The lives of teachers are anything but dull. Having to deal with students all day long is guaranteed to bring a whole lot of interesting situations. Sometimes they're funny, and sometimes they're the exact opposite... Here are the darkest things a student has done, according to real teachers:
#1 Fish Boy
Our school had a selective mute kid that graduated last year. Kids were calling him "fish boy." It turns out he was buying fish and ending them in various ways on Instagram based on people's requests in the comments. He was not a student of mine so I can't really elaborate. All I remember is the school found out because he brought a fish to school.
#2 Big Red Flag
I don’t know if there is any research to back this up but it seems like the people who are obsessed with ending animals are the ones who end up as criminals. I went to high school in a rural area and many of my classmates were hunters. There was one kid three years behind me and he hunted, but he was obsessed with hunting to a weirdly extreme level. He ended up threatening the school one day and he never came back.
#3 Losing A Brother
The kid seemed down so I asked him to please tell me what was wrong... "Not today, but when you're ready," he said. It was his last class of the day and he promised he would. At the end of the year, he told me his brother passed away. He said he thought about the same many times but always remembered that he had made me a promise. I made him promise to call me if he ever thought he might again and he promised me again. He's doing amazingly well and is about to graduate from college.
#4 Branded With An "A"
I taught welding and metal sculpture at the high school level for a year. One morning, one of my students (a quiet, awkward, but really nice young man) came into class and asked me for a bandage. I asked him what for and he replied that it was for a burn (class hadn’t started yet for the day). He showed me and it was a fresh second-degree burn that was already blistering. It was in the shape of an “A”.
Some kids from a different class of mine had swiped a small metal letter “A” from one of my supply bins, heated it with a lighter, and then branded this kid on the morning school bus. He had let the kids do it because he really wanted to fit in. He didn’t have many friends and these kids had seemed cool because they were always acting out. As a mandatory reporter, I reported it. The police got involved. Other than that I have no idea what else happened.
#5 Dual Meanings
I gave my first-grade class a writing prompt asking what they would do if they could be the principal. One student wrote, "If I was principal, I would take everyone to the gym and end them." He also wasn't a very good speller, so it actually said, "I would take everyone to the gym and mend them." I'm not really sure which one he really meant to say.
#6 An Active Imagination
I did this when I was three years old at daycare! My dad had just started traveling a lot for work and someone must have asked where he was. I said he was no longer with us. My mother was mortified when she picked me up and I went to a child psychologist for a month. Turns out, three-year-old me just wasn’t grasping that dad wasn’t dead, he was just in Topeka, Kansas.
#7 A Call For Attention
God, I did something weird at 11. I faked a note from my parents and everything to keep the lie up. The teacher ended up super concerned and called my mom herself. I’m not a psychopath now, and I have no idea what was going through my head at the time... I was just bored I guess. Kids do stupid things to feel wanted and accepted. So do adults.
#8 The Hit List
As a sixth-grader, I was on a hit list. The boy who composed the list was known for his odd behavior and spontaneous meltdowns in school, so I took it seriously when a friend told me about it. I reported it during counseling with my dad and they told me he would get the help he needed, and ever since the meltdown stories have ceased. Now, he seems like any other, if not loud, student.
#9 Young Psycho
I had a student casually tell me about how he pulled the eyes out of his rabbit's head. He explained how there was carnage everywhere. This was my first day working as a supply teacher at that school, and my first conversation with the student. I later brought it up to support staff and they were shocked he mentioned it to me. Apparently, he ended his rabbit because his mom loved it more than she loved him. The boy was now in foster care, as his mother was unstable. He shared a lot of really dark stuff with me that day.
#10 A Sad Situation
My students had to write their addresses for an assignment, but this fourth-grade girl didn't know hers. Another student asked me, "Do you know where the so-and-so motel is? She lives there!" It really broke my heart, as this girl was so young and innocent, and didn't really understand how unfortunate her living situation was. She proudly Googled the motel and found her address. It was in a really low-income part of town.
