1.
“Yesterday, I had to tell students that they weren’t allowed to give each other stick and poke tattoos during lunch.”
—hailsrex
2.
“I teach preschool, and my kids LOVE having conversations in the bathroom. They’re also at this stage where they’re obsessed with marriage and are constantly discussing who’s marrying whom in the classroom. Naturally, this led to my having to tell a little girl one day, ‘We don’t propose to people while they’re pooping.'”
—lindsaybk
3.
“My preschool had implemented a policy where we were not allowed to say ‘don’t’ while reprimanding a child because it was too negative. As in, instead of saying, ‘Don’t hit,’ we had to say, ‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ etc. One day, one of my angels spat in my face. I marched right up to the woman who implemented this ban and said, ‘How do I turn this into positive language? Keep your spit in your mouth?’ Stupid policy.”
—putter34942
4.
“I had to move a first grader to another lunch table because he slapped his friend in the face with a slice of pizza.”
—katherineh4cf556234
5.
“So many things. I literally said to a 13-year-old, ‘Don’t pee on other people’s shoes.’ And then had to clarify that it included his own shoes as well.”
—megans4a3f428fd
6.
“I teach Pre-K. I was on a prep period when I got a call from the technology teacher. Six of my kids had decided to bite themselves over and over again. Some left marks on themselves. I had to bring them all to the nurse and call all their parents. When I asked why they did it, they said they were bored. At least they didn’t bite each other!”
—alwayshope123
7.
“When I taught 8th grade, a couple of boys brought hot sauce packets out to recess from the cafeteria and started chugging them until they threw up. Needless to say, hot sauce isn’t allowed to recess anymore.”
—emilyw45ae95d1e
8.
“My first year teaching, another teacher and I heard a lot of commotion coming from the girls’ restroom. We walked in to discover two girls throwing wads of poopy toilet paper over the stall at each other. We had to talk about how throwing poop is unhygienic and make them write an apology letter to the custodians.”
—ashleys41a586589
9.
“A 10-year-old student showed me that she found a dandelion, so I told her she should make a wish. Instead, she made direct eye contact with me and ate it.”
—victoriab440cc3858
10.
Had to give a 14-year-old a warning because he was dabbing constantly during my class. Every sentence I spoke, he dabbed. It was the weirdest warning note to write.”
—miravancaenegem
11.
“I’ve had to start pocket-checking a student because he continuously brought odd items to school. He would bring eyeshadow palettes, the tiniest single square from a Lego set, and the kicker was a plastic baggie filled with about a half ounce of granulated sugar.”
—lizr4c23520e2
12.
“Literally just yesterday, a kid in my sixth-grade class got in trouble at lunch for vomiting on his shirt and then chasing others around trying to touch them with it. Sixth. Grade. He still doesn’t understand why everyone was so upset.”
—katiep41ef9d9e5
13.
“Not sure anything will top the time I had to tell a student (who had some bowel control issues) that he should not, under any circumstance, pick up his own feces and put it in his pocket!”
—catn48584a656
14.
“Licking the wall. Literally, just sticking his tongue out until it was flat against the cinder block and walking, dragging his tongue on the wall the whole time. He got a good five feet before I stopped him because I was so dumbstruck by what I was seeing.”
—sarahm49e4a46cd
15.
“When I had to tell a student in my anatomy class not to lick the pig hearts that had been sitting out all day…he licked them.”
—judyhammersmithr
16.
“I had to detain a student and implement a ban on bottle flipping in my classroom after someone flipped a glass bottle.”
—johnfranciscanlasg
17.
“I was teaching sixth-grade language arts in Anchorage, Alaska. One of my students picked a scab and used their blood to mark the bubbles of multiple-choice answers on a test. I was so horrified, I called security directly to my room.”
—kirap4
18.
“When I was a student teacher, I had to make sure that I was explicitly clear that dissected specimens are NOT for eating after a student thought that the frogs we were dissecting in biology had tasty-looking legs. This was a high school class!!”
—haileh3
19.
“After a student blew his nose, I had to tell him, ‘Stop showing people your boogers. They don’t want to see that.’ No big deal…unless the student is 13.”
—monil430751160
20.
“I had to tell a junior in high school that he could not start the microwave with his fidget spinner inside.”
—zoejsimon
21.
“I looked up during a test, and an eighth-grade kid was pretending to ice skate across the carpet, wearing the two Kleenex boxes as skates. When I took them away, he fell to the floor screeching, ‘You’re killing my dream!'”
—lizm4075643b7
22.
“This is my mom’s favorite story: Last day of my first year as a 2nd-grade teacher. This kid was the clumsiest kid in the world and overly dramatic. He was eating a popsicle, and he bit his tongue. Well, another kid decided he’d better go check this out! Whilst he was checking the mouth of the other kid, he said, ‘Yup, you got the blood vein.’ SCREAMS could have been heard in China. Poor kid just thinks he bit his ‘blood vein’ and that he was going to just die! The other kid just keeps insisting, ‘Yup, blood vein.’ I’ve never had to shout, ‘Stop saying blood vein,’ while consoling a child who bit his cheek, trying not to laugh, in front of all my parents.”
