Ah college. What a time to be alive.
The people who love to keep that party going are great.
But many have a bad Pater Pan complex and never learn to grow up.
Yet some end up on top of the world.
It's all a coin toss.
Redditor ihaveaclip4urclique wanted to share the tales about what happened to the life of the party after everyone grew up. They asked:
"College graduates of Reddit: What happened to that friend that never stopped partying?"
My life of the party people are dead and depressed. Cheers...
Yin & Yang
We Did It Win GIF by HBO MaxGiphy"One’s a doctor, one lives in a towable caravan."
Low_Corner_9061
"There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground in this thread."
space_monster
Tabs Up
"Worked at a bar in college, and friends worked at other bars. So I knew a lot of people who drank a lot. Most went on to be in sales or some other job where interpersonal communication skills are more valued than raw academic skills. Some do very well."
AmigoDelDiabla
"Bartended full or part time for 15 years now. It's funny those same people keep coming in to drink, but now it's with coworkers and clients and rack up huge tabs and tip the best."
Minimum_Attitude6707
Drink to the Top
"He drank with the right executives at a conference and got offered a job. He now makes three times what I do."
Moctor_Drignall
"I know someone this happened to as well! Our senior year I think she drunk-tweeted something and a company loved what she tweeted that they offered her a job. We graduated 11 years ago and she still works for them! (Although this kind of goes against the thread because she doesn't drink anywhere near as much anymore since she got married and started a family)."
PAKMan1988
Genius
"Ran into an old friend who was like that. We were in our late 30s when that happened and chatted; turned out he partied hard until late 30s and during that time, flitted around job to job to simply fund his partying. One day he looked around and noticed that he was the old guy at the bars hanging with early 20-somethings."
"He realized that all of the folks our age were ahead in their careers, with family/kids etc. Said that was a pretty sobering revelation and enrolled himself back into school and was in his 2nd year of engineering as he wanted to be an aerospace engineer."
rudebish
The Right Way
golden globes GIFGiphy"He partied with the right guys and now makes very good money in sales where he parties with clients but the company pays for it."
MySonHas2BrokenArms
Sometimes vodka works you all the way to the corner office. I'm on my way...
Never took off...
Drunk Vince Vaughn GIF by HBO MaxGiphy"He decided to do a commercial pilot license. Spent so much money on the training and the partying that his debts overtook him. Here, most airlines don't accept pilot candidates with outstanding debts or criminal records. He never got to fly a plane. He still owes a lot of people small to medium amounts of money. Accepted a menial job writing technical manuals."
Ruggiard
The Mess
"I lived in a house with a bunch of guys. One of them was in electrical engineering. He got a job at Applebees for some extra cash and started having parties with work people after work (so 3-5am). That made it hard to make class so he dropped a semester."
"We all graduated and he said he would refocus on school soon, but he was having too much fun partying. I went back to college 20 years later for a football game. He is still working as a waiter at Applebees. He is the creepy guy who acts like he is best friends a with a bunch of 20 year old kids. He’s a mess."
alpacasarebadsingers
Tragic
"He never stopped. He continued drinking at a crazy pace, and lost his job, his driving license, and his wife. He had to move near to a liquor store to keep drinking. He was found dead on the floor of his apartment from a hemorrhage in his stomach caused by years of alcohol abuse. He bled to death from within. He left behind two sons."
SpaceLaserPilot
'dedicated party house'
"A friend of mine in college pulled a Van wilder, and spent 7 total years in college (just getting his undergrad) because he liked the partying so much. He lived in the college 'dedicated party house' that had just two modes, actively throwing a wild party, or recovering from the latest party."
"What was wild about him was that even though he lived a party lifestyle, he got excellent grades and took phenomenal care of himself (when he wasn't getting black out wasted and having weird sexcapades), and was the person who got me into running/marathoning."
"Eventually, he finally graduated with a degree in Mechanical engineering, moved to the east coast, got married and became a born again Christian. He seems happy and successful and just had his first kid recently, but its absolutely weird seeing him post pictures of him getting adult baptized and doing mission work."
GlastonBerry48
Unrecognizable
Sad Lonely GIF by PokémonGiphy"He overdosed, blacked out and fell off a balcony at a hotel and hit the pavement so hard his mother couldn’t recognize him."
Impressive-Orchid748
The party has to end sometime. When the lights come on... go home. That's clearly a general life lesson as well.
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People Share Their Absolute Best Memory From Their Time In School
Hit me baby one more time....
Ah the good ole days of yore. The time when we believed the world was against us and education was a prison. Lord we knew nothing. Those days were the best we had. Ok, well maybe for many school wasn't a picnic but, there had to be some moments of joy. We all hold memories that last and bring a smile. Don't we?
Redditor u/hellohuman122 wanted everyone to share the best days of their lives, even though we didn't know it by asking.... What was a good memory you had when you were in school?The Loft
read suicide squad GIFGiphyMy 3rd grade class had a "reading loft". It was a pretty good sized "fort" (probably taking up 1/3 of the classroom) covered in carpet and had lots of cool places to hang out if you wanted to read. The teacher incentivized us to finish work early so we could grab a book and head to the "reading loft" so we didn't have to hang out at our desks being bored.
One day in math.....
I got bullied a lot in middle school. One day in math I'd just been overwhelmed and couldn't take anymore so I called my dad and begged him to pick me up. He told me I'd be alright and just ignore it. 20 minutes later I got called to the office for check out and he took me to get my favorite food and spent the afternoon in the park with me. RIP old man, that was one of the best days of my entire life.
Being Strange....
