From what I’m told, teaching is equal parts rewarding and forehead-slapping. I’ve always marveled at the endless patience that educators display, especially during those facepalm-worthy moments that make you wonder what’s going on in students’ heads. Inspired by a viral thread started by u/12345burrito on Reddit, teachers from around the globe came forward to spill the tea on some truly baffling classroom exchanges.
Here are 28 times students said or did something so outrageously clueless, that it left their teachers wondering if they were being pranked. Were they live on the set of Impractical Jokers with hidden cameras all over the place? From wildly incorrect test answers to bizarre questions that defy reason, these tales from the chalkboard front lines will have you rolling your eyes and chuckling in solidarity.
1. One of my 16 year old students asked, while starting a multiple choice test, if it mattered what letter he chose. I just stared at him. Sometimes there are no words.
2. Watching a video about dinosaurs. A 13 yo asks ‘how did they get video of real dinosaurs if they are all dead?’ Same girl also wanted to know how Mayans communicated with each other if they had no cell phones or ‘wall phones’ as she called them. Yeah. And my evaluation and raises depend on these kids.
3. “Are mermaids real?” followed shortly by “I don’t believe in dinosaurs.” She was 16.
4. How can I type lowercase ‘a’? All I have in my keyboard are capital letters.
5. Not a teacher, but this is from when I saw a Teacher’s face which clearly showed it. Blonde Girl [Literally the stereotypical bimbo; bottom in all ability sets and dumb as a brick; but Geography wasn’t in ability classes] in my Year 9 [13~14 y/o] Geography Class: “How are we in Europe? I thought we were in America.” We’re in the UK The Geography teacher had a look of pure horror and despair. Bonus points since we were his first class at that school.
6. Don’t know if this counts, but I was a TA for a semester in grad school (never again). One student submitted this paper I will never forget. Basically, the author was wrong because the student found the argument “boring.” In explaining the author’s argument, he got most points wrong and then proceeded to say he had a better argument. His argument WAS the author’s argument.
7. I asked my class of 5th graders what city they live in, and the first response was “Texas”.
8. Handed out an exam…in University. 6 hands that went up instantly…I pointed to one of them and said “yes”. She asked “What does Surname mean?”…I paused, and answered it calmly…”it’s your last name”. The other 5 hands went down. I thought to myself….f**k we’ve lowered the bar.
9. College instructor, you would be shocked. Just last year: multiple students can’t save word docs as pdfs, students take smartphone pictures of every single slide while I lecture even though I upload them to our LMS. When asked to insert a picture into a word document, one student prints the word doc, prints the picture, puts the picture on the word doc, takes a smartphone picture and uploads the file.
10. One of my sixth graders had a brain fart moment. They couldn’t remember the word for ‘suspenders’. Called them farmer straps (complete with hooking his thumbs through his imaginary suspenders and moving his hands up and down, like an old guy wearing suspenders might do), and I laughed so hard I cried and almost fell outta my damn chair.
11. My dad is a history teacher and he had a student tell him the statue of liberty was in pearl harbor.
12. During a unit on Vietnam I was discussing the number of bombs dropped by the US and a student asked me if all those bombs are what killed the dinosaurs. Had another student ask if Pearl Harbor was still alive after doing a mini-lesson on it last December. She thought it was a woman’s name.
13. “When did the world change from black and white to color?” They honestly believed that from like 1970 (when color photography became prominent in publications) to THE BEGINNING OF TIME, humans lived in a totally black and white world.
14. I mentioned bringing my lunch to work and a kid put up his hand to ask where I worked. Right after lunch. In class. Where I teach him.
15. I teach Intro. Geology. I gave a lab quiz on the Density and Buoyancy lab we had done the week before. One of the questions asked how are we able to build ships out of steel, considering that we measured steel to be more dense than water the week before. Almost the entire class gave variants of “The ocean is so big compared to a boat, that all the water is able to keep the boat afloat . . .” as an answer. I get some version of this answer every semester, but it really struck me because so many of them put it. (And they weren’t just copying each other.) This school happens to be right next to a bay. So I took a large, uninteresting rock from the prep room and marched the students outside to the bay. I said “This rock is about 8 kilos and has a density of about 2.4 g/cc. But, according to your last test responses, the bay is so big that it should float . . .” I threw the rock into the bay and we all patiently waited for it to bob back up to the surface.