#11 Saved By The Scream
Not a teacher, but there was a guy in my class who was trying to hurt himself during a class. My friend and I were trying to talk to him out of it without telling the teacher because were scared he would get in trouble (we were 13). I screamed and I guess it scared him and he stopped. He was expelled the following year for drawing sensitive comics about the teachers and the students.
#12 Algebra Drama
I teach an algebra class and I was explaining how (in our city at least) your address tells you how far you are from the central streets like a Cartesian coordinate system. A girl, who happens to be my daughter's friend, volunteered to let me graph her address. Three months later, a boy got expelled for threatening the school. He had her address and had written threats to kidnap her from her house. He got the address from that class.
#13 Dirty Grandpa
Not a teacher, but I did do a lot of volunteer work with little kids. One of the fifth-grade boys was caught grabbing random girls and trying to pull them into the supply closet to try to kiss them. He was even caught trying to grab their butts. He would put his hand on their seat as they started to sit down. When we finally got to talk to his parents, it turned out his grandpa was teaching him these things. The weirdest part was when we questioned the grandpa about it, his response was: "Who cares, they're just little girls."
#14 Just Like Wind River
I was teaching in a tiny community. 13-year-olds. This kid's uncle (also a teacher) pulled her aside and she started bawling. She said her teenage brother died in a Skidoo accident. We found out a week later that he was basically almost lifeless and left for dead by a gang of teenagers. He froze to death. That place was all sorts of messed up. She turned out okay.
#15 A Twisted Mind
My first year of teaching was the worst year. On the first day of school, I was getting to know the kids by asking them random questions and I asked this one boy what he wanted to be when he grows up. He replied, "It doesn't matter, I'm going to end up in prison, just like my parents." From there, things got progressively worse. He was hearing voices and always threatening to hurt other staff or students. He was hitting his head on walls or windows when frustrated. He came back from spring break and told me the voices told him to end a cat he found.
#16 Aggressive Behavior
I saw a couple of kids walking down the hallway. One ended up behind another, and for no reason at all, he punched the other one in the head as hard as he could. I immediately called him over and asked why he did it. He immediately acted like he had no idea what I was talking about. If I hadn't seen him do it I'd probably have believed it he was so convincing.
I reminded him there are cameras and then he admitted he did it just because he wanted to. No remorse, no reason, no regret. I had multiple other incidents like that with him throughout the year. I worked in a low-income high needs school then and tried my best not to judge my students but it was weird to honestly believe this 14-year-old was going to seriously injure or end someone one day.
#17 Seen Some Stuff
I actually had a year where kids were doing personal narratives and sharing them with the class. They knew in advance of choosing their story that they'd be sharing with the class. One kid told the story of her dad ending her mom and then himself, which she woke up to on Christmas morning. Another talked about defending her brother in court for beating her dad within an inch of his life when he found out the dad was hurting her. The next told about fleeing the cartels after his dad ended one of them to protect him and seeking asylum in America. Let me tell you—kids have seen some STUFF.
#18 The Note
My grandfather was a band director. I was taking a trumpet lesson with him after school when another teacher walked in and handed my grandfather a note he found from a student I didn’t really know. My grandfather left and I went home. After talking to him later, he talked with the student and the counselor. Eventually, they got him the help he needed.
#19 Too Forward
Not a teacher but in my fifth-grade class, this autistic kid that had a crush on this girl decided to make his move. They sat on the same table in English, so the autistic kid stood up on top of the table and took his pants down for the girl and for everyone in the whole classroom to see... The kid got suspended and surprisingly the girl didn't leave the school but she was crying of embarrassment.
#20 Putting On A Show
There was a severely autistic kid in my elementary school who was about three years older than me. Twice at different times, he stood up during assemblies, asked the principal if he could say something, and he would profess his love to one of the girls in his class. He'd then pull down his pants. In front of the whole school.