In third grade, it was some reading appreciation week, and we decided as a class to visit a cemetery. Granted it's a pretty famous cemetery with a couple of really important people buried there, and we had a scavenger hunt to find them. Along with like the oldest grave we could find, the biggest, and we had to make a rubbing of one of our choosing. As a strange child, it was the best field trip I had ever been on.
Can you hear me now?
can you hear me now GIF by BET AwardsGiphyWhen I was in second grade, I got bullied because my whole family was deaf. One kid kept picking on me everyday. Well one day he came up to me and started screaming, saying can your mom hear me, and this tall girl stepped in and punched him in the face. She got suspended, but no one ever made fun of me again. We became best friends after that.
You're Exiled.
I got banned from reading in class because I'd finish my work early and pull out a book. The teachers would always say I wouldn't pay attention.
So I started writing and doodling. Then the teachers started confiscating my pencil and paper, saying I wouldn't pay attention.
So I'd read ahead in the textbook instead. Then the teachers started holding my textbooks when I didn't immediately need them, saying I wouldn't pay attention.
So when I'd finish my classwork I'd just dissociate and spend the rest of the hour staring at empty space. It was not particularly healthy, and it definitely has had a permanent effect on me.
Hey Ho! Let's Go!
I was always a shy introvert and when I went off to high school I made it a goal to do one thing during my 4 years there that would force me out of my comfort zone. I ended up trying out for the cheerleading team. I was definitely not the type to get up in front of a crowd and cheer. The tryouts involved performing a personally choreographed dance which was no issue as I had some dance background.
They allowed those who wanted to try out to perform their dances in groups, but since I had no friends I did it alone. I was so damn nervous but I did it and I made the team! The rest of my high school experience pretty much sucked but that one thing made me really proud of myself.
Ask Dave...
I had a young teacher who was maybe a year or two out of school himself. He asked if he set his own car on fire at a Dave Matthew concert, would it be illegal. I told him that it would be. He thought since it was his property he could destroy it. I had to point out, yes, but it is disorderly conduct. Then I had one teacher who played minor league baseball for years. He was very good looking.
It was a private, Catholic school and they paid crap. I know because another math teacher wrote a problem on the board and muttered the people in the problem with a lemonade stand were finally people who made less than him. High school was a strange time!
Gossip Queen...
shocked new girl GIFGiphyA math teacher paused a class because he got a message from his brother. His brother met a girl at a party and had a crush on her, but he found a week later that she was lesbian and got a heartbreak. He went outside to call his brother and came back and told us the story.
Safe from Chocolate....
Every morning my teacher will ask us questions about history if we get it right he would give us a snicker bar. But this the funny part, he would throw the snickers bar at us real hard. So if get the question right you would had to dodge the fast moving snickers.
Straight Up!
stand up 80s GIFGiphyWatching my mother rip the principal a new one because a typing teacher failed me for poor posture despite my having 100% on every assignment plus bonus marks.
Mom ranked up that day.
The Jump
In high school we had a group project and this class was 90% girls so the other 10% guys (including me) were in a group. This teacher used to kinda gang up on us with the girls and one day she was preoccupied and we were talking about how we didn't want to be there and we should just jump out the window.
This one guy scopes out the window, sticks his feet out first, give us a wink and just jumps out. Dropped probably 7-10 feet onto the grass and just waltzes back into class like he just came from the bathroom or something. Teacher didn't even notice.
"sex equals fun"
Sexy Jessica Alba GIFGiphyOne of my math teachers in high school was a bit on the crazy side in a very good way.
He'd scoot around the room on his desk chair, rolling over backpacks and the like. He'd punctuate talks with weird sayings like "but, but, but, he said, which is tub spelled backwards." He generally made the class time entertaining for everyone.
One day, he decided to show us the derivation of a mathematical formula. Nowadays, showing this particular formulation to a bunch of high school students would likely get him kicked out.
I don't remember the exact derivation, but the end result was "the integral of e to the x power equals some function of u to the nth power." Written out, it looks like this:
Sex = f(u)n
Yes, he went through a whole mathematical derivation just to tell a group of high school students "sex equals fun."
C-
I was a terrible student and a huge baseball fan growing up. In 6th grade I had an English teacher who knew I wasn't dumb, just hard to motivate. She privately offered me an extra credit assignment, all I had to do was write a 2 page essay on any topic I liked at all explaining why I liked it so much. I straight up turned down her offer, being content with my C- grade.
So she flipped it around on me and publicly told another guy in my class that since HE was the biggest Red Sox fan in the class, he should write a 2 page essay about the Red Sox and present it to the class. I practically jumped out of my seat and said I was a way bigger Red Sox fan than Mike and I should be the one writing that essay. She let us both write one. She was a really good teacher.
Miss you Mr Pitchford.
Reminds me of my history teacher in my first 2 years at secondary school. He hummed and spoke in rhyme and called the class his 'little chickadees'. He was a fun teacher who I only saw genuinely angry twice. He had kinder egg toys on his desk.
He grew his beard every 5 years and shaved it off for charity.
He had a heart attack and fell down the stairs in our last year at school and supposedly had another not long after we left. No idea if that awesome teacher is still alive, he wasn't that old, if alive I expect he would be around 60-70 now.
Miss you Mr Pitchford.
Wizards & Turtles....
Nickelodeon took over my school when I was in the 2nd grade. We were the first school to win and it was because a girl at my school who was a few grades older entered the contest. All the Nickelodeon celebrities were there - Mr. Wizard did cool science experiments, Barth did gross stuff with food, Marc Sommers had the super sloppy double dare obstacle course we could go through, teachers got slimed, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles put on a concert. It was literally a dream come true. And then at the end we all got free backpacks filled with Nickelodeon swag. I still think about that day.
