In a reverse take on this thread, I’d like to ask all of you for your best stories about students abusing professors one way or the other.
I have several friends who went to the same school in Phoenix and told me a couple of interesting stories about some of the teachers there:
One teacher was so oblivious that a couple of students smoked a joint in the back of one of her classes one day without her noticing.
And you know those room-to-room intercom systems where the principal (or one of their lackeys) comes on every once in a while and says something to the effect of “Ms. Jones, please send Leslie to the front office”? Well, apparently one teacher was easily fooled by rather cheap imitations of this system. One of my friends regularly cupped his hands on the desk, leaned into them and said “Ms. Jones, please send Joe to the office immediately.” The teacher invariably said “OK, will do” and let him go. (Sometimes followed by a faux “Do I have to?” interaction which would leave the teacher feeling rather tough afterwards.)
Do high school teachers count? We had a chemistry teacher we could talk into doing almost anything. “Will that shock you if you touch it?” “I don’t think so…BZZT!” That kind of thing. Pretty humorous.
Never a joint, but in 9th grade I had a science class with 2 friends in a room set up with the 4-seat tables instead of desks. The class was taught by a guy 2 days older than dirt and pretty much kept showing up to earn his full pension. He’s give lectures and hand out tests through the class monkey so never really even noticed who was there and who skipped.
Anyway, we’d cup a cigarette and pass it between each other. We were in one of the more popular/feared cliques so nobody said anything. Looking back on it, I feel kinda bad for what the teacher could have been subjected to if the admins ever found out.
If high school teachers count, the best “hack” from our HS was when a group of my friends (really, I wasn’t involved) inverted the math teacher’s desk. They rotated the desk 180 degrees, then rearranged everything on top of the desk to make it look like it was the right way around.
The teacher was totally oblivious to it–until he tried to get something out of a drawer.
In my very conservative Christian high school, some senior boys gave the librarian (a befuddled old lady with a countenance roughly equal between Aunt Clara from Bewitched and Winston Churchill in drag) a marijuana plant for her birthday. She had a veritable rain-forest in the library and she fertilized, watered and talked to the plants constantly. She tended the plant and it grew. Quite large. Several students volunteered to help prune it.
Nobody noticed for months.
Until a police officer came to give a public-service talk on drug awareness. He noticed. (True story.)
I attended undergrad at a small state school in Alabama where the philosophy professor (a brilliant fellow- was literally once a physicist for NASA) was the first “out” atheist that many of his students had ever encountered. The continual hijacking of that class by religious students (particularly by Fundies who had never had their views challenged and couldn’t distinguish between the views of the professor and the views of the philosopher he was teaching) bordered on abuse. He actually had a shelf full of Bibles in his office that had been given to him anonymously over the years.
Must tell my “Anne Frank” story when I have more time.