When I was in high school one lunchtime I was sitting there reading sci fi by myself like a total nerd and some other kids were sitting nearby and they started smoking cigarettes, which was against the rules. Anyway a teacher saw them just as the lunch period ended and the teacher said: “all right You, You, You, and You stay behind!” And the teacher pointed at me, because I was nearby. I was like: wow, I haven’t been in trouble before! I was writing a lot of short fiction and poetry at the time so I thought it’d be a good experience. So I sat there and listened for a while as the teacher berated the kids. But eventually I realized I’d gotten all I was gonna get from this teacher’s unimaginative lecture, so I stood up and was like: I gotta go to class. The teacher glared at me and was gonna go off, but the other kids were cool, they were like nah he wasn’t a part of this. The teacher looked at me, looked at my sci fi book, looked at me again, then realized yeah these kids would never have anything to do with this dork. So they let me run off to class.

Myself and a friend decided to share a cigarette in the toilets one day. This was fairly common practice way back then. You’d get someone to look out and they would cough if a teacher was coming. It wasn’t flawless but it has a high success rate.

So we’re utterly destroying one cigarette between the two of us as quickly as we can and there’s a cough followed by loud banging on the door. We’re rumbled.

“OPEN UP. I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE”

So we open the door, sheepishly.

“WHAT WERE YOU BOYS DOING IN THERE?”

Now we’re both confused and look at each other. I timidly reply:

“Smoking, sir”

“WELL I HOPE THAT’S ALL YOU WERE DOING”

and the man stormed off. We couldn’t believe our luck. Smoking apparently A-OK once you’re not being gay.

Barred from the school computers for Responsible disclosure of a security laps in the school computers.

Turned out of you open Encyclopaedia Britannica application and select the open document window it brings up the regular windows open file dialogue window. If you pressed the up folder enough times you went from your local profile to the folder on the server that contained every users files and you had full read right privileges in all student folders.

I reported it to the it desk and was barred from using the school computers for a month for hacking the school computers.

When the letter was sent home about it dad wanted to know what I had done so I told him and he thought, yea you did the right thing I’ll call the principal and get this sorted.

Dad use to be the treasurer of the parent teacher committee so he knew the school admin quite well. My teacher for computer studies got a note from the principal the next day that I was permitted to use the computers again.

Grade 5 or 6, teacher was introducing a project about the wisdom inherent in proverbs (not biblical, traditional sayings). In discussion I opined there was no wisdom in contradictions like “look before you leap” versus “he who hesitates is lost” and “many hands make light work” versus “too many cooks spoil the broth”, the wisdom was knowing which proverb applies to the situation at hand. Sent to the principal and received a beating with a paddle for being a disruptive smart aleck.

The teacher had a favorite, who sat behind me. Anytime she tried to talk to me I got in trouble. I literally got detention once where I had to write out the same run on sentence over and over again 75 times about how sorry I was for being disruptive in class, all because this girl leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder while the teacher was looking at me. I never spoke a word to her, I didn’t even look back at her. Teacher didn’t care, it was somehow my fault. I remember my hand cramping up writing the sentence and after the first however many minutes my writing started deteriorating so the teacher made me redo sentences. It was a very painful and miserable experience, I could barely hold the pencil by the end. Thinking about it now, that teacher was a sadist and had a very creepy fixation on that girl.

Went to a pretty strict school with uniform/dresscode in Asia. One of the rules is we’re not allowed to dye our hair. One of my high school teachers was convinced that all Asians have black hair, so my hair that’s very slightly brown under sunlight cannot be natural. It’s so subtly brown that most people would say I have black hair. It’s just that he saw me under the sun with my friends who had blacker hair than me that he assumed I died my hair.

At first he gave me a written warning. I thought it was stupid so I ignored it. The next time I had his class, he pulled me aside and told me he was gonna send me home cos I still hadn’t dyed my hair back to black. I’d never really been in trouble at school so I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do. Since he was teaching a class, he sent me to the teachers lounge and find someone there and tell them I’m supposed to be sent home. Luckily the teacher I found there was someone who liked me and when I told her about the issue she just laughed and said that’s stupid. She let me hang out with her until the end of the period so I didn’t have to deal with the other teacher until she got a chance to talk to him.

I got in trouble at multiple points for reading books during recess/bringing them to lunch. For some reason, it made some teachers really upset. It wasn’t even that they were school library books - just that I wasn’t supposed to have books at recess or something.

What was really ridiculous was the troubled teen facility/alternative “school” I went to (as a punishment for tattling on my mom for all of her drugs/attempting to kill myself because she was a psycho bitch I couldn’t escape from).