16. I teach on the college level and students try to convince me dumb stuff is true a lot. At least once a semester a student will try to fight with me saying Africa is a country.
17. When teaching a health class to sixth grade girls and having to stop and explain that babies don’t actually grow in a stomach and they have 3 exits in their nether regions. They literally had no clue about their own anatomy. Parents, please talk to your children about this stuff. Get them a book. Something. They need to know this stuff.
18. I teach science. Sometimes I teach remedial science so I have to hype up my lessons. When students start showing an interest in things I get super excited and help support their interests as best I can. A girl came to my desk wearing a cute white marshmallow jacket with a NASA symbol on the back. I said “oh, super cool of you to be repping NASA!” Her response “Thanks, it’s a cool new brand everyone is wearing.” I asked a few more questions and turns out, she seriously didn’t know what NASA was! She was 18 years old. Another story – two kids just talking to each other working on laptops. Silence for a few minutes, typing etc. Then randomly, one boy says, “if mandarin is a fruit, how do people speak it?” He was 16, and dead serious.
19. Kids at lab tables. Suddenly, there is a bright blue flash and a loud pop. I turn and look directly at a kid, still holding a pair of scissors and a now severed laptop cord, his eyes wide. “I didn’t realize it would do that.”.
20. I teach swimming lessons and lifeguarding courses. During one, I was trying to teach them cpr and instead of showing them first, I told them to show me what they already knew about it. I then proceeded to observe 15 16-20 year olds do the weirdest s**t to those poor training dolls. My favorite though was the kid who did a two foot jump onto the chest of the dummy. The dummy slid out from under his feet like a cartoon banana and he landed on his rear end on the pool deck. Good times.
21. University course – paper on Witches – spelt Which throughout the whole paper. Favorite sentence – Whiches and broomsticks. footnoted a phone number as a source! Marking those papers broke me.
22. In the intro of a paper, a kid (8th grade, teenager) wrote “In this SA, I’m going to explain…” and throughout the paper he wrote “SA” several more times. He meant essay. S-A. This kid’s first language is English. I had literally no words.
23. Not my story, but my Brothers. I still chuckle about it. He taught at a trade school, and he’s a super nice, patient guy. One of his students calls in him in a panic that she can’t get to school bc of a flat tire, she’a frantic and has no one else to call for help – np, this will be a good teaching moment, So he drives out to help her, and as he’s examining the tire, explains to her that the she’s got a nail right in the top, and is going to show her how to change it She scoffs at him, rolls her eyes, and proceeds to tell him that that’s absolutely impossible bc the tire is flat on the BOTTOM, not the top where the nail is…. Needless to say, my brother didn’t even bother explaining to her how to change the tire…
24. Student 1: yeah, my aunt had cancer, and my mom, and my grandma. Student 2: wow, that’s awful, do you think you’ll get it as a result? Is it hereditary? Student 1: nah, it’s not hereditary, its genetic. Freshman in College.
25. My students tried turning in plagiarized papers. Unfortunately they’re so dumb that they neither bothered changing the file name or paraphrasing the content. I think almost 50% of the kids in class sent me the same paper over and over again. Spelling mistakes and all.
26. I asked my students to write a sentence and give an example. One of the students (age 12/13) asked “what’s an example?” Actually really hard to explain.
27. I have a poster on my wall that says something about not believing everything you read on the internet, and it attributes the quote to Abraham Lincoln. Student said, “Wait, did they have internet back then?”.
28. My class had a math test over polygons. So I was grading their tests and one of the throw away multiple choice answers was fiveagon. I laughed out loud, so my class naturally asked me what was so funny. I told them that no one could be that silly as to pick fiveagon as an answer. I immediately saw one kid slouch really low in his seat and about three papers latter I realized why. He had answered fiveagon for pentagon. I felt like the worst teacher in the world. After class, I went up to him and apologized. He said not to worry but I could tell it made him feel bad. I never forgave myself for that one. I now grade papers after school.