The Journey...
Going to an inter school sports competition. Our school would participate every year and we would come last without fail!
I took part for 8 years during which we never won ANYTHING (just got a participation certificate).
While going to the competition we would play games on the bus, listen to songs, eat at fast food joints.
Looking back I don't remember the many losses that our team endured but the time that we spent together is still crystal clear.
It was never about the destination.... it is all about the sweet journey.
Thanks Dad....
fathers day dad GIFGiphyWatching my stepdad call the principal of my school in 4th grade out on his bullcrap right in front of me. Because it was the first time I had a father figure in my life who cared enough about me to stand up for me.
Detention Rocks!
I got in trouble for calling my English teacher out on an incorrect Harry Potter fact she was spouting one day. (Granted, I was a little fool and was also refusing to do the work she assigned, but I was done with her BS.) Principal decided to give me detention as punishment.
Thing is, detention involved an hour or so of homework/reading time before a period where we were to help the host teacher with whatever tasks they needed. I was a book nerd, and the host teachers were both science teachers who I got along with swimmingly. Plus, they wanted help with cleaning the fish tank.
Needless to say, those days of detention were AWESOME.
I just remember the principal's face when he asked me how detention was going. Apparently, being excited to go back was not what he expected.
Middle of the winter.
Oh boy it was a few months before corona. Middle of the winter. It was so cold that I guess the morning due froze and so the floor was kind of frosted over. I'm late to school riding my bike as fast as I could. I arrived but my class was kinds far. So I run for it determined to make it on time. I go up the stairs of the 800 building which is outside of the building and run to my class.
I'm running. Then I notice I'm about to run right past the class who were all outside. I make an abrupt stop, but the frosted floor has other plans. I slide about a good six ft while still standing. Everybody's watching me in awe. I didn't fall down. It was epic.
Edit: btw I made it on time
Fill it Up....
patrick eating GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphyWatching a freshman attempting to deepthroat 7 cheese sticks at once.
The record for most milk cartons drank before throwing up was 26 by the time I graduated. They started suspending anyone who tried to break the record because they were cleaning up milk puke so often.
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History Teachers Break Down The Most Interesting Responses They've Ever Gotten To A Lecture
Teachers work so hard to prepare students with knowledge for the real world. Of course, there are many different kinds of teachers and their chosen subjects bring unique challenges.
History teachers, for example, are tasked with helping young people become engaged and thoughtful citizens. That means knowing about past events--as seen from ALL perspectives--and applying that to life in the present day.
What a rewarding project, right?
For many history teachers, for every fulfilling teaching achievement there is a horrifying glimpse at student ignorance. Many times, that offers only more opportunity to set the record straight.
But for some students, as on Reddit thread illustrates, that ignorance has dug its heels in pretty deeply.
7deadlycinderella asked, "People who teach history, what's the most interesting or concerning response you've ever got to one of your lessons?"
The Very Best Source
"So I teach 4th grade, and it's a history lesson focused on sources, like what makes a good source and what makes a bad source(its a lot more nuanced but still), I give my students the task of finding out how old the school is."
"My idea, when I planned the lesson, was that they would go out along the school and find a couple a bricks with the year on it or a plaque. Some of the students did that, and got mixed results, another found a website with the exact age and picture of when it was founded, took them awhile to do."
"The last group just went up to the principal and got every answer straight from him."
"It was awesome, I loved that they had the balls to do that. I made sure to give credit where it was due. The principal thought it was a laugh as well."
Yeesh
"'They're only Jews.' To put it politely, I seized the opportunity to make that a teachable moment."
"It was on my demo lesson for an interview. I got the job 😛"
"But, But My Family Said..."
"My high school history teacher met Revolutionary War hero Samuel Prescott's descendant. When Mr. Kirk said Prescott was half black, the kid shouted, 'You're a damn liar!' Mr. Kirk told him that no, it's historical fact."
"The kid spoke to his family and it had apparently become a family secret by the time he was attending my high school. Considering this was in the South, the family had good reason to be secretive."
"His family told him Mr. Kirk was right but that he should still be careful who he tells about it. I wonder what he's doing now."
-- ugagradlady
In One Ear
"I teach criminology but always do a few mini lesions on various historical topics (history of prisons and jails, law enforcement, mass incarceration, etc).
"One lesson was on economic inequality between races, which requires a quick history lesson about segregation (among other topics). I provided numerous sources, and keep in mind that segregation is a measurable phenomenon."
"Yet on the exam, when I asked them if segregation still occurs, approximately 30% of the class said something like, 'No, because there's a family of (insert race here) descent that lives on my street.' Keep in mind we do talk about the difference between anecdotes and data, and as I've said I shared with them the data on segregation."
"I was very concerned that they truly believed their own individual experience was at all relevant to answering that question."
-- zarza_mora
A Unified Conclusion
"Teaching about the start of the Civil War. Asked the question, 'Why didn't Lincoln just let the South go?' "
"At first, the consensus was, 'He should have.'"
Slanderous Sources
"I'm not a history teacher but my teacher told us a story once. He had assigned a paper on Martin Luther King Jr. One of his students found the website that the KKK made to try to make MLK look bad. It had stuff like he had many affairs and a drug problem. The dude wrote his entire paper using that one source."
"The site has been since been taken down."
