methodists are going to Hell, an actual Methodist student objects. Eventually, the entire class claims to be Methodists and walks out.
• I Meant to Do That: Invoked by this professor. Thankfully, it fit into the lesson he was teaching that day.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: I need to see a fast dentist. It Makes Sense in Context.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: A security guard catches a camera thief with this method.
• Innocently Insensitive: This American exchange student in Japan tries to show their appreciation for their classmates by getting everyone flowers... not knowing that in Japanese culture, putting flowers on students' desks is a memorial custom, and doing it for someone who's still alive is tantamount to telling that student you want them dead. Luckily, the Japanese classmates are quick to clear up the confusion and appreciate that the submitter wasn't trying to declare their undying hatred for their entire class. The submitter still plans to get everyone else chocolate for the next Valentine's Day instead.
• I Reject Your Reality: This odd substitute teacher can't find his assignment given to him by the regular teacher and immediately jumps to the conclusion that one of the students stole it (which none of them did). He holds on to this story even after the police officer the substitute called in to arrest the entire class confirms that none of the students have it.
• It Makes Sense in Context: There's a long and convoluted reason ballgames at this school serve their hot dogs in flatbread.
• I Was Beaten by a Girl: A grade four bully loses to a grade one girl.
• Ignored Epiphany: This student believed he could flunk high school and still get by fine as a mechanic. His teacher, who was a mechanic for 20 years, easily demonstrates that he still needs an education to succeed at that job. The student's response? "FUCK YOU, OLD MAN!"
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: "You can't expect me to mark essays! I deal in science, not WORDS."
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: "You can't expect people to control their population just by not having sex."
• Incompetence, Inc.:
  • This school board, which completely botches the closing of one school and the merging of its functions with another school.
  • This elementary school has a colossal field trip failure. The aim is to go to a pre-US fort, but the school forgot to buy tickets or even warn the fort staff that they were coming. While a teacher stays to negotiate, the students are taken to a McDonalds with a Play Place, only to be turned away before even getting in because there are more of them than the Play Place is rated for. The students are then taken to a park to eat their lunch, which they don't manage to finish before it emerges that it's not a park, it's private property, and they have to leave. The staff member at the fort is unsuccessful, so everyone just goes home, the parents tear into the school administration for the failure, and rather than learn their lesson about preparation, the school just decides to abandon field trips altogether for nearly ten years.
• Inherently Funny Words:
  • Flying buttresses. The teacher is Genre Savvy enough to let the class get the laughs out of their systems before continuing.
  • "Well, I didn't have a joke. But people just laugh when I say 'chicken'!"
• Innocent Innuendo:
  • "I pulled off my G string!"
  • "Wow, if this is a quizzie, I'd hate to see your testes."
  • Somebody stole my beeotch!
  • "Class, I have two balls."
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Students getting their grades docked for not wearing their PE uniform, when said uniform is on back-order and they will not receive it for another couple of weeks. Thankfully, in this case it's an accident, rather than deliberately failing kids over things beyond their control.
  • This substitute teacher gives a student a low grade in their math test because she actually worked out and solved the problems, rather than memorizing a table with the answers on them, even though all of the student's answers were correct. She then tries to argue that memorizing the answers out of context is more productive than learning how to find them out on one's own.
    • Likewise, this teacher is teaching an ineffective manner of solving multiplication problems and apparently giving the students problems that are supposed to be unsolvable with this method — and actually failing the submitter for getting the problems correct by using the proper method. Her dad puts her in a different school within the week.
  • You can stay here. Except you can't. But you can, but you also can't. The submitter actually ponders at the end whether an honest-to-God real security guard was really being that stupid, or if it was a dehydration-induced hallucination.
  • This teacher tries to claim banning same-sex marriage is not bigotry since he can't marry a man since he's already married, for which a student calls the teacher out on his poor excuse, and won't explain and defend his views.
  • This substitute teacher doesn't believe in left-handedness. She outright states that the submitter is a victim of child abuse and that his parents were drug addicts who tortured him into being left handed.
  • This problem teacher believes that the wheelchair-bound student, who didn't join their friends to look for the wallet one of them is missing, automatically means that they are the ones that took it. Completely ignoring the fact that the wheelchair cannot fit between the benches, meaning their search would have been physically difficult for them to do, and doesn't even consider that Problem Girl was another student that didn't help look.
  • This principal insists on a staff member getting his approval before posting photos on the school's social media account… after the principal had directed them to post them.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • This student ends up giving away that he threw a piece of eraser at another student, because that student thought it was a spitball at first.
  • This student hates gym, and is assured by the guidance counselor that they will not be taking gym. The submitter is instead put into "Today's Sports," which is different from gym simply because it's an elective, as opposed to a health class. The student in question is not happy with this.
• Inspector Javert: The idiotic Sadist Teacher in these two stories, who is extremely bad at handling crimes supposedly committed by students, resulting in apologies from the head teacher and discipline for him when it turns out the student in question wasn't guilty. This may be down to a lack of objectivity with regards to a notorious Attention Whore that both stories anonymize as Problem Girl. While he was eventually fired, commenters took the fact he lasted as long as he did and his colleagues' and boss's failure to intervene before students were panicking about potentially being wrongfully arrested to be symptoms of his place of employment generally being a Sucky School.
  • When Problem Girl tries to frame another girl, the submitter of both stories, for cyberbullying, this teacher, failing to see this for the Wounded Gazelle Gambit it is, approaches the submitter out of the blue, misinterprets her bewilderment as cowardice, refuses to explain what she's being accused of, and basically acts like confirmation of her guilt is a Foregone Conclusion from the very beginning, resulting in his suspension when Problem Girl ruins her scheme.
  • Later, when students' belongings are being stolen by a kleptomaniac Cloud Cuckoolander^note who, thanks to him, was only caught in an investigation that happened after his miserable failure of one, after initially refusing to help until a student's purse is stolen, he accuses a girl in a wheelchair of being the thief purely because she didn't help search for the items — because she couldn't due to her wheelchair — and the only other student who didn't help look is Problem Girl, who the cyberbullying incident clearly didn't teach him not to blindly defend. When the submitter's policewoman grandmother, well aware of how this particular teacher treated her granddaughter, arrives to defend that girl from the accusation, he decides to gloat at the poor girl, resulting in him being fired.
• The Internet Is for Porn: This teacher learns the hard way about doing a Google image search on Prince Albert. ("Prince Albert" is a certain style of male genital piercing)
• Is That Cute Kid Yours?: It happens here, but the man helpfully points out that he and the woman he was with, along with the four kids they were supervising, were all from different countries, and they were wearing clothes that indicated that they were part of an international exchange project.
• Isn't It Ironic?: Apparently, verbal irony is when you say "I hate irony" and someone hits you with an iron E.
• It Amused Me: This student creates a matches-and-turpentine-fueled bonfire that burns off another student's hair and half her shirt. His reason for doing so? He was bored.
• It Was His Sled: invoked A subversion—apparently, at least one student doesn't realize the title character is going to die... in Death of a Salesman (for those who don't know the play, the title is meant literally).
• It Makes Sense in Context: "In the second and third movement I kind of picture Mary and Jesus in the Millennium Falcon..." Unfortunately, no context is given.
• It's Been Done: In this story, the submitter (a high school student) can't think of an idea for a creative writing assignment, until a plot involving a teenager killing school bullies comes to them in a dream. Before they can submit it, one of their friends points out that the story was actually just the plot of the movie Heathers, which the friend group had seen recently. They get away with submitting it because the teachers don't recognize the story, but only after convincing the teachers that they aren't planning any violent acts thsmselves.
• It's What I Do: In this story, after a physical fitness test, a teacher remarks that a class seems to have the condition of 12-year-old girls. One of the students points out that they are 12-year-old girls.

Tropes J-P

• Japanese Ranguage: "Then, another man began to crap. Soon, everyone is crapping. I think they enjoyed my song, after all."
• Jerkass: Unfortunately, as the omnibus general page for NAR demonstrates.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In a class about medicine, one "teeny tiny" mistake really can have dire consequences.
• Jerkass Realization: These two students realize the reason they were never bullied in school: They were the bullies.
• Jerk Jock: A swim-team example of this trope spent most of a lifeguard training course bullying smaller or female students. During the final exam, the poster (his assigned "rescuee") made sure he got a crash course in what a drowning and panicking person can do to an untrained (he'd also ignored most of the coursework, since he was such a good swimmer he'd never have any problems) rescuer. He failed the exam miserably, and was told he'd have to retest if he wanted to get his lifeguard certification.
• Joke and Receive: During an eighth-grade talk about appreciation, this teacher comments that everybody should have one really bad thing happen in their life, so they learn to appreciate what they have. One of their students has their house burn down that very night, without any loss of life but they did lose just about everything else. The teacher never made that speech again.
• Just One More Level!: Over the course of a college semester, this group of students (with the lone exception of the submitter) all miss at least one day of class because they got sucked into playing Tetris 2 on the submitter's SNES.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The teacher in this story is not reported for locking a student in a closet and leaving them there because the student assumed they deserved it somehow. Fortunately, his temper would get him fired a year later.