—kacik2
23.
“I once had a four-year-old run screaming down the hallways, ‘Deez nuts!’ All I could respond with was ‘Please use your school words.'”
—carolynm4e398b55c
24.
“After asking her not go on several occasions, I eventually wrote a sophomore up because she insisted on painting her toenails during study hall. She was very confused as to why this was undesirable behavior.”
—alid4c960ee52
25.
“I had a student (high school senior) who was obsessed with threading eyebrows. He would sit in the back of class, and the girls would beg him to thread their brows. I was constantly telling him to put the thread away. My last button was pushed when he had started one girl’s brows during passing period and then refused to stop when the bell rang for class to start. I sent him to the office for his defiance, and the girl was left with only one eyebrow done.”
—meriecandelario1
26.
“I once had to ban the term ‘jingle poop’ in my classroom. It was too hard not to giggle when it was sung.”
—kimb27
27.
“I had a student in a high school study hall that I had to tell to stop throwing slices of cucumber at the wall. He told me that he wanted to see if they would stick.”
—emilyb4d5ac6442
28.
“I didn’t really have to discipline him, but I had a student start shucking and eating an ear of corn in the middle of a discussion of The Tempest last year.”
—jaimeeliser
29.
“I teach middle school math, and I had two incidents where I emailed the principal with the subject ‘Can you stop by? I don’t know how to handle this.’ The first was a boy who brought his variety pack of hot sauce, and was drinking it and screaming that his mouth was on fire during the lesson. The second was when a girl came to school 45 minutes late and proceeded to make slime with a large bottle of detergent in the middle of class.”
—a48c0c2883
30.
“A student threw a dead bird at a girl’s face in the middle of a test. When asked where he got the dead bird (which seemed really, really important to find out), he said he snuck it back in the school in his coat pocket during the fire drill three hours earlier and had been saving it ‘for just the right moment.’ It was a class of AP seniors.”
—lmh88
31.
“I work at a preschool, and during my first week, we went outside, and a little boy pulled down his pants and pooped outside. I went to calmly explain to him that we poop on the potty, not outside, and he looked at me and said, ‘But my doggie does it.'”
—emilysuzanned
32.
“Despite many conversations about what we may and may not do at school, I had a group of kindergarten boys who would not stop playing a game they called ‘in the wiener.’ It was basically punching each other in the crotch. Eventually, I wrote a note to their parents in which I actually had to write the words ‘in the wiener’ so that they would be able to specifically address and discuss the behavior with their children.”
—eisraeldavis
33.
“Our school has ‘merit trips’ where students earn merits to go on field trips for positive behavior. Last quarter, I stayed back with the group of kids who didn’t earn the trip. One student was throwing grapes across the classroom during lunch, so I asked her to move to the back table. I found this on my back table the next day. It was so hard to keep a straight face when talking to her about it.”
34.
“I had a freshman algebra class one year with two girls and over 20 boys. They were beyond wild. Once, I had to stop class because they had all taken their shoes off and were throwing them across the class to each other so they could smell them and determine who had the stinkiest feet.”
—teachernicole
35.
“A student came in late after a doctor’s appointment. She told me she left something in her mom’s car and that her mom was sick and couldn’t bring it to her at the front office (which was our procedure) so she asked if her mom could pull up to my room (I have an external door to the parking lot) so she could run out really quick to grab whatever it was she needed. I said sure, thinking it was probably her doctor’s excuse that she needed. She walked back into my room with a 3-4 month old baby and a diaper bag and sat down at her desk like it was nothing. The weirdest part? It wasn’t even her baby. It was apparently a friend who needed a babysitter, and this girl thought she could just babysit it at school. I had to call a principal because the mom had already driven off.”
—lindseydeckerd
36.
“In my Junior English class, I could not get my eighth period to listen to me for anything. It’s the last class period of the day, and they get antsy. To try to get their attention, I downloaded an app that made different noises, one of which was the John Cena theme song, which I knew would catch their attention. It was after that song played that a boy brought out a large recorder (yeah, the ones you play in elementary school), and started playing the John Cena theme song on it. The entire class broke out in laughter, and it was near impossible to get them back on track after that. He would frequently bring out the recorder throughout the year and play it. I never thought I would ever say the words, ‘Put the giant recorder away and stop playing John Cena or I’m calling your mom!'”
—jacij3
37.
“All day, one of my four year old students had been complaining about how much he hated his shirt, so while the class was painting, he quickly pulled the shirt off and dunked it into a container of black paint.”
—savors
38.
“My preschool class and I were at the park when I noticed a bunch of them congregating around something. Soon after, a little boy ran over to me and said, ‘There’s a dead bird over there and everyone’s poking it!’ So I had to go over and shoo them all away. Then, the same little boy asked to hold my hand, to which I responded, ‘I don’t know…did you touch the dead bird?’ And he looked at me like I had accused him of something preposterous and said, ‘No! I only spit on it.’ Kids, man.”
—doughnutxhole
39.