-- Kerberos--
Makes You Wonder
"I was surprised to learn 'people these days' didn't know the movie Titanic was based on an actual event." -- ColdEngineBadBrakes
"I think about this all the time. Will the things we experience today be remembered in 100 years? Sometimes I think about what would happen if someone from the late 19th or early 20th century ended up in the present somehow. Would they think we're all completely ignorant?" -- Dark197
Tough for Some to Swallow
"Started a unit on the Middle East for freshmen World Studies with a lesson on the most basic basics of Islam in Cornfields, IL. Some of the students and their parents would not hear it that Islam is an Abrahamic religion and thus worship the same god as Christians." -- Pox22
"I sometimes joke that everybody acknowledges that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, except for some Christians and Muslims." -- Genshed
Rewritten Narratives
"Hitler killed himself because he had really bad social anxiety/depression and the idea of having to stand in a court and talk to people made him so anxious he killed himself."
"A student said this during a presentation and I had zero idea how to respond, honestly I still don't."
Not What We Were Going For There
"9th grade World History class. I did a whole unit on the European wars of religion. The common theme was that religious intolerance led to wars, massacres, persecutions, etc. And all this ended during the Enlightenment when people figured out that freedom of religion worked just fine."
"On the unit test, one moron wrote that the US would be better off if everyone was forced to be the same religion, because then there wouldn't be any religious violence. No, dummy, that's not the takeaway here!"
"In my English class..."
In my English class in high school, we were talking about what sci-fi is and some kid genuinely asked if Mein Kampf was considered sci-fi.
"I was a student teacher..."
I was a student teacher this year, teaching US to 13 year olds. I had two kids, one white and one Black, say they wish they could own slaves. They were not joking.
"It wasn't me..."
It wasn't me, but I personally found it adorable when a young man at my very Southern undergrad college angrily and dramatically stamped out of class one day when our history professor pointed out that the naked male figures on some Greek vases were not wrestling.
"Once he brought up the facts..."
This was more of an experience I had in History Class, But anyways in my case there were these "thoty kind of girls" in my class, and one of them said that it was super sexist of what my teacher said about why men fought in wars and woman didn't.
Once he brought up the facts and logic to the reasoning to why that stuff happened, they went quite fast. Lmao they dont know much history, so this was a very uncharted section of knowledge that they didn't have any knowledge of.
"I think it was..."
Me: Okay does anyone know who killed Abraham Lincoln?
Student: I think it was John Stamos Booth.
"Started a unit..."
Started a unit on the Middle East for freshmen World Studies with a lesson on the most basic basics of Islam in Cornfields, IL. Some of the students and their parents would not hear it that Islam is an Abrahamic religion and thus worship the same god as Christians.
"One of my third graders..."
One of my third graders asked me where Jesus was born when we were talking about immigration. I said that was a question for home. Another kid yelled "in a barn, dummy". I had to change the subject fairly quickly after I told the kid not to call people a dummy.
"I could have gotten..."
4th grade. We are reading Number the Stars. Day after I give my primer about the Holocaust, many kids first introduction to not only the Holocaust but the Nazis at all, a kid tells me "My mom says the Holocaust didnt happen, and is a myth." This was a student from a country where Nazis are strangely idealized to this day.
I decided to kill that with fire. I asked the kid (who was honestly the sweetest little girl in the world) to have lunch with me the next day. I brought my copy of Night from home. First I told her her mom is wrong, which is shocking for a kid to hear but I minced no words. I told her I had an advanced book for her to read called Night. I said its a really hard book but I think shes a great reader so she is up to the challenge. I e-mailed her mom, told her what her kid told me, and attached an .avi of Night and Fog and respectfully told her that shes been misinformed, and asked her to watch it.
Kid came back the next day and I asked her privately if she started reading the book. She said her mom showed her the movie, which wasnt really my intention but it is just as well. We talked about it a bit, and I said that I was sorry she had to see that but it was extremely important she understood that it was real and that it was one of one of the worst things that has ever happened.
I could have gotten into trouble for that one but I didnt really care.
"Just before starting the unit..."
Just before starting the unit on the American Revolution, I told my class of juniors the administration was upset with how many tardies there were already in the school year. Since money is a powerful motivator, the board approved some financial penalties.
- If you are late, you must pay $2.00 for a tardy slip.
- If you want to know your current grade average in any class, that will cost $2.00.
- If you want to print anything, you have to purchase school paper at $0.75 per sheet. (Color prints are $1.50 each page.)
- Any other paperwork they want (such as report cards, permission slips, etc.) has to have a stamp from the main office that costs $2. Any papers without the stamp will be considered a forgery and whoever holds it will receive a detention (that costs $10).
Then I went into a lesson about the Declaration of Independence. While doing this, I read the room. Some seemed not to care, but many were pissed. One guy who showed up late almost every day was seriously upset. (And yes, a few knew what I was doing and sat there quietly smiling.)
That's when I apologized for my ruse, explained there were no such charges, and described how this mirrored taxation during the lead-up to the Revolution.
The response was amazing! We talked about what everyone felt over the fake charges, and that dovetailed nicely into colonial sentiment towards Great Britain and why the colonists were upset. All students got it, and that's both rare and interesting.
"Teaching about the Church..."
Teaching about the Church in Europe during the medieval period. Kid asks "Isn't the Pope that stuff in the orange juice?"
"Reading a Peter Rabbit story..."
Reading a Peter Rabbit story to kindergartens and they all got worried when Mr. Gregor's hoe came into the story. One little girl told me I shouldn't say that word.
"There was a light chuckle..."
I once worked as teacher's assistant and we had a history lesson coming up and the subject would be 9/11 (this was held in 9.11.) The teacher was running late, so i decided to start the class without saying anything and played on a big screen the original news footage of 9/11 and the aftermath. After the clips were over, 1 kid (12yo boy) in the front row had light tears in his eyes, so i asked him what's wrong? The kid answered: "When i'm old enough and strong enough, i want to stop those people who would do such a thing."
