What's the wackiest thing a student has done in a class?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The question is for pretty much anyone. What are some wacky things you did in school, wacky things your children, siblings, parents, or friends did in school, or wacky things that your students did when you were teaching or otherwise involved in the school faculty or staff? The grade level range is open - it could be anything from a kindergartener saying something out of place to complex attempts to bypass the intent of school rules while obeying the letter of them (“but teacher, the rulebook says that hall passes must be ‘approved’. It doesn’t say that my Aunt Tillie can’t be the one to approve them!”) to a complex in-joke in a PhD dissertation (e.g. the “Scott, M” citation in a recent thread).

ps. The OP title says “wackiest” and “in class”. Consider the question to be as written in the text of the question. The event doesn’t have to have been in a class as long as it was with reference to school and as long as it has something to do with either academics or conduct.

I’m not primarily interested in tales of dorm life unless they involve “interesting” adventures with the conduct police.

2

There was this senior prank when I was a student, rumored to have been pulled off by students from a rival high school, in which someone broke in and emptied every single fire extinguisher.

3

In high school, a friend of mine asked the teacher if he could use the restroom.

(I was at school that day, but not in the class in which it happened.)

Teacher says “of course, go ahead”.

Friend #1 goes to the restroom where Friend #2 is waiting with clippers.

Friend #2 shaves Friend #1’s head as quickly as possible.

Friend #1 comes back to class bald, and says something like “man, that was such a relief”.

4

About 25 years ago, the night before the first day of school, the seniors snuck on campus and painted out every room number on campus with the exact shade of paint used on the doors. (They did such a good job that all the District Office had to do was restencil the numbers.) The next morning the campus was filled with 500 freshmen wandering around like lost children at Disneyland, crying for their mommies. Was hilarious!

Then there was the girl in one of my English classes who raised her hand and asked “Mr. Silenus, how do you spell illiterate?”

5

I taught art, so wacky happened daily sometimes. The ones that stand out, and I don’t know why, were the accidental head-butting. A student was walking along quickly, stooped to pick up a piece of paper, head butted another student on her way up and that kid staggered back into the principal, who’d just walked through the door. The three stooges couldn’t have done it better.

The second was the student who turned a staple gun to see if it was loaded correctly and managed to staple his cheek.

We were making a plaster mask of one student’s face, when the fire alarm went off. We had to get the plaster off before we could get out and the firemen got there in record time.

One panicked, grabbed the plastery student and carried her out. It did no good explaining water wouldn’t help at that point-- he doused her right on the front lawn. He later swore he thought she was choking to death. Well, yeah, after being soaked with extreme prejudice. At least he didn’t use a fire hose.

There was always something going wack a doodle with water, clay, paper making, glue, and once, pulling a small cup of acrylic paint down on their head.

Good times!

6

I’ve got to imagine a lot of non-freshmen ended up wandering lost as well. I know I hadn’t memorized all the room numbers (or even met all the teachers) in my high-school by the time I graduated.

I can’t think of any good ones from my school days. The wildest I was involved in was the history class where everyone coordinated to wear red on the day of a big exam on the Soviet Union.

A friend once told me about a prank at his high school in which the seniors released four pigs and three chickens into the school overnight. The pigs had signs hung around their necks numbering them 1, 2, 3 and 4. The chickens were similarly numbered 1, 2 and 4. Apparently, the staff spent hours trying to find chicken #3.

7

At my high school there was a group of guys, myself included, whose favorite sport was pranking the library and librarians in various ways. Things like replacing Time and Newsweek in the magazine rack with Hustler and Juggs. Or getting a group of people to each check out a book from the same shelf, rendering it bare. One guy held the record for being ejected from the library in something like ten seconds.

But then we out-did ourselves. Remember “Hands Across America”? We staged “Hands Across the Library”. Got hundreds of kids involved to join hands and sing in the library. The administration got wind of it before hand, but actually allowed it to happen. Good times.

8

Well… I should then confess what I did, many years ago… It is a long story, so please bear with me!

This happened in 1988, in my city of birth (Albacete, Spain). I was in my third year of university (I studied computer science).

That university had been founded only 3 years earlier, and we were still in a temporary campus, some 3 miles from the city, while the main campus was being built in the city itself.

