NotAlwaysLearning / Tropes J to Z

Tropes A to I | Tropes J to Z

Back to the main page

open/close all folders

J-K

Japanese Ranguage: "Then, another man began to crap. Soon, everyone is crapping. I think they enjoyed my song, after all."
Jerkass: Unfortunately, as the omnibus general page for NAR demonstrates.
Jerkass Has a Point: In a class about medicine, one "teeny tiny" mistake really can have dire consequences.
Jerkass Realization:
- These two students realize the reason they were never bullied in school: They were the bullies.
- In Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day? Uncomfortable, the submitter's classmates at a school poetry club and teacher running it don't take the submitter's discomfort with a male student also in the club who is trying to get her to date him seriously, the classmates figuring that the male student is just socially awkward and would eventually leave her be while the teacher just says "boys will be boys" and does nothing about it either. Finally, the submitter has had enough and calmly but firmly tells the male classmate that she is not interested in dating him, which prompts him to read a "poem" (though it's less a poem and more a vicious misogynistic tirade) aimed directly at the submitter at the next poetry club meeting. The submitter's horrified classmates and teacher swiftly shut him up and boot him out of the poetry club, and afterward sincerely apologize to the submitter for not taking her discomfort with him seriously.
Jerk Jock: A swim-team example of this trope spent most of a lifeguard training course bullying smaller or female students. During the final exam, the poster (his assigned "rescuee") made sure he got a crash course in what a drowning and panicking person can do to an untrained (he'd also ignored most of the coursework, since he was such a good swimmer he'd never have any problems) rescuer. He failed the exam miserably, and was told he'd have to retest if he wanted to get his lifeguard certification.
Joke and Receive: During an eighth-grade talk about appreciation, this teacher comments that everybody should have one really bad thing happen in their life, so they learn to appreciate what they have. One of their students has their house burn down that very night, fortunately without any loss of life, but they did lose just about everything else. The teacher never made that speech again.
Just One More Level!: Over the course of a college semester, this group of students (with the lone exception of the submitter) all miss at least one day of class because they got sucked into playing Tetris 2 on the submitter's SNES.
Karma Houdini Warranty: The teacher in "Agatha Trunchbull Has A Brother" is not reported for locking a student in a closet and leaving them there because the student assumed they deserved it somehow. Fortunately, his temper would get him fired a year later.
Karmic Jackpot: Volunteering at a company demonstration gets this apprentice recognized by trainers and management as a good candidate for a high-pay, high-responsibility job, despite being otherwise underqualified.
The Key Is Behind the Lock:
- "You want me to pay full tuition to get to the point where I'll only have to pay half tuition." Thankfully, once the student says this, the employee at the financial office realizes their own mistake, though this is right after having phrased it slightly differently and not getting through to them.
- "So, before I can meet with a registrar who can help fill out my schedule, I need to fill out my schedule first, so I can get a registrar to help me fill out my schedule?" Unfortunately, this time the submitter fails to get the other person to understand the problem.
Knight Templar Parent: This Taekwondo student's father is so overprotective that he tries to attack the submitter just for advising his son on how to perform a kick. Thankfully, the teacher stops him in a heartbeat, and he's soon arrested, and it's implied that he loses custody of his son. Even the son agrees it's all for the best, as this was not an isolated incident.
(When we appear in court and the kid is asked to the stand, he says this:)
Son: My dad was always overprotective. But this was never something he should've done in any shape or form. Personally, I think he deserves it.
Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
- Much like doctors and nurses on Not Always Working, there are a sad number of stories where teachers seem to believe that they know more than their students simply by virtue of being a teacher, rather than having actually learned anything to do with their subject. Worse, these are usually the types who have also determined that their entire job is to be seen as the smartest person in the classroom, and as such will attempt to punish any student that proves to know better than they do.
  - Case in point, this ICT teacher:
    Teacher: "But I'm experienced enough to deal with [an unplugged mouse]! You don't know enough to do that!"
    (The teacher then walked off, apparently forgetting that they have had to ask other students for help with computers many times before.)
  - Similarly, this teacher normally teaches domestic science and was most likely only selected to teach computer class because she used to teach typewriting when that was a thing. She winds up listing the mouse, keyboard, and monitor - all human interface devices - as PC components, ridiculing the submitter in front of the class for listing actual PC components, mishearing "CPU" as "CBU" and saying it's a made-up word, and on two occasions years apart, being left completely befuddled when someone switches off her computer's PSU.
- A student example in "Google Is Free (Even Twenty Years Ago)". A girl in the submitter's class acts like she is the be-all-end-all when it comes to knowledge of the animal kingdom when when she is blatantly wrong^note, and, curiously, always seems to suddenly have somewhere else to be whenever the submitter gets out science books about animals in an attempt to correct her. The submitter discovers more than twenty years later that the girl didn't grow out of this behavior and now spouts similar misinformation about vaccinations (according to her, vaccines don't merely cause autism but literally inject autism into your body). The submitter understandably blocks her after that.

Large Ham: "BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!"
Laser-Guided Karma: Now with its own page!
Latin Land: A bizarre example in "Puerto Rico And Mexico Are Different Places?!", in which a Puerto Rican student is assumed to be Mexican by a Mexican teacher, who is bewildered that she doesn't know what Día de Los Muertos is. When the student corrects the teacher about her nationality, the teacher just becomes more confused — "Catholics in Puerto Rico don't celebrate Día de Los Muertos?"^note The student patiently replies, "I'm a Protestant, Señora."
Lawful Stupid: This rather strict private school forbids students from using cell phones on school grounds at all times. One day, as classes are letting out, the submitter sees the school disciplinarian (whom the submitter compares to Agatha Trunchbull) lying in wait at the entrance and then handing out roughly two dozen detention slips for phone usage in ten minutes. The submitter suspects that incidents like this was what led to the cell phone ban being relaxed to only apply during school hours.
Lazy Artist: This school district decides to spruce up its schools with art of their respective mascots. Only, the art is so generic that they don't look like the animals they're supposed to be. And anyone who visits multiple schools can tell that they used the same art, just with different colours, regardless of if the mascot's a panther, a wolverine, or a warthog.
Lethally Stupid:
- This teacher, whose response to what she thinks is transphobic parents refusing to let their child use their preferred name and pronouns is to call a meeting with the principal, without asking the student's permission, to berate the parents for their supposed bigotry. Thankfully, her assumptions were completely wrong: the student was a cis boy and not a trans girl, and his parents would've been accepting even if he had been trans; the teacher had just jumped to conclusions because she misread the boy's cursive signature as "Beth" and refused to believe 'Seth' (the kid's actual name) was a real name. But if she had been right... outing a trans person against their will is cruel at the best of times, and doing so when the subject is a child with transphobic parents is basically asking for the parents to seriously abuse or even kill the child.
- This grad student left a hydrogen gas cylinder unsecured in the middle of the hallway, which could easily have turned into a rocket trailing explosive gas. After the submitter points this out to the professor and threatens to Resign in Protest if nothing is done, the professor lets the grad student go.
- This teacher steps out of the room, during which time there's a fire drill, so despite it raining outside, the class evacuates as they've been trained. The teacher later says the class should've stayed inside as "nobody would schedule a fire drill when it is raining!"
- This school keeps its supply of EpiPens safe and secured away from students... in a locked cabinet, in a locked cupboard, in a locked storeroom, inside the headteacher's study - which was also locked if nobody was in the room. This only gets changed when the parents bring up the potential of litigation should a student suffer an allergic reaction and die in the event nobody could find all the keys.
- This teacher destroys an expensive piece of machinery and only narrowly misses student injury when a water electrolysis experiment explodes. Amazingly, he isn't fired, but he is banned from using the school's equipment.
- This lazy mother takes her child to preschool knowing her son is sick with a fever, so she mixed in some Tylenol with her son's juice. This winds up getting the entire class infected. She winds up getting investigated by CPS.
Like Is, Like, a Comma:
- After her teacher warns her about middle school and especially the popular girls, the brilliant student plans to invoke this trope with a little Obfuscating Stupidity to be a smart and popular girl. The teacher wholeheartedly agrees.
- This student, in a two page writing assignment, uses "like" 56 times and "that" 87 times. Their way of speaking out loud is exactly the same.
Literal Metaphor: An unintentional version in "A Bloody Good Performance". A musical director describes the cast's less-than-energetic rehearsal as "anemic", not realizing that most of the students present had just donated to a blood drive, meaning they literally were a bit anemic at that point.
Literal-Minded:
- This university receptionist asks a student if he had a pencil ready to take down some information. The student takes it to mean that he literally needs a pencil, instead of the pen he had handy, and fumbles around for one, eventually hanging up after fruitless searching. The receptionist asks from then on if they have something to write with.
- When asked to provide an explanation of the steps he took to solve a math problem, this fourth-grader takes it up to eleven and explains literally everything in painstaking detail — to the point that his explanation for the solution ends up taking nearly three times as much space as other students in his class.
LOL, 69: This teacher was talking about someone "sucking" in the figurative sense — but that's no help when the student sucks enough to get a 69%.
Loophole Abuse:
- This university professor has strict formatting rules for submitted essays... too bad he forgot to mention they had to be typed.
- A student, giving an improvised two-minute speech regarding war, runs out of material a minute in. So he asks for a minute of silence for those who died.
- This student tries to get around a rule that says undergarments must not be visible. However, he tries this by wearing no undergarments at all.
- This student apparently believes plagiarizing an entire paper for her essay is perfectly acceptable, because nobody actually said that cheating isn't allowed. Naturally, she doesn't win when she tries to appeal her grade. Most public US universities DO have a schoolwide "Academic Dishonesty" policy, under which plagiarism is punishable by immediate expulsion, no refunds— so yes, there WAS a rule, and that girl's lucky all the TA did was fail her.
- This professor administers a test where the students are allowed to use "any resource in the room" for reference, since the class is more about knowing how to find the information they need than about memorizing it. Mid-test, one student realizes the professor is a resource, and asks for help with a particularly difficult question. After a Beat, the professor tells them where to find the answer, and then patches the loophole for future tests.
- One middle-school English teacher let students score points for reading books, but forgot to set a cap on the number of points students could earn. Cue one bookworm student reading and turning in the forms for 130 books, earning an A without doing a single regular assignment. Next semester, the syllabus was changed to limit points from reading books.
- A teacher tells his kindergarten class to put their Pokémon cards away. When he sees one student playing with cards, the student points out that they are Digimon cards. "You got me there."
- After a school Easter egg hunt, kids take their candy to class and are instructed to not unwrap it until later. The narrator notices one kid who realized the teacher said nothing about eating still-wrapped candy.
- In 1979, programmable calculators were a new thing. One student programmed all the calculations he'd need for a difficult test into his calculator. The teacher gave him an A "for exploiting this loophole which I will now close."
- When a school is prevented by district meddling from providing sex education or contraceptives to students, one student starts attaching condoms from the free health clinic to cheap Dum-Dum lollipops with rubber bands, then handing out "snacks" to her classmates and anyone who asks for one. The teachers all turn a conspicuous blind eye.
- This teacher instructs the class to write a haiku using one of their vocabulary words, but specifically states they are not to end it with the word "refrigerator", which is a popular joke in English-language haiku circles due to having five syllables^note. So one girl writes, "Refrigerator/I circumvented the rule/Ha ha microwave" ("circumvent") being one of their vocabulary words). While the teacher is annoyed by this, she has to admit it was pretty clever.
- This professor gives an assignment for his computing class to do the last several problems in chapter 11 of their textbooks, writing it as: "Do the following problems: 11-21, 11-22, and 11-23". One of his students (the submitter) decides to be cheeky and turns in their assignment having taken the professor's instructions literally and written down "-10, -11, -12" after the directions. The professor asks the submitter to do the actual problems correctly after he's done laughing his ass off.

Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: invoked As this person admits.
Malaproper:
- This teacher. ("I don't think that word means what she thinks it means.")
- This young camper malapropers the word "facilities" (like in "shower facilities") into "f**ky lights", much to the shock and horror of their camp counselors.
Mama Bear:
- This one does her part in the civil rights movement by standing up to an abusive teacher.
- This one would make the above proud, too.
- And this one who managed to walk in at just the right moment.
- This mama responds in kind to a teacher's flipping her child's desk in front of the rest of the class. Said teacher is later fired.
- When a teacher questions whether or not a student does their own work, this mother responds in an understated manner that still got the teacher's attention.
- This mama won't let her child serve a detention a second time after they've already served it...especially when said child didn't really deserve the detention and the instigator had thus far gotten off scot-free thanks to being the son of the vice-principal.
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: One student wonders what happens if a girl has a baby and they don't know who the mother is.
A Man Is Always Eager: If a student propositions a TA, the TA is not supposed to accept.
Massive Numbered Siblings: This mother tries to enroll all twelve of her children at a virtual charter school, which is a problem because the school has to have one learning coach per four children. And to make matters worse, they've been homeschooled all their life, and their mother can't even remember all of her kids' names.
Mathematician's Answer:
- "Which tooth did you lose?" ''*holds up tooth* This one!"
- "When will you be four?" "On my next birthday."
Mayan Doomsday: This kid's parents believed it.
Million to One Chance: This first-aid teacher decided to show the class some photos of injuries they'd never encounter in real life, just to see if they could work out the correct treatment. Out of four photos, three of them were ones that happened to either the poster's relatives or her friend's relatives.
Minor Injury Overreaction: This soccer player isn't even trying to get a foul. He just overextended himself and is a massive Hypochondriac.
Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher:
- This teacher has her sociology students, in a university, write down words they use to describe other people. That's the whole lesson. She giggles if any students give "naughty, sweary" words (as she puts it). The submitter takes advantage of this to insult her to her face, with such words as infantile and patronizing, and she just cheers them on for having a big vocabulary.
- This vice-principal at a high school does an intercom speech regarding students jaywalking on school property... in a style that would be better suited for elementary school students, prompting a wave of raucous laughter from students and teachers alike.
- This woman who teaches an English class for middle school-aged kids insists on reading the students' assigned books to the students herself, goes on long-winded tangents about her childhood, treats the students like they are much younger than they actually are, and assigns ridiculously simple one-page tests for the students to do, when they are at the age that they should be ready for essays, studying, and otherwise doing their assignments and homework themselves. The students put up with this for two years until the school administrator finally steps in and takes over the class, while the teacher is reassigned to an elementary school class.
- This one teaches a college-level course that is supposed to teach other people how to teach music classes. Instead, she sits behind the piano and tells them all to sing children's songs. When called out, she basically stops trying to teach altogether.
Miss Conception: A variation.
Female Student: *grabs her breasts* Hey, how does milk get in these anyway?
Mistaken for Dyed: This student had to prove to their substitute teacher that their red hair is natural.
Mistaken for Racist:
- "I don't like Tiana. I just don't like her color… I don't really like green."
- The submitter here stops socializing with an Asian classmate because said classmate has a very bad attitude. The teacher calls the submitter racist when they attempt to explain this fact.
- This student gets accused of racism over such things as the saying "pot calling the kettle black" and playing the white side at chess against an African-American classmate. Both times, the classmate points out that the student's actions are clearly not racist, the saying is completely out of context and he chose the black side for chess, and is ignored. Finally, the teacher goes to the student's father to complain about their "racist" behavior… and gets read the riot act by a textbook Scary Black Man; the accused student is mixed-race.
- A new substitute Teacher accuses an older substitute (the submitter) of racism when they are talking to a black student who asks to go to the bathroom and asked "which one are you". The student is one half of a set of twins and the submitter has had a terrible time at telling the two apart despite knowing them for years, and when the new sub goes to the principal to complain the principal tells her she might want to reconsider her career options if she can't learn how to avoid jumping to conclusions.
Mistaken for Servant: Well, mistaken for teacher in this case. Even by the teacher.
Mondegreen Gag: Brings a spontaneous performance of "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" to a hilarious halt.
- The semen floor!
Moon Logic Puzzle: Employed by this teacher as a hint, after the question itself goes unanswered. It works^note.
Moving the Goalposts: This teacher wants her students to donate their money they made from their school newspaper to an animal charity she runs despite the fact the students are planning to use the money to help one of their poorer classmate to go on vacation with them. Refusing to accept this, she tries everything from shaming the poor classmate, to refusing to accept the students all unanimously voting twice and standing by their decision, to outright threatening disciplinary actions. Thankfully, the principal put a stop to that teacher's antics.
MRS Degree:
- The basic assumption behind "Married To A Bad Idea".
- This substitute also seems to assume this about a female student in an engineering class. When the student is blocked from entering the class for the second day in a row, the entire class leaves in disgust until the regular teacher returns. The substitute is noted to have been practically "forced into early retirement" as a result.
Mugging the Monster:
- This professor tries to force a military veteran, who only feels comfortable if his back is to a wall, to move forward from the back of the classroom, and won't brook any argument. After the veteran leaves in disgust, one of the students (also leaving in disgust with the professor's behavior) mentions that the veteran's uncle is the dean, to the professor's horror. She resigned for "personal reasons" a week later.
- In "Assuming Makes An Essay Out Of You And Me", a student fails to recognize his professor and insults him, earning him an extra homework assignment. To the student's credit, he actually does a half-decent job on the assignment. Lesson learned, we hope.
- This bully is just asking for a fight. (No, literally, he is.) A grade one girl gives it to him.
- Tried and failed by a student who expected a passing grade in a required-for-graduation course despite not attending a single class or completing a single assignment. "You will give me a passing grade, or my lawyer will be contacting the school."
Mundane Solution: Sometimes, this is the answer the teacher is looking for.
- Sometimes, the solution really is that simple. Even better, the student actually gave that answer as a joke.
- "You are in a burning building. You have a paper clip, a pencil, and a sweat-sock. How do you get out?" The student's solution? Leave by the door. The question doesn't say anything about being trapped in the building. Unlike the previous example, it's evident that the teacher didn't intend this answer, but let it stand anyway.
- Another one meant as a joke: this student realizes that you can get a pair of skis through any door regardless of how long they are.
- This one was certainly expected.
- A group of college students needs to see if a bin is large enough to carry the beverages they're bringing to a Halloween party. Three of them measure the bin, then start calculating the sizes of everything involved and debating the most efficient way to pack the cans. The fourth?
  Student 4: Don't worry; they'll all fit.
  Student 1: Wait, how do you know?
  Student 4: I put the cans in the bin while you were arguing.
Murder Is the Best Solution: Played for laughs in this solution. The teacher gets a bout of in-universe Fridge Logic later on when she wonders how come murder only solves the problem 80% of the time.
Must Have Nicotine: This driving instructor, who cannot manage a full hour without a smoke, always taking ten minutes out of his hour-long sessions so he can do so. He also insists that the students have their driver's window open at all times, thought by the submitter to be because he's always smoking in his car and doesn't want to fill the vehicle up with smoke. It ends up biting him in the ass when he insists his students have the window open when it's freezing cold and raining heavily, so by the time the session ends the two students from that session are very cold and very wet, and when his bosses find out (about that, and about the unauthorized breaks) they fire him.
My Beloved Smother:
- This mother is a little too desperate to make sure that her college-student son's eating.
- This mother complains about the submitter "traumatizing" her daughter and teaching "how to kill an innocent animal," in the sense that he explained the basic concepts of where certain types of food came from. When the headmaster defends the submitter, the mother screams at the two, threatening to get them fired. She does so by showing up at the house of a board member, only leaving when the board member threatens to call the police, and removes the daughter from school on the grounds that it is "too provocative." She later gets arrested for assault and loses custody. The girl's father is implied to be a much better parent.
- This mother grounds her son, forces him to attend literally every minute of in-school tutoring possible, calls him a high-school dropout, chews him out because another student smiled at him in greeting, and on and on. Why? Because, due to a quirk in the grading system that registered an incomplete part of a project as a zero, the otherwise straight-A student temporarily has a B in one class. Naturally, this explanation goes in one of the mother's ears and out the other, and she outright says that a B is 'teaching [her] son that failure is okay'. And as they're leaving, she continues to chew him out for 'flunking school' (her actual words).
- This mother calls her son's university and orders them to tell her exactly which classes her son is enrolled in, or at least give her his login and password so she can look up his class schedule herself. Since the son is a legal adult, and did not list his mother as an approved contact^note, neither happens. She then threatens to sue the university if her son is in any classes that aren't on the list "we agreed on" ... at which point the poster forwards the call to the university's legal department as per policy.
- This mother, after leaving her son insisting she has a degree in psychology, rips into the submitter for giving her son tips on how to play chess because "If you mix positive messaging and negative messaging, you’ll give him a complex!" It turns out that she got a coach for her son fired for doing this, and now tries to get the submitter fired as well. And yet she missed her son placing second in a tournament and forgot about him for some time…
My God, What Have I Done?:
- Two friends come to the realization they were bullies.
- The substitute teacher in "And My Teachers Always Said, "Running Won't Kill You..."" is horrified when he realizes his refusal to believe the submitter causes said submitter to suffer a medical emergency that necessitates an ambulance.
My Greatest Failure: The mother of a student is brought to the point of tears to admit that, despite being able to speak English as a second language perfectly well, she can barely read it... and then she actually does cry when the teacher, having recognized that what the mother is describing is a classic symptom of dyslexia, hands her another document written in a dyslexic-friendly font, and she realizes she can read it.
My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Apart from the submitter, the English teachers at this school in Germany aren't that good at actually speaking English. As a result, when students prepare questions in English to ask some visiting nuns from India, the submitter discovers that the questions are utterly incomprehensible, and the submitter is forced to ad-lib. And to make matters worse, the Indian nuns have thick accents that the submitter isn't familiar with, so the submitter has to partially ad-lib the answers too.
Basically, I had a conversation with myself.
My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: This teacher has a burning hatred of cell phones, and at the beginning of the year, makes all students in her class sign a contract stating that they won't have phones in class or risk confiscation of those phones. Pretty soon she sees a New Transfer Student on his phone and makes him sign the contract. He then promptly goes back on his phone. The teacher wheels on him, but the student refuses to hand over his phone, nonchalantly pointing out that contracts signed by minors aren't legally binding. When the principal agrees with the student on this point, the teacher goes ballistic and has to be restrained by security. The teacher would be fired and sent to anger management, while student received a detention for disrespecting his teacher. Not surprisingly, the student would later go to law school.