“I’m not a teacher, but in my senior year, I was an elementary school office aide and heard some pretty strange things. My personal favorite was when a kid came running into the office and asked, “Can we roll our oranges down the hall? We’re racing them!” I tell him no, and he runs back out, and I hear him yell, “GUYS SHE SAID NO WE HAVE TO STOP!!” It makes me laugh every time I think about it.”
—kendallama
40.
“Students have their own laptops, which has led to a few interesting detentions. Luckily, I have yet to catch anyone watching porn, but I did write a sophomore up for googling ‘men moaning at the gym’ and playing it on his classmate’s computer at full volume. The most common thing I have to reprimand students for is watching Netflix or some other streaming service. However, I found something that works better than detentions for this. We have the ability to control the students’ screens, like someone fixing your computer from a different location, and put an attention screen up, which is a screen with text that prevents the student from doing anything. When I catch them watching a TV show or a movie, my attention screen is a spoiler for what they are watching. I spoiled the rose ceremony from The Bachelor once, and that student never tried to watch a video again in my class.”
—pattifh
41.
“There was a popular trend among my sixth graders of putting hand sanitizer in their eyes to see who could go the longest without crying. It pained me that I had to remove all hand sanitizer from my classroom.”
—s40b1e23d4
42.
“A student came up and asked me for a rubber. It was only after the fact that I had written him up that I realized that he meant eraser.”
—ellens44c07b3cd
43.
“After class one day, a girl came up to me and told me that every time I turned around, two boys got out of their seats and pretended to jerk off behind me. I was MORTIFIED. They ended up being suspended and had to apologize to me, and the awkwardness of the apologies was worse than the crime itself.”
—christinam47acafd9b
44.
“I had a student take off his pants and feed them into my paper shredder.”
—jilliant499e46c0b
45.
“I was teaching the class when I started hearing clucking noises. I knew one of the students was obsessed with chickens and heard the sound coming from his direction. I assumed it was a weird text tone he had, and I told him to turn his phone off. He told me it wasn’t his phone. I asked him again, thinking he was lying, and he told me again that it wasn’t his phone. It turns out, he had a live chicken in his backpack. A real live chicken. I live in Hawaii, where it is not uncommon to see stray chickens running around. I just never thought that a kid would actually put one into his backpack. He didn’t really get in trouble for it, but the aide talked to him outside and explained to him how keeping the chicken in his backpack is harming the chicken.”
—reenyfaceb
46.
“One of my students (second grade) was taking too long in the bathroom, so I walked over to see what the problem was. I kept hearing a flushing sound and decided to go in. He had his head in the urinal, licking it as the water was running. This was the first and hopefully last time I will ever have to say, ‘We don’t lick the urinal!’ After that, he was not allowed to go to the bathroom by himself. Don’t know how long he was doing it, I just know I was the first person to catch him.”
—jolindel
47.
“It’s maybe different for me since I teach high school, but a few years ago, I had a kid make flamethrowers with Axe and a lighter under his desk. (Who somehow thought I wouldn’t notice that?)”
—hannah27
48.
“I am not a teacher, but once in my JUNIOR class in high school, my math teacher gave detentions to these boys in the back who kept giving each other purple nurples. Another time, one of the two farted really loud, so the other one pulled a can of Axe from his backpack and emptied the thing in our tiny classroom; nobody could breathe.”
—a466ce2e0a
49.
“Pre-K teacher, but I was also the lead of an after-school program for four years. ‘We don’t hit our friends in the face with our dinosaurs,’ is probably one of the best I’ve had to say.”
—jessicabp
50.
“My first ever referral was written for a boy who announced to the class during math that he was a turd salesman.”
—b49cbcf397
51.
“I once was a teacher for a pre-k 4 class. They had little tiny bathrooms in the classroom that we would let the children who were potty-trained go in. If it was a Number 2, they knew to call us and we’d help them clean up. Well, one day during story time, one of the students asked to go, and so I asked Number 1 or 2? He said 1. So, I told him to go, but to sing me a song so I could make sure he was OK. I was the only teacher in the room at the time. Well, he was taking longer than usual, so I ended story time early and went to check on him. As soon as I opened the door, I yelled like I’ve never yelled before. The kid was completely naked, painting the walls with his shit-singing ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’ at the top of his lungs. He thought he was making art, and I about passed out. I put him in time-out and had to tell his mom the horrible news.”
—janinneb
52.
“I once had to say, ‘No lap dance, please,’ while substituting in seventh grade. A glorious day.”
—lysanel
53.
“I teach eighth grade. My first year, a student had left the room to go to his locker. He had apparently put on an inflatable sumo suit over his clothes. He came back in quietly during an activity, so I didn’t notice anything until I heard a loud whirring sound. Everyone turned around to see this kid standing at the back of the room next to an outlet with his inflatable sumo suit plugged in, just blowing up.”
—caseyaford
54.
Finally, “I once had to confiscate a kid’s glass eye. He kept putting it under the desk or around chairs and shouting, ‘I can see you!'”
—karenr43497f315
OK, I want to hear from parents, teachers, babysitters, and the like to share the strangest reasons they’ve had to discipline kids either in the comments or completely anonymously in the form below!
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