• Karmic Jackpot: Volunteering at a company demonstration gets this apprentice recognized by trainers and management as a good candidate for a high-pay, high-responsibility job, despite being otherwise underqualified.
• The Key Is Behind the Lock:
  • "You want me to pay full tuition to get to the point where I'll only have to pay half tuition." Thankfully, once the student says this, the employee at the financial office realizes their own mistake, though this is right after having phrased it slightly differently and not getting through to them.
  • "So, before I can meet with a registrar who can help fill out my schedule, I need to fill out my schedule first, so I can get a registrar to help me fill out my schedule?" Unfortunately, this time the submitter fails to get the other person to understand the problem.
• Knight Templar Parent: This Taekwondo student's father is so overprotective that he tries to attack the submitter just for advising his son on how to perform a kick. Thankfully, the teacher stops him in a heartbeat, and he's soon arrested, and it's implied that he loses custody of his son. Even the son agrees it's all for the best, as this was not an isolated incident.
  Son: <during his father's court case> “My dad was always overprotective. But this was never something he should’ve done in any shape or form. Personally, I think he deserves it.”
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
  • Much like doctors and nurses on Not Always Working, there are a sad number of stories where teachers seem to believe that they know more than their students simply by virtue of being a teacher, rather than having actually learned anything to do with their subject. Worse, these are usually the types who have also determined that their entire job is to be seen as the smartest person in the classroom, and as such will attempt to punish any student that proves to know better than they do.
    • Case in point, this ICT teacher:
      Teacher: “But I’m experienced enough to deal with [an unplugged mouse]! You don’t know enough to do that!”
      (The teacher then walked off, apparently forgetting that they have had to ask other students for help with computers many times before.)
  • A student example here. A girl in the submitter's class acts like she is the be-all-end-all when it comes to knowledge of the animal kingdom when when she is blatantly wrong^note for instance, she insists that all snakes are venomous (including constrictors) and slimy, frogs and toads actually give humans warts and HPV, the California condor doesn't actually exist and they are in fact red-tailed hawks, etc., and, curiously, always seems to suddenly have somewhere else to be whenever the submitter gets out science books about animals in an attempt to correct her. The submitter discovers more than twenty years later that the girl didn't grow out of this behavior and now spouts similar misinformation about vaccinations (according to her, vaccines don't merely cause autism but literally inject autism into your body). The submitter understandably blocks her after that.
• Large Ham: "BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!"
• Laser-Guided Karma: Now with its own page!
• Latin Land: A bizarre example here, in which a Puerto Rican student is assumed to be Mexican by a Mexican teacher, who is bewildered that she doesn't know what Día de Los Muertos is. When the student corrects the teacher about her nationality, the teacher just becomes more confused — "Catholics in Puerto Rico don't celebrate Día de Los Muertos?"^note  No, they don't. They have All Souls' Day, which is on the same date and shares the same origin, but it's a somber day of remembrance, not a celebration. The student patiently replies, "I'm a Protestant, Señora."
• Lawful Stupid: This rather strict private school forbids students from using cell phones on school grounds at all times. One day the submitter sees the school disciplinarian (whom the submitter compares to Agatha Trunchbull) lying in wait at the entrance and then handing out roughly two dozen detention slips for phone usage in ten minutes. The submitter speculates that incidents like this was what led to the cell phone ban being relaxed to only apply during school hours.
• Lazy Artist: This school district decides to spruce up its schools with art of their respective mascots. Only, the art is so generic that they don't look like the animals they're supposed to be. And anyone who visits multiple schools can tell that they used the same art, just with different colours, regardless of if the mascot's a panther, a wolverine, or a warthog.
• Lethally Stupid:
  • This teacher, who is convinced that a cisgender boy named Seth is, in fact, a transgender girl named Beth and "her" parents are transphobic, all because she misread his cursive handwriting and doesn't think "Seth" is a real name. The fact she's wrong on both counts is a very, very good thing, given her idiotic idea to confront the student's mother and accuse her of trans erasure rather than talk to the student in question to make sure this "transgender girl" actually is a transgender girl. Outing a trans girl to her parents against her will already makes you a danger to any transgender student. Outing a trans girl to her parents against her will when you think the parents are transphobic is so incomprehensibly idiotic that any death resulting from the abuse the parents will inflict on their so-called "son" for identifying as a girl should bring manslaughter charges.
  • This grad student left a hydrogen gas cylinder unsecured in the middle of the hallway, which could easily have turned into a rocket trailing explosive gas. After the submitter points this out to the professor and threatens to quit if nothing is done, the professor lets the grad student go.
  • This teacher steps out of the room, during which time there's a fire drill, so despite it raining outside, the class evacuates as they've been trained. The teacher later says the class should've stayed inside as “nobody would schedule a fire drill when it is raining!”
• Like Is, Like, a Comma: After her teacher warns her about middle school and especially the popular girls, the brilliant student plans to invoke this trope with a little Obfuscating Stupidity to be a smart and popular girl. The teacher wholeheartedly agrees.
• Literal Metaphor: An unintentional version here. A musical director describes the cast's less-than-energetic rehearsal as "anemic", not realizing that most of the students present had just donated to a blood drive, meaning they literally were a bit anemic at that point.
• Literal-Minded:
  • This university receptionist asks a student if he had a pencil ready to take down some information. The student takes it to mean that he literally needs a pencil, instead of the pen he had handy, and fumbles around for one, eventually hanging up after fruitless searching. The receptionist asks from then on if they have something to write with.
  • When asked to provide an explanation of the steps he took to solve a math problem, this fourth-grader takes it up to eleven and explains literally everything in painstaking detail — to the point that his explanation for the solution ends up taking nearly three times as much space as other students in his class.
• LOL, 69: This teacher was talking about someone "sucking" in the figurative sense — but that's no help when the student sucks enough to get a 69%.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • This university professor has strict formatting rules for submitted essays... too bad he forgot to mention they had to be typed.
  • A student, giving an improvised two-minute speech regarding war, runs out of material a minute in. So he asks for a minute of silence for those who died.
  • This student tries to get around a rule that says undergarments must not be visible. However, he tries this by wearing no undergarments at all.
  • This student apparently believes plagiarizing an entire paper for her essay is perfectly acceptable, because nobody actually said that cheating isn't allowed. Naturally, she doesn't win when she tries to appeal her grade. Most public US universities DO have a schoolwide "Academic Dishonesty" policy, under which plagiarism is punishable by immediate expulsion, no refunds— so yes, there WAS a rule, and that girl's lucky all the TA did was fail her.
  • This professor administers a test where the students are allowed to use "any resource in the room" for reference, since the class is more about knowing how to find the information they need than about memorizing it. Mid-test, one student realizes the professor is a resource, and asks for help with a particularly difficult question. After a Beat, the professor tells them where to find the answer, and then patches the loophole for future tests.
  • One middle-school English teacher let students score points for reading books, but forgot to set a cap on the number of points students could earn. Cue one bookworm student reading and turning in the forms for 130 books, earning an A without doing a single regular assignment. Next semester, the syllabus was changed to limit points from reading books.
  • A teacher tells his kindergarten class to put their Pokémon cards away. When he sees one student playing with cards, the student points out that they are Digimon cards. "You got me there."
  • After a school Easter egg hunt, kids take their candy to class and are instructed to not unwrap it until later. The narrator notices one kid who realized the teacher said nothing about eating still-wrapped candy.
  • In 1979, programmable calculators were a new thing. One student programmed all the calculations he'd need for a difficult test into his calculator. The teacher gave him an A "for exploiting this loophole which I will now close."
  • When a school is prevented by district meddling from providing sex education or contraceptives to students, one student starts attaching condoms from the free health clinic to cheap Dum-Dum lollipops with rubber bands, then handing out "snacks" to her classmates and anyone who asks for one. The teachers all turn a conspicuous blind eye.
  • This teacher instructs the class to write a haiku using one of their vocabulary words, but specifically states they are not to end it with the word "refrigerator", which is a popular joke in English-language haiku circles due to having five syllables^note  the classic example being "Haikus are easy/But sometimes they don't make sense/Refrigerator". So one girl writes, "Refrigerator/I circumvented the rule/Ha ha microwave" ("circumvent") being one of their vocabulary words). While the teacher is annoyed by this, she has to admit it was pretty clever.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: invoked As this person admits.
• Malaproper:
  • This teacher. ("I don't think that word means what she thinks it means.")
  • This young camper malapropers the word "facilities" (like in "shower facilities") into "f**ky lights", much to the shock and horror of their camp counselors.
• Mama Bear:
  • This one does her part in the civil rights movement by standing up to an abusive teacher.
  • This one would make the above proud, too.
  • And this one who managed to walk in at just the right moment.
  • This mama responds in kind to a teacher's flipping her child's desk in front of the rest of the class. Said teacher is later fired.
  • When a teacher questions whether or not a student does their own work, this mother responds in an understated manner that still got the teacher's attention.
  • This mama won't let her child serve a detention a second time after they've already served it...especially when said child didn't really deserve the detention and the instigator had thus far gotten off scot-free thanks to being the son of the vice-principal.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: One student wonders what happens if a girl has a baby and they don't know who the mother is.
