Trouble-makers, psychotic breakdowns, and general freaky attitudes have culminated into these teachers sharing career-altering moments with their worst students. No one could have been prepared for what these students would do.
(Content edited for clarity.)
The Biggest Sign In Second Grade
“There was a kid I knew in second grade – he was wild. When we were in the same class together, the teacher would regularly have to call the ‘assistance team’ (a group of teachers that would restrain unruly kids and were trained on how to do so) as he would throw desks, chairs, even scissors once. The following year he tripped a very pregnant teacher causing her to go into labor. No idea how he didn’t get expelled for that but the final straw was when he found a rusty pocket knife on the playground during recess and stabbed the student sitting next to him in the stomach with it for no reason. Still wonder what happened to him. Oh oh and he sucked his thumb regularly.”
The Class Act
“It happened a few years ago when I was an intern at a big school in my town. My job was simple: follow the teacher wherever she went to and complete 100 hours of unpaid work, that’s it. Unfortunate, but I had to do that in order to get my diploma.
So, there was this boy, around 14, who was always alongside his personal therapist. I don’t usually ask questions, but since that same teacher was my high school teacher years ago, I felt comfortable in asking her what was wrong with him. She said he had autism, and sometimes he would get aggressive towards his classmates, so his therapist had to be with him at all times while he was at school to help calm him down if something or someone triggers him.
Days later I went to the teacher’s room to ask for signatures for my internship documents. Everyone is helpful and starts signing until the coordinator walks in and asks for our attention.
‘Guys, I have some news to tell you all about [boy]. You’d better sit down. You gotta listen to this,’ she said.
Turns out the same freaking kid had been pretending to be autistic for years. He looked up on the internet for the ‘symptoms’ of autism and just started using his acting skills to fool even a psychologist and his whole family. His therapist had empty eyes, his mother looked like her son died in front of her. I don’t know the details, but it seems a different psychologist did something to him and caught him off guard, discovering his ruse.
And people have the gall to say that a teacher’s life has no thrill. I’ve been in the teaching career for only about 7 years and I’ve already had this and some other similar kinds of things happening, I can’t wait for what the future holds for me!”
When 666 Looks Like Child’s Play
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“My worst one was first institutionalized at the age of 4. Reading his file was like reading a biography of the serial killer. He killed the family pet. He tried to set his mom’s bed on fire while she was in it. He had violent fits of rage and heard voices that weren’t there. He had been diagnosed with mental disorders that I have never even heard of. There were at least four maybe five mental conditions listed within his file. By the time he made it to my class, he had been removed from our school twice and placed in the most restrictive setting in our school district. And both times parents pitched a fit and threatened a lawsuit if he did not return to our school.
On the first day of school, while he was in my class, he graphically explained how intercourse works to one of the younger students. We had a parent conference on the third day of school so that everyone could get acquainted. When we brought it up to the parents, the dad got super defensive and tried to explain away how his son would know so much about intercourse. It was a huge red flag. By the way, the kid was not allowed into the bathroom with other boys. This stemmed from an incident right before he left us the second time. The actual details never made it into his file and no one would really say exactly what had happened. However, you can guess.
While he was in my class, he would do anything to get out of doing his work. He quickly figured out how to game the system. He realized that if he caused a big enough disruption, then we would have no choice but to take him out of the room. Sometimes this disruption would be him crying and screaming at the top of his lungs. Other times it would be him peeing and pooping his pants. One time we had to get our other students out of the room so he didn’t hurt them. We had to move furniture away from him so he wouldn’t throw it at us.
Part of his positive behavior plan included time to journal. He would write some of the most violent and disgusting stories. Often the stories were about him hurting other children and needing to be punished. He was obsessed with death and violence. He was obsessed with Five Nights at Freddy and many of his stories incorporated those characters. He would write about burning children alive.
Worst of all, the parents would take his medicine for themselves. We never had any definitive proof that was happening, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money on it. The mother did say that the psychologist he was going to said to take him off of his antipsychotic medicine to see if we would notice. Yeah, we noticed. When he was medicated, he was somewhat manageable. However, when he was off his meds, he was completely and totally unpredictable.