Fourth- and fifth-grade me was super upset by it and it would feel sick to my stomach for the rest of the day each time it happened. He also would walk up to her at recess and grab her and kiss her. This poor girl was so kind to him in spite of it all. Never made fun of him, never said anything. I sincerely hope she wasn't too ruined by it all because it must have been awful and traumatizing for her.
#21 No Justice
I had a student in my class as a sophomore. Every morning, she would come in and chat in the morning. One day, out of the blue, it stopped. In fact, she wasn’t at school at all anymore. Fast forward three months, she showed up and looked...broken. I asked her what was going on. After quite a bit of hesitation, she told me that she went to a party and couldn’t remember a thing about the previous night. A couple of weeks later, she found out she was pregnant.
#22 What A Creep
Not a teacher, but when I was in high school, a guy in my English class asked me out. I wasn’t into him but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said that I wasn’t really looking to date anyone. Every day for the rest of the semester, he sat behind me in class and would describe in vivid detail the ways he was going to end me. One example of this was him cutting my legs off and dragging me behind his car. Someone told me that he waited for me to leave school one day, but I always stayed several hours late at school for speech and debate practice and theater rehearsal.
#23 A Troubled Child
Had a kindergartener smash a glass measuring cup to the point that blood was everywhere. We ended up getting him enrolled in a full day hospitalization program that combined therapy and schooling. I’ve heard great things about it, but his family moved to another city the following year. I think about him often, I really hope he got some help because he was a charming and intelligent child but was very troubled.
#24 That's Messed Up
In my high school, a senior got a girl pregnant. He came into the school beaming with pride when their daughter was born. I look back now and cannot believe that the cops were never involved. Nope, it was just the secret everyone knew and only whispered about. To my knowledge, the guy doesn't have Facebook or any social media. Think super poor small town in Texas. A lot of the people I went to school with there have zero social media presence. I honestly never knew the girl's name. I was pretty disgusted at her parents for being totally okay and accepting of the situation. They weren't upset at all.
#25 The Evil Drawing
I gave the kids a fun little drawing activity. I gave them a coloring sheet of a house—they were to color it in and write in the appropriate name of each room. Eric drew two people naked and floating in the living room ceiling. One of them was dead while the other had a look of shock on her face. The criminals were standing to the side. "What's this a picture of, Eric?" Eric started happily waving and clapping his hands. "The bad men who turned my parents into ghosts. Look! I'm taking a bath up in the bathroom."
#26 The Hyper-Religious Guy
This happened around ten years ago, so the details escape me now. I had this one guy in freshman university English. He was vocal about being Christian and tried to steer almost every conversation towards faith and whatnot. Pretty overbearing about it, sometimes. One day, at the end of class, I noticed that someone had left their notebook behind on their desk. I figured I had better make sure it got back to them, so I looked for a name. Nothing on the outside, so I opened it up.
There were all these explicit stories about violence, dominance, degradation, humiliation, etc, written in the first person. Some really disturbing stuff. After flipping through it, I finally found the owner's name. You guessed it. The hyper-religious guy. I didn't know what, if anything, I should do about it, so I just left it and noped out of there. Nothing was ever said about it.
#27 The Fairy Tale
I asked my students to write a narrative fairy tale using common literary archetypes (which I had extensively taught). I had a girl write a story about a young girl whose mother repeatedly sold her for demons to use. Mom needed magic potions but the demons would only take the young girl's secrets as payment for the potions. Eventually, a hunting party found the young girl and rescued her. After a long search, they returned her to her King of a father and she became a princess. Later, I learned that my young author had spent two years in foster care while they tried to find her father. She left that part out of her fairy tale.
#28 Uncomfortable Laughter
We had a motivational speaker come my senior year. This one girl, S, was always extremely quiet. I think the assembly was held to cover some self-defense stuff, I don't honestly remember. He said something around the lines of, "Remember, if you ever think your life is in danger, get help." S started laughing hysterically; like, everyone started staring in total confusion. She couldn't stop and they removed her from the assembly so the speaker could finish.
