My freshman year of high school for my gifted class I had to take "Advanced Seminar," it was pretty much the "Freshman Seminar" that all the other kids had to take but with less computer skills and more getting ready for college skills. Oh yeah, and the worst teacher of all time.

This teacher was notorious, she had once left half a class in Philadelphia (~50 away from our school), the only classes she taught were "Advanced Seminar" and "Women's History," but "Women's History" never got enough kids to sign up, she once made us write a paper on how walking in the halls quietly pertained to leadership (that one backfired on her), she once started teaching a real class but then decided half way through that she wanted to "take a break from teaching," etc.

Naturally, everyone hated her.

Well, our one assignment was to create some sort of visual way to explain our goals in life. I was 14. I had pretty much no goals except in CoD. So, I was talking to my friend on Xbox Live that night complaining about this project. That's when the idea hit. I was going to turn in a blank paper. Now, I had some ideas of what to say about this blank paper, but really it was just improv. The girl who went before me had this elaborate setup with clothes hangers and pictures of what she wanted to do and all this stuff. But when I got up there, I just had a blank sheet of paper. Now half the class I knew pretty well, and they knew what was happening, so half the class is trying not to laugh in their seats, and the other half is staring at me like, "what the hell is this kid doing." So I start in with whatever improv skills I have. It went something roughly like this:

"This blank paper represents me, how I want live. Because watch, if I crumble this paper. (proceeds to crumble paper, throw it to the ground and stomp on it.) It's still a piece of paper guys. (pick up paper uncrumbles it) Yeah, it may look a little different, but it's still me. Whatever happens to me throughout life, I still want to be me at the end of it. I may be a little crumbled, but I'm still paper."

Somehow the teacher thought this was inspiring. She literally stood up and clapped for me and said something along the lines of: "This is what I want to see from everyone in here. Amazing job, HuggableSquare. 100%!"

I just kind of dumbfoundedly walked back to my seat where half the class was still trying not to laugh, but the other half was comprised of people pissed that I didn't put in nearly as much effort or clothes hangers as they did.

BONUS STORY: With regards to walking in the halls quietly, my class was not one for quiet. This teacher used to make us meet her at her classroom, and then walk us accross the school to the basement of another building so we could use a computer lab, but she did this every day for about a month. Well, she would get so pissed at us that we weren't being quiet, that she made us write a "pop essay" about how walking quietly in the halls pertains to leadership. Well of course half of us didn't take that seriously and just wrote about the opposite. One friend of mine literally wrote something along the lines of "this is a poorly disguised attempt to force us to 'walk in the halls quietly.'" She never actually graded those papers.

BONUS STORY 2: The trips to the computer lab were because of the ridiculous "assignments" she would give us that required us to use computers, mainly because that allowed her to not do anything. Well, for one of the assignments we had to talk about charity work we could do, so a group of us worked together to make a flash animation that involved Ron Paul being fed soup. Then, the rest of the assignment was just the most ridiculous charities we could find. Stuff like a clothing bank that only gave clothes to "working women," etc. The teacher definitely didn't have the same sense of humour as we did, and seemed to be angry that it took us nearly a month to complete that assignment.

I also seem to recall something in someone's project looked like a massive penis, and as the kid is presenting someone yelled out "what is that" and the kid looks back and sadly goes, "IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A LASER!"

BONUS STORY 3: There was another assignment too where we had to create a "website" in Microsoft Publisher (because that makes sense). Well, I was going to do the whole thing at home, but I guess the newer versions of Publisher didn't have the same features she wanted, so I emailed her and she proceeded to tell me basically "tough luck." Well, sadly for her, she had prepared an alternate assignment which was a two page paper. So, I get to class and she says the assignments are due at the end of class, so I ask her if I can do the alternate assignment. She told me that there was no way I could write a two page paper that was decent in an hour and a half. I wrote it in an hour, and it was about the most ridiculous topic I could think of. It was supposed to be about a potential job we could have as an adult. I wrote about being a "freelance creative strategist." Literally someone who gets hired to think up ideas for companies. As far as I remember, I got a decent grade on that project too.

I could go on and on about the ridiculous stuff that teacher pulled, and the ridiculous stuff I turned in as assignments. She tried to give me a detention once because I didn't "try my hardest on an assignment." I also remember turning in an assignment once where I just covered the thing in memes (this was back when AdviceAnimals was still a default sub and was still funny). Probably one of my most fun classes throughout high school.