Whether you were a class clown or a teacher's pet, you never know when your educator might turn on you. Unfortunately for these students, they had to face the brunt of their teacher's madness. They were disciplined in ways that honestly should have gotten the teachers suspended, or maybe even expelled. These teachers went overboard when a simple detention wouldve sufficed. Content has been edited for clarity.
No Breakfast For Tiffany
“I went to school with a girl named Tiffany who was not good looking, had bad hygiene, and wore clothes that were far too old for her (not too old like provocative, but like grandma clothes).
As it turns out her family was very poor. She lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with her mother and 8 members of her extended family. Her mother, a Target cashier, was the only source of income for the whole household.
How do I know this? Because one day I left my backpack in chorus class and went back to retrieve it. My chorus teacher was sitting there with the popular kids telling them all of this stuff about Tiffany. And no, it wasn’t in a ‘Hey guys you need to lay off, her situation is difficult’ type of way, it was a ‘Hey let’s laugh at how pathetic this is!’ type of way.”
You Callin’ Me A Liar?
“My 6th grade math teacher didn’t believe my mom signed my homework sheet because the signature was messy. In all reality, my mom did sign it but was in a hurry. My teacher wanted to give me detention for a ‘fake signature’ but I insisted she call my mom. My mom told the teacher she did sign it but was in a hurry.
The teacher called my mom a liar and gave me detention anyways. As a high strung 4.0 student who had never been in trouble at school, this was such an ordeal for me.
She was a bully, and she pulled stuff like this with other students.
Forget you, Mrs. Cooper.”
Oh, So That’s The Reason
“The class was learning about the legal system and doing a mock trial. The case involved a girl being assaulted. The student who was picked to play the girl, coincidentally, had been a victim in real life.
She felt it was going to be too draining on her and tried to get out of the role. The teacher wanted an explanation but she wasn’t willing to share, she was just saying it was very private. It was not clicking in the teacher’s head why a girl may have very private reasons not to play an assault victim in front of a class. She kept on trying and finally the teacher raised his voice and said ‘You’re holding up this project for the entire class for no apparent reason. WHY is this such an issue?’
The whole class was looking at her at this point when she said she had been a victim and started crying.
As far as I know the teacher didn’t face repercussions, but the project was changed.”
Suspension Over A Shirt?
“My father died early in the morning of the first day back at school for the year. He had been sick for a few months and most of my summer vacation was spent visiting him at the hospital. At the end of the previous school year the school decided to change the school uniform. I went back to school on the second day and was called up to the vice principals office because I didn’t have the new shirt (they knew my father had died the previous day). I was told if I didn’t have the right shirt tomorrow I would be suspended. I had to scrape together the money and take a bus to the store to get the shirt that day because my mom was dealing with enough stuff and I didn’t want to add to it. That was the day I stopped caring about school and it was a real turning point (for the worse) in my life. I was an A student before then. I was 15 and it blew up my world for quite a lot of years. There was a lot going on, not just dealing with school and of course his death, but the loss of income and his family deciding we weren’t worth knowing. Basically I started drinking a bit and went ‘punk’ which worried my mum a fair bit. I grew out of it and got back on track eventually, but forget that school.”
Tormented Year After Year
“I once had a friend of mine die. I was not told properly. They announced it over the freaking intercom after pulling the students who knew him out of classes. It was a gruesome death. I was then reprimanded for grieving. Somehow they missed the fact that I was his neighbor but got his other neighbors?
To give you some background, I was in a 6th grade individual learning plan when I was only in 2nd grade, yet I was held back to stay with students my age. As a result I was completely cut off from my education and forced back into material I considered beyond elementary and a waste of my time, as I had begun basic algebra at that point, so I was already not enthused to be in school.
Then I was constantly terrorized by teachers from 3rd to 10th grade.
Turns out when you’re supposed to skip 3-4 grades and you don’t, and you ‘learn’ to count and add for 7 years, you just sort of don’t want to do any work, then they are offended you won’t pay attention. And then they’re more offended you don’t need them to do well on the material. And even more offended when you don’t like them for being upset at you when you both wish you weren’t there.
It was a huge farce partially at the fault of myself and my parents where the staff from 3rd to 10th or so would have killed me if they could have legally. I was supposed to skip but no child left behind left no incentive to keep me on an individual learning plan if they could just barrage me until I got a perfect score (which they didn’t need to).
I’m also (now known to be likely borderline autistic) adhd and was heavily mistreated for crying and or displaying any type of emotional outburst associated with it including laughter (inappropriate or appropriate) and crying was something they used as an excuse to get me out of the room anytime they wanted since they could easily make me cry.
I am a unique case in that I was told I had rights by my parents and I was a frighteningly advanced kid. It made everyone involved very mad that I wouldn’t let them push me around as much as they wanted to. I wasn’t an angel by any means, but I was a fairly well behaved kid.
I was once sent to the office for reading and then later sent to the office by the same teacher for not reading. They legitimately always had at least one teacher sometimes all teachers a year who just hated me being around.
