When it comes to teaching, the job is never simply teaching. Whether it be technical difficulties, crazy parents, or chaotic student behavior, there are a lot of situations that teachers have to deal with day to day that go beyond grading late essays and marking students tardy. The Blue and White interviewed teachers from around campus to learn more about the underbelly of teaching, and give teachers a chance to share some of their wildest experiences from their careers. So without further ado, here are the five best stories we received.
- Submitted by an anonymous Art Teacher
I think the craziest parent story I have was one that happened while I was working in a middle school many years ago. I had to make a call home to a parent because their child was misbehaving in class. At first they believed me, but then they went and spoke to their child about it and somehow their child convinced them that someone else misbehaved and that I got them mistaken! They were so adamant that the child (and then therefore the parent) actually accused another student BY NAME.
I was absolutely baffled by this because both of the students were as visually different as can be! They had different skin tones, height, voices, eye colors, clothing styles, everything! Even their hair was different (one student had brown hair and the other had firetruck red hair)! There was absolutely no way they could have been confused.
Even after informing the parent of this they did not believe it at all. The craziest thing was that they were so unconvinced that they actually reached out to the mother of the other student, accused her child of being guilty of the misbehavior, and somehow managed to convince her to make her child write an apology letter to me and the school! For something that they didn’t even do???
To this day I still have no idea how they managed to do that, it was wild.
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- Submitted by an anonymous Art Teacher
In my class there seems to be a general trend of students trying to eat classroom materials?
I had one student legitimately and honestly ask me for one good reason why he shouldn’t eat marker ink. It took me a few minutes to reply because I was in shock about how genuine he was.
Another time, I had a student who took some clay (which he was not supposed to use) and claimed he licked it so he didn’t have to put it back. When I asked him to clarify (out of disbelief), he reasserted himself. Loudly. In front of his whole class. He confidently and enthusiastically admitted that he had licked two-year-old charcoal-covered Sculpey clay. To this day, I don’t know if he actually did or if he was just lying to play with the clay, but either way, everyone in the class now knew he was either willing to lick dirt OR publicly admit he licked dirt just to play with some clay.
- Submitted by Senior english teacher, Mrs. Lewis
My second year of teaching, I was at an “alternative school” for students who had been removed from regular schools due to behavior or learning disabilities. I was shiny and just out of the new teacher wrapper. I would decorate my room for each holiday, making everything magical for my 6th grade students. So this was right when computers were starting to enter the classroom and there was a newspaper app on my desktop. Every week I would put the students’ work, spelling/vocab words, any announcements I had for the week. It was called Lewis News and had all this cute clip art that matched what we were doing that week along with birthdays and fun little global holidays like National Ice Cream Day, etc….it was just to keep students organized and parents informed. So jump ahead a couple of weeks and my admin pulls me into the office. She proceeds to ask me about Lewis News. I explain all the things to her and she’s just nodding. She asks about the pictures I put on it. I tell her it’s just various clip art I’ve used from the computer. The pictures pertain to what we’re doing in class. All this time she’s nodding slowly trying to understand the words coming out of my mouth and then she leans back in her chair.
“So where do the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse come into your curriculum?”
I become a gawking fish. I open my mouth and then close it. Open, close, open, close, before saying, “I’m sorry, the what?”
“You put one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse on your sheet.” She is very serious.
“I have not one clue as to what you are referring to.” I am sitting there completely baffled. I worked so hard on those sheets. The school didn’t have a copier and my mom was copying them at her job. Why wasn’t I being praised?
She slides a copy of my newsletter across the table at me. I look at it. She taps one long blood red acrylic nail on the clip art on the top right hand corner, smirking like she’s caught me doing something naughty. I follow the accusatory finger.
February first is National Canadian Mounted Police Day and she in fact is pointing at a drawing of a Mountie.
I slowly look up at her.
“Well?” she shot out at me.
“That’s a Canadian Mounted Policeman.”
She swivels the paper around to take a closer look and slowly looks up. She still looks a bit confused.
I lean over and point to the gigantic Maple leaf in the background of this man in uniform sitting on a horse.
“You may go. And Ms. Lewis, next time make better decisions.”
Now it was my turn to slowly nod as I turned and left the room.
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- Submitted by an anonymous English Teacher
In 2021 students returned back to school (this was not at Apopka). It was December of 2021, when I was on my planning period, I saw students standing and dancing on the lunch tables, singing and flashing hundreds of dollars around for anyone to see. No teachers were around except for me and I told them to get down and asked why it would even be smart to flash that amount of money around (it was probably 1000 dollars or more.) The students told me that the administration walked right by them and didn’t say anything. I didn’t see any administration around at all, actually. I then told them in a VERY firm voice to get down and put their money away before I had to raise my voice. They still didn’t listen. I then had to raise my voice, in which the students did finally come down, still flashing their money and walked away saying “ain’t no one going to steal from us.” Later on, I had heard that the same students had all of their money stolen by other students and that the students who had their money stolen were trying to press charges on the perpetrators. Guess they didn’t heed my warning.
- Submitted by Mr. Peters
I have a student who picks up garbage on his way to and from school every day. One morning he went to put some items in my recycling bin and I noticed right away it was an empty beer bottle. “I’m like, seriously, you’re going to put an empty beer bottle in MY recycling bin!”
He said “Yeah.”
I just shook my head and told him to put it in my garbage can and bury it with some of the trash he collected.
As shown by these stories, teachers have to grapple with issues other than low pay and working during their free time. So next time you want to yell about your teacher putting in the wrong grade, or accidentally marking you absent, show some sympathy for your educators. You never know what crazy story they might have to tell about that day.
