I was in second grade, it was for reading. I don’t remember what book anymore, but it was age appropriate. I was just reading the wrong thing during reading time.

High school bathroom during lunch. 15 or so guys, handful smoking. Saw a guy making a smiley face on the ceiling with a cigarette lighter. It just leaves a soot mark that wipes away easily.

No sooner do I attempt to do the same thing, the principal walked in and saw me…

“YOU!” he yelled. “You’re going to HQ!” Like he was a cop or something.

Cops came, he said that he wanted me charged with attempted arson. He took the cops to the bathroom. When they came back, the cops were kind of laughing at the principal.

Got charged with criminal damage to property, but it got dropped, because the mark could be wiped off easily.

we were building a snow fort and I was punching a hole into a snow block

next thing I know, a teacher is telling me I have to go inside because I punched a kid in the face

I had to sit in detention, as like a first grader, and have the older kids guide me through it. I was so confused. pretty sure I was crying. no adult helped me, that I can recall.

either this kid hated me and made some shit up, or they were so fucking stupid and enough of a little bitch that they walked right behind and stuck their face where I was repeatedly punching the snow and got hurt without me feeling the impact.

and on that day, my mistrust of authority was born. no amount of insistence would sway them. I must be punished.

When I saw in first grade I was held back for pronunciation problems and in my second time through Math at a 1st grade level I completed a lot of the homework because I remembered math pretty well. My teacher caught me doing this in class and she started flipping through the pages, I had finished about 15 pages of upcoming hw. I got written up and my parents had to come in, I don’t remember a detention because it was 1st grade but it could have happened.

In third grade I was at recess playing with a friend and I lightly tapped him, like a friend tap, on his cheekbones. I remember it being in jest and good faith. He then reported me to the teacher and then the principal. I received a detention for playing with my friend by my friend.

I usually just received detentions for regular things like not doing homework. I guess I was jaded because i got detention for just existing.

Sweet tap-dancing christ, this whole thread. If there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that some teachers are the most petty dictators that cannot tolerate being proven in the wrong, nor can handle having their decision making skills challenged. They’re out there doing real lasting damage to people and their ability to think critically.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go into education, just to displace one of these tyrants.

Sincerely, I’m sorry all of you had to go through any of this. Here’s hoping you have support and find closure.

I ‘won’ both my disciplinary hearings.

Freshman year, I beat a bully so bad his family had to move somewhere he could get PT for his crippled hands.

I showed up to that one with a PD detective, whos sone was also a bullying victim. He threatened charges against the Vice principal for aiding and abetting the assault of a minor/ potential attempted murder which i had successfully defended my friend from. (Bully had said he was going to choke out my friend until he was retarded- and was in the process of doing so when jumped him) i had told the VP himself the timing and specificity of the threat, hence the possible charge.

This turned the meeting pretty quickly into one about school negligence and culpability, and triggered policy changes that included mandatory dismissal of staff for failure to intervene. We also got a SRO, whos first statement was that he was a resource for students, especially if staff was failing in their duty to them, and that he was not another disciplinarian. (To his credit, and before the ACAB crew, who i agree with, he did live up to that- guy was genuinely a good guy got a bunch of certs in child counciling and advocacy. In his 20 year tenure, according to his recent obituary, he arrested 1 student- for a rape on school premises that he stopped. )

That Vps carreer ended a couple months after, partially at the hands of the SRO. He punched a student who wouldnt give up his hat. Unfortunately, it was a football player, who knocked him out with his helmet. The SRO watched the whole thing, told the players to get to the field. VP left the school handcuffed to a stretcher.

Junior year I had a sillier one. My GF and I were in AP calc. The teacher gave me a blank copy of the midterm, to copy her near perfect exam as a study guide for the upcoming final. I was doing so in study hall, when the english teacher grabbed both off my desk, accusing me of cheating. This led to another disciplinary hearing, scheduled for Friday afternoon. On Thursday I talked with the math teacher, who told me she had been told she was not allowed to attend, and her ‘input was not nescessary’.

At the time, I had a job filming for public access TV, mostly school sports, but also the school committee meetings. So, after the meeting that evening, I spoke with the superintendent of the school system, and expressed my concerns.

Next day, I go into the meeting alone, and sit down, facing the principal, flanked by the VP and the english teacher, feeling pretty screwed. The VP (not the original one from last story, but his replacement is the same disciplinarian role ) starts things off yelling about how bad cheating is, how ive ruined my academic career, and can kiss college goodbye.

He has just hit his stride when the door opens. The Superintendent walks in, along with one of my favorite teachers.

First words out of the Superintendents mouth are “what the fuck is wrong with you? go take a walk, before you have an aneurism!” And he sends the VP out.

They then take a seat on either side of me, clearly marking his side in the adversarial meeting, and asks the english teacher exactly what she saw. he the asks the principal to pass the tests in question over. He then asks her mockingly, "do you know what a midterm is? They were 4 months ago! and these papers clearly say midterm in very large letters. Look, this one (holding up my GFs) even has a grade on top, a 98%, end a unicorn sticker, well done Lauren! (my gfs name, also the math teacher was a total geek, and famous for putting cutesy stickers on good grades)

He the continues on, “still, cheating is a serious accusation.” Switching his attention the principal, "I suppose you did a thorough investigation before this meeting. Have you discussed this with the math teacher? Did she say there was any credit to be gained from this assignment?, by the way where is she?
At this point the principal knows hes in a bit of trouble and is looking down at the table and barely responding. The superintendent goes on for a minute about how its wasnt very sporting of them to have 3 people gaming up on me and not to even have the math teacher there to defend my side.