• A Man Is Always Eager: If a student propositions a TA, the TA is not supposed to accept.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: This mother tries to enrol all twelve of her children at a virtual charter school, which is a problem because the school has to have one learning coach per four children. And to make matters worse, they've been homeschooled all their life, and their mother can't even remember all of her kids' names.
• Mathematician's Answer:
  • "Which tooth did you lose?" ''*holds up tooth* This one!"
  • "When will you be four?" "On my next birthday."
• Mayan Doomsday: This kid's parents believed it.
• Million to One Chance: This first-aid teacher decided to show the class some photos of injuries they'd never encounter in real life, just to see if they could work out the correct treatment. Out of four photos, three of them were ones that happened to either the poster's relatives or her friend's relatives.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: This soccer player isn't even trying to get a foul. He just overextended himself and is a massive Hypochondriac.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher:
  • This teacher has her sociology students, in a university, write down words they use to describe other people. That's the whole lesson. She giggles if any students give "naughty, sweary" words (as she puts it). The submitter takes advantage of this to insult her to her face, with such words as infantile and patronizing, and she just cheers them on for having a big vocabulary.
  • This vice-principal at a high school does an intercom speech regarding students jaywalking on school property... in a style that would be better suited for elementary school students, prompting a wave of raucous laughter from students and teachers alike.
  • This woman who teaches an English class for middle school-aged kids insists on reading the students' assigned books to the students herself, goes on long-winded tangents about her childhood, treats the students like they are much younger than they actually are, and assigns ridiculously simple one-page tests for the students to do, when they are at the age that they should be ready for essays, studying, and otherwise doing their assignments and homework themselves. The students put up with this for two years until the school administrator finally steps in and takes over the class, while the teacher is reassigned to an elementary school class.
  • This one teaches a college-level course that is supposed to teach other people how to teach music classes. Instead, she sits behind the piano and tells them all to sing children's songs. When called out, she basically stops trying to teach altogether.
• Miss Conception: A variation.
  Female Student: *grabs her breasts* Hey, how does milk get in these anyway?
• Mistaken for Dyed: This student had to prove to their substitute teacher that their red hair is natural.
• Mistaken for Racist:
  • "I don't like Tiana. I just don't like her color… I don't really like green."
  • The submitter here stops socializing with an Asian classmate because said classmate has a very bad attitude. The teacher calls the submitter racist when they attempt to explain this fact.
  • This student gets accused of racism over such things as the saying "pot calling the kettle black" and playing the white side at chess against an African-American classmate. Both times, the classmate points out that the student's actions are clearly not racist, the saying is completely out of context and he chose the black side for chess, and is ignored. Finally, the teacher goes to the student's father to complain about their "racist" behavior… and gets read the riot act by a textbook Scary Black Man; the accused student is mixed-race.
  • A new substitute Teacher accuses an older substitute (the submitter) of racism when they are talking to a black student who asks to go to the bathroom and asked "which one are you". The student is one half of a set of twins and the submitter has had a terrible time at telling the two apart despite knowing them for years, and when the new sub goes to the principal to complain the principal tells her she might want to reconsider her career options if she can't learn how to avoid jumping to conclusions.
• Mistaken for Servant: Well, mistaken for teacher in this case. Even by the teacher.
• Mondegreen Gag: Brings a spontaneous performance of "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" to a hilarious halt.
  • The semen floor!
• Moon Logic Puzzle: Employed by this teacher as a hint, after the question itself goes unanswered. It works^note "I'm a gorilla" —> "Me Kong" —> Mekong.
• Moving the Goalposts: This teacher wants her students to donate their money they made from their school newspaper to an animal charity she runs despite the fact the students are planning to use the money to help one of their poorer classmate to go on vacation with them. Refusing to accept this, she tries everything from shaming the poor classmate, to refusing to accept the students all unanimously voting twice and standing by their decision, to outright threatening disciplinary actions. Thankfully, the principal put a stop to that teacher's antics.
• MRS Degree:
  • The basic assumption behind this story.
  • This substitute also seems to assume this about a female student in an engineering class. When the student is blocked from entering the class for the second day in a row, the entire class leaves in disgust until the regular teacher returns. The substitute is noted to have been practically "forced into early retirement" as a result.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • This professor tries to force a military veteran, who only feels comfortable if his back is to a wall, to move forward from the back of the classroom, and won't brook any argument. After the veteran leaves in disgust, one of the students (also leaving in disgust with the professor's behavior) mentions that the veteran's uncle is the dean, to the professor's horror. She resigned for "personal reasons" a week later.
  • In this story, a student fails to recognize his professor and insults him, earning him an extra homework assignment. To the student's credit, he actually does a half-decent job on the assignment. Lesson learned, we hope.
  • This bully is just asking for a fight. (No, literally, he is.) A grade one girl gives it to him.
  • Tried and failed by a student who expected a passing grade in a required-for-graduation course despite not attending a single class or completing a single assignment. "You will give me a passing grade, or my lawyer will be contacting the school."
• Mundane Solution: Sometimes, this is the answer the teacher is looking for.
  • Sometimes, the solution really is that simple. Even better, the student actually gave that answer as a joke.
  • "You are in a burning building. You have a paper clip, a pencil, and a sweat-sock. How do you get out?" The student's solution? Leave by the door. The question doesn't say anything about being trapped in the building. Unlike the previous example, it's evident that the teacher didn't intend this answer, but let it stand anyway.
  • Another one meant as a joke: this student realizes that you can get a pair of skis through any door regardless of how long they are.
  • This one was certainly expected.
  • A group of college students needs to see if a bin is large enough to carry the beverages they're bringing to a Halloween party. Three of them measure the bin, then start calculating the sizes of everything involved and debating the most efficient way to pack the cans. The fourth?
    Student 4: Don't worry; they'll all fit.
    Student 1: Wait, how do you know?
    Student 4: I put the cans in the bin while you were arguing.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Played for laughs in this solution. The teacher gets a bout of in-universe Fridge Logic later on when she wonders how come murder only solves the problem 80% of the time.
• Must Have Nicotine: This driving instructor, who cannot manage a full hour without a smoke, always taking ten minutes out of his hour-long sessions so he can do so. He also insists that the students have their driver's window open at all times, thought by the submitter to be because he's always smoking in his car and doesn't want to fill the vehicle up with smoke. It ends up biting him in the ass when he insists his students have the window open when it's freezing cold and raining heavily, so by the time the session ends the two students from that session are very cold and very wet, and when his bosses find out (about that, and about the unauthorized breaks) they fire him.
• My Beloved Smother:
  • This mother is a little too desperate to make sure that her college-student son's eating.
  • This mother complains about the submitter "traumatizing" her daughter and teaching "how to kill an innocent animal," in the sense that he explained the basic concepts of where certain types of food came from. When the headmaster defends the submitter, the mother screams at the two, threatening to get them fired. She does so by showing up at the house of a board member, only leaving when the board member threatens to call the police, and removes the daughter from school on the grounds that it is "too provocative." She later gets arrested for assault and loses custody. The girl's father is implied to be a much better parent.
  • This mother grounds her son, forces him to attend literally every minute of in-school tutoring possible, calls him a high-school dropout, chews him out because another student smiled at him in greeting, and on and on. Why? Because, due to a quirk in the grading system that registered an incomplete part of a project as a zero, the otherwise straight-A student temporarily has a B in one class. Naturally, this explanation goes in one of the mother's ears and out the other, and she outright says that a B is 'teaching [her] son that failure is okay'. And as they're leaving, she continues to chew him out for 'flunking school' (her actual words).
  • This mother calls her son's university and orders them to tell her exactly which classes her son is enrolled in, or at least give her his login and password so she can look up his class schedule herself. Since the son is a legal adult, and did not list his mother as an approved contact^note (many commenters suspect that was deliberate on the son's part), neither happens. She then threatens to sue the university if her son is in any classes that aren't on the list "we agreed on" ... at which point the poster forwards the call to the university's legal department as per policy.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Two friends come to the realization they were bullies.
  • The substitute teacher in this story is horrified when he realizes his refusal to believe the submitter causes said submitter to suffer a medical emergency that necessitates an ambulance.
• My Greatest Failure: The mother of a student is brought to the point of tears to admit that, despite being able to speak English as a second language perfectly well, she can barely read it... and then she actually does cry when her description of her problem allows her daughter's teacher to immediately diagnose her with dyslexia, and to provide her with dyslexia-friendly material that she can read.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Apart from the submitter, the English teachers at this school in Germany aren't that good at actually speaking English. As a result, when they prepare questions in English to ask some visiting nuns from India, the submitter discovers that the questions are utterly incomprehensible, and the submitter is forced to ad-lib. And to make matters worse, the Indian nuns have thick accents that the submitter isn't familiar with, so the submitter has to partially ad-lib the answers too.