There was a light chuckle in the class room after he said that but i followed up with a devil's advocate question to see what he'd answer: "But why would you want to fight on behalf of the U.S.? They attacked them, not our country." "They attacked people, like us, that's why."
Gotta say he's got a point.
"Here's a good rule of thumb..."
Concerning: An outrageous amount of Jewish conspiracy crap, the worst of which basically blames them for pogroms and The Shoa/Holocaust. Also, and probably related, a large amount of people who think a YouTube video is a proper source for a paper or presentation.
Interesting: The same things because I am a professor. Meaning I teach at a university. Meaning these kids actually had to do OK in High School. And I don't teach a low level course either, meaning they had to do ok in other history courses.
Here's a good rule of thumb folks: If it doesn't have sources, it's not a source.
"Surely..."
In a college music history class, one student wrote on her exam:
"Bach had 20 children, 2 wives, and practiced on a spinster in the attic."
Surely, she must've meant to have said "spinet."
"I made multiple students..."
Not one of my students, but last year we were doing a long research project for all the sophomores. I was student teaching and my mentor teacher (who was a very bad teacher) had a student who wrote their whole research essay on how 9/11 was faked.
Now, this is not really the student's fault. The teacher was supposed to teach about source credibility and finding reliable sources. They were also supposed to check their student's sources and read their drafts and generally trouble shoot when they got stuck. The student should have never gotten to the stage of final draft using only conspiracy theory based websites without anyone noticing. That is a teaching failure not a student problem.
I made multiple students re-do steps of the process because they had crappy sources and we talked extensively about what made sources high or low quality all semester long.
As a teacher it's important to remember that your students will come up with all kinds of weird and sometimes shocking stuff, they're teenagers it's expected. It's the teacher's job to help guide them without publicly shaming them or making them feel stupid.
And more importantly your job is to give them the critical thinking tools to help them better navigate on their own, because you won't always be there to let them know the thing they just read on the Internet is a bunch of BS.
"I was presenting..."
I was presenting some Week Without Walls trip options at an international school. A good portion of the Muslim kids (the liberal ones who dislike their own conservative culture and governments) started booing/snickering when Israel was presented as an option.
"The kid spoke to his family..."
My high school history teacher met Revolutionary War hero Samuel Prescott's descendant. When Mr. Kirk said Prescott was half black, the kid shouted, "You're a damn liar!" Mr. Kirk told him that no, it's historical fact.
The kid spoke to his family and it had apparently become a family secret by the time he was attending my high school. Considering this was in the South, the family had good reason to be secretive.
His family told him Mr.Kirk was right but that he should still be careful who he tells about it. I wonder what he's doing now.
"For their final project..."
I did a class project based on Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start The Fire." For their final project of the year, the class had to put together a PPT that described the historical significance of each event and each individual mentioned in the song. Every student had to participate in the project by speaking in front of the audience for a minimum of 3 minutes. I invited the entire high school to come and watch the presentation. It was impressive.
"He was the football coach..."
When I was doing my student teaching, I had to shadow teachers. A world history teacher told his students that the Eastern-Roman monk Methodius invented Methodism (a popular Christian sect in the south). Literally nothing about that is even close to true.
Methodius and his brother Cyril invented the Cyrillic alphabet for the Russians. Methodist Christianity was a hundreds of years later, in America.
He was the football coach, and a moron. At the same school, I sat in on an American history class and the teacher taught them about the KKK....without mentioning anything bad they did. Did not mention lynchings at all. He told they class that they helped enforce prohibition.
Confederate flag boots were the hot fashion statement at this school.
"The look on my professor's face..."
Background: History student with a background in Classics. Lots of work with ancient languages and such.
First day of my university program's advanced Ancient Greek history class. Keep in mind that this is a course reserved for History majors/minors. The professor, who is a really level guy, started his lecture by justifying the reasons why we study ancient cultures. He pulls from a variety of sources, including modern literature and advertisement, and relating them to progenitors. This goes on for about 40 minutes. Everyone is engaged. Connections are being made for the uninitiated. All is well.
In the last few minutes of class, as our professor was briefly surveying Alexander the Great's conquest of Asia Minor, one of the students raises her hand. At this point we're all generally relaxed. That didn't last. She asked:
"So what was the United States doing in this period? What were *we* up to?" That emphasis was very, very punctuated.
The look on my professor's face was absolutely amazing. I have never seen internal screaming look so transparent.
I really feel bad for that student. I sincerely hope she went on to do wonderful things.
"In an AP US History class..."
In an AP US history class some girl asked if Hitler was the reason we got into the Vietnam war.
A school is a necessary institution with very strange side effects. Hundreds, even thousands, of teenagers run around an enclosed space day in an day out.
It's no wonder some weird stuff goes down every once in awhile.
And it's not always the students doing the bizarre and grotesque behaviors. Often, a teacher is the unnerving presence, dropping strange foreboding clues until some bombshell discovery comes out.
And then there are the outside agents, the people not affiliated with the school who drop in just long enough to put everyone on edge, or worse.
This Reddit thread reminds that for all of school's mundanity, occasionally something arises to put everyone on their heels.
twatomexus asked, "What is the most disturbing thing to happen at your school?"
"Calm, Sadistic"
"School dismissed one day and as the students were leaving one of the 8th grade English classes, one of the students stayed behind alone to meet privately with the teacher. Said he had a surprise for her, 'A good surprise,' he assured."