#29 A Ghost To Memory
Three or four months into the school year, morning meetings revealed one of the girls in one of my classes was found and saved by a teacher, but we never saw her again. It pains me that I don't even remember which student she was. No face, nothing. No idea. Almost like she never existed, and deep in the back of my heart is a tiny scrap of self-blame. I know it wasn't my fault; I was new, the kids' names were impossible for me to remember on that scale, and some kids just blend in. But still, I wish I could go back, find her, remember her, love her. Now, even though thank God she survived, she's just a ghost to my memory.
#30 Future Surgeon?
Not a teacher, but I remember in the third grade, a kid at recess would spend the whole period locating different bugs to dissect them with his hands. Nice enough guy aside from that, but it always made me feel uneasy seeing him do that with such intrigue on a daily basis. I hope he became a surgeon or something and not a serial killer.
#31 A Teacher's Warning
When I was still in college, I was shadowing in a room with students with severe behavior problems. They were around eight to nine years old. One student looked me in the eyes and said, "The voices in my head are telling me to end you." The teacher in charge motioned for me to move away and then told me to leave for the day because he would do it. She had just gotten back from having a broken clavicle.
#32 A New Year Surprise
I am a seventh-grade teacher. Shortly after Christmas, I had a student in my class call in a threat one day. He made the call while skipping class to make an unauthorized bathroom break with a few other students. He thought he was being smart by making the call over the net through a VPN. We went on lockdown for the day, local police brought out dogs to sniff. It was chaos all day.
Somehow, the call was traced. Since it was a school threat, DHS got involved. They traced the call through the network and routed it back to him, at least. The kid was already on probation and just had his ankle monitor taken off. Last I heard, his father was refusing to post bail for him. He may still be sitting in the JDC.
#33 Malicious Tendencies
One of my kids smiled while pushing a child down the steps of the playground. He also would kill any bug he’d come across, even squeezing the worms we got for them. After speaking to the parents, they admitted to him running down a sidewalk and straight-up stomping on a frog. We quickly acted and thankfully after a couple of months of empathy practice he was fine. It was one of my best accomplishments to date!
#34 A True Troublemaker
We had a kid who climbed the railing of the longest staircase in the building and kept threatened to jump because he wanted to end it all. He ran from the police when they came and ran across a busy street without looking or stopping for cars and nearly died. He was back at school the next day like nothing happened. I quit soon after.
#35 Karate Kid
Karate teacher here. Before class one day, I saw a kid messing around with a girl's chest gear. I told the nosey kid to drop it. He did. The girl put it on mildly irritated. Later on in class, the kid broke this girl's ribs. I checked her chest guard. He had broken every soft plate in her gear. He had tampered with it. He admitted it with a smile. I asked him why he did it and he said, "She refused to give me her email."
#36 The Darndest Things
Not a teacher, but when I was in the fourth grade, we had to write sentences using spelling words. One day, I made all of my sentences about my dad having been arrested and put in jail. No such thing ever really happened, and my dad was actually fairly well known in the community as a scientist who made lots of TV appearances. My teacher was even a friend of my dad’s and lived down the street. God knows what kind of rumors I sparked.
#37 Keeping A Balance
A student shared a Google Slide with me (randomly) detailing a bunch of horrible things that had happened to him, including abuse, family conflicts, mental health struggles, you name it. We had a great relationship and I let him get away with quite a lot behaviorally, but I also reined it in when I had to. I miss him, and I hope this quarantine isn't ruining their life. I feel the same about a lot of my students.
#38 Don't Mess With Drills
A bunch of the kids was watching an enormous drill bore a huge hole in a very large metal piece. Think pipe fixture size. The chips came out as a continuous piece, but very, very large and thick. They were all hunched over in a group watching. One kid had curly hair, and the chip caught his hair. The force of the chip even twirled the kid around, and eventually, his skin gave. It was horrible.
#39 Senseless Violence
I taught public speaking at a college in the Chicago area. The first speech topic was a moment that changed your life. The class was diverse and many stories of overcoming or helping family members in the old country, but the one that got me (and everyone) was the kid who held his friend in his dying moments after a stray bullet hit him while walking down the street.