  Basically, I had a conversation with myself.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: This teacher has a burning hatred of cell phones, and at the beginning of the year, makes all students in her class sign a contract stating that they won't have phones in class or risk confiscation of those phones. Pretty soon she sees a New Transfer Student on his phone and makes him sign the contract. He then promptly goes back on his phone. The teacher wheels on him, but the student refuses to hand over his phone, nonchalantly pointing out that contracts signed by minors aren't legally binding. When the principal agrees with the student on this point, the teacher goes ballistic and has to be restrained by security. The teacher would be fired and sent to anger management, while student received a detention for disrespecting his teacher. Not surprisingly, the student would later go to law school.
• Naïve Newcomer: This Japanese student doesn't realize those "friendly" American ads for people who want a late night chat are in fact phone sex lines.
• Never My Fault:
  • This substitute teacher refuses to admit he messed up a high school class's calculus exam by entering the questions incorrectly into the computer with incorrect answers. This resulted in all of the students failing, when the answers the class wrote down were correct and they actually passed the exam. The normal teacher and the principal thankfully intervene and the substitute is fired, while the students get their correct grades. Still not willing to take responsibility, he writes to the local newspaper and school board, accusing the students of cheating the exam by blackmailing the school and demanding their expulsion because according to him, students who are part of a study group leads to gang activity.
  • This PE teacher gets her class to play lacrosse while giving them very little indication of how to play it. When the submitter – playing goalie – is hit badly in the chest with the ball, the teacher shames and blames the submitter for playing without the proper equipment, having made no attempt to tell them this beforehand.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: This teacher gets annoyed at a student for staring at falling snow out the window instead of working, pointing out that nobody else in the class is doing so — turns out this is only because they didn't notice the snow, until the teacher very helpfully pointed it out to them.
• No Indoor Voice: Behold 'The Screamer'. Who is an adult, not a child.
• No Longer with Us: Assumed by this student.
• No Man of Woman Born: A student whose birthing parent has since transitioned to male snarks that he could kill Macbeth, because he was born of a man.
• Noodle Incident:
  • One student has negative thoughts about Montana because his uncle got lost out there and was eventually found naked in a cave. No further details are given.
  • The comments to this post about a science fair gone haywire seem more interested in the lines about an electrical experiment blowing up and someone getting bitten by a goat than in the actual story.
  • “Violins are NOT weapons!”
• No OSHA Compliance: This entire school. During the submitter's time there, it was horrifically overcrowded, with each classroom usually holding around three to four times the amount of students they should and every student funneled through a single pinchpoint between classes. The administrators' response to fire drills is to prepare for them in advance by hiding all of the extra chairs, and having most of the students taught on the school's sports bleachers for the duration of the inspection. The whole thing is just an actual fire away from massive loss of life.
• No Periods, Period: This PE teacher forgot this trope doesn't exist in real life.
  • Some things transcend language barriers.
  • A frequent story: Female student needs to use the restroom, teacher says no, female student blurts out why she needs to use the restroom, horrified/humiliated teacher lets her go.
  • This terrible teacher tried to have a student punished for explaining why she suddenly needed the restroom. At a girls' school. The OP concludes by wondering what that teacher does about her own monthly.
  • Another teacher tried to publicly shame a female student for being late to class by demanding she announce her "excuse" in front of the whole class. He wasn't expecting a list of what one needs to do to when one's period starts in the middle of the night without warning.
    He's never hassled another student like that again — especially the girls.
  • This student, on the other hand, plays it perfectly straight... for good reason.
  • This (male) teacher tried to shame a (female) student for giving her (female) friend unknown items in class by asking if she'd brought enough for everyone, only to be shamed himself when the student nonchalantly asked if he needed a pad or a tampon. The ending implies the teacher learned from this, as when he became principal, he made sure the girls' bathrooms always stocked menstrual supplies.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: A female student was locked out of her dorm, but doesn't have the money to pay a security officer to open it for her. She tries an… alternate method of payment.
  Security Officer: Well, those are very nice. Now, that'll be £5 please.
• Not Listening to Me, Are You?: This student drove a teacher crazy by repeatedly subverting the trope.
• Not Me This Time: This story, a follow-up to this one, involves a series of petty thefts going on around the PE class (and often unusual things like single shoes, pencil cases and not phones or cash). Everyone immediately suspects Problem Girl, who nearly got the submitter expelled in the first story, suspecting it to be yet another one of her many schemes to grab attention, but in the end it turns out to be a completely different student whom nobody really knew; she was stealing people's things and hiding them at her home just to be a Troll. She is eventually busted and everyone's items are returned to their rightful owners.
• Not That Kind of Doctor:
  • This agricultural professor gets accosted by a woman who thinks his doctorate means he knows how to deliver babies.
  • This professor has a PhD, and doesn't miss a beat when a student trips and another student makes a "is there a doctor in the building" joke.
• Not What It Looks Like: In this story, the submitter forgets to put away his spelling list before a test and is accused of cheating. Fortunately for him, the teacher notices he misspelled a word.
• Number of the Beast: These school bus drivers think it's fitting that the route with the craziest kids is numbered '333' – half of 666.
• Obstructive Code of Conduct: Many of the stories show an administrative policy that keeps the victims from defending themselves and lets the guilty get away. It's especially horrific when the official policy is that bullying, no matter how criminal, does not happen unless a teacher sees it. For a full year, the pint-sized terror got away with it because the teachers were expressly forbidden from taking witness statements, because the bully would attack them while the teachers had their backs turned or were elsewhere, and then made it look like he was being attacked when the teachers showed up.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Or something similar, and you have to admit his reason for learning how to do it makes sense.
  • This kid at day-care seems able to use this trope to get on and off a filing cabinet.
• Off the Rails: One student manages to derail a political game by getting people to contribute their money to them without realizing, and eventually dissolves the partnership and keeps all the money for themselves.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Lampshaded here.
• Omniglot: Downplayed, because the person in question "only" speaks three languages, but… "Wait, did you just tell him not to speak Spanish in an English class, in Korean?"
• Once Original, Now Common: This student thinks that Shakespeare is full of cliches, not realizing that he invented most of them. invoked
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: In this story the librarian, who knows a group has booked an A/V room to watch a football game, blithely assures a student awkwardly reporting a group watching "...non-school-related videos" that this is fine but, given the student's consternation, agrees to ask them to turn the noise down. It turns out the student wasn't talking about that group at all, but another cluster watching pornography on a library computer.
• Overly Long Name: In which getting the students to vote on names for some rescued guinea pigs results in one of them being named "McDonnel Douglas F15-E Strike Eagle".
• Overly Preprepared Gag: This gag here.
• Papa Wolf: This dad calmly and epically tore a teacher and vice-principal to shreds when they were bullying his daughter over wearing glasses.
• People's Republic of Tyranny: Invoked by this student.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Someone put up a picture of Ben Franklin on a wall next to other famous scientists with a caption that included the word "scientifical". This person's teacher later added a Post-it saying that it's actually a real word.
• Plot Allergy: This student has a severe intolerance to peppers, unleashing a gastrointestinal nightmare they refer to as 'The Evil'. They also have a teacher who a) doesn't believe that intolerances are real and that anyone who claims to have one is just being picky, and b) believes that all foods should be seasoned with pepper. Add in an overactive gallbladder and some oil-fried wontons, set to mix for an hour, and the results are horrific. The teacher is entirely unrepentant right up until the principal recommends she be fired.
• Pluto Is Expendable: The then-five-year-old submitter in this story is insistent that Pluto is too small to be a planet. A decade or so later, the IAU makes its decision to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status, prompting the submitter's mother to laugh hysterically when she hears the news.
• Political Overcorrectness: You can't say South African! It's racist! You have to say African-American!
• Poor Communication Kills: This professor is Genre Savvy enough to avoid it.
  "Now, if you write something like, say… ‘The National Socialist movement outlawed Jewish business ownership and started a systematic purging of Jews from German economic and social life,’ and the comment in the margin says, ‘Excellent,’ that means I think you have done well, not that what the Nazis did was a good thing. Okay?"
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure:
  • This guy doesn't know who Marilyn Monroe was.
  • Many of these high school students don't know Bohemian Rhapsody.
  • This New Jersey student has to ask who Bon Jovi is. This after learning the song "Livin' On a Prayer".
  • This English teacher was brought in to teach literature so the students would understand references that will be used in college. Unfortunately, the rest of the staff, including the superintendent, suffer from this so badly that they want to spend four years focusing on "the four classics", which doesn't include Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, or Nineteen Eighty-Four. The science teacher, the district's resident Only Sane Man, basically tells the English teacher to run for her sanity.
  • This student wrote a review of The Princess Bride for an English assignment, and was apparently forced to redo it with a different movie because the teacher had never heard of it.
  • This professor thinks Lady Gaga is named "The Gaga Lady." Even better, he only referenced her since he didn't think any of his students were old enough to remember Paula Abdul.
  • This teacher has somehow never heard of Mary Poppins, and is completely flummoxed when a student puts "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" as the answer for an English word that English-speaking people might have trouble spelling, followed by the entire class breaking out into the iconic song.
• Potty Failure:
  • Discussed here. The submitter is an American teacher working in Mexico, and tells a coworker they needed a month for their digestive system to get accustomed to the local food, "even ended up having to throw away a pair of underwear."