That temporary campus was roughly a half-mile away from a very important air force base (Spanish air force base “Los Llanos”; they had supersonic Mirage fighter planes). One fateful saturday, during a party, a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the base told me: “Oh, by the way, this coming thursday, at noon, don’t be scared if you see that the base goes crazy – We are having a full drill”. At that point, a little lightbulb went “ding” in my head… An idea began to take form…

From monday to wednesday I meticulously prepared what was shaping to be a nice prank… The terminal room we had for our VAX had big windows with a wonderful view of the air base. Some time ago a group of us found out how to send messages and dump files from one terminal to another in such a way that the “Message from Terminal XXX” wouldn’t show.

Anyway… By that fateful thursday, I had everything ready. I went to the terminal room at 11AM, sat in a corner from which I had a good view of the rest of the room, and waited for a suitable victim.

Around 11:45 or so, a new teacher of English (we had to take English language classes) entered the room. He sat one row in front of me, a bit to the right, so I could see what he was doing. He took out of his pocket a little sheet of paper with what appeared to be instructions, and I saw him doing what every newbie did (checking his account, changing his passwords, etc.). After about 10 minutes of observation, I could see that this guy had absolutely no idea regarding computers, and I decided that he was going to be my victim.

I prepared my first file, and when he was busy checking his “crib sheet” I dumped a file on his terminal. The screen was blanked, and the following text (in Spanish, of course) appeared:

"WELCOME TO THE COMPUTER SYSTEM OF THE ‘LOS LLANOS’ AIRBASE

Please enter your password (4 digits):_"

The poor man looked at his screen, did a double take, looked around (I was busy working at my own terminal, of course…) and, after maybe 30 seconds of hesitation, human curiosity compelled him to do what I hoped he would do: He pressed 4 digits at random.

At that point, I dumped the second file on his terminal. Again his screen went blank, and the following text appeared:

"ACCESS GRANTED – MAXIMUM ACCESS RIGHTS.

Please select one of the following ten options

  1. Green dog
    1… (and so on, until 9, each option showing some kind of absurd codename)"

The teacher in question was again taken aback, and it looked as if he was going to call the operator or something… In the end, though, after another 2 minutes or so (by then I was starting to worry that I would run out of time) he hesitantly pressed a digit.

That was it. I immediately dumped the third and final file on his terminal. This is what appeared:

"VERY WELL, SIR.

GENERAL ALERT – ALL PERSONNEL TO TAKE THEIR POSTS.

TARGETS DESIGNATED AND CONFIRMED.

ALL AIRCRAFT ARMED AND READY."

The poor guy was sitting there, looking at his screen in total confusion. There were perhaps 20 seconds of perfect silence, and then…

…Sirens could be heard coming from the base… People could be seen in the distance running around… Supersonic fighters began taking off…

That unfortunate English teacher literally jumped almost to the ceiling and ran out of the room screaming: “OPERATOOOOOOOR!!!”. As soon as he went away, and while the few other people in the room looked at him, flabbergasted, I got to work erasing all traces of what I had been doing.

A few minutes later the poor man came back, literally dragging the operator by the arm, and trying to explain to her that he had accidentally triggered a war. He never lived that down.

This story has an epilogue, though…

Months passed… At the end of the academic year, after all classes and exams were over (and after all the marks of all the students had been confirmed and were fixed), I went to see this poor guy to his office, and made a full confession. I explained that it had been a prank, I told him how I did it, and asked for his forgiveness.

He took it very well, and laughed. I asked: “So… No hard feelings?” “No hard feelings!”, he said.

Three weeks later you had me trying to explain to my mother how come I had a year’s subscription to “Play Girl”.

9

Once when I was teaching, a student walked into the classroom ten minutes late, took a seat in the front row, put his head down and fell asleep for the duration of the class.

And someone witnessed about the approaching end of the world, once. Raised her hand as if to ask a question, then stood up and told us the rapture was THAT SUNDAY. She never came back to class.

10

I’m sure you’ve all seen those gags (and participated too) where everyone in the whole class, on some pre-arranged signal, does some disruptive thing all at the same time.

F’rinstance, my 8th grade math teacher always insisted that only one person could go to the pencil sharpener at a time. So on one occasion, the whole class suddenly got up all at once and lined up at the pencil sharpener.

But here’s the really fun one I came here to tell about: (You have to be of a certain age to “get” this.)
In 6th grade in 1963, it was still reasonably fresh in everybody’s mind about a certain 1960 incident that made international headlines.

My 6th grade teacher was in the habit of starting each day by saying “Good Morning” and a few other meaningless pleasantries, then “Okay, let’s get started.” On the appointed pre-arranged day, (we all had to get ready ahead of time for this), when he said that, the WHOLE CLASS took off one shoe (we already had them off under our desks, actually) and banged them on the tables while shouting Nyet! Nyet!. (See the fifth picture, or group of pictures, down. And farther down, you can read an article with some history of the incident.)

