Teachers of Internet–What was your “Oh fuck that’s impressive but I still have to punish the kid” moment?

My husband used to work in after school care. One time he saw two kids starting to fight in the sandpit. He headed over to try to calm them down, but while he was on his way, one kid ran at the other, who just calmly flipped the first kid over his head like a textbook martial arts move. My husband said he had to stop himself from shouting ‘Wow! Great job!’

Obligatory not me but I was there.

Background: my principal was like mid fifties and always wearing suits. (Christian high school ayyyy). He also had a lazy eye and a pot belly. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

We have spirit week and one of those days is twin day. So one kid decides to have a fucking mad lad day and dress up as our principal. Bonus points: he was the only kid at school with a lazy eye.

So this little punk shows up in a suit, a pillow stuffed underneath his shirt for the pot belly, and just calmly sat at his desk. My principal (also doubling as math teacher) was turned doing problems on the board. He turns back, sees this punk ass kid, turns back to the board, swallows the laugh, and turns back saying “better be glad I don’t beat kids. Detention.”

Punk kid served detention still in his twin suit, pillow gut and all.

In a school I used to work in (as a NET in asia) there was a kid who was frequently in trouble but at his core was a good kid. He was always late/failing exams/not doing homework or having arguments with teachers over stuff. He only argued if he genuinely felt the teacher was in the wrong (at times they were) however he was a genuine and funny kid and just lacked motivation.

He was also kinda picked on by a group of boys in his class. Now as an English teacher I assigned the kids into groups and asked them to write a song/rap/poem that they could perform for the class in English.

This kid decided it was his chance to destroy the guys in his class picking on him. He whipped out a rap that wrecked them which included two lines “….. get all the chicks, but its hard to please with their tiny dicks”.

I had to punish him but god damn I was impressed!

I teach a tech certification class here for a local non-profit.

Just a week or so ago I was walking the students through using Task Scheduler in Windows when my phone started to blow up with emails.

Turns out one of the students created a dozen scheduled tasks to send me an email every five minutes.

Title: CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS

Body: CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS CATS …….

You get the picture.

Needless to say, his punishment came in the form of a scheduled task running as a service on his PC that randomly ejects the optical drive at different intervals.

He has not figured out why this is happening yet, and it’s forcing him to learn how to troubleshoot an issue, so I see it as a win.

I was the punished student. Here we have some little stick (about 3 cm long and 5mm diameter) firecrackers that if you scratch them to rough surface it will create a little cracking sound. I invented a magnificent way to let them explode, put the firecrackers below a stone then fricking stomp it, literally the sound was like a flat tire and actuallu a bit deafening.

I try it outside my class, the principal was walking by, the whole school heard it, every eyes were on me. The principal immediately drag me to his office, threatening me to call the police (i was underage and firecrackers should only be used with adult supervision) and he did make a phonecall, i started crying my tears out begging him not to call the police. Few years later i realized that he was calling his family in his local language and dialect.