  • Happens to a tech member who was already en route to the restroom when the speaker being used for a high school play unexpectedly starts playing music at a ridiculously high volume, scaring the daylights out of everyone.
    "Well, I had to use the bathroom. Had to. It’s a past-tense need now."
• Power Perversion Potential: One class goes into a discussion about what they would do if they could turn invisible. A male student says he would go to the girls' locker room, which is met with immediate revulsion from the rest of the class.
• Preemptive "Shut Up": "Don't you dare say it!"
• Prepositions Are Not to End Sentences With: A textbook case, followed by a textbook retort.
• The Problem with Pen Island: Occurs in this story, which takes place in a Spanish class. The students all have progress sheets that use one- or two-letter codes, one of which is "ME" for mucho efuerzo ("much effort"). Upon explaining to the students the correct Spanish phrase whenever a student is asked to give themselves an "ME", the teacher ends up writing DATE ME ("date" meaning "give yourself") on the board.
• Puppy Love: On the first day of kindergarten: "I met (Boy). I'm going to marry him someday!" "Uh-huh." Twenty years later, they do.
• Putting the "Pal" in Principal: The submitter of this story is divorced by their husband, who remarries a family "friend" within a month, and then their mother dies a mere two months after that, causing the submitter's elementary school-aged daughter to fear for the submitter's safety. The principal of the daughter's school, who is also the submitter's boss, personally escorts the child to the nurse's office to calm down every day before class, and later gives the submitter ingredients for a Thanksgiving dinner.
• Pyromaniac: This science teacher, who makes the best of it.

Tropes R-Z

• Rage Breaking Point: This drunk asshole decides to pick a fight with the submitter, their roommate, to "get these feelings out" because the submitter is "too uptight." The submitter doesn't respond to the drunk's taunts, or even the drunk breaking their phone and laptop... but once the drunk hurts the submitter's kitten, he gets the fight he wanted... along with several broken bones, as the submitter clobbers him with his desk and then keeps beating him while he's down. The kitten was taken to the vet and recovered.
• Rapid-Fire Interrupting: In this story, a nurse repeatedly cuts off a student, chastising her for asking her brother to pick her up from class, assuming that the brother is still in grade school. Once the student is finally able to explain that the brother is not only college-age, but also on spring break, the nurse chastises the student for not saying so sooner.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • "There are some things I never thought I'd have to state at the front of a classroom." Such as "I've never felt 'Bear Grylls.'"
  • In this story, a middle school technology teacher has to utter the sentence "Class, please don’t start cults in the tech lab."
• "Rashomon"-Style: This maths teacher remembers an incident where a student went up to him for help with questions on an exam. The student, however, remembers it differently; she was asking why those questions were marked wrong when they were actually correct. Given the teacher's replies (and that the teacher was using the incident to justify writing that the student "struggles at math" on a reference to university), it's strongly implied that the student is in the right.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: This student consistently tests at the limits of the reading tests given (at both second and third grade, she demonstrates sixth-grade reading capability). Unfortunately, the teacher doesn't realize this is why the student in question is "not improving"—the test doesn't actually cover the grade levels the student is capable of reading at, with sixth-grade level being its limits. (A different test proves the student has eighth-grade level reading skill while in third grade.)
• Really Gets Around: Zeus has this reputation in one classroom, to the point that the teacher calls him the god of (among other things) unfaithful husbands.
• Real Men Wear Pink: This one represents the Lollipop Guild.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: This teacher deliberately puts a question about a topic her class hasn't covered yet on a history test, then gives a 0 to the one student who happened to know the answer already and accuses him of cheating no matter despite all evidence showing that the kid did not. The student's parents and the principal get involved, and when the student's dad finds out what happened, he is furious and lays into the teacher for deliberately giving students questions she knows full well that they won't be able to answer and then failing his son just because he knew the answer already. It turns out the teacher had bullied other students in the past this way and is immediately fired afterward.
  Dad: So, you wrote a question on a topic that you hadn’t taught, expecting everyone to fail to answer, and then you punished the only student that answered? Why did you put that question in the first place? Did you put it intentionally to lower their grades, knowing that the highest grade would be eight? Are you such a bad teacher that you don’t even know what you have taught? Or are you such an a**hole that you feel the need to bully some twelve-year-olds because you know more about history? And since [Student] knows history, you decided to bully him?
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Claiming a fear of needles will not get you out of the blood-sampling assignment in this class. Actually having a physical panic attack will.
  • A driving student mixes up left and right and takes a wrong turn. Instead of reprimanding them, the instructor praises them for executing the turn safely and guides them back to the intended route. Wrong turns can be fixed; unsafe ones cannot.
• Recruiting the Criminal: Well, "criminal" is stretching it in this case, but in this story, a couple of high-schoolers figure out how to exploit security vulnerabilities in the website their school uses for testing to give themselves and their classmates huge scores. The website's technicians are more impressed than annoyed; they enlist the duo's help in fixing the bugs and even end up giving one of them a work experience position.
• Reflexive Response:
  • A student that often gets admonished for chewing gum in class spits out his gum when the teacher shouts his name... just before the teacher actually gives him a compliment.
  • How to counter a series of "no"s.
• Revealing Cover-Up:
  • This umpire's decision to call the mercy rule in a baseball game earlier than allowed^note It was the top of the first inning with the away team leading 12-0; normally the rule cannot be called until after 3 to 5 complete innings ends up inadvertently exposing a massive bribery scandal.
  • This college professor paid another man to teach his classes and was only found out when a student had a question outside of class and asked administration where the nonexistent professor's office was.
  • Another college professor marks all his computing class final papers as 'incomplete' so he can go skiing instead of properly grading them. A student complains because the unfair grade is threatening to cost her a job she had lined up, so administration call the professor to grade them properly... but the professor, more interested in his vacation than his job, simply calls his assistant and tells them to give everybody an A.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: In this story, the submitter's roommate is rich enough to have had a maid do the cleaning at home. When asked to get cleaning supplies for their dorm, the roommate has no idea what constitutes an adequate amount of cleaning supplies and goes way over budget.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: "When is the paper due?" "Midnight." (Hands up if you did this in college.)
• Right Behind Me: A singular bigot of a university student seems determined to start every class with a rant about a hated-by-him group du jour. In this case, he goes after the French. Only this time, the professor actually shows up to hear at least a good chunk of the snarling—and he's French. The bigot is assigned to write 3,000 words about U.S./France relations within two days.
• Rules Lawyer:
  • One student decides to test just how far a math teacher's "As long as you're quiet, you can do whatever you want after the test" rule goes by painting after an exam. Turns out the teacher meant exactly what she said; when another student complains about the submitter painting (cursing in the process), the teacher points out the submitter hasn't broken any rules, but the complaining student has — twice, by both failing to be quiet, and cursing in the classroom.
  • Students were given treats for wearing camo, or red-white-and-blue. One student tried to get a treat by wearing camo underpants. The teacher wasn't impressed.
  • One middle school English teacher allowed students to get extra credit for reading books and turning in a brief form to certify that the book was in fact read, but didn't set a limit on how many points could be earned this way. One little girl decided to have fun with this: She read and turned in the forms for upwards of a hundred and thirty books, and got an "A" in the class without turning in a single regular assignment.
• Running Gag: This student apparently wants a cookie.
• Sadist Teacher:
  • Abusive, too... until the student's mother shows up.
  • This one, among other infractions, forces students who didn't study with their parents for spelling tests to sit in at recess with their heads down, even if they got an 'A' on the exam. The parents of the submitter complain about this behavior—pointing out that it teaches kids to lie—and eventually the teacher is dismissed after a different incident.
  • This teacher consistently failed a student because she believed that "some students should not be given special privileges", despite the student's work being correct. The student (and family) was white/Caucasian, while the community was primarily Hispanic, so the teacher's statement was very thinly-veiled racism. The mother got her children assigned to a different classroom.
  • This first-grade teacher hates the submitter for no apparent reason and punishes them constantly, even when they are not misbehaving. When they don't bring back slips signed by their parents for their "misbehavior", she takes away their recesses, leaves them alone in the room during that time, and threatens to make them sit in the office for the rest of the year if they leave. When the fire alarm goes off one day, the submitter stays put because they're afraid of getting in trouble if they leave, but the teacher runs in minutes later and takes them through a different exit so that no one notices that she left a six-year old all alone (all while praising them for staying in like she asked and giving back their recess). Unfortunately, the teacher ends up getting away with it because the submitter was too afraid to tell their parents until years later, and they still don't know why she treated them horribly.
  • This substitute teacher rips a student's hearing aids out of their ears and stomps on them, because "headphones aren't permitted in class" — despite the student and the entire class telling her they weren't headphones, they were hearing aids. Fortunately, another student (ordered to the principal's office for swearing at the sub over the broken aids) brought the vice-principal to see what was going on; by the end of that day, the substitute had been fired, and the school district was paying to replace those $3000 hearing aids.