11

My Contracts teacher from law school told us a great story. He was a fun guy, who had a policy that if you wrote a song on a contracts-related subject, he would sing it in class. We did the “hairy hand” case on the first day of school, and he had an actual hairy hand that he put on while a student was talking, then pretended he didn’t know why people were staring at him.

Anyway, so he was telling us about his tenure decision. One thing that they do in law school in the course of the tenure process is to send someone in to observe you teaching once or twice. You don’t know ahead of time what day they will be there. So the head of the department and one other member of his tenure committee came in on the day he was going to be teaching Frigaliment. They got there early to explain that they would just be sitting quietly in the back and observing, and that they would not disrupt his class but wanted him to be aware that today was the day.

So he goes to the podium and is about to call the class to order, when he notices that there is a guy in front who already has his hand up. This is sort of weird, but he calls the class to order, then calls on the guy. He stands up, and yells: “I have had it with this class! We talk about the weirdest stuff, but this one takes the cake. The opinion starts with, ‘The issue in this case is, what is a chicken?’ I know what a chicken is. This is a chicken!” And he reaches into his backpack, pulls out a live chicken, and throws it down into the center of the classroom.

Utter, total pandemonium. The chicken is squawking, the students are yelling, girls are climbing on the tables to get away from the chicken, feathers are flying, and all he could think was, “Well, at least I’ll have a good story about why I didn’t get tenure!”

(He did get tenure, despite the incident. The student, who had thought it was a great joke, was horrified when he realized that the tenure committee was there, but they thought it was hysterical.)

12

The high school building I went to has been added too over the years so the architecture is crazy. When a substitute had a class, a student anounced he was “sick of life” and jumped out the third story window. The drop was only about 10 feet to the roof of a second story addition, but unless you looked out and straight down it looked like a three story drop. The substitute teacher of course had never looked out and straight down.

Another time the typewriters were going to be replaced. The substitute did not know that. A student anounced he was “sick of typing” and he picked up his typewriter and hurled it out an open window.

One particular teacher would stomp on the papers in the wastebasket every time he came into the room, ususally 5 minutes late. One day the students emptied the basket, filled it up with water, and then floated some papers on top.

13

I have two from law school…

  1. Constitutional Law—on Constitution Day, the professor entered the room, and we serenaded him with the School House Rock version of The Preamble.

  2. April Fool’s day, Contracts II—this professor was very old school, and did not allow guys to wear hats in his class. In Contracts I, he’d made a point of making this rule known, and insisted on enforcing it. So nefarious legal scholars that we were, we plotted to get him. On April fool’s day, every student was to bring a hat. When the professor turned to write something on the blackboard, there would be a pre-arranged signal, and everyone would don their hat. Surely the prof would be befuddled when he turned again to face the class. Except that another faculty member had tipped him off–told him his entire class was downstairs wearing hats about 15 minutes prior to class. Prof made a quick trip to his car, the bell rang, we filed in, and he entered as normal, except he carefully did not look out into the seating area. Instead, he turned to the board, and began writing something while launching into what we expected would be a short lecture to intro the case for discussion. The signal was given, and we all donned our hats, waiting expectantly. Instead, he said the the single most important thing he could ever hope to teach us future lawyers was to always…Always…ALWAYS (prof fumbles under his jacket for something…ducks down briefly…spins around wearing a hat of his own) BE PREPARED!

That just killed us. Much laughter ensued all around, and he taught the remainder of the period in his hat. Great guy. We ended up voting him favorite professor for our class year.

14

I have some pretty good ones, but my favorite was when I was teaching middle school and our art teacher was out for the day. This was a pretty rough inner-city school in Houston, and the art teacher, bless her soul, was kind of a free spirit. Which meant the kids ran roughshod over her, because she had no classroom management skills. Basically the kids goofed off in her class, and woe betide us all if it was papier-mâché day, or the kids were doing something involving water or paint.

So of course when she was out, it was chaos central. There had been rumblings that the assistant principal and other tough teachers had been sticking their heads in the room all day to get kids to pipe down. The sub was a guy no-one knew, and seemed to be pretty much out of his depth. Then we heard stories about how he sent three kids to the office, then 10, and so on (our principal typically paddled the kids if they could get CP and sent them right back - so this was a pretty ineffectual method for management).