"She thought it was awkward how much he was struggling to get it out of his backpack. As soon as she looked up, she realizes that her 'surprise' was an 8 inch butcher knife. The student stabbed her in the chest and punctured her lung."
"Violence in our local schools of course was never unheard of, but the weapon of choice and the calm, sadistic nature of that attack took the cake."
-- ladyyyyyyy
What is it about 8th Grade?
"In 8th grade a boy who was known to be a trouble kid was sent to the principal's office. Before the principal could send him to in school suspension, the boy picked up a metal stool and bashed the principal over the head. The principal needed over 100 sutures to close the wound but came back to the school to finish the year before transferring to a different school system.
"The boy was arrested for murder our sophomore year. He's on death row now."
A Classic, Horrible Story
"Gym teacher would 'massage' girls' legs after class so they 'wouldn't get sore later.' That's gross alone, but he was recently fired for grooming them to date him."
"One victim apparently won't testify because she's 'in love' with him."
The "Adult in the Room"
"A boy decided to mess around near the glass display case, he bumped into it and the whole pane fell over his and lacerated his arm down to the bone. There was a sea of blood on the floor and glass everywhere."
"Our gym teacher, who was a gym bro dude, got squeamish and passed out."
-- Bison_Eyes
Impervious Frats
"Some frat got in trouble for pouring boiling water on their pledges. Just kidding, they didn't get in any trouble. A few guys were arrested but all charges were dropped, and the frat is still active today." -- golf43
"A fraternity was doing an annual event where they dive into a cold pond on campus and holler a lot. It was called off half-way through when one of the bros found a decaying corpse hidden in the murky water." -- vorpal_potato
It Stops Being Silly When Someone's Got a Sledgehammer
"Some pants-less lady walked into the school's quad area holding a sledgehammer during my lunch period and started screaming about how "GOD IS COMING" and proceeded to put said hammer through a couple windows. Eventually, the custodian managed to pin her down and she was arrested."
"I was in the library at the time and when the bell rang got to witness the chaos. At least no one got hurt."
-- LilMoi
A Complete Escalation
"The tennis coach at my high school was always kinda weird. He'd pay a little too much attention to the girls on the team, wink at them in the hallways, general creepy things like that."
"My sister was on the team during her sophomore year and one day he brought a chainsaw to practice and chased students around with it while it was running."
"Obviously it freaked everyone out and my mom called the athletic director to report it, along with several other parents.They investigated the incident and he "resigned" a week later."
"He died of cancer several years later, I've always wondered why he brought the chainsaw."
Like Clockwork
"USA: Every year around 9/11 an old man would circle the school (on foot) and shout Islamophobic things. We could hear/ see him from the windows and always had to be on soft lockdown bc of it." -- the_cumsquat
"America is so f***ed up man." -- fredbuddle
Would Never Pee Again
"One of my friends told me that his friend went to the bathroom at school one time and looked up and saw a man looking at him from an open spot in the ceiling. It turned out to be a homeless man that had been living in the school for a while." -- yeeb0p
"I shi**ed my pants and had to look up my ceiling wall." -- 80mebcdy_
Explosive Vandelism
"I don't know if this is disturbing but in the computer science room someone jammed metal pieces in the outlets under a few tables and every time someone bumped a cord plugged into the metal filled socket(which was often) sparks would shoot out everywhere.
"After a while the teacher found the outlets and when trying to unplug a cord to reach the metal pieces sparks shot all over the floor and almost hit people all around the spot. It was an interesting time."
-- sandworm45
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College Professors Recall The Most Genius Things Students Have Ever Done In Their Class
College is a formative time in many people's lives. It's usually the first taste of real freedom, and real accountability, many people get as young adults.
Some choose to coast through the experience with as little effort as possible, while others struggle with the extra responsibility and expectations. Still others find their calling in education and really apply themselves to the whole experience.
College professors deal with a wide variety if students from different backgrounds, with different interests and abilities, and this can lead to some pretty interesting outcomes in the classroom.
Reddit user ziggiddy asked everyone on r/AskReddit:
19.
I'm a student, and On our exams we are able to have an index card we can write notes on to use as a reference during the test. Most kids just write super small, but this genius wrote some notes in red ink, and others that overlapped in blue ink. They then used 3d glasses to be able to read the jumbled mess. I sat there in astonishment. m1234321p
18.
I was a TA, we had a statistics course at our university that was unnecessarily hard to get through our undergrad business program. Anyways we had a student who recorded himself using doing the homework and uploading it on YouTube for the other students to understand (it was genuinely helpful). He even used different numbers and examples and what not to not give ya the answer.
The professor caught wind of it and claimed he was cheating gave him 0's on every assignment/test up to that point, threatened to sue him for using her materials to make public, and made him public apologize to the class for "academic dishonesty". That guy literally helped so many people that would struggle in the class or be in tutoring for HOURS. Forget that professor. Batterypacked123
17.
While teaching an algorithm class, I prefer giving assignments that require no code. Instead, I ask them to write pseudocodes.
Nevertheless, most of them try to convert a piece of code into pseudocode. However, one of the students handed me in almost a full technical paper using LaTeX. I admired that student. Talked to him after grading, and told him that I wish I was that smart when I was in college.
Nobody topped him yet. PisEqualToNP
16.
I was taking an easy elective class in college and my professor would give out 30-40 question test-like homework assignments. While googling to understand some of the concepts, I came across a site that had every question, word for word, and in order. I could tell that the questions were the same through the google search preview, but opening the page blurred everything except a subscription box in the middle. I think my teacher was trying to make extra money off of selling her own answers. Either that, or she was stealing the content.