  • This one doesn't just excessively punish students for such crimes as "having a nickname" or "being left-handed", she also calls their parents to blame the "sins" of the students on supposedly bad parenting, or in the case of the submitter, staying single after his wife was killed in a car accident. All the students and their families want her gone, as does the principal, but the school district doesn't have cause to fire her... until she deliberately blames a fight on a student who was home sick that day. The district is forced to investigate whether the rest of her recent disciplinary action reports were equally dishonest, and enough are that she's fired the next day.
  • This kindergarten teacher goes so far as to punish the submitter by hitting them with rocks (being careful enough to do it where no security cameras can see). Worst of all, the submitter was too young to realize that the punishment was too extreme, and doesn't tell their parents until years later, by which point, the teacher was retired.
• Sarcasm-Blind: This girl doesn't get it when someone else tries to call her out on her hypocrisy.
• Scare 'Em Straight: This school requests the police do a presentation about the dangers of vaping, which the police do by bringing in an apparent convict whose vape products had been contaminated and killed a young customer. After the presentation, the students look up the "convict" to find out more and... he's just another police officer. The sob story was pure baloney.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: The submitter's father in this story was bullied by another student. Years later, the bully is a Head Teacher of Athletics, and the submitter is a student in his school. So he decides to screw over the submitter's father by signing the submitter up for a multitude of sports (even though he can't play them due to an injury) so that the submitter (and their family) would be on the hook to pay for fees for equipment and uniforms. Thankfully he's found out and then put on administrative leave before being transferred to a different school entirely.
• Scrabble Babble: Blarbleskutch, apparently the sound made by a fish when you take it out of water.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: "I'd still give it to the police."
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: This teacher admonishes a student for having her lunch split between two bags and for using chopsticks to eat it, rather than a fork. She ends up taking that student to the principal over it... only to learn there are no rules about how many bags a student can have their lunch in or what utensils they can eat it with. The teacher ended up fired not long after this incident.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • Here.
  • Also here... Until it's subverted.
  • This college class is needed for a bunch of majors, but on the face of it, seems laughably easy. It isn't long before a number of students start slacking off. Then, when the final exam hits, it's long enough that the students who slacked off are up the creek without a paddle, and three quarters of the class fails.
• Separated by a Common Language: Invoked here.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: In a school situated in an affluent county, these students are absolutely shocked that their teacher didn't like iPads, and didn't have a laptop until college. They wonder what the teacher did to survive, and she of course replies that she played outside.
• Shipper on Deck: "So, basically, a six-year-old scored me a boyfriend." Complete with the "sitting in a tree" chant.
• Shout-Out: While many works are given a Bland-Name Product treatment like "Transforming Robot Franchise" on the Not Always sites the occasional Shout-Out does get through, especially when it's integral to the story. And sometimes even when it's not, like the "Vetinari Points" in the same story as the No Man of Woman Born example above.
• The Show Must Go Wrong:
  • This disastrous science fair. An exhibit about electricity goes awry and sets off the school's fire alarm, destroying several science exhibits in the ensuing commotion; one of the speakers at the fair falls into the school lake and ends up missing her cue to speak in front of the students; the principal's well-meaning attempts to salvage the fair go completely wrong due to her misreading her cue cards and improvising based on what she's read before finishing reading; and someone gets bitten by a goat.
  • The actors in this production of Fiddler on the Roof give it their best, but an errant bat decides to crash the party.
• Single-Biome Planet: This student apparently can't wrap their head around the fact that the Planet of the Apes is not one of these, convinced that it is the only kind of planet that can exist. When asked what sort of planet Earth is, in that case, the student replies that Earth is an Earth planet.^note Of course, for added irony, the Planet of the Apes is also an "Earth" planet.
• A Sinister Clue: Several stories about forcing left-handed students to do everything with their right hand exist on the site, but this one is probably the most ridiculous. Even the headmaster thought it would be "more natural" to tape a pen to the stump of the student's right arm ^note  The submitter had had their right hand amputated when they were a baby than letting them use their perfectly usable left hand.
  • Played with here: the struggling student thinks he has to ask for permission to use his left hand, when the computer teacher just didn't know. As soon as they get him a left-handed mouse, his difficulties using the computer vanish.
  • (I hadn’t realized you could sound pretentious about which hand you operated a computer with!)
• Skewed Priorities: Common enough to warrant their own page.
• Smug Snake:
  • Unaware that the submitter is using their phone to complete an assignment in the form of an animation unlike the other students, a classroom assistant on a power trip very loudly and vocally busts them for supposedly listening to music and "drawing things" instead of doing the assignment and smirks at the submitter as they come up to the teacher's desk. When the teacher explains that she allowed the submitter to complete the assignment this way (and expresses interest in how the app they are using works), the assistant is so humiliated that they begin trying to get themselves transferred to a different class and as far away from the teacher and submitter as possible.
  • A creepy teacher regularly gets away with sexually harassing girls because the principal believes all of the complaints are racism-influenced (the teacher is black). He continues with this attitude even when another teacher overhears him making a sexual comment, still acting smug even after he slaps that teacher for speaking up, right up until the cops arrive and he realizes he's not getting away with it this time - at which point the cops have to drag him to their car kicking and screaming.
• Snipe Hunt: During a wood-working class, the teacher asks a student to fetch a fallopian tube.
• Soapbox Sadie: This "activist" at a high school vocally vouches for a different cause every week, but does very little to support the causes he purportedly stands for and seems to use his "activism" as an excuse to bully and pick fights with people, leaving in a huff when whoever he is talking down to doesn't take the bait.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: These students laugh when a video quiz uses the standard TV censor bleep as part of a fill-in-the-blank exercise, resulting in questions like "Force equals mass times (BLEEP)".
• Space Whale Aesop: Learn math, or someday a psychotic math teacher will kill you. Amusingly, the teacher gives a reasonable excuse for it actually making sense.
  "Son, let me assure you... if there are any jobs in the world likely to cause a psychotic break, high school math teacher is at the top of that list."
• Spy Speak: This teacher mistakenly thinks this is happening when told one of his students is in the clinic. He replies with "The dog barks at midnight."
• Stay in the Kitchen:
  • "The only reason any woman goes to university is to get a husband with an education; they earn more! You don't need a good average, no woman does!" This was said by a woman.
  • "I bet you're still a white-belt because you're just a girl. Girls can't fight." And then he got his ass kicked.
  • In this story, a criminal law class holds an exercise where a student will state two facts and one lie about themselves, to see how well the other students can spot a lie (like a classroom version of To Tell the Truth). One of said students makes his guesses — and inevitably gets them wrong — based entirely on whether the person speaking is a girl (e.g. one female student claiming to love comic books, the submitter claiming to have eight tattoos and then revealing she hates romance novels).
  • This Dumb Jock assumes his female math teacher doesn't know anything about football. She surprises him.
  • A rather troubling example here, where an old substitute teacher actively refuses to let the only girl in a class even enter the classroom, because he thinks it's a boys-only class. The entire rest of the class decides to sit out the class with that girl for the entire two weeks that the substitute is there, and when the normal teacher returns said substitute was forced to retire early by the superintendent and school board.
  • This student in a Human Resources Management class eventually realizes he's digging himself in a hole with his claim that women can't do most jobs, and then asks his female professor to bail him out.
    "Nope. What you've been saying for the last five minutes is a massive HR violation and would get you fired in the real world."
  • This substitute teacher is not only sexist — he tells the girls in the class that they shouldn't bother studying for college and should get married instead, and accuses their female history teacher of being stupid because she does her lessons using computers (which he thinks are only used for entertainment) — but is also racist as well; he claims one Asian student will marry the girl sitting next to him, whom he accuses of being a slut, if she gets pregnant, as Asians are an honorable race. This last part bites him since the "couple" he pointed out are in fact fraternal twins, who not only report him for being sexist and racist, but also for giving advice about college, which is illegal for teachers to do and may get him fired and his teaching license revoked.
  • This woman is given a low grade for her training to become a teacher (which would tank her chances at gaining employment) after she is told she has done a very good job. The logic that the board gives is that since the woman is married, she doesn't need to work, and that they reserve the high grades for single women.
  • It is not advisable to have this attitude when guest lecturing at a girls' school.
    I walked out.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: This teacher does it when he hears his student scream.
• Stealth Insult: This student apologizes to an Indian classmate for stereotyping against Indian people. They say that they shouldn't have assumed that all Indians were so smart. The classmate eventually gets what the student was implying.
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: This teacher hopes that no protesting students get up to mischief while he's on his break. He especially hopes that they don't push that BIG BUTTON over there. That would be terrible.
• Sticky Situation: This story, in which a pair of students have to ask after accidentally supergluing their hands to a table.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: This ADHD student makes up challenges to keep from being bored while taking tests. The substitute overseeing one test comments that their daughter did the same thing, and it cost them a lot of money in psych visits to figure out she was just bored. The student is surprised to learn there are people who don't think that way.
• Streisand Effect: invoked This Christian principal wanted to stop rumors spreading that a married teacher was having an affair with a student's mother... by announcing it to the entire school during the auditorium assembly. The ironic part was that absolutely no one, including the student herself, knew about the affair until the principal mentioned it. As a result, the poor girl was forced to leave school, humiliated by the revelation, and the principal was hated by the whole school for his actions.