So lunch came and went, and he had the eighth graders next - who of course knew that this sub was a pigeon and acted nuts. My classroom was on the second floor and every so often I would hear a kid in the hall talking about how nuts the art class was that day. Then it happened.

Like a bomb went off. Kids were screaming, yelling, running into the halls… and I was like, “what the fuck is going on?” I finally see one of my students and grab her and said, “What the hell is going on in the art room?”

She’s half laughing and gasping, looks at me and says, “Mr. Hollow, he took his leg off!”

Turns out the sub was ranting at the class about their behavior and they blew him off, so in desperation he pulled off his prosthetic leg and slammed it on the desk to get their attention. Well, that got their attention, all right. It caused the class to freak the fuck out and essentially flee the class like the boogeyman was in there. Half were genuinely spooked and the other half were laughing their asses off to the point of tears.

The administrative team swooped in and corralled the kids, and escorted the sub to the office - he got his paycheck for the day, but they sent him home, and the behavioral adjustment class teacher brought his posse of miscreants to art and camped out there the rest of the day. Problem solved, more or less. But the rumor mill started going, so by the day’s end, the story was that the sub attacked a kid with his fake leg, or he grabbed some kid’s collar with a hook hand, or he took out his false teeth and bit a kid. The truth of course was more mundane (but not much more, honestly) than that.

The next day the art teacher was told. Her response? “The sub was a friend of mine and I told the class he was coming. I can’t believe they acted that way!” The sub was banned from our campus and the art teacher was directed to not inform her students of her absence in the future.

That was totally a moment where I expected camera crews to come out and a director to say, “Cut! We’ve got the movie’s great comedic scene in the can.” Sixteen years later, that situation still cracks my shit up.

15

During Halloween time in college there was inevitably a pair of students who would go around campus interrupting classes with a lights abet fight.

In high school drama class the teacher was talking about being thespians and one girl started to cry because she didn’t want to have to kiss another girl.

16

JoseB that story is superb.

I love that the teacher got you back in his own small way, too.

17

A friend told me this story about a class her daughter was in.

The setting was a university classroom that was held in an auditorium-type room, with exits on either side up front. While class was in session, a guy dressed up like a huge bunch of bananas entered from the left, ran across the room in front of the class and exited on the right. About 15 seconds later, another guy in a gorilla suit did the same thing.
mmm

18

I cannot top JoseB; I am not in the same universe. But my craziest instance was when four students came into my graduate course in abstract algebra wearing animal heads. I don’t recall exactly, but one was a lion, maybe one was a gorilla, and I am sure that one was a giraffe, because that one was Bay (Angela) Buchanan, Pat’s sister, who was briefly US treasurer and signed all US currency. She worshiped Nixon, who was president at the time (probably around 1971 or 72). It was not at Halloween, incidentally. I tried to ignore it (after all, if a giraffe wants to learn abstract algebra, that’s fine), but according to at least one of the students, I was not successful.

But the best prank I ever heard of involved an MIT prank at Harvard. These are the stuff of legends. For a number of days, an MIT student entered the Harvard stadium wearing a referee’s striped jersey, blew a whistle, and distributed a large quantity of birdseed. Then came the first game and an actual referee came onto the field and blew his whistle to start the game. Then the shit descended.

19

The best one I can remember happened in Grade 7 when the teacher left the room for a few minutes. Somehow somebody managed to toss a big Gummi Smurf up and it stuck to the ceiling. I’m talking about an OLD school with something like 25 foot high ceilings. One kid ran into the hall to stall the teacher while we piled a chair on top of a desk, one kid standing on that chair, another kid on that kid’s shoulders with a yardstick to flick the Gummi off the ceiling. When the teacher came back in we were all sitting perfectly at our desks and he was none the wiser.

Same class, same teacher: one day he was taking some kind of survey about the students. He said, “Are there any 13 year old boys in this class?” Nobody raised their hand. The teacher said, “There are no 13 year old boys here?” One kid said: “We’re not boys. We’re MEN.” The teacher rolled his eyes and said: “Fine, are there any 13 year old MEN in the class?” Half the boys raised their hands.

20

I didn’t do it, but I wish I’d been around to see it. A group of friends of mine had a teacher that chronically arrived late to class, and took the opportunity to rotate his desk 180 degrees, then rearrange everything on his desk to make it look like it was the right way around. The teacher finally came to class, tried to get something out of a desk drawer, and found nothing there.

Nobody took credit as being the ringleader of this caper, but one of those friends was the same person who successfully convinced another student that she had taken a left-handed fork from the cafeteria and needed to go get a right-handed fork.