Naïve Newcomer: This Japanese student doesn't realize those "friendly" American ads for people who want a late night chat are in fact phone sex lines.
Never My Fault:
- This substitute teacher refuses to admit he messed up a high school class's calculus exam by entering the questions incorrectly into the computer with incorrect answers. This resulted in all of the students failing, when the answers the class wrote down were correct and they actually passed the exam. The normal teacher and the principal thankfully intervene and the substitute is fired, while the students get their correct grades. Still not willing to take responsibility, he writes to the local newspaper and school board, accusing the students of cheating the exam by blackmailing the school and demanding their expulsion because according to him, students who are part of a study group leads to gang activity.
- This PE teacher gets her class to play lacrosse while giving them very little indication of how to play it. When the submitter – playing goalie – is hit badly in the chest with the ball, the teacher shames and blames the submitter for playing without the proper equipment, having made no attempt to tell them this beforehand.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: This teacher gets annoyed at a student for staring at falling snow out the window instead of working, pointing out that nobody else in the class is doing so — turns out this is only because they didn't notice the snow, until the teacher very helpfully pointed it out to them.
Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: In "It's A Con Text", Problem Girl ruins her Wounded Gazelle Gambit by dramatically running into Problem Teacher's^noteso named by "It's A Con Text, Part 2" office wailing about more cyberbullying texts the submitter supposedly sent her... while the submitter has had no access to her phone due to Problem Teacher talking with her and her mother.
Problem Girl: Mr. [Problem Teacher]! I just got more messages from [submitter]! She's getting really mean now!
Problem Teacher: [after he and the submitter and her mother look at Problem Girl and the submitter's phone] When did you get these new messages?
Problem Girl: Just now! See?! [thrusts the phone, displaying messages barely sent a minute ago, towards Problem Teacher]
Problem Teacher: [extremely uncomfortable] [Problem Girl], that's impossible.
Problem Girl: What?! Are you calling me a liar?!
Submitter's mother: [cutting Problem Teacher off] Given that my daughter hasn't had anything electronic during the time you got those messages, yes.
NO INDOOR VOICE: Behold 'The Screamer'. Who is an adult, not a child.
No Longer with Us: Assumed by this student.
No Man of Woman Born: A student whose birthing parent has since transitioned to male snarks that he could kill Macbeth, because he was born of a man.
Noodle Incident:
- One student has negative thoughts about Montana because his uncle got lost out there and was eventually found naked in a cave. No further details are given.
- The comments to this post about a science fair gone haywire seem more interested in the lines about an electrical experiment blowing up and someone getting bitten by a goat than in the actual story.
- "Violins are NOT weapons!"
No OSHA Compliance: This entire school. During the submitter's time there, it was horrifically overcrowded, with each classroom usually holding around three to four times the amount of students they should and every student funneled through a single pinchpoint between classes. The administrators' response to fire drills is to prepare for them in advance by hiding all of the extra chairs, and having most of the students taught on the school's sports bleachers for the duration of the inspection. The whole thing is just an actual fire away from massive loss of life.
No Periods, Period: This PE teacher forgot this trope doesn't exist in real life. To his credit, he never repeated that mistake.
- Some things transcend language barriers.
- A frequent story: Female student needs to use the restroom, teacher says no, female student blurts out why she needs to use the restroom, horrified/humiliated teacher lets her go.
- This terrible teacher tried to have a student punished for explaining why she suddenly needed the restroom. At a girls' school. The OP concludes by wondering what that teacher does about her own monthly.
- Another teacher tried to publicly shame a female student for being late to class by demanding she announce her "excuse" in front of the whole class. He wasn't expecting a list of what one needs to do to when one's period starts in the middle of the night without warning.
  He's never hassled another student like that again — especially the girls.
- This student, on the other hand, plays it perfectly straight... for good reason.
- This (male) teacher tried to shame a (female) student for giving her (female) friend unknown items in class by asking if she'd brought enough for everyone, only to be shamed himself when the student nonchalantly asked if he needed a pad or a tampon. The ending implies the teacher learned from this, as when he became principal, he made sure the girls' bathrooms always stocked menstrual supplies.
Not Distracted by the Sexy: A female student was locked out of her dorm, but doesn't have the money to pay a security officer to open it for her. She tries an… alternate method of payment.
Security Officer: Well, those are very nice. Now, that'll be £5 please.
Not Listening to Me, Are You?: This student drove a teacher crazy by repeatedly subverting the trope.
Not Me This Time: "It's A Con-Text, Part 2", a follow-up to "It's A Con-Text", involves a series of petty thefts going on around the PE class (and often unusual things like single shoes, pencil cases and not phones or cash). Everyone immediately suspects Problem Girl, who nearly got the submitter expelled in the first story, suspecting it to be yet another one of her many schemes to grab attention, but in the end it turns out to be a completely different student whom nobody really knew; she was stealing people's things and hiding them at her home just because It Amused Me. She is eventually busted and most of everyone's items are returned to their rightful owners.
Not That Kind of Doctor:
- This agricultural professor gets accosted by a woman who thinks his doctorate means he knows how to deliver babies.
- This professor has a PhD, and doesn't miss a beat when a student trips and another student makes a "is there a doctor in the building" joke.
Not What It Looks Like: In "Speling Tests Are A Speshal King Of Hecc", the submitter forgets to put away his spelling list before a test and is accused of cheating. Fortunately for him, the teacher notices he misspelled a word.
Number of the Beast: These school bus drivers think it's fitting that the route with the craziest kids is Route №333 – half of '666'.