• The Stoner: This substitute teacher.
• Stopped Reading Too Soon: In this story, a boy keeps receiving abysmal grades in math, and his grandmother who's a teacher herself accompanies his mother to the parent-teacher conference. She instantly realizes that this and not the below inability to do math is the problem—he only did the problems on the front of the worksheets, not the back.
• Strolling on Jupiter: Even textbooks aren't immune apparently.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Don't play with alkali metals. No, really, don't.
• Sucky School: This school is implied to be one. The story centres around a teacher who pulls the submitter's daughter from a field trip just for taking an interest in snakes and subsequently tried to discriminate against her. But the submitter notes that rather than being fired, the teacher was moved to an administrative position so that she wouldn't be in contact with students, and that this practice is apparently common enough that the school has more administrative staff than teachers. Not surprisingly, the submitter pulled their daughter from that school entirely.
• Summon Bigger Fish: This college professor constantly harassed OP for the minor accomodations she got under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She finally had enough and asked him if she needed to get her father involved ... since her father was also the head of the department and the professor's boss. Amazingly, the professor quit harassing OP immediately.^note (Dad still had a "chat" with the professor, who had a record of complaints from disabled students for pretty much the same reason as the poster's.)
• Sustained Misunderstanding: In a library, one student asks another for her copy of a book, thinking it's actually a library copy. When the second student replies that the book is her own personal copy, the first student seems to think (from that point) that the library gave her that book, or at least that the second student thinks that. The misunderstanding only gets worse from there.
• Take That!: This one, against the petty arguments that occur a lot in the Star Wars fandom. Also proof that a true fan can take on the petty fans any day.
• Talk About That Thing: This teacher uses the (false) excuse of a student not doing work to take said student to the principal's office... to discuss the bullying he's been experiencing, without letting the bullies know he's telling on them.
• Tap on the Head: The KO Punch variant, here:
  Mid-sentence, she tries to shove my regular again, but this time the regular catches the college girl's arm and delivers a powerful right cross to her face, knocking her out cold. The regular watches the drunk college girl drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes, then sits back down on her barstool and turns back to the bar.
• Teacher's Unfavorite Student:
  • The English teacher in this story has a naked disdain for the submitter. She goes out of her way to assign extra homework on days she knows the submitter is busy with extracurriculars, (by her own admission) grades the submitter more harshly than their classmates, offers an extra credit assignment that she knows the submitter won't be able to turn in before the due date, and refers to the submitter with demeaning nicknames such as "The Jock". The submitter gets their revenge by calling her out in their answers to feedback bonus questions during the final exam, and when she brings the submitter to the principal's office in tears, it results in her being forced to begin accepting assignments by email and have her assignments signed off by the department chair. The teacher is fired some years later when, despite being monitored now, she picks another student to use as a punching bag.
  • This piece of work who unfavorably singles the submitter out when they did nothing wrong and there are other students behaving worse. The submitter suspects it's because they're taller than the teacher.
    (But seriously, where are you in life where you have to bully a middle school student to feel empowered?)
• Technologically Blind Elders:
  • This old tenth-grade math teacher is a massive technophobe who doesn't like pocket calculators, let alone computers. So when the school forces him to work with a SmartBoard, he is less than pleased. Eventually, he gets so frustrated with it that he punches it until it breaks, then rips it from the wall and throws it out the third-story window. Later on, when the school decides to add more technology, he decides that's a good time to retire.
  • This possibly senile biology teacher, among other problematic foibles, decides that during the COVID-19 pandemic, he doesn't even want to try online teaching, and gives all his students a 95%.
  • This grandmother:
    “You know what I think? I think all computers in the United States should be shipped to MARS! They are totally worthless. I don’t know how to log in to look at your directory. I only use phones.”
  • This poor student lives with her technophobic grandmother, who has her type her assignments on her typewriter.
  • This professor's old laptop has power issues, so he uses a different machine, then has trouble accessing the site he needs because he refuses to stop double-clicking. When the submitter leaves him, he's trying to use a movie-theatre-style screen as a touchscreen.
• Tempting Fate:
  • After this student complains to mom about the ridiculous number of fire alarms in the dorm (as no one seems to know how to use an oven), she replies, "Maybe it will be better this time." Cue three fire trucks, sirens wailing, headed toward the dorm.
  • It's a theater tradition to say "break a leg" instead of "good luck" because of this trope, but "break a leg" can backfire too.
  • The rulers in this story are supposed to be shatterproof. It doesn't take long for the students to prove they aren't.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Here, in response to a hypothetical question about the use of strips of land to prevent erosion, one student replies "I'd destroy his groin!"
  • This foreign student wanted to ask his teacher if he he could stay overnight for a study session. Unfortunately, what he said was "Can I, uhh... sleep... with you?", but the situation was defused quickly.
  • "I've been drilling him, and he's been drilling me."
  • "I'm actually still relieving myself right now!"
  • The F-word.
  • "I just got 'completely naked'."
  • This doctor on sperm samples — "Oh, these things come in spurts."
  • A teacher when instructing a choir — "Okay, lower lady parts!"
  • This girl about the small intestine — "But there is no way a seven-meter-long thing fits in me!"
  • "I was on drugs…"
  • "You can have all the secs you— WAIT, NO! THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT!"
• There Are No Therapists: It's easier to lock the autistic child in a closet than to get a counselor to teach her appropriate behavior. Not only is her own mother furiously calling anyone who will listen to report them, another Mama Bear who witnesses this "treatment" immediately withdraws her own children and convinces two dozen other families to do the same. The principal and school district do nothing.
• They Just Dont Get It: Can be seen on their own page.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Group poop.
  • This exchange.
  • An unintentional example, thanks to Japanese Ranguage.
  • ... and THEN pee in it!
  • "Know before you go" and other wilderness advice mnemonics all get corrupted this way by a Boy Scout troop of fourth-graders.
• Tomato Surprise: This heavily-soused lady calls a cab in the morning to take her to the liquor store for more wine, and then to a local college for her class. After getting the wine and promising not to drink it in the cab, she decides maybe she's already too drunk to go to class... she might set a bad example for her students!
• Tranquil Fury:
  • One story spells out the trope fairly well, with one student's mother: "Now, my mum is terrifying on the warpath. She doesn't hit, scream, throw things, or anything else like that: she is just nebulously yet definitely terrifying..."
  • Once it's demonstrated first-hand that the fire alarms at a summer camp cannot be heard inside of the bathrooms when the showers are on, this camp director practically has their eyes pop out of their skull in anger, before calmly excusing themselves to chew out an administrator for the poor placement of the alarms.
• Troll:
  • This one escaped the confines of the Internet.
  • This one repeatedly insults another student in an effort to get the second student in trouble. When the second student finally snaps, the first student tattles. But despite the teacher being right there and looking in their direction, the teacher saw nothing.
  • This guy giving a presentation on "Chinese Food".
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: This student, having previously been told "Never write poetry again" when their current Language Arts teacher was judging a poetry jam, doesn't see the point of putting a lot of effort into writing a poem for class, plus is pretty out of it on cold medication. The student doesn't think the completed poem even makes sense, but to their bewilderment they get extra credit for it, as one of the best poems the teacher has ever seen.
• Twin Telepathy: These students, apparently. Their teacher requests that they be moved into separate classes so they can't cheat off each other.
• Two Decades Behind: This high school's "IT" classes seem to cover the very very basics of computing... and by that we mean the students are learning about incredibly simple things such as what a keyboard and mouse are and how to save a word document; such subjects probably wouldn't have been too bad back during the genesis of personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s, but not in the mid-2000s when this story takes place and when most people could easily own a PC. On top of that, the students are required to save their work onto floppy disks, when floppies had long since been mostly supplanted by the compact disc and the then-brand new USB technology by that point in time. Even the teachers find the classes pointless and boring. After an incident involving bored students in one of the classes throwing their chairs around the classroom and out the door (while their teacher gets blasted out of his mind with the alcoholic beverages he brings into class because of how little he cares anymore), the students at the school begin campaigning for a overhaul of their "IT" classes. Fortunately, the faculty listens and by next year, new IT classes that are more with-the-times and teach more useful material have been established.
• Tyop on the Cover: An unfortunate misspelling indeed.
• Ultimate Job Security: This school has more administrative staff than teachers because they get a lot of teachers who can't teach, but who clearly aren't getting fired.
• Understatement: The submitter in this story makes one without realizing it, telling their karate sensei that a fellow student is injured and likely won't come in, saying that they were "limping a little." At the end of the class, the student comes in with a broken leg and a broken arm.
  Sensei: “LIMPING A LITTLE?!”
  Submitter: <realizing their mistake> “The crutches really help with the limping.”
• The Unfavorite: When your parents ignore your birthday, you might be…
• The Unfettered: The submitter's brother in this story is a Pint-Sized Powerhouse soccer player. When an opposing player notorious for cheating behaviour but clever enough to do it when the refs aren't looking gets in his face, he's laid flat, earning the submitter's brother a yellow card. The opposing coach promptly pulls the cheating player, fearing that the submitter's brother has become this trope:
  Player: “C’mon, he’s already got a yellow. I’ll be fine.”