I had no opportunities other than public school, so my education was a nightmare. I was the actual touted case many people said no child left behind would hurt. And it did. It caused me tremendous pain.”
May I Have This Dance?
“I was chosen for a dance competition in school in 3rd grade. Since it was a girls school and I was not very thin, I was playing the boy for a couple dance number. After a week of practice I was enjoying myself and the teacher had taken money from us for costumes. One morning my dance partner didn’t stop by to get me for practice. Assuming she was absent I asked my teacher to let me go to practice. Because of this I was almost 15 minutes late. I ran my way to the room only to see some other girl dancing with my partner. I apologized to my teacher for being late. She pulled me out of the practice room and told me they had taken someone else. I apologized again and tried to explain the situation. She got frustrated and told me they wanted someone better looking and thrust my money into my hand. I ran and sobbed my way to my classroom where my teacher told me to quiet down or leave class. It was one of the most painful memories of my childhood.
Later I found out the teacher had replaced me with her niece and I was a stand in, an unaware stand in, so that practice wouldn’t be interrupted.”
Refusing To Listen
“When I was in 9th grade my dad punched me in the face and left a bruise. I wore sunglasses to school to hide it. In the middle of one class, the teacher was yelling at me from the front of the room to take them off. I asked if we could speak in the hallway and she kept yelling at me. I took them off and everyone was shocked and focused on me the rest of the class – exactly what I was trying to avoid. The day ended when my dad showed up at the school and explained I was ‘troubled’ and he was taking me out early for counseling. He ended up dropping me off at a hospital and ‘Baker Acting’ me and left me there for 2-3 months until I was released to my mom’s care. Went through a lot, which the school never helped out with, but I ended up a better person in the end.”
“She Told My Mother That I Had A Devil In Me”
“In the early ’90s I was diagnosed with ADHD, put on Ritalin, and also lived in the deep south in Mobile, Alabama. The Ritalin made me itch and made me feel like things were ‘crawling’ on me. I started pulling out my eyelashes, clumps of hair (basically what junkies do). I mean I was just a kid and I didn’t realize I was being weird or my behavior was troublesome.
I was always getting in trouble — all the time. I was in the principal’s office every day, many parent-teacher meetings, etc.
But this one teacher, she made me feel terrible. She’d take me out in the hall and make me ‘pray to Jesus’ to ‘forgive me’ for my behavior. One day when my mom came to pick me up from school she told my mother that I had the devil in me.
It made me feel so freaking awful. I was like 6 or 7 — I thought they gave me pills because I was stupid and now I’m being told I’m evil and have a devil in me.
The Nurse Gave Her What She Had Coming
“One of my teachers had a bit of a breakdown, and her screaming caused one of my classmates to have an epileptic fit. However, the teacher thought he was faking it and stood over him screaming at him to get up. Whilst we were all aware of his condition, he was still going through diagnosis but the school gave us training on what to do when he had an episode. We started clearing the tables and chairs around him so he wouldn’t hurt himself, and someone ran off to get the school nurse (the teacher lunged at her as she tried to leave the room and knocked her into a filing cabinet but she managed to get out and get the nurse). Luckily the nurse at my school was awesome and as soon as the teacher started screaming at her she replied with a quick backhand and the teacher stormed out of the room.”
Stop Making That Stupid Face!
“One time in high school, we had a substitute teacher who was the hard-nosed type. She was giving a rant about how strict she was, then she looked at the middle eastern kid and yelled ‘And you! Quit making that stupid face at me!’
The kid said ‘what face?’ Then the sub said ‘I’m going to count to 3, and if you’re still making that face you’re going to the front office.’
Then she counted to 3 and sent the kid away because of course, that was just his face. 20 minutes later the kid returned to class with the principal. Then the principal said ‘Mrs. Hardnose, may I have a word with you?’
Then I heard a few racial slurs from the hallway. We all just talked until class ended and never saw that sub again.”
To Good To Be True
“In 7th grade, we had a group project to create a magazine. Our group’s magazine was supposed to be animal themed, with articles being written by animals, for animals. I was assigned to write a poem.
Now, I’ve always been a good reader, and a decent writer, and I wasn’t bad at poetry either. On top of this, my father had commissioned a painting with the ‘Clock of Life’ poem on it around the time I was born. I grew up loving the painting, and the poem.
I took inspiration from that poem. A theme of time running out, that’s all. And I wrote a good poem. It was done days before the due date. But I forgot our animal theme. On the day it was due, I quickly adjusted ‘man’ to mammal and such changes. It really messed with the meter, but it was done.
Now, my painting went to another student, our ‘editor’, and he compiled the magazine before turning it in, so it was a week or more before the next step.
My teacher pulled me out of class into the hallway. He told me he knew I had copied the poem, and that I would get a zero. I protested my innocence, of course. He said he knew it wasn’t mine because it was ‘too good’ for a student to write. Tearfully, I still told him I wrote it. He said that if I insisted, he would find where I copied it from, and give me a zero and get me in trouble when he did. This sounded fine to me since there was nothing to find (and I really wanted to get away from being yelled at).