O-P

One Dialogue, Two Conversations: In "Don't Football Players Normally Wear More Padding?", the librarian, who knows a group has booked an A/V room to watch a football game, blithely assures a student awkwardly reporting a group watching "non-school-related videos" that this is fine but, given the student's consternation, agrees to ask them to turn the noise down. It turns out the student wasn't talking about that group at all, but another cluster watching pornography on a library computer. Cue a Big "WHY?!" from the submitter.
Obstructive Code of Conduct: Many of the stories show an administrative policy that keeps the victims from defending themselves and lets the guilty get away. It's especially horrific when the official policy is that bullying, no matter how criminal, does not happen unless a teacher sees it. For a full year, the pint-sized terror got away with it because the teachers were expressly forbidden from taking witness statements, because the bully would attack them while the teachers had their backs turned or were elsewhere, and then made it look like he was being attacked when the teachers showed up.
Off the Rails: One student manages to derail a political game by getting people to contribute their money to them without realizing, and eventually dissolves the partnership and keeps all the money for themselves.
Offscreen Teleportation:
- Or something similar, and you have to admit his reason for learning how to do it makes sense.
- This kid at day-care seems able to use this trope to get on and off a filing cabinet.
Oh, No... Not Again!: Lampshaded in "Modern Schooling Can Draw Blood".
Omniglot: Downplayed, because the person in question "only" speaks three languages, but… "Wait, did you just tell him not to speak Spanish in an English class, in Korean?"
Overly Long Name: In which getting the students to vote on names for some rescued guinea pigs results in one of them being named "McDonnel Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle". Which the students refuse to allow to be shortened to "Mac".
Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: This gag here.
Papa Wolf: This dad calmly and epically tore a teacher and vice-principal to shreds when they were bullying his daughter over wearing glasses.
- The trope gets name-dropped in this story, when the submitter's father shows up to pick her up from school and her homeroom teacher is forcing the class to repeat fire drills in the dead of winter.
Parental Neglect: This mother clearly brings her child to a preschool's afterschool program just so that he can be someone else's problem. Where this really becomes problematic is one time when she brings him when he's had a fever, with her only treatment for him being some Tylenol. As a result, every other student winds up coming down with a contagious virus. The mother would be investigated by CPS, though the submitter's mother (a preschool teacher) never finds out what came of this.
She left in a huff complaining that she didn't want to spend all day with a sick kid. Lady, neither do we!
People's Republic of Tyranny: Invoked by this student.
Percussive Maintenance: How this lab aide fixes the malfunctioning CRT screen of an old computer terminal.
Perfectly Cromulent Word: A student in this class decided to put up a picture of Ben Franklin on a wall next to other famous scientists with a caption that included the word "scientifical". The teacher for the class later added a Post-it note clarifying that "scientifical" is actually a real word.
Plot Allergy: This student has a severe intolerance to peppers, unleashing a gastrointestinal nightmare they refer to as "The Evil". They also have a Home Economics teacher that the submitter describes as a "cantankerous, middle-aged, stuck-in-her-own-opinions woman that nobody actually liked", who a) doesn't believe that intolerances are real and that anyone who claims to have one is just being picky, b) believes that all foods should be seasoned with pepper, and c) forces everyone to eat their portion of food without arguing or skipping out, under threat of docking entire letters from their final grade for each instance. Add in an overactive gallbladder and some oil-fried wontons, set to mix for an hour, and the results are horrific. The teacher is entirely unrepentant right up until the principal recommends she be fired for deliberately harming the submitter.
Pluto Is Expendable: The then-five-year-old submitter in "I Didn't Planet This Way" is insistent that Pluto is too small to be a planet. A decade or so later, the IAU makes its decision to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status, prompting the submitter's mother to laugh hysterically when she hears the news.
Political Overcorrectness: You can't say South African! It's racist! You have to say African-American!
Poor Communication Kills:
- This professor is Genre Savvy enough to avoid it.
Professor: Now, if you write something like, say… 'The National Socialist movement outlawed Jewish business ownership and started a systematic purging of Jews from German economic and social life,' and the comment in the margin says, 'Excellent,' that means I think you have done well, not that what the Nazis did was a good thing. Okay?
- This school is so haphazard with its extension building works that a worker smashes a window in and starts demolishing the wall while there's a class full of students inside. The administration shrugs off the teacher's concern that they weren't relocated beforehand, simply stating that the "plans [were] dynamic".
Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
- This guy doesn't know who Marilyn Monroe was.
- Many of these high school students don't know Bohemian Rhapsody.
- This New Jersey student has to ask who Bon Jovi is. This after learning the song "Livin' On a Prayer". The rest of the class tells him to Get Out!.
- This English teacher was brought in to teach literature so the students would understand references that will be used in college. Unfortunately, the rest of the staff, including the superintendent, suffer from this so badly that they want to spend four years focusing on "the four classics", which doesn't include Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, or Nineteen Eighty-Four. The science teacher, the district's resident Only Sane Man, basically tells the English teacher to run for her sanity, which they do. The school would close two years later, with all of the students moving to the submitter's new school, where it's mentioned they had a lot of catching up to do.
- This student wrote a review of The Princess Bride for an English assignment, and was apparently forced to redo it with a different movie because the teacher had never heard of it.
- This professor thinks Lady Gaga is named "The Gaga Lady." Even better, he only referenced her since he didn't think any of his students were old enough to remember Paula Abdul.
- This teacher has somehow never heard of Mary Poppins, and is completely flummoxed when a student puts "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" as the answer for an English word that English-speaking people might have trouble spelling, followed by the entire class breaking out into the iconic song.
Potty Failure: Discussed in "No One Deserves To Deal With That". The submitter is an American teacher working in Mexico, and tells a coworker they needed a month for their digestive system to get accustomed to the local food, "even ended up having to throw away a pair of underwear."
Power Perversion Potential: One class goes into a discussion about what they would do if they could turn invisible. A male student says he would go to the girls' locker room, which is met with immediate revulsion from the rest of the class.
Preemptive "Shut Up": "Don't you dare say it!"
Prepositions Are Not to End Sentences With: A textbook case, followed by a textbook retort.
The Problem with Pen Island: Occurs in "The Language Of Romance", which takes place in a Spanish class. The students all have progress sheets that use one- or two-letter codes, one of which is "ME" for mucho efuerzo ("much effort"). Upon explaining to the students the correct Spanish phrase whenever a student is asked to give themselves an "ME", the teacher ends up writing DATE ME ("date" meaning "give yourself") on the board.
Puppy Love: On the first day of kindergarten: "I met (Boy). I'm going to marry him someday!" "Uh-huh." Twenty years later, they do.
Pushover Parents: This mother's approach to parenting her son is basically that "he never gets told no." Thanks to this, her son is an "aggressively hyper" misogynist who won't listen to women.
Putting the "Pal" in Principal: The submitter of "Giving Thanks For Good Principals With Good Principles" is divorced by their husband, who remarries a family "friend" within a month, and then their mother dies a mere two months after that, causing the submitter's elementary school-aged daughter to fear for the submitter's safety. The principal of the daughter's school, who is also the submitter's boss, personally escorts the child to the nurse's office to calm down every day before class, and later gives the submitter ingredients for a Thanksgiving dinner.
Pyromaniac: This science teacher, who makes the best of it.

Rage Breaking Point: This drunk asshole decides to pick a fight with the submitter, their roommate, to "get these feelings out" because the submitter is "too uptight." The submitter doesn't respond to the drunk's taunts, or even the drunk breaking their phone and laptop... but once the drunk hurts the submitter's kitten, he gets the fight he wanted... along with several broken bones, as the submitter clobbers him with his desk and then keeps beating him while he's down. The kitten was taken to the vet and recovered.
Rapid-Fire Interrupting: In "Can't Get A Word In Nursewise", a nurse repeatedly cuts off a student, chastising her for asking her brother to pick her up from class, assuming that the brother is still in grade school. Once the student is finally able to explain that the brother is not only college-age, but also on spring break, the nurse chastises the student for not saying so sooner.
A Rare Sentence:
- "There are some things I never thought I'd have to state at the front of a classroom." Such as "I've never felt 'Bear Grylls.'"
- In "I, For One, Welcome Our New Plastic Overlords", a middle school technology teacher has to utter the sentence "Class, please don't start cults in the tech lab."
- "Right, it's a butt, not a Pokémon ball."
"Rashomon"-Style: This math teacher remembers an incident where a student went up to him for help with questions on an exam. The student, however, remembers it differently; she was asking why those questions were marked wrong when they were actually correct. Given the teacher's replies (and that the teacher was using the incident to justify writing that the student "struggles at math" on a reference to university), it's strongly implied that the student is in the right.
Readings Are Off the Scale: This student consistently tests at the limits of the reading tests given (at both second and third grade, she demonstrates sixth-grade reading capability). Unfortunately, the teacher doesn't realize this is why the student in question is "not improving"—the test doesn't actually cover the grade levels the student is capable of reading at, with sixth-grade level being its limits. (A different test proves the student has eighth-grade level reading skill while in third grade.)
Really Gets Around: Zeus has this reputation in one classroom, to the point that the teacher calls him the god of (among other things) unfaithful husbands.
Real Men Wear Pink: This one represents the Lollipop Guild.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech:
- This teacher deliberately puts a question about a topic her class hasn't covered yet on a history test, then gives a 0 to the one student who happened to know the answer already and accuses him of cheating no matter despite all evidence showing that the kid did not. The student's parents and the principal get involved, and when the student's dad finds out what happened, he is furious and lays into the teacher for deliberately giving students questions she knows full well that they won't be able to answer and then failing his son just because he knew the answer already. It turns out the teacher had bullied other students in the past this way and is immediately fired afterward.
  Dad: So, you wrote a question on a topic that you hadn't taught, expecting everyone to fail to answer, and then you punished the only student that answered? Why did you put that question in the first place? Did you put it intentionally to lower their grades, knowing that the highest grade would be eight? Are you such a bad teacher that you don't even know what you have taught? Or are you such an a**hole that you feel the need to bully some twelve-year-olds because you know more about history? And since [Student] knows history, you decided to bully him?
- When this young woman declines an afternoon out with her middle-aged classmates because she's too busy, they mock her because they think a jobless "teenager" (she's actually 20) with multiple iDevices and brand clothes wouldn't know what busy is. This causes her to go into a tirade tearing into them for assuming she's a lazy kid and spelling out her actual situation: her mother has severe brain damage due to a virus, the situational change caused her autistic brother to become emotionally unstable, her father is deployed in Afghanistan, and she has no local extended family, leaving her as the only functional and responsible adult in her household and her mother and brother's full-time carer.
  Submitter: The fact that I am able to come to uni at all is an amazing privilege. Why the hell would I complain about it? But, not having a job doesn't make me lazy and doesn't make me spoiled. Still, by all means, tell me how irresponsible I am. Educate me on grownup life. (The middle-aged students are all silent.) Well, okay. I'm going to go and take my mother to see her neurologist now. Enjoy your coffee.
- After a bully lies that a teacher touched her inappropriately, forcing the teacher taking early retirement, the submitter's mother points out to the bully that she's not a nice person. Considering that the submitter's mother is normally nice to everyone, the condemnation serves as a scathing indictment of the bully's character that her reputation never recovers from.
  Mom: [Bully], I was right there next to you on the playground when you bragged to your friends about it. You said, ‘I can do whatever I want, and if I get in trouble, I can just get them in trouble like Mrs. [Teacher]. My mom told me how to do it: I just have to lie about her touching me. And now that she’s gone, they all know that I can do it to anyone else I want.’ You did lie, and you were proud of getting her in trouble. Nice people don’t do that.
Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Claiming a fear of needles will not get you out of the blood-sampling assignment in this class. Actually having a physical panic attack will.
- A driving student mixes up left and right and takes a wrong turn. Instead of reprimanding them, the instructor praises them for executing the turn safely and guides them back to the intended route. Wrong turns can be fixed; unsafe ones cannot.
Recruiting the Criminal: Well, "criminal" is stretching it in this case, but in this story, a couple of high-schoolers figure out how to exploit security vulnerabilities in the website their school uses for testing to give themselves and their classmates huge scores. The website's technicians are more impressed than annoyed; they enlist the duo's help in fixing the bugs and even end up giving one of them a work experience position.
Reflexive Response:
- A student that often gets admonished for chewing gum in class spits out his gum when the teacher shouts his name... just before the teacher actually gives him a compliment.
- How to counter a series of "no"s.
Revealing Cover-Up:
- This umpire's decision to call the mercy rule in a baseball game earlier than allowed^note ends up inadvertently exposing a massive bribery scandal.
- This college professor paid another man to teach his classes and was only found out when a student had a question outside of class and asked administration where the nonexistent professor's office was.
- Another college professor marks all his computing class final papers as 'incomplete' so he can go skiing instead of properly grading them. A student complains because the unfair grade is threatening to cost her a job she had lined up, so administration call the professor to grade them properly... but the professor, more interested in his vacation than his job, simply calls his assistant and tells them to give everybody an A.
Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense:
- In "This Sounds Like The Opposite Of A Problem", the submitter's roommate is rich enough to have had a maid do the cleaning at home. When asked to get cleaning supplies for their dorm, the roommate has no idea what constitutes an adequate amount of cleaning supplies and goes way over budget.
- At this middle school "promotion ceremony", some parents spend "multiple hundreds of dollars on elaborate dresses for thirteen-year-old girls, and little guys in ill-fitting tuxes" for an effectively pointless ceremony, as there's no way you can't get moved along to high school. One girl and her family realizes this, so she only shows up in a t-shirt and jeans, prompting some Rich Bitches to accost her. The girl soon puts them in their place.
  Mean Girl #3: Are you poor or something?
  Girl: *without missing a beat* This isn’t the last graduation I’ll ever attend.
Ridiculous Procrastinator: "When is the paper due?" "Midnight." (Hands up if you did this in college.)
Right Behind Me: A singular bigot of a university student seems determined to start every class with a rant about a hated-by-him group du jour. In this case, he goes after the French. Only this time, the professor actually shows up to hear at least a good chunk of the snarling—and he's French. The bigot is assigned to write 3,000 words about U.S./France relations within two days.
Rules Lawyer:
- One student decides to test just how far a math teacher's "As long as you're quiet, you can do whatever you want after the test" rule goes by painting after an exam. Turns out the teacher meant exactly what she said; when another student complains about the submitter painting (cursing in the process), the teacher points out the submitter hasn't broken any rules, but the complaining student has — twice, by both failing to be quiet, and cursing in the classroom.
- Students were given treats for wearing camo, or red-white-and-blue. One student tried to get a treat by wearing camo underpants. The teacher wasn't impressed.
- One middle school English teacher allowed students to get extra credit for reading books and turning in a brief form to certify that the book was in fact read, but didn't set a limit on how many points could be earned this way. One little girl decided to have fun with this: She read and turned in the forms for upwards of a hundred and thirty books, and got an "A" in the class without turning in a single regular assignment.
Running Gag: This student apparently wants a cookie.

Sadist Teacher:
- Abusive, too... until the student's mother shows up.
- This one, among other infractions, forces students who didn't study with their parents for spelling tests to sit in at recess with their heads down, even if they got an 'A' on the exam. The parents of the submitter complain about this behavior—pointing out that it teaches kids to lie—and eventually the teacher is dismissed after a different incident.
- This teacher consistently failed a student because she believed that "some students should not be given special privileges", despite the student's work being correct. The student (and family) was white/Caucasian, while the community was primarily Hispanic, so the teacher's statement was very thinly-veiled racism. The mother got her children assigned to a different classroom.
- This first-grade teacher hates the submitter for no apparent reason and punishes them constantly, even when they are not misbehaving. When they don't bring back slips signed by their parents for their "misbehavior", she takes away their recesses, leaves them alone in the room during that time, and threatens to make them sit in the office for the rest of the year if they leave. When the fire alarm goes off one day, the submitter stays put because they're afraid of getting in trouble if they leave, but the teacher runs in minutes later and takes them through a different exit so that no one notices that she left a six-year old all alone (all while praising them for staying in like she asked and giving back their recess). Unfortunately, the teacher ends up getting away with it because the submitter was too afraid to tell their parents until years later, and they still don't know why she treated them horribly.
- This substitute teacher rips a student's hearing aids out of their ears and stomps on them, because "headphones aren't permitted in class" — despite the student and the entire class telling her they weren't headphones, they were hearing aids. Fortunately, another student (ordered to the principal's office for swearing at the sub over the broken aids) brought the vice-principal to see what was going on; by the end of that day, the substitute had been fired, and the school district was paying to replace those $3000 hearing aids.
- This one doesn't just excessively punish students for such crimes as "having a nickname" or "being left-handed", she also calls their parents to blame the "sins" of the students on supposedly bad parenting, or in the case of the submitter, staying single after his wife was killed in a car accident. All the students and their families want her gone, as does the principal, but the school district doesn't have cause to fire her... until she deliberately blames a fight on a student who was home sick that day. The district is forced to investigate whether the rest of her recent disciplinary action reports were equally dishonest, and enough are that she's fired the next day.
- This kindergarten teacher goes so far as to punish the submitter by hitting them with rocks (being careful enough to do it where no security cameras can see). Worst of all, the submitter was too young to realize that the punishment was too extreme, and doesn't tell their parents until years later, by which point, the teacher was retired.
- This third-grade teacher locks the submitter out of class and screams at them before arbitrarily blaming them for a poop stain on the floor. She then takes advantage of the submitter being home sick to basically preach to the class about how evil they are. The submitter's mother has to get the submitter to skip a grade to get them away from her. It would later transpire that the teacher has some sort of mental condition and each year picked a different student to persecute like that, but as far as the submitter's aware, she never received any sort of punishment or reprimand for her behaviour.
Sarcasm-Blind: This girl doesn't get it when someone else tries to call her out on her hypocrisy.
Scare 'Em Straight: This school requests the police do a presentation about the dangers of vaping, which the police do by bringing in an apparent convict whose vape products had been contaminated and killed a young customer. After the presentation, the students look up the "convict" to find out more and... he's just another police officer. The sob story was pure baloney.
Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: The submitter's father in "He's Been Caught Left-Handed" was bullied by another student. Years later, the bully is a Head Teacher of Athletics, and the submitter is a student in his school. So he decides to screw over the submitter's father by signing the submitter up for a multitude of sports (even though he can't play them due to an injury) so that the submitter (and their family) would be on the hook to pay for fees for equipment and uniforms. Thankfully he's found out and then put on administrative leave before being transferred to a different school entirely.
Scrabble Babble: "Blarbleskutch", apparently the sound made by a fish when you take it out of water.
Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Among many other problematic foibles, this mother tries to bribe a karate school into giving her son – who is not only on his first day but proving to be a He-Man Woman Hater Enfante Terrible – a black belt.
Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: "I'd still give it to the police."
Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: This teacher admonishes a student for having her lunch split between two bags and for using chopsticks to eat it, rather than a fork. She ends up taking that student to the principal over it... only to learn there are no rules about how many bags a student can have their lunch in or what utensils they can eat it with. The teacher ended up fired not long after this incident.
Secret Test of Character:
- "This Test Has Your Name On It". Students are offered the chance to walk out on the final exam and still get a barely passing grade for it. After most of the class walks, the few remaining students (including the submitter, who knows they are struggling with the subject but wants to earn their mark) turn over the test... and see that the only "question" there is "Name:".
- Also in "Profess To Be The Professor"... Until it's subverted.
- This college class is needed for a bunch of majors, but on the face of it, seems laughably easy. It isn't long before a number of students start slacking off. Then, when the final exam hits, it's long enough that the students who slacked off are up the creek without a paddle, and three quarters of the class fails.
"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: This student thinks that Shakespeare is full of cliches, not realizing that he invented most of them. invoked
Separated by a Common Language: Invoked in "Blimey! What A Lot Of Rubbish!", where a teacher makes a point about how American English and British English differ by rattling off a description of what they're doing, using all British terms and thoroughly confusing the students. Once they've made their point, they then explain what each term meant.
Sheltered Aristocrat: In a school situated in an affluent county, these students are absolutely shocked that their teacher didn't like iPads, and didn't have a laptop until college. They wonder what the teacher did to survive, and she of course replies that she played outside.
Shipper on Deck: "So, basically, a six-year-old scored me a boyfriend." Complete with the "sitting in a tree" chant.
Shout-Out: While many works are given a Bland-Name Product treatment like "Transforming Robot Franchise" on the Not Always sites the occasional Shout-Out does get through, especially when it's integral to the story. And sometimes even when it's not, like the "Vetinari Points" in the same story as the No Man of Woman Born example above.
The Show Must Go Wrong:
- This disastrous science fair. An exhibit about electricity goes awry and sets off the school's fire alarm, destroying several science exhibits in the ensuing commotion; one of the speakers at the fair falls into the school lake and ends up missing her cue to speak in front of the students; the principal's well-meaning attempts to salvage the fair go completely wrong due to her misreading her cue cards and improvising based on what she's read before finishing reading; and someone gets bitten by a goat.
- The actors in this production of Fiddler on the Roof give it their best, but an errant bat decides to crash the party.
Single-Biome Planet: This student apparently can't wrap their head around the fact that the Planet of the Apes is not one of these, convinced that it is the only kind of planet that can exist. When asked what sort of planet Earth is, in that case, the student replies that Earth is an Earth planet.^note
A Sinister Clue:
- Several stories about forcing left-handed students to do everything with their right hand exist on the site, but "What Leftist Nonsense!" is probably the most ridiculous. Even the headmaster thought it would be "more natural" to tape a pen to the stump of the student's right arm ^note The submitter had had their right hand amputated when they were a baby than letting them use their perfectly usable left hand.
  - A similar situation plays out multiple times in "Sending All The Lefties To China", only it's students trying to get a left-handed teacher to use their right hand. The reason for this is that the teacher is a westerner teaching English in a part of China where it's seen as impolite to write with the left hand. They even have to put up with it in a restaurant, where a woman grabs their chopsticks out of their left hand and puts them in their right.
- Played with in "In Danger Of Being Left Behind": the struggling student thinks he has to ask for permission to use his left hand, when the computer teacher just didn't know. As soon as they get him a left-handed mouse, his difficulties using the computer vanish.
- (I hadn't realized you could sound pretentious about which hand you operated a computer with!)
Skewed Priorities: Common enough to warrant their own page.
Smug Snake:
- Unaware that the submitter is using their phone to complete an assignment in the form of an animation unlike the other students, a classroom assistant on a power trip very loudly and vocally busts them for supposedly listening to music and "drawing things" instead of doing the assignment and smirks at the submitter as they come up to the teacher's desk. When the teacher explains that she allowed the submitter to complete the assignment this way (and expresses interest in how the app they are using works), the assistant is so humiliated that they begin trying to get themselves transferred to a different class and as far away from the teacher and submitter as possible.
- A creepy teacher regularly gets away with sexually harassing girls because the principal believes all of the complaints are racism-influenced (the teacher is black). He continues with this attitude even when another teacher overhears him making a sexual comment, still acting smug even after he slaps that teacher for speaking up, right up until the cops arrive and he realizes he's not getting away with it this time - at which point the cops have to drag him to their car kicking and screaming.
Snipe Hunt: During a wood-working class, the teacher asks a student to fetch a fallopian tube.
Soapbox Sadie: This "activist" at a high school vocally vouches for a different cause every week, but does very little to support the causes he purportedly stands for and seems to use his "activism" as an excuse to bully and pick fights with people, leaving in a huff when whoever he is talking down to doesn't take the bait.
Sound-Effect Bleep: These students laugh when a video quiz uses the standard TV censor bleep as part of a fill-in-the-blank exercise, resulting in questions like "Force equals mass times (BLEEP)".
Space Whale Aesop: Learn math, or someday a psychotic math teacher will kill you. Amusingly, the teacher gives a reasonable excuse for it actually making sense.
"Son, let me assure you... if there are any jobs in the world likely to cause a psychotic break, high school math teacher is at the top of that list."
Spoiled Brat: This karate school student has basically been spoiled rotten by his mother, who tells the school that "he never gets told no." As a result, the boy is an "aggressively hyper" misogynistic Enfante Terrible who not only refuses to listen to a female teacher's assistant, but calls her inappropriate names and assaults a female student, which leads to his mother assaulting the girl and teacher's assistant after the TA tries to break them up. The story ends with both the boy and his mother being banned from the school, and the mother facing assault charges from the girl's parents.
As for the boy, I honestly feel bad. His childhood has been robbed by piss-poor parenting, and I wish we could've had more time to straighten him out. I have a particular dislike for his views of women, and I feel like I really could've helped turn him around. Maybe, maybe not.
Spy Speak: This teacher mistakenly thinks this is happening when told one of his students is in the clinic. He replies with "The dog barks at midnight."
Stay in the Kitchen:
- "The only reason any woman goes to university is to get a husband with an education; they earn more! You don't need a good average, no woman does!" This was said by a woman.
- "I bet you're still a white-belt because you're just a girl. Girls can't fight." And then he got his ass kicked.
- In "Misogyny Is A Lie-ability", a criminal law class holds an exercise where a student will state two facts and one lie about themselves, to see how well the other students can spot a lie (like a classroom version of To Tell the Truth). One of said students makes his guesses — and inevitably gets them wrong — based entirely on whether the person speaking is a girl (e.g. one female student claiming to love comic books, the submitter claiming to have eight tattoos and then revealing she hates romance novels).
- This Dumb Jock assumes his female math teacher doesn't know anything about football. She surprises him.
- A rather troubling example in "Trying To Reverse-Engineer Bigotry", where an old substitute teacher actively refuses to let the only girl in a class even enter the classroom, because he thinks it's a boys-only class. The entire rest of the class decides to sit out the class with that girl for the entire two weeks that the substitute is there, and when the normal teacher returns said substitute was forced to retire early by the superintendent and school board.
- This student in a Human Resources Management class eventually realizes he's digging himself in a hole with his claim that women can't do most jobs, and then asks his female professor to bail him out.
  "Nope. What you've been saying for the last five minutes is a massive HR violation and would get you fired in the real world."
- This substitute teacher is not only sexist — he tells the girls in the class that they shouldn't bother studying for college and should get married instead, and accuses their female history teacher of being stupid because she does her lessons using computers (which he thinks are only used for entertainment) — but is also racist as well; he claims one Asian student will marry the girl sitting next to him, whom he accuses of being a slut, if she gets pregnant, as Asians are an honorable race. This last part bites him since the "couple" he pointed out are in fact fraternal twins, who not only report him for being sexist and racist, but also for giving advice about college, which is illegal for teachers to do and may get him fired and his teaching license revoked.
- This woman is given a low grade for her training to become a teacher (which would tank her chances at gaining employment) after she is told she has done a very good job. The logic that the board gives is that since the woman is married, she doesn't need to work, and that they reserve the high grades for single women.
- It is not advisable to have this attitude when guest lecturing at a girls' school.
  I walked out.
Stealth Hi/Bye: This teacher does it when he hears his student scream.
Stealth Insult: This student apologizes to an Indian classmate for stereotyping against Indian people. They say that they shouldn't have assumed that all Indians were so smart. The classmate eventually gets what the student was implying.
Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: This teacher hopes that no protesting students get up to mischief while he's on his break. He especially hopes that they don't push that BIG BUTTON over there. That would be terrible.
Sticky Situation: "Truly Inseparable Friends", in which a pair of students have to ask for help after accidentally supergluing their hands to a table.
Strange Minds Think Alike: This ADHD student makes up challenges to keep from being bored while taking tests. The substitute overseeing one test comments that their daughter did the same thing, and it cost them a lot of money in psych visits to figure out she was just bored. The student is surprised to learn there are people who don't think that way.
Streisand Effect: invoked This Christian principal wanted to stop rumors spreading that a married teacher was having an affair with a student's mother... by announcing it to the entire school during the auditorium assembly. The ironic part was that absolutely no one, including the student herself, knew about the affair until the principal mentioned it. As a result, the poor girl was forced to leave school, humiliated by the revelation, and the principal was hated by the whole school for his actions.
The Stoner: This substitute teacher.
Stopped Reading Too Soon: In "Teacher Only Doing Half Their Job", a boy keeps receiving abysmal grades in math, and his grandmother, who's a teacher herself, accompanies his mother to the parent-teacher conference. She instantly realizes that this and not an inability to do math is the problem—he only did the problems on the front of the worksheets, not the back.
Strolling on Jupiter: Even textbooks aren't immune apparently.
Stuff Blowing Up: Don't play with alkali metals. No, really, don't.
Sucky School:
- This school is implied to be one. The story centres around a teacher who pulls the submitter's daughter from a field trip just for taking an interest in snakes and subsequently tried to discriminate against her. But the submitter notes that rather than being fired, the teacher was moved to an administrative position so that she wouldn't be in contact with students, and that this practice is apparently common enough that the school has more administrative staff than teachers. Not surprisingly, the submitter pulled their daughter from that school entirely.
- When the submitter's mother considers enrolling him in this private school, they're both put off by how snobbish everyone is, and notice how they spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the school's trophy cabinet. Eventually, the headmaster eagerly asks the submitter's mother what sport the submitter plays. When the submitter's mother responds that he doesn't play any, the headmaster tells her that she'd better look for another school, as "every student is required to represent the school in at least one [sport]." Suffice to say, the mother does not enroll the submitter there, which the submitter would be all the more grateful for when they learned more about the school from people who went there. It turned out that at that school, bullying wasn't just rampant, it was allowed, with one student getting away with threatening another student with a knife because his parents were rich and "good friends of the school."
- This school has a rather ineffectual anti-bullying meeting. When a student mentions that gays are a major target of bullying, another student tells them that "If you [gays] have to be gross, it’s okay that we make fun of you." When the submitter tries to explain how tolerance is important, the teacher shoots them down, because "tolerance" is apparently too big a word for sixth-graders, and 70% of the class literally doesn't know the meaning of the word.
Summon Bigger Fish: This college professor constantly harassed OP for the minor accommodations she got under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She finally had enough and asked him if she needed to get her father involved ... since her father was also the head of the department and the professor's boss. Amazingly, the professor quit harassing OP immediately.^note
Sustained Misunderstanding: In a library, one student asks another for her copy of a book, thinking it's actually a library copy. When the second student replies that the book is her own personal copy, the first student seems to think (from that point) that the library gave her that book, or at least that the second student thinks that. The misunderstanding only gets worse from there.
Swiss-Cheese Security: Security at this upscale apartment is apparently so lax that the submitter – a language tutor – made it all the way up to her client's apartment without even realizing that she was supposed to be buzzed in.

Take That!: This one, against the petty arguments that occur a lot in the Star Wars fandom. Also proof that a true fan can take on the petty fans any day.
Talk About That Thing: This teacher uses the (false) excuse of a student not doing work to take said student to the principal's office... to discuss the bullying he's been experiencing, without letting the bullies know he's telling on them.
Tap on the Head: The KO Punch variant in "When Toxic Personalities Become Intoxicated":
(Mid-sentence, she tries to shove my regular again, but this time the regular catches the college girl's arm and delivers a powerful right cross to her face, knocking her out cold. The regular watches the drunk college girl drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes, then sits back down on her barstool and turns back to the bar.)
Teacher's Unfavorite Student:
- The English teacher in "Few Things Are As Gross As Teachers On Power Trips" has a naked disdain for the submitter. She goes out of her way to assign extra homework on days she knows the submitter is busy with extracurriculars, (by her own admission) grades the submitter more harshly than their classmates, offers an extra credit assignment that she knows the submitter won't be able to turn in before the due date, and refers to the submitter with demeaning nicknames such as "The Jock". The submitter gets their revenge by calling her out in their answers to feedback bonus questions during the final exam, and when she brings the submitter to the principal's office in tears, it results in her being forced to begin accepting assignments by email and have her assignments signed off by the department chair. The teacher is fired some years later when, despite being monitored now, she picks another student to use as a punching bag.
- This piece of work who unfavorably singles the submitter out when they did nothing wrong and there are other students behaving worse. The submitter suspects it's because they're taller than the teacher.
  (But seriously, where are you in life where you have to bully a middle school student to feel empowered?)
- This mentally unstable third-grade teacher persecutes the submitter every way she can for very little reason – even trying to frame them for a poop taken on the floor. It later transpires that she finds one student each year to terrorize this way.
Technologically Blind Elders:
- This old tenth-grade math teacher is a massive technophobe who doesn't like pocket calculators, let alone computers. So when the school forces him to work with a SmartBoard, he is less than pleased. Eventually, he gets so frustrated with it that he punches it until it breaks, then rips it from the wall and throws it out the third-story window. Later on, when the school decides to add more technology, he decides that's a good time to retire.
- This possibly senile biology teacher, among other problematic foibles, decides that during the COVID-19 pandemic, he doesn't even want to try online teaching, and gives all his students a 95%.
- This grandmother:
  Caller: "You know what I think? I think all computers in the United States should be shipped to MARS! They are totally worthless. I don't know how to log in to look at your directory. I only use phones."
- This poor student lives with her technophobic grandmother, who has her type her assignments on her typewriter.
- This professor's old laptop has power issues, so he uses a different machine, then has trouble accessing the site he needs because he refuses to stop double-clicking. When the submitter leaves him, he's trying to use a movie-theatre-style screen as a touchscreen.
Tempting Fate:
- After this student complains to mom about the ridiculous number of fire alarms in the dorm (as no one seems to know how to use an oven), she replies, "Maybe it will be better this time." Cue three fire trucks, sirens wailing, headed toward the dorm.
- It's a theater tradition to say "break a leg" instead of "good luck" because of this trope, but "break a leg" can backfire too.
- The rulers in "Shattered That Claim" are supposed to be shatterproof. It doesn't take long for the students to prove they aren't.
That Came Out Wrong:
- "Keep A Close Crotch On This Student": in response to a hypothetical question about the use of strips of land to prevent erosion, one student replies "I'd destroy his groin!"
- This foreign student wanted to ask his teacher if he could stay overnight for a study session. Unfortunately, what he said was "Can I, uhh... sleep... with you?", but the situation was defused quickly.
- "I've been drilling him, and he's been drilling me."
- "I'm actually still relieving myself right now!"
- The F-word.
- "I just got 'completely naked'."
- This doctor on sperm samples — "Oh, these things come in spurts."
- A teacher when instructing a choir — "Okay, lower lady parts!"
- This girl about the small intestine — "But there is no way a seven-meter-long thing fits in me!"
- "I was on drugs…"
- "You can have all the secs you— WAIT, NO! THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT!"
There Are No Therapists: It's easier to lock the autistic child in a closet than to get a counselor to teach her appropriate behavior. Not only is her own mother furiously calling anyone who will listen to report them, another Mama Bear who witnesses this "treatment" immediately withdraws her own children and convinces two dozen other families to do the same. The principal and school district do nothing.
They Just Don't Get It: Can be seen on their own page.
Toilet Humor:
- Group poop.
- This exchange.
- An unintentional example, thanks to Japanese Ranguage.
- ... and THEN pee in it!
- "Know before you go" and other wilderness advice mnemonics all get corrupted this way by a Boy Scout troop of fourth-graders.
Tomato Surprise: This heavily-soused lady calls a cab in the morning to take her to the liquor store for more wine, and then to a local college for her class. After getting the wine and promising not to drink it in the cab, she decides maybe she's already too drunk to go to class... she might set a bad example for her students!
Too Dumb to Live: This teacher sees her class standing up because the fire alarm has gone off off, and tells them to sit down, because there's no fire drill scheduled that day. One of the students points out that surely that provides more reason to leave the classroom and they all leave anyway, leaving the teacher bellowing at them. And then, when she does finally come out and sees the entire rest of the school gathered outside, she assumes all the other teachers lost control of their classes as well (and is surprised by their reactions to that assumption!)
Tranquil Fury:
- One story spells out the trope fairly well, with one student's mother: "Now, my mum is terrifying on the warpath. She doesn't hit, scream, throw things, or anything else like that: she is just nebulously yet definitely terrifying..."
- Once it's demonstrated first-hand that the fire alarms at a summer camp cannot be heard inside of the bathrooms when the showers are on, this camp director practically has her eyes pop out of her skull in anger, before calmly excusing herself to chew out an administrator for the poor placement of the alarms.
Troll:
- This one escaped the confines of the Internet.
- This one repeatedly insults another student in an effort to get the second student in trouble. When the second student finally snaps, the first student tattles. But despite the teacher being right there and looking in their direction, the teacher saw nothing.
- This guy giving a presentation on "Chinese Food".
True Art Is Incomprehensible: This student, having previously been told "Never write poetry again" when their current Language Arts teacher was judging a poetry jam, doesn't see the point of putting a lot of effort into writing a poem for class, plus is pretty out of it on cold medication. The student doesn't think the completed poem even makes sense, but to their bewilderment they get extra credit for it, as one of the best poems the teacher has ever seen.
Twin Telepathy: These students, apparently. Their teacher requests that they be moved into separate classes so they can't cheat off each other.
Tyop on the Cover: An unfortunate misspelling indeed.

U-Y

Ultimate Job Security: This school has more administrative staff than teachers because they get a lot of teachers who can't teach, but who clearly aren't getting fired.
Understatement: The submitter in "Limping To Conclusions" makes one without realizing it, telling their karate sensei that a fellow student is injured and likely won't come in, saying that they were "limping a little." At the end of the class, the student comes in with a broken leg and a broken arm.
Sensei: "LIMPING A LITTLE?!"
Submitter: (having an awkward Oh, Crap! moment) "The crutches really help with the limping."
The Un-Favorite: When your parents ignore your birthday, you might be…
The Unfettered: The submitter's brother in "Son, Just Don't" is a Pint-Sized Powerhouse soccer player. When an opposing player notorious for cheating behaviour but clever enough to do it when the refs aren't looking gets in his face, he's laid flat, earning the submitter's brother a yellow card. The opposing coach promptly pulls the cheating player, fearing that the submitter's brother has become this trope:
Player: "C'mon, he's already got a yellow. I'll be fine."
Coach: (exasperated) "Exactly! He's already got a yellow! On the next hit, he's leaving the field, anyway. He has no more reason to hold back! If I put you back on that field, you're leaving it on a stretcher!"
Unfortunate Search Results: This history teacher, during a lesson on Victorian England, used Google Images to pull up a picture of Prince Albert for the class... but forgot to turn Safe Search on.
Ungrateful Bastard: This 2nd-grade student asks the submitter for an answer on a test, and upon receiving it, then asks for the submitter's phone number so he can call his mother and tell her he cheated.
Unishment: A school with a heavy emphasis on rugby and hockey forces students to play one or the other for their sports credits. Anyone who argues will be made to run laps as punishment, which suits this student just fine.
Unit Confusion: This apathetic student causes some when the submitter asked them what they answer they got for a question.
Student: "1.45."
Submitter: "1.45 what?"
Student: *shrugs* "I don't know. Time."
Unsettling Gender-Reveal: This girl does it to another group of girls who were infatuated with her.
The Un-Smile: This person's "smile" manages to convince their band director that they're feeling sick.
Unusual Euphemism: Averted; to the shock of these middle-school students, having your wisdom teeth out is not one for losing your virginity!
Unwanted Assistance: This teacher notices that a girl is sitting in the library alone every lunchtime, and, failing to consider whether she wants to make friends yet, decides to bring her out of her shell, against her objections. All he manages to do is scare the poor girl, and her mother is forced to intervene on her behalf.
Uranus Is Showing: "Well, Both Places Don't Get A Lot Of Sunlight":
(One of the girls asks me to check her work, so I pick up her workbook and start reading aloud from it.))
Submitter: "It is a well-known fact that vampires used to live on Uranus."
(As this is an unusual opening statement even by the standards of their writing, I give her an appraising look. She looks me in the eye, face perfectly straight, and says…)
Student: "I'm not talking about the planet."
(I immediately started corpsing and had to leave the room in order to laugh out loud. The delivery was absolutely killer.)
Viewers Are Morons:
- This teacher unfortunately goes beyond the assumption that students are ignorant, and seems to operate under the assumption that students are stupid.
- This teacher seems to operate under the same logic, having assumed that none of the students (Germans who are learning English) have ever heard an English word before entering his classroom, and as such throws a fit when a student turns out to know most of the words in a poem without having to look them up as they were reading it.
- This teacher tries telling her students that negative numbers don't exist, because she doesn't think they could understand that. Naturally, when it turns out they do, rather than praising them for knowing more than she expected, she sends the first student to speak up about it to the principal for "insubordination" (though the student quickly returned). After that incident, the teacher went to the more plausible "We're not covering that yet."
Victoria's Secret Compartment: Where this substitute teacher keeps her phone.
Waking Non Sequitur: In "He'd Sleep Through Vogon Poetry", a teacher tries to catch out a student who is prone to sleeping (through no fault of their own), by asking about the book she slammed onto the student's desk. The student mentioned the first thing that came to mind ("42!"), which had nothing to do with the book being discussed. However, the answer did have everything to do with the book that was slammed down onto the desk...
Walking Disaster Area: This accident-prone student. The science teacher even has an X Days Since sign in the lab, just for that student.
Walking Techbane: The submitter, who's prone to blowing out lightbulbs. Apparently It Runs in the Family too — the submitter's father tends to have computers and cleaning appliances break for no explained reason.
Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: An excellent example of why proper use of commas is essential.
Waxing Lyrical:
- Carry on my wayward son.
- I want to be the very best, like no one ever was…
What's a Henway?: "What the heck's a 'torial' and why do we need two of them?!"
Wholesome Crossdresser:
- This student body voted to allow boys on the cheer team, but also to keep skirted uniforms for everyone on the team instead of switching to a version with shorts. This lasted for two years before the Parent-Teachers Association demanded a skirtless uniform, despite the student body voting in favor of skirts again with an 80% majority. The submitter concludes that years later, he misses the cheer team and having an excuse to wear a skirt.
- "In Which Everyone Gets To Learn A Little Something" has a first-grade boy discover that he likes to wear dresses, and by the end it's treated as just something he does.
Who's on First?:
- "That was actually correct? Because I really don't care."
- "You're great?"
With Friends Like These... Who Needs Enemies?: This high school senior is horrified to find that their good friend has entered an ugly tie contest with a tie covered in pictures of the submitter — and wins.
Womanchild: A kindergartner in "The Bigger Child" gets violent and temperamental when he doesn't get a second slice of cake, but when his mother complains over the incident, it becomes evident he gets it from her, as she becomes no less temperamental and violent.
Worst Aid:
- Oh boy. A student breaks his arm, and the first thing three people do is physically test it to see how badly it's actually injured. Thankfully not repeated by the nurse, but seriously—a suspected broken arm should not be tested in that manner; doing so can make the injury far worse.
- This school nurse's procedure for treating one student is very poor indeed.
- This one as well. Even worse, the nurse in question isn't too incompetent to see that the finger is very obviously broken, noticing every sign of such, but she still decides to completely ignore them because the submitter wasn't showing enough pain.
- Not unlike the first story listed, this student breaks their arm on the playground, and every teacher/faculty member they go up to afterward (first a hall monitor, then the secretary, and finally a school nurse) reacts the same exact way: They say "Hmm, it doesn't look broken..." before physically testing the arm, causing the poor kid to scream in pain every time. Fortunately, they didn't appear to cause any further damage to the kid's arm (which their doctor later confirms really was broken; all three are shocked the next day when the student shows up wearing a cast).
Would Hurt a Child: This gym teacher tries to attack a student because he doesn't play soccer (a sport the teacher loves and fails anyone who doesn't play it) and the teacher thinks he is lazy. Too bad the student was a jiujitsu practitioner who kicks the teacher's ass for trying to grab him. The incident gets the teacher removed from the position of the school's soccer coach.
Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
- Attempted in "A Touching Conclusion". It eventually backfired because witnesses came forward, and the guy who claimed he was touched got barred from a school trip--the same one he was trying to get the other guy barred from.
- This charming girl plays this card after repeatedly abusing and threatening a handicapped girl and getting attacked by the aforementioned girl's friend. Thankfully, it didn't work.
- This horrible girl attempts to get the submitter expelled, perhaps even arrested, for cyberbullying. Thankfully, Problem Girl causes her plot to implode by sending more bullying texts to herself while the submitter has no access to a phone and rushing into the office of the teacher about to punish the submitter. The head teacher apologises profusely and the teacher in question is suspended for mishandling the situation^note. While Problem Girl doesn't officially get punished, Part 2 reveals that the backlash from the incident has completely destroyed her reputation at the school and nobody trusts her anymore.
You Are Not Alone: The basis of "How To Combat The Bullying A-gender". A trans woman ducks into the girl's locker room to evade some bullies. The gym teacher fends the bullies off, and says that she considers the student one of them, a sentiment shared by the girls in the locker room. Furthermore, she allows her to hide in the room as a refuge should more troubles occur.
You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
- This IEP teacher steadfastly believes that the submitter is being "difficult" because she won't put on her PE shoes, in spite of the submitter repeatedly stating and showing that the shoes in question are too small for her. The IEP teacher then states that she is going to call the submitter's mother to take the submitter shoe shopping, and then come back to finish the class, even though there's only twenty minutes to do so, even after the idea is spelled out to her. The teacher then calls the submitter's mother with the same idea.
  Submitter: Let me get this straight... you're going to call my mom while she's at work, pull me out of school during class, and take me to get new shoes, and then COME BACK to FINISH the class? All in 20 minutes?
  IEP Teacher: Yes, exactly!
  Submitter: That's fucking bullshit.
  (later)
  Mom: Wait... so you want me to take time off work in the middle of the day, pick up my kid, take her to a shoe store so she can get some new PE shoes, and then somehow bring her back to school and sign her in in time to finish the class that, at now, only has 15 minutes left?
  IEP Teacher: Yes, that's all I asked!
  Mom: That's fucking bullshit. *hangs up*
- These teachers believe that the submitter is being passive aggressive for forgetting to bring a pencil to his reading class (where he isn't allowed to use the pencil). The utter stupidity of the teachers causes the mother to burst into tears.
  Mom: "I'm not crying because my son 'is passive aggressive and needs counseling,' I'm crying because he has to spend ALL DAY SURROUNDED BY YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES."
You Just Ruined the Shot: A variation in "Well, Her Heart Is In The Right Place". When a group of students film a project where one plays a homeless man getting talked to by another person, a passerby comes over and threatens to "smack the stupid right outta" the filmmaker and the other actor for accosting a homeless man and filming him.
You Just Told Me: In "This Lesson Just Went You-Know-Where In A You-Know-What", an elementary school teacher playing a "guess the word" game with students realizes in the middle of giving a hint that she needs to fact-check what she was about to say and asks someone about it...except that in the course of the question, she uses the word the students were supposed to be guessing. To her credit, the teacher seems to realize that it's Actually Pretty Funny and is able to laugh it off.
You Keep Using That Word: A young student objects to another person's use of "gay" (as a derogatory term along the lines of "stupid" or "annoying") along these lines. Also here.
You Never Asked: This teacher violently dragged a student to the principal's office for discipline after he refused to rise and recite the American Pledge of Allegiance with the rest of the class. When the principal does ask why he refused, the student replies that he's English.
Your Mom: The submitter's response to their teacher's question of: "Who in the world taught you how to do math?!". The funny thing is, the submitter isn't kidding; his mom really did teach the submitter math at the submitter's high school.

Tropes J to Z

2 Following

Previous

Index

Next

Not Always Learning / Tropes J to Z 2 Following

Previous

Index

Next

Tropes J to Z

2 Following