At that point, he turns to me, and asks how I felt about the ambush. And I start off with “well, I dont really get how we got here in the first place- you have to be incredibly fucking myopic…” (I was going to say to assume copying the answers from one page that says exam to another must always be cheating ) but i was interrupted by the principal who seeing an out, had jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over, and was pointing at me, yelling

“HE SWORE! HE SWORE! HE FUCKING SWORE” he looked like a giant toddler, and the superintendent and my teacher burst out laughing at him. They laughed for an uncomfortably long time. Until he calmed down and sheepishly returned to his seat.

Finally, it was the art teacher who spoke up. He goes “well, rules are rules, you did swear. The maximum penalty for a first time for that is a 1 day suspension, do you have anything important tomorrow?” I shake my head no, and he says “good, why dont you take a three day weekend while we all consider what to do about this whole debacle.” He looks over at the superintendent, who nods, and we leave the room.

On monday i found out the decision had been made to remove me from the english class, with the art teacher allowing me to hang in his room. I was offered my 95 grade average to be entered in as my score for all future assignments, getting me out of both a final exam and a 10 page paper, which suited me fine.

Later I found out the english teacher got demoted back to teaching middle school. The principal was apparently put on their version of double secret probation, with a caution that one more complaint and he was out, and the VPs contract was up already not renewed (i can only assume both of those were final straw descisiond, although the school system generally tried to stagger each schools leadership turnovers, and the principal only had a year left before he was leaving )

One of our teachers said you have to learn some things by rote because “if you throw enough mud at a wall, eventually some of it sticks”. We were investigating this for science on the (windowless) back wall of the gym and we all got detention. We had got quite a lot of brown smudging but very partial and blotchy coverage.

4th Grade - my friends and I used to fold up pieces of paper into ‘guns’ that we would play with. They basically looked like a big L. It was right when zero tolerance policies started to get implemented, so of course I got 3 days suspension for my paper. That same year another kid got the same for an action figure gun.

11th Grade - in computer science class all of our exams were written only. I finished my test early, then went to a computer to work on my coding project for that week. The teacher I guess first thought I was cheating on the test, so called me to the front to make an example of me. When she learned I had already turned in my test she changed the charge to using the school computers for non school activities. When I demonstrated that I was working on my project she changed again to say that using the computer was against the agreement we all signed at the start of the year regarding appropriate use of the school computers. I asked to see what part of the agreement I had violated, and she pulled out the sheet to show me. When that didn’t back her up she again changed her approach, this time writing me up for Saturday detention for “not bringing my book to class”. I went to the Vice Principal to contest the entire issue, but he just told me to go to the detention anyway. I ended up spending an hour cleaning marker off of the walls.

In 6th grade, I got in trouble for putting gum in my mouth before the bell rang. It was maybe 15 seconds before the bell. The idiot teacher called my mom in to discuss it.

I beat a teacher at a typing test (speed, which is raw speed with mistakes subtracted; aka WPM, words per minute). He said it wasn’t fair that I found a “better” way. Right fingers on Shift and Enter (and maybe right thumb on Space), and left hand doing the rest of the work. He said that’s not the right way to type, even though he couldn’t type as fast as me. So he took me to the office and said I cheated on the typing test. To pass the class, he made me learn the “normal” way of typing. So I did, and I beat him again, this time with office staff watching.

This was in the early to mid-1990s. No computers, no phones, no Google. I don’t envy today’s kids.

I was in 5th grade during George W. Bush’s stint as governor of Texas in the 90s. He did a bunch of “education reform” there that was the predecessor of the No Child Left Behind Act he championed as President. I was in a relatively good school but despite that, we were learning about nouns and verbs for the first time that year.

The teacher was an idiot and we would get dozens of worksheets that covered the same topic. For the nouns and verbs section, we would read through a paragraph and had to write all the nouns in one column and all the verbs in the other column. When the test came, it was the same as the worksheets but the teacher changed the columns to verb/noun, which I didn’t read and I got a 0 for the test.

I went to the teacher and told her that it was an honest mistake and showed her how I aced all the other assignments, so I obviously understood the concept. She was insistent though that I got a zero despite that. However, because of the new Bush educational policies, students had the right to retake any assignment for the minimum passing grade.


So I asked her to retake the test, she said ok, and I crossed out Noun and wrote Verb and and same to Verb to Noun and handed it back. She immediately wrote another large zero on the page because I couldn’t change that part and I lost recess privileges for the rest of the week for being “rude”.

Revenge came though several weeks later when she was hanging black plastic sheeting on the suspended ceiling to create a makeshift planetarium in corner of the room. She was on a tall ladder and when she was putting up the last sheet, she lost her balance and fell through the sheeting and off the ladder and broke her arm. She was crying out for someone to help her but me and the other kids just let her struggle for a few minutes before she freed herself by tearing through the plastic sheet like Ace Ventura escaping from the rhino, crying.

I sang the pledge of allegiance to the tune of happy birthday, started multiple food fights, sucked the ink out of a gel pen, and taped library books together to make bigger books.

ate shit once

Being literally a few seconds late to sit down when the bell rang and getting suspended by the racist teacher.