They would punish me for things that “happened” at home, so she would tell them that I cussed/fought my sister/did drugs.

The absolutely insane thing though: I wanted to watch Fight Club. My mom had friends over and was drinking, I asked her permission to watch the movie, she gave me permission, I watched the movie (I had read the book so many times, fell in love with it as a silly teenager.)

The next day, she was angry that I had taken advantage of her being drunk by tricking her into letting me watch the movie. (Big thing with her - getting punished retroactively because she didn’t mean to give me permission for something.)

So I was sent to school with my “stoplights” being all red.

We had to come up with “goals” that we would work on to improve ourselves at the school. I genuinely thought I had done something wrong, so I made my goal “not to ask my mother for permission to do things when she is drinking.”

This lead to consequences. We had a meeting, where I was told saying things like that was dangerous, implied my mom was an alcoholic (the bitch had DUIs!!! My siblings and I used to show off how good our lungs were by starting the car because it had a fucking breathalyzer), and that I could be taken away and put in foster care.

I lost my “progress” in my levels, and spent a week in the red with no privileges - because my mom was a fucking oxy popping lush.

This is the “funny” story there. What they did in retaliation to my allegations of sexual abuse was far worse.

Grade one detention. Yelling at another kid for reading over my shoulder during quiet time after I quietly, repeatedly asked him to stop.

I’m in my 30’s now and you can still get FUCKED Mrs. Williams. You can eat a dick too, Patrick. Get your own fucking book.

Inadvertently walked in on two teachers discussing their affair in junior high school.

My choir teacher, at the time a young woman in her twenties, was fucking a history teacher in his 40’s who was married to another teacher at the same school. I walked into the room where all the sheet music was stored to get something and they were talking, at which point he immediately turned to me and snarled: “Do you mind?!” I didn’t even hear what they were saying, but in hindsight, the circumstances make it obvious.

I was just a teenager and not expecting this weird moment, was stunned and just backed out of the room. I didn’t put it all together until later because I couldn’t imagine a young woman screwing what I saw as an old man at the time.

I got called in to the office later that day and she’d made an allegation that I’d harassed her and I was going to be suspended, but really, she and history teacher concocted this to cover for themselves in case it got out.

It was an important early lesson in distrusting authority.

One of the kids in my grade just happened to be the son of my teacher at the time. He did not like me because the girl he liked was giving me attention. We’ll, one day he caught us holding hands (hard-core, I know) so he went to his mom, my teacher, and said I punched him in the face and had been bullying him. I never ever bullied anyone, especially him, and certainly never hit him or anything of the sort. Not once. But it was my word against his and obviously my teacher sided with her son. I had to stay after school everyday for something like 2 weeks. She never treated me the same again. I’m still salty about that. He totally got me. That ginger motherfucker. Jesse, if you’re out there somewhere, fuck you.

I got thrown out of class for borrowing a pencil.

Didn’t understand then, don’t understand now.

I had just learned how to shoot a rubber band with one hand at school in 5th grade. 1998ish. Thought it was the coolest thing. I had this teacher everyone hated. She was so self centered and mean.

So from the back of the class, I shot a tiny rubber band toward her. She unfortunately saw me out of the corner of her eye. She immediately went into hysterics and I was sent out of class to wait in the office. My mother was called to pick me up. This teacher was crying into the arms of the principle like some victim of some heinous act.

My mom found out that the teacher was one of her best friends from Catholic school. Was outraged at me. I had no idea wtf they were so mad about. I’ve shot tons of rubber bands in class and never before had they gone so nuts about it. I only find out later that they had told my mother I had pretended to shoot a gun at my teacher.

My mother threw me down two flights of stairs and held me on the wall by my neck, feet dangling. She hissed and spit in my face, telling me how embarrassed she was and how horrible I am. And to this day she doesn’t believe I was shooting a fucking rubber band like kids fucking do.

Asking questions and wanting to learn more.

3rd grade. Teacher sent me and my best friend to the office with a note for being too disruptive (we were snickering a lot). I was used to getting into trouble, but he was petrified and shaking. I felt bad for him, so I told him I would take care of it.

I tossed the note over the wall, then we went off and played in the yard for the rest of the morning.

In the afternoon, there was school assembly. The two of us were called out by name and were told our parents would be called to come collect us. My mother showed up and couldn’t stop laughing at the silliness of it all.

My friend, he never talked to me again.

Didn’t get in trouble, but did get called after class and chastised for arguing with my science teacher that her description that current electricity was useful and static electricity was useless had an exception of dusters, aren’t those useful? She was furious that I questioned her lesson and told me to accept it or shut up next time. Pretty universally hated teacher.