  Coach: (exasperated) “Exactly! He’s already got a yellow! On the next hit, he’s leaving the field, anyway. He has no more reason to hold back! If I put you back on that field, you’re leaving it on a stretcher!”
• Unfortunate Search Results: This history teacher, during a lesson on Victorian England, used Google Images to pull up a picture of Prince Albert for the class... but forgot to turn Safe Search on.
• Ungrateful Bastard: This 2nd-grade student asks the submitter for an answer on a test, and upon receiving it, then asks for the submitter's phone number so he can call his mother and tell her he cheated.
• Unishment: A school with a heavy emphasis on rugby and hockey forces students to play one or the other for their sports credits. Anyone who argues will be made to run laps as punishment, which suits this student just fine.
• Unit Confusion: This apathetic student causes some when the submitter asked them what they answer they got for a question.
  Student: “1.45.”
  Submitter: “1.45 what?”
  Student: *shrugs* “I don’t know. Time.”
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: This girl does it to another group of girls who were infatuated with her.
• The Unsmile: This person's "smile" manages to convince their band director that they're feeling sick.
• Unusual Euphemism: Averted; to the shock of these middle-school students, having your wisdom teeth out is not one for losing your virginity!
• Unwanted Assistance: This teacher notices that a girl is sitting in the library alone every lunchtime, and, failing to consider whether she wants to make friends yet, decides to bring her out of her shell, against her objections. All he manages to do is scare the poor girl, and her mother is forced to intervene on her behalf.
• Uranus Is Showing: This story:
  Submitter: <reading from student's workbook> “It is a well-known fact that vampires used to live on Uranus.”
  Student: <deadpan> “I’m not talking about the planet.”
  Submitter: <starts Corpsing>
• Viewers Are Morons:
  • This teacher unfortunately goes beyond the assumption that students are ignorant, and seems to operate under the assumption that students are stupid.
  • This teacher seems to operate under the same logic, having assumed that none of the students (Germans who are learning English) have ever heard an English word before entering his classroom, and as such throws a fit when a student turns out to know most of the words in a poem without having to look them up as they were reading it.
  • This teacher tries telling her students that negative numbers don't exist, because she doesn't think they could understand that. Naturally, when it turns out they do, rather than praising them for knowing more than she expected, she sends the first student to speak up about it to the principal for "insubordination" (though the student quickly returned). After that incident, the teacher went to the more plausible "We're not covering that yet."
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Where this substitute teacher keeps her phone.
• Waking Non Sequitur: In this story, a teacher tries to catch out a student who is prone to sleeping (through no fault of their own), by asking about the book she slammed onto the student's desk. The student mentioned the first thing that came to mind ("42!"), which had nothing to do with the book being discussed. However, the answer did have everything to do with the book that was slammed down onto the desk...
• Walking Disaster Area: This accident-prone student. The science teacher even has an X Days Since sign in the lab, just for that student.
• Walking Techbane: The submitter, who's prone to blowing out lightbulbs. Apparently It Runs in the Family too — the submitter's father tends to have computers and cleaning appliances break for no explained reason.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: An excellent example of why proper use of commas is essential.
• Waxing Lyrical: Carry on my wayward son.
• What's a Henway?: "What the heck's a 'torial' and why do we need two of them?!"
• Wholesome Crossdresser:
  • This student body voted to allow boys on the cheer team, but also to keep skirted uniforms for everyone on the team instead of switching to a version with shorts. This lasted for two years before the Parent-Teachers Association demanded a skirtless uniform, despite the student body voting in favor of skirts again with an 80% majority. The submitter concludes that years later, he misses the cheer team and having an excuse to wear a skirt.
  • This story has a first-grade boy discover that he likes to wear dresses, and by the end it's treated as just something he does.
• Who's on First?: "That was actually correct? Because I really don't care."
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things: This teacher stopped with bribing jokes after a certain incident.
• With Friends Like These... Who Needs Enemies?: This high school senior is horrified to find that their good friend has entered an ugly tie contest with a tie covered in pictures of the submitter — and wins.
• Womanchild: A kindergartner in this story gets violent and temperamental when he doesn't get a second slice of cake, but when his mother complains over the incident, it becomes evident he gets it from her, as she becomes no less temperamental and violent.
• Worst Aid:
  • Oh boy. A student breaks his arm, and the first thing three people do is physically test it to see how badly it's actually injured. Thankfully not repeated by the nurse, but seriously—a suspected broken arm should not be tested in that manner; doing so can make the injury far worse.
  • This school nurse's procedure for treating one student is very poor indeed.
  • As is this one's. Even worse, the nurse in question isn't too incompetent to see that the finger is very obviously broken, noticing every sign of such, but she still decides to completely ignore them because the submitter wasn't showing enough pain.
  • Not unlike the first story listed, this student breaks their arm on the playground, and every teacher/faculty member they go up to afterward (first a hall monitor, then the secretary, and finally a school nurse) reacts the same exact way: They say "Hmm, it doesn't look broken..." before physically testing the arm, causing the poor kid to scream in pain every time. Fortunately, they didn't appear to cause any further damage to the kid's arm (which their doctor later confirms really was broken; all three are shocked the next day when the student shows up wearing a cast).
• Would Hurt a Child: This gym teacher tries to attack a student because he doesn't play soccer (a sport the teacher loves and fails anyone who doesn't play it) and the teacher thinks he is lazy. Too bad the student was a jiujitsu practitioner who kicks the teacher's ass for trying to grab him. The incident gets the teacher removed from the position of the school's soccer coach.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • Attempted here. It eventually failed because witnesses came forward, and the guy who claimed he was touched got barred from a school trip--the same one he was trying to get the other guy barred from.
  • This charming girl plays this card after repeatedly abusing and threatening a handicapped girl and getting attacked by the aforementioned girl's friend. Thankfully, it didn't work.
  • This horrible girl attempted to get the submitter expelled, perhaps even arrested, for cyberbullying. Thankfully, Problem Girl caused her plot to implode by sending more bullying texts to herself while the submitter had no access to a phone and rushing into the office of the teacher about to punish the submitter. The head teacher apologised profusely and the teacher in question was suspended for mishandling the situation^note he approached the submitter out of the blue, forced her to hand over her phone, refused to explain what she was being accused of, and, from the absence of the messages and her bewilderment, jumped to the conclusion that she'd deleted the messages and was refusing to cooperate. While Problem Girl didn’t officially get punished, Part 2 reveals the backlash of the incident completely destroyed her reputation at the school and nobody trusted her anymore.
• You Are Not Alone: The basis of this story. A transwoman ducks into the girl's locker room to evade some bullies. The gym teacher fends the bullies off, and says that she considers the student one of them, a sentiment shared by the girls in the locker room. Furthermore, she allows her to hide in the room as a refuge should more troubles occur.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
  • This IEP teacher steadfastly believes that the submitter is being "difficult" because she won't put on her PE shoes, in spite of the submitter repeatedly stating and showing that the shoes in question are too small for her. The IEP teacher then states that she is going to call the submitter's mother to take the submitter shoe shopping, and then come back to finish the class, even though there's only twenty minutes to do so, even after the idea is spelled out to her. The teacher then calls the submitter's mother with the same idea.
    Submitter: Let me get this straight... you're going to call my mom while she's at work, pull me out of school during class, and take me to get new shoes, and then COME BACK to FINISH the class? All in 20 minutes?
    IEP Teacher: Yes, exactly!
    Submitter: That's fucking bullshit.
    (Later)
    Mom: Wait... so you want me to take time off work in the middle of the day, pick up my kid, take her to a shoe store so she can get some new PE shoes, and then somehow bring her back to school and sign her in in time to finish the class that, at now, only has 15 minutes left?
    IEP Teacher: Yes, that's all I asked!
    Mom: That's fucking bullshit. (Hangs up)
  • These teachers believe that the submitter is being passive aggressive for forgetting to bring a pencil to his reading class (where he isn't allowed to use the pencil). The utter stupidity of the teachers causes the mother to burst into tears.
    Mom: I'm not crying because my son 'is passive aggressive and needs counseling,' I'm crying because he has to spend ALL DAY SURROUNDED BY YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.
• You Just Ruined the Shot: A variation in this story. When a group of students film a project where one plays a homeless man getting talked to by another person, a passerby comes over and threatens to "smack the stupid right outta" the filmmaker and the other actor for accosting a homeless man and filming him.
• You Keep Using That Word: A young student objects to another person's use of "gay" (as a derogatory term along the lines of "stupid" or "annoying") along these lines. Also here.
• You Never Asked: This teacher violently dragged a student to the principal's office for discipline after he refused to rise and recite the American Pledge of Allegiance with the rest of the class. When the principal does ask why he refused, the student replies that he's English.
• Your Mom: The submitter's response to their teacher's question of: "Who in the world taught you how to do math?!". The funny thing is, the submitter isn't kidding; his mom really did teach the submitter math at the submitter's high school.

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