I could talk for hours about this kid. However, there is one day I’ll never forget. He was playing with this toy that he brought from home and I reached over and took it off of his desk. He first looked at my hand and then looked me straight in my eyes. It was at that moment I realized that he really wanted to hurt me. He threw his head down and cried on the desk like he normally did. Only a few minutes later did I look over and hear him still crying. But he’s looking straight at me, with no tears in his eyes, and he had the most psychotic and evil looking grin on his face, all the while still making sobbing sounds. It was the only time I’ve ever been afraid of a student in my career.
Eventually, my co-teacher and I had enough and we pretty much harassed his mother every single day until she called an IEP meeting. He went on a modified day schedule so that he left at noon every school day. Finally, she put him in the online homeschool program that the state offers. The last time that I saw him, he came up to me, gave me a hug, and asked if I knew that there were glass houses on the dark side of the moon where a bunch of people live.
I have no doubts that this kid will go on to kill someone either for fun or just to see what it’s like.”
A Kid Named Kevin
“It’s not uncommon as a teacher to have students who are a bit behind the curve in certain aspects, but 99.99999% of the time they are keen on something. They might not understand how to identify a noun or what a theme is, but they somehow know how to make a mean plate of nachos. You learn pretty quick to not judge fish for their tree climbing ability, ya know?
I thought this was the rule when I was teaching until I met Kevin. Kevin isn’t his real name, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t spell it anyway. Kevin was a student of mine during my last year of teaching. He came to my classroom with very little to show for his academic past. He had moved a few times and thus was missing a lot of typical test scores that we use to try and ballpark their ability. I thought, ‘That’s fine. I’ll just do some one-on-one with Kevin and see what’s up.’ One on One with Kevin was like conversing with someone who’d forgotten everything in a freak, if not impossible, amnesia incident. There was no evidence that he had learned anything past the 2nd grade….and now he was in 9th grade. Flabbergasted, I figured we needed to get more serious with this. If he was going to be in my class, I needed to know why and how.
I decided to meet with him, his guidance counselor, his parents, and another teacher to see what was really going on. This is where it all became clear. It was by some incredible fluke that his family hadn’t been wiped off the face of the Earth years ago. Odds are his entire heritage was based on blind luck and some type of sick divine intervention that saves his family every time a threat presents itself. Kevin was the genetic pinnacle of this null achievement. Even my instructional lead, a woman who could find a redeeming trait in a Balrog, failed to see any reason this kid or his family should be alive today.
So here’s a list of events that made it abundantly clear that God exists and he’s laughing uncontrollably:
- Kevin frequently forgot when/where the class was. On more than one occasion, I had to retrieve him from other classrooms.
- Kevin ate an entire 24 pack of crayons, puked, and then did it again the next day. This is 9th grade. I have no idea where he got crayons.
- Kevin’s dad wrote tuition checks and mailed them to me…his English teacher. This was a public school. When I gave it back to Kevin, voided, to give to his dad with a brief note explaining that this is a public school, Kevin got in trouble for trying to spend it at 711 after school.
- Kevin was removed from the culinary arts program after leaving a cutting board on the gas stove and starting a fire….twice
- Kevin threw his lunch at the School Resource Officer and tried to run away. He ran into a door and insisted it wasn’t him.
- Kevin stole my phone during class. I called it. It rang. He denied that it was ringing. (Not that it wasn’t his, not that he did it…..no, he denied that the phone was actually ringing). He tried it three times before the end of the year.
- Kevin called the basketball coach an ‘Uncontrolled Narcissist’ during gym. Basketball tryouts were that afternoon. Kevin tried out. It didn’t go well.
- Kevin’s mom could never remember which school he went to. She missed several meetings because she drove to other schools (none of which he ever went to)
- Kevin tazered himself in the neck before a football game
- Kevin kept a bottle of orange kool-aide in his backpack for about 4 months. He thought it would turn into some mind-altering substance. He drank it during homeroom and threw up.
- Kevin says the N-word a lot. Kevin was white. The high school was 84% black. Kevin got beat up a lot.
- Kevin stole another student’s iPhone….and tried to sell it back to them.
- Kevin didn’t understand that his grade was dependent on tests, quizzes, homework, classwork, and participation. Kevin finished his first semester with a 3% average. He tried to bribe me with $11.
- Kevin spit on a girl and said: ‘You should get out of those wet clothes.’ The girl was the Spanish Student Teacher.