#40 Exploiting Kindness
A girl was going through a lot. She unpromptedly told me that her older brother died in Iraq recently and that that was why she was having such a rough time. I told all her teachers so they knew it was a thing to be aware of. I was super nice to her and supportive as well. Eventually, I told the counselor and he called home to ask if the family needed anything. Turns out, she has never had a brother.
#41 Gathering The Courage
A former student of mine was always "the quiet one" in class. I taught her for four years and I spent a large amount of time trying to get her to open up and contribute to class as her written work was exceptional. Seven years after graduation, she emailed to apologize for being quiet and that she didn't want me to think they were stuck up. She was being emotionally abused by a family member the whole time and she was too afraid to speak out.
#42 A Little Girl's Mind
A little girl in class would constantly talk about death and dead things. Everything she wrote about and discussed revolved around it. I had a meeting with the mother who said a few things. The first was that her daughter would ask her to stop alongside the road to look at dead animals. Second, she made the comment that she never left her alone with her father (that's all she said, but why would she say that?). No idea what happened after that.
#43 The Deadpan Delivery
I came back to school after a month off for illness. When I came back, one of my delightful 12-year-olds asked me: "Were you off because you had cancer?" I was very taken aback (I knew they had been told it was non-serious), so I asked her why she asked that. "Because I thought it would be really funny if you were dying of cancer." Deadpan. Small smile at the crease of her lips. Amusement in her eyes. I shuddered and walked away.
#44 All For The Art
We were reading treasure island at the time and had a project to make our own pirate maps. We used markers and crinkled the paper a bit to make it look more realistic. I sat next to this kid and looked over to see him letting his real blood drop onto his map. I casually raised my hand and when the teacher got closer I pointed subtlety at the kid. She pulled him out of class and I'm not sure what happened next. Probably a call to child protective services.
#45 Oh, Preschoolers
I work in a preschool. One preschooler one day was running around the classroom, not listening to us. We told him to join the class for circle time, and he said when he grew up he was going to come back and destroy the school. Another time, a different preschooler wouldn’t come inside from the playground for a nap. I went outside to bring him in and he climbed to the top of the castle and called me a bad word no less than 13 times.
#46 Locked Away
One of the girls I went to middle school with ended the old man her mom was a caregiver of for $300, a new pair of rollerblades, and the permission to continue being with her 17-year-old boyfriend. Her mom was a real piece of work. She used to threaten her and her brother all the time. She gets out of jail soon.
#47 Tooth Extraction
A nine-year-old ripped out an adult tooth then spit in my face. Then he jumped me. I was his 1:1; he’d already been removed from our classroom for attacking other students with his chair so we were in the hall attempting any kind of learning. I worked in a behavior school and a ton of crazy stuff happened, this was really up there.
#48 A Disturbing Story
In my creative writing club, we got a story written by an elementary school kid where a man climbs through her window, ties her to a chair, and then leaves. Nothing really bad happens in the story, but we were all kind of weirded out by it, so we showed it to the club's sponsor teacher. To my knowledge, nothing ever came of it, but I heard that after that year the club had a new policy to follow up on potentially worrying stories "like that one where the girl was tied up."
#49 Hacker Hurter
I once had a "hacker" in my coding camps. He was 12, and he was having fun running shutdown commands on other people's computers. When I asked him what he felt was the consequence of his behavior, he looked at me and said, "I had to go be suspended for sticking my last teacher with a pencil." We worked it out but it was definitely a dark moment.
#50 Uh, Duh
I obviously don't remember this but according to my mom, when I was in kindergarten, my parents were called to see the teachers because I had made a drawing with some animals, but then painted the whole page black. The teachers started freaking out thinking something was wrong with me, but no one bothered to ask me the reasoning behind it. After the meeting, they ended up asking me why I had painted the whole drawing black and I very calmly replied, "Because it was night time, duh."