When grades came out, I learned he given me a zero on the poem anyway. In addition, the ‘magazine’ was returned to the editor, not the individual contributors, so I never got my poem back. I can’t even remember the words now, but this was one of the traumatic points in my childhood that taught me not to listen to authority.
Later, in high school, I wrote a journal entry for another English teacher about the experience. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she shared the original teacher’s last name. She happened to be married to a history teacher of that name. When she graded my journal, she apologized to me, and insisted she was of no relation to the original teacher. Which was kinda weird, but it did feel nice to have some acknowledgement of how messed up the situation had been.”
Seriously I Can’t See
“I asked my 6th grade science teacher if he could switch my seat to the front of the room because I was having trouble seeing the board (I wear glasses and just have terrible eyesight) and he decided for some reason that I had an ulterior motive for wanting to be in the front of the room. To punish me for trying to ‘pull one over on him’, he moved me to the very back of the room for the rest of the year where I could not see the board at all so I learned nothing that year. To make matter worse, we didn’t have textbooks, everything was put up on the board.”
Detention For Self Defense
“I went to school in the ’70s and early ’80s, and I can’t count how many teachers and admin staff were obsessed with ‘control’ and ‘order.’ Anything that a student did that might somehow reflect badly on anyone in authority, whether it be a teacher, a library staff member, a secretary in the front office, heck, even the darn janitor was crushed as quickly and completely as possible.
What annoyed me was how they dealt with fights. They just gave detention or ISS to both kids without doing any kind of investigation and that just ticked me off. I didn’t get into too many fights, and in fact I started zero. I even ended a few, I’ll tell you that.
One kid, Carlo, just took a disliking to me for reasons that I will never know. He came after me in the hallway after Bio one day and let’s just say it didn’t turn out too well for him, but I used just enough force to stop it. I didn’t go after him, I stopped him from hurting me.
And the Vice Principal/Dean of Discipline wanted to give me two weeks detention. I argued for an hour that I was defending myself and did nothing wrong. I wasn’t going to stand there and let Carlo whale on me for no reason. I wasn’t going to be physically harmed, forget that.
What got me was they just didn’t care to investigate. There were like sixty witnesses. All they had to do was ask, ‘What happened here?’
‘Dan was walking to his locker. Carlo hit him from behind.’ End of story. But they just don’t want to have to justify punishing one kid over another to the first kid’s parents. And this was PUBLIC school, it wasn’t like our parents were paying tuition or anything.”
“Some People Just Deserve To Die Lonely, Miserable And Forgotten”
“My second grade teacher was doing an arts and crafts thing for Father’s Day. We had to make a paperclip out of some materials with the shape of a mouse cut out of felt. She said to start at the sides but me being the enthusiastic ‘idiot’ that I was cut the shape from the middle. Instead of saying you should have started at the side, she took everything away from me for ‘wasting’ felt, and said I could not make anything. So I had to come and home tell my mom we did nothing for Father’s Day which was unusual as we did something for both Mother’s and Father’s Day each year. She found out from some of the other parents that they had made something in class and I confessed when confronted with it. My mother was mortified hearing how my teacher treated me.
The teacher had an issue with me all year, and to this day I still despise that woman. Instead of using my mistake as a teaching moment she turned it into a horrible memory that I carry to this day even though it is quite silly in the grand scheme of things. In my life many people have wronged me, and I rarely hold a grudge but what she did to a small 7-8 year old boy who made a dumb mistake and how she treated me that year, will stay with me for life. In the end it did give me a valuable lesson, never ever punish a kid for harmless mistakes which can be used as teaching moments instead. That and some people just deserve to die lonely, miserable and forgotten by everyone.”
You’re Going To Eat The Brownie And Like It!
“In first grade, I didn’t want to eat a brownie that a classmate had brought in for their birthday. My teacher decided that this was incredibly rude and that I wasn’t allowed to go outside for recess until I ate the brownie. When she wasn’t looking, I wrapped it in a napkin and placed it carefully in the garbage can. She noticed, took it out of trash, unwrapped it, and still made me eat it.”
The Box
“My 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Hannah, would bully this kid that obviously had serious behavioral/family issues. She was not at all sympathetic to him and literally made him sit in a cubicle desk the entire day that she called ‘The Box.’
It was so infuriating and humiliating to watch. She also once told me she was going to nail my ears to the wall, so I reported her. I hated her so much and I felt really bad for the kid that she really scapegoated. Hope he’s doing well today.”
It’s My Birthday I’ll Eat Candy If I Want To!
“High school French class. It was my birthday and the teacher gave me this small bag of candy and a cute note. I thought it was really thoughtful because you don’t really expect teachers to give a care about your birthday in high school. I thanked her, popped a piece of candy in my mouth, and promptly got a detention for eating in her classroom. I was shocked and nearly cried because it was my first detention ever. Everyone else was just as surprised and started arguing with her but that witch wouldn’t budge.
And that’s my story of how I got my first ever detention by eating a piece of candy the teacher gave me on my birthday.”