- Kevin didn’t know dogs and cats were different animals.
- Kevin tried to download adult content onto a computer in the library…..at the circulation desk….while he was logged on.
- Kevin asked a girl to prom (he was in 9th grade and freshmen don’t go to prom) by asking for her phone number and then texting her his address
- Kevin got gum in his hair, constantly.
- Kevin regularly tried to cheat on assignments by knocking the pile over, grabbing one before I had picked them all up, and then writing it name on it wherever there was room.
- Kevin had several allergies, but neither his parents nor he could remember what they were. They were very concerned that ‘the holiday party’ (it’s high school, we don’t have those) would have peanuts. When they finally got a doctor’s note….he was allergic to amoxicillin.
- Kevin and his parents took a trip to Nassau (how did they even get airline tickets?) and forgot all their luggage at home. I didn’t believe him when he told me until I talked to his mom, who told me 1st thing when I saw her at the bi-weekly meeting.
- Kevin’s grandfather apparently died in a chainsaw accident. I can only assume God was looking the other way that day.”
So. Many. Red. Flags.
“I had a student earlier this year who came to me because he was ‘kicked out’ of his last school (according to him). He was covered in tattoos as a freshman in high school. On the second day of having him in my class, I looked up from my desk while students were supposed to be taking a test to see him miming cutting off my head with something shiny. When I went back to see what it was he laughed and hid it, swearing he had nothing. I looked up to see him doing it again. The same thing happened again… I let it go.
After he left the room, I found the pen he had been writing with under his desk with two small incisions in the cap, indicating that he was using some kind of sharp object (a thumbtack, I suspect) to mime cutting my head off. I immediately reported it to admin.
He was moved to another teacher a few days later for an unrelated scheduling issue. He threatened to kill her. He was moved to another teacher because of this. In the third teacher’s class, he drew pictures of weapons all over his essays.
So. Many. Red. Flags. He was finally sent to the alternative school a few months back. But he’ll likely be back.”
A Rough Day
“This was a long time ago. I was doing a co-op placement as an educational assistant when studying Sociology.
Had a student in the class (with behavioral problems mind you) walk up to another teacher who was pregnant and proceed to tell her he was going to cut the fetus out of her.
Nobody really knew how to react, and the tone in his voice/look in his eyes was up there with the evilest stuff I’ve seen up till that point in my life.
He had severe behavioral problems related to his disability. He was sent home and kept at home for a number of weeks but was eventually allowed back to class. This was an experimental program (no longer exists) at this one high school for rather severe behavioral issues, so the rules were bent quite a bit while I was there.
He was a rather pleasant kid more often than not, but when he had his bad days he was one of the worst in respects to violence and threats.”
In The Unusual Cicumstance
“Taught 2nd grade for a while. Had a female student who always wanted to peek down people’s pants to see what color underwear they were wearing. Had a few serious talks with her and her mom and she eventually stopped doing it. Turns out that she was being abused at home and her father and uncle used to do that to her all the time. Another teacher of hers in 4th grade picked up on it and reported it. To this day, I hate myself for not picking up on that and dismissing it as a ‘weird kid.’
From what I know, there were some potential ‘issues’ that her 4th-grade teacher noticed and had a conversation with her mom about. The teacher had the girl speak to a child psychologist and this came out. The mom did not know about any of this happening. When they figured this out, the mom moved out with the daughter and another young child and is separated from the father. They have filed a case with the police. I’m unsure about any further details. I left the school very soon after and moved to a different state a few years ago and found out through an ex-colleague.”
To Cure The Itch
“My friend teaches and told me this. He had a student who constantly picked at his scabs. He would rip them off and eat them, then lick the blood off his fingers. Then he would pull disinfectant swabs out of his backpack and clean the wound while smiling creepily. He made everyone feel super uncomfortable and grossed out, but no matter what, he wasn’t removed from the class.
Finally one day my friend comes back from the teacher’s lounge to find him using a letter opener….under his skin and moving it back and forth, blood everywhere. When asked what he was doing he said his skin itches and it’s best to get it at the source…
The kid was finally removed from the school. My friend never found out where or what happened to him though.”
An Inexplicable Story
“When I was a sophomore, I had a friend who was kind of… strange. We all liked him well enough, he had a dark sense of humor and would often tell stories