Regardless, I'm no good with code so I didn't even think to try anything fancy. I just used a ctrl+A on the page and pasted it into a word document. It worked. I had plain searchable text I could reliably pull from the internet every week. I didn't tell a soul and got everything I needed to "pass" the class just through the homework assignments. BurberryPert
15.
Not a college professor, but I was in a 400+ student auditorium when a bizarre incident occurred during a final exam.
Barely five minutes after we started the test, a student gets up, hands in his paper to the proctor, yells "WE OUT!", and JUMPED OUT THE WINDOW.
It was the first floor, but still. dysenterychampion
14.
My Dad is a chemistry professor. This means that he gets to filter all the students trying to get into medical school. A surprising amount of them are cheating morons, which doesn't bode well for medical school. You can't cheat your way through a surgery. Nevertheless, I've got stories.
One time one of my dad's colleague's students managed to secretly install on his professors keyboard software that would track what was typed in. He figured out the professor's password, got into the grading system, and changed his and his friend's grades. They almost wanted to give him some credit for ingenuity, but the school makes its students sign an honor code and part of it is that they understand not to cheat, so he was booted. Poor kid. I hope he's using his clever tricks to better society.
Lately my dad's been stressing out about the whole online class thing and how you prevent students from cheating. His solution was to make tests way harder but allow use of the internet. He didn't feel he had to specify that you shouldn't get somebody else to do problems for you (edit:) after he had already stated so clearly.
But he found one of his students using this one website (edit:) called chegg where you could post the question and have people solve it for you. The students apparently making this really compelling case that he didn't know it was cheating. Maybe if he gets booted he can go to law school. CrimsonDawnSyndicate
The Best "Give The Hardest Job To the Laziest Person" Success Stories | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
13.
There's always that story of the guy that showed up to class late, saw a problem on the board, and assumed it must be the homework for that week. He completed it and turned it in the week after.
Turns out it wasn't homework, but rather a famous unsolved mathematical principle that he just discovered a proof for.
12.
I am a professor, so... My students are very bright for undergrads, but there are no real Good Will Huntings. One clever thing I notice a student do now and then is instead of (or in addition to) copying a long-detailed timeline or diagram I spend writing an hour writing out on the board, they will pull out their phone and take a picture of the board. narwhal_
11.
I once had a student who turned in an essay not in full sentences, but in bullet points. I was about to fail the student, except that all bullet points entailed one clear, concise point, every point clearly indicated its purpose for the overall argument, and the structure was more logical than most essays I had read before.
It was a bit like going from a late-Wittgenstein to an even more condensed version of an early-Wittgenstein. I decided to use my grading scheme on it, and basically the student met all the requirements I had communicated before, so it was an A.
In another instance, a student decided that my assignment was boring, so they started the essay by arguing that the question was boring for the following reasons, coming up with a better question (which was admittedly more interesting, but would have been too hard for the assignment), and then answering this question by using arguments established in the previous part about how the original question was boring. That one was an A+. fidadst
10.
I watched one of my students write a crib sheet on a small piece of plastic and place it perfectly inside the label of her water bottle so that it was barely visible, but readable inside. Over the course of a two-hour lecture. It was magnificent. No I did not call her out on it or demand she throw her water bottle away. It's not my business what she chooses to do in another class.
Students cheat for a lot of reasons, but often times we find it's because the professor's expectations are ridiculously f*cked (it's usually this one), or because the student is dealing with far too much on their plate and cheating can alleviate at least some of that burden of stress for an underprivileged student. I'm not saying it's right, but I understand it.
9.
A friend of my brother's was doing a Bachelor in Pharmacology and the only elective that fit his schedule was Philosophy. He had no interest in it but had to pass with at least a C in his final year. When he got to the exam there was one question on the paper:
"Is this a question?"
After the 3 hour exam he was talking to fellow classmates and asking what they had come up with. They had discussed word etymology, structures of thought, ideas on different cultural elements of language, the impact of spiritualism on philosophical questioning and reasoning and so on. He said "Oh no" and got real worried. Then a fellow student said "What did you write?"
He said "I wrote "If that's a question then this is an answer" and then left the exam room after 5 minutes. To his astonishment he got an A+
8.
I taught a lab that had a microscopy section back in the late 00s. Despite having a microscope camera for taking pictures of the field of view in my own high school labs and the technology being readily available, it was not something the university was willing to spring for the students of a 100 level class. One of my students just stuck his IPhone camera right up to the ocular lense of the scope and took a picture. I was floored. Now looking back I'm thinking "of course that would work why wouldn't it?" but at the time myself and my Blackberry were very impressed.
7.
We had assignments based on the daily lectures in class. Assignments were due at the end of the week, but this one student always turned his assignments in minutes after each class. I notice on his laptop, while everyone else was taking notes on theirs, he would be filling out the assignment as the professor went through his powerpoint. He would also ask the professor questions about the lecture that gave him the answers to the assignment. Not only was he learning from essentially taking notes, but he never had to do homework outside of class.
6.
Not me, but I took and Intro To Accounting class that was required for all Business Majors where we had a teacher that was teaching his first college class ever. He said T Accounts were for nerdy accounting people and wanted to show everyone how to look at the P&L and Balance Sheet like a business does.
He would assign us things to do and if you couldn't figure out the answer he would tell you to re-read the chapter the answer was in there. As you could guess a ton of kids struggled or had to cheat to get by after the first test.
But then there was some kid who had taken accounting before at a different university and the credits didnt transfer so he was forced into this class and he knew all the answers. He hosted a Homework Review in the library on a whiteboard and answered any questions and helped everyone study. I think we all just learned from that dude more than the teacher.
5.
I'm a TA for a chemistry class. Twice a week the students have to turn in a worksheet to me, and I require them to have them stapled because of the mess it turns into otherwise.
Anyway, one student made it through the class without buying a stapler because they figured out some wierd oragami like way of folding the corners together in such a way that you physically could not get them unstuck without carefully undoing the folds. Now I teach it to my students and tell them if they don't own a stapler they can just do that.
4.
On an exam, a student answered a question about DNA topology with an answer that neither the prof nor I had ever seen...and it was correct. And neither of us had come up with it.
And that made us have to go back and re-grade the entire class's answers to that question.
3.
This wasn't so much genius as it was ballsy, but in the last class I taught, students were required to give a 10 minute persuasive speech about a topic. I listed some common topics from previous classes like whether college athletes should be paid, legalizing marijuana, stuff like that. They were supposed to do a little bit of research and incorporate empirical evidence into their presentations.
This guy did a whole 10 minute speech, complete with a powerpoint presentation, on why one food item was better than another, similar food item. It was completely and totally irrelevant, subjective, and not related to anything the course discussed.
However, the presentation was very well done. Where students often struggle with the use of filler words, improper preparation and a flat, boring speaking voice, this student was engaging and seemingly excited about the topic.
Because I use a rubric, I told him I had to take off points for the fact that his "research" relied mostly on personal opinion rather than evidence, but I still gave him an A- because the actual presentation itself was well done. Honestly, it was one of the better speeches I heard that semester, if you don't factor in the content.
2.
My math professor told the class a story about an incredible student he had. He liked having both calculation questions (solve the diffeq, etc) and proofs testing conceptual things in the class. Well one time, this incredible student managed to proof things that were well beyond the scope of the course. She would also ask questions that suggested incredible insight about the class.
He was impressed and had to see what her math background was. Well, it turned out she was a C and D student. In fact she failed Calc 3 and got a C (I think) the second time. Her first exam also suggested that she had a very difficult time solving and applying the kinds of things learned in the course. Yet she could prove the bonus question extremely well.
He realized that she just had a hard time with applied math but was incredibly gifted at pure math. So he went to the head of the math department and after some fighting, managed to convince the department chair to give her harder exams on the account that the exam must be approved. Well that's what he did. And the department was astonished at the difficulty of the 2nd exam. She could never complete this! But she did. And she got an A in the course.
To this day he and her are good friends and she visited the class near the end of the semester (she was doing a pure math phd).
This stuck out to me. Honestly, I don't think she would have pursued mathematics. And that would have been a shame. The professor stood out to me. Not only was he an incredible teacher but he really cared about his students.
1.
I was taking a Romantic era lit class in University, due to some quirk of scheduling it was twice a week, 6-9 pm. We all had to do presentations for a tiny part of our grade on whatever the topic of the day was throughout the term. We were encouraged to take a very wide ranging view of what could constitute a presentation. This prof was pretty great and actually managed to get a bunch of 20 year olds to dress up in period costumes to read poetry to the class, or to tell pulpy stories about all the banging the Byrons and/or Shellys got up to.
Buddy was a super friendly guy who had time for everybody. Imagine the personality of Jack Black in the body of a 24 year old Harry Potter.
His day to present comes up and the poem is Rime of the Ancient Mariner. At first he doesn't show. The Prof goes through the preliminary matters and then before she can ask where he is, Buddy KICKS down the door to the class and struts in with somebody dressed as a fisherman and a woman in a showy prom dress. These people are not in our class.
He proceeds to take a literal boom box (this is like, 10 years after those stopped being a thing?) to the front of the room, plug it in, and start playing the Rime of the Ancient Mariner metal song by Iron Maiden. We think "Ok, cool, this is his presentation..." NO!
Dear reader that is not what happened.
What happened next was a 60 plus minute reenactment of the overall story of Rime of the Ancient Mariner through a Hunter S. Thompson Lens. The woman is initially the guest going to a wedding whom he stops, but then terrorizes her and holds her captive with a reenactment (a presentation within a presentation) with his captain friend about how he killed an Albatross in an aviary while pressuring this captain figure into driving him around to score more drugs as things kept spiralling out of control.
As this is going on the girl at first seeming terrified of them, circles around throws on some dark makeup and suddenly, with everyone's attention on this weird gonzo reenactment, makes her entrance as death and his rival from the play, lecturing them for their mortal hubris and both demanding her attention and ignoring her.
The metal song stopped playing 15 minutes ago and the whole class is caught off guard by this reversal when they thought the whole thing was wrapping up after he got to the part in his weird story about the dead bird.
But she keeps going in a fury! She throws out the sea captain / driver. And then she and he finish out the rest of the poem, with the mariner receiving his curse. They must have been rehearsing for weeks, there's no reference to anything written down, and they are just LIVING the emotional depths of this reckoning.
As they draw to the end she resumes being the woman waiting for a bus / wedding guest. They finish. Take a bow. The class is part amazed, part confused, and just besides themselves. There is some scattered applause, then he abruptly takes his boombox and they storm the fu*ck out.
Never came back to the class that night.
The proff takes a break, pokes her head out to look around. Tries to talk about the poem but she just can't. We've all just witnessed something together. Something weird, and wonderful, and spell binding. None of us put a stop to it, least of all her. There was nothing left to say about Coleridge.
No presentation I have ever experienced in my educational or professional career will ever approach the time I saw a gonzo re-imagining or Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a lit class.
Do you have something to confess to George? Text "Secrets" or "🤐" to +1 (310) 299-9390 to talk to him about it.