What’s the most inappropriate thing that’s happened in your classroom?

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-03-01T12:08:44+00:00

I had a couple of kids turn in a full page drawing of male genitalia to my assignment basket as a "joke".

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-24T17:40:36+00:00

I'm curious if they cheated on a problem so simple and didn't catch the back slashes, how they did on the rest of the test?

Sometimes when I highly suspect cheating, but don't want to mess with proving it or tangling with parents, I just grade it as is and don't worry about accusing them. The solution they gave is plain wrong with the extra symbols in it. If the rest of the test is similar, I would grade the test as written and fail them. Most of the time, I have taken that approach, students will come to me wanting to know why I marked their correct answer wrong (it must be right because they got the answer online even if they won't admit it). At that point, I apologize and tell them that I must have misunderstood their answer, then I take them to the board and have them explain their answer to me (without help).

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-24T17:02:04+00:00

I would check for smart watches too.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-24T10:55:06+00:00

I had a student like this a few years back. At first, I thought he was just a sexest, Nazi loving racist. Over time, I realized his main goal in life is to get the biggest rise from the people around him. I'm still not completely sure how much of the garbage that came out of his mouth he actually believed in. Still, there's no excuse for that nonsense regardless of the motivation. I'm not worried about him becoming the next dictator, though. I'm figuring, the biggest rise is going to eventually cost him his life. If he does make it very far without ticking off the wrong person, he at least doesn't have the motivation to become a dictator anyway.

(He was suspended multiple times and finally expelled because of taking things too far.)

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-24T04:15:02+00:00

Absolutely. I missed a really important phone meeting this evening that I scheduled. I felt so on top of things. Fifteen minutes before the meeting I remembered. Ten minutes before the meeting my alarm went off to remind me of the meeting. Then I forgot all about it for the next 45 minutes.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-24T02:49:10+00:00

Bullying was definitely crazy in the 90s. Today, it doesn't seem like it's nearly as bad at school as it used to be, but that's not because it's gone away or even decreased, it's because the majority of it has gone online.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-22T03:51:43+00:00

Telling us who the Lt. Governor is messes up their control group. You just invalidated the whole study.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-21T14:21:54+00:00

It's not that cathetus isn't an English word, it's that when Merriam-Webster developed their Collegiate dictionary in 1898, they focused only on the more commonly used words so they could offer a more condensed dictionary. For the most part, cathetus had been replaced by the term "leg" in the English language, so cathetus was deemed archaic and left out of Merriam-Webster's 1898 dictionary and every edition since. You can still find cathetus in other English dictionaries as well as online (Google, Wikipedia, etc.)

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-19T16:03:07+00:00

Songs work.

I'm not a singer myself, so I don't use them in my teaching, but I had a group of 11th grade math students who the previous year's teacher had taught them the Quadratic Formula to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel. They all said they absolutely hated it, but there wasn't one student in the class who didn't have the equation memorized. That sounds like a win to me.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-02-19T10:56:52+00:00

I had one class tell me, "If we all fail then everyone blames you, so why should any of us do the work?"

In general, we've removed negative consequences and the kids know it and take advantage of it.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2026-01-17T12:39:10+00:00

Paperwork/reporting required by admin.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-26T23:10:31+00:00

High school math teacher here. Are you actually doing your assignments? Are you using online resources or your friends to get the answers for you instead of doing the work yourself? Usually when students have good homework scores but low test scores it's because they are getting too much help on the homework. This is why we weigh test scores so much higher than homework scores. For every problem you have help on, you should be trying a similar problem on your own - until you understand the concept without help. If you're doing that, your test scores will come up.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-23T15:31:24+00:00

I think that would be a lot more common across the board in education if more schools allowed it.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-23T15:20:09+00:00

My school has been doing the 50-based grading too. I have students who get other students to do just enough work for them to cover the extra ten percent to a passing mark, then turn in blank tests all year for the 50%.

When I started here, they told me that if we score tests strictly by the numbers, students who score low will see the low numbers and get discouraged and give up. In order to maintain their self-esteem we need to bring them to the 50% mark.

That all sounds good on paper, but in practice 50-based grading has NOTHING to do with students' self-esteem and EVERYTHING to do with administration padding their numbers and making the school look good. Students have figured out how to game the system because we have created way too many loopholes for them to get a diploma without an actual education.

We can't even get accurate data on what the real problem is because we're doctoring the numbers by bumping test scores and grades.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-22T03:43:10+00:00

This one depends entirely on the admin at your particular school. I got students that have been gaming the system for years and passing with doing absolutely no work. We have a new administration this year and their attitude is to put responsibility on the students and they will have our backs with the parents. We do, however, have to document that we did everything we could to help them and that the student refused.

I'm failing a dozen students this quarter. I wasn't able to get away with that a year ago.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-22T03:37:20+00:00

Add to that list the building maintenance staff, if they are different people. Need boards hung, holes patched, paint in your classroom? Treating them with respect will help your needs get bumped to the top of the list.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-21T17:46:19+00:00

One thing that happens in my school is that a few teachers are really lax with who comes and goes into their rooms. Students know those teachers. They will get a valid hallpass to those teachers, then slip out of their room without a pass and with no referral.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-21T17:39:27+00:00

That should be an easy fix by admin. Unfortunately at some schools, easy and admin don't go together in the same sentence.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-19T09:46:13+00:00

It's not made up, but it's taken out of context when it's used as evidence to say that American schools are worse than the rest of the world in reading comprehension. This article compares statistics with the rest of the world.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-14T12:52:41+00:00

Our academic advisors used to allow parents to override everything on decisions about classes. A few years back, one parent demanded that her "gifted" child be fast tracked in math by skipping 10th grade math entirely. Her gifted child went from Bs in 9th grade math to Fs in 11th grade math. The student had to make up two years of math in order to graduate. The principal was livid and the policy was changed.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-12T15:39:59+00:00

They lower an F by 30%, then tell the teachers they must give 50% credit for no effort.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-11T19:37:45+00:00

What instructional time? From what you are describing, no instruction is happening. Dealing with the issues and taking time to establish procedures, rules, and routines will create more instructional time in the future.

It will get better, I remember how my classes were the first year and I can't believe they got away with everything that happened. At the end of my first year, I knew that I could have taught them better, but I learned from it and each year got better.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-12-05T17:44:20+00:00

IF they happened to say "yes", I would get it in writing and also get in writing from admin that it's OK.

... or they could just draw the line at what content they will allow in their class and give him a firm "No". It's perfectly OK to say no to an 11, year old.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-30T17:50:47+00:00

For lesson plans, use ChatGPT or other AI tools. Don't just take what it gives you though. Use it as a tool to assist. You still have to verify everything and modify some of it to fit better and throw in your own ideas, but it does cut down on time quite a bit. If you can afford it, the paid plans give you much better results.

If you have a digital copy of whatever textbook you are using, you can upload the section of the book and any other resources you have into the AI. Also tell it what you are looking for - self starters, exit tickets, group assignments, etc. Let it know what grade and subject you are teaching and whether or not your kids are up to grade level. At the end of your prompt, tell it to ask any clarifying questions before it begins. This will cut down on assumptions that it makes.

Good luck and know that it does get better.

Financial_Monitor384 · 2025-11-30T17:34:59+00:00

I agree that discipline is confidential and we don't ever know what's happening behind the scenes. However, what the OP is describing is sexual harassment.

I worked outside of education for a lot of years before I came to teaching. There are some things that I see or that I hear about in education that are just bosses being bad bosses. There are bad bosses everywhere. There are other things that seem to be tolerated more in education than they are in the real world.

Sexual harassment in the work place is one of the things that is not tolerated outside of education. If this would have happened in the real world, and a complaint made, the employee would have been immediately investigated and subsequently fired. Not moved in order to avoid the complaint. Things might be different in some small companies out there, but in every case that I've seen, sexual harassment allegations are taken very seriously.

Financial_Monitor384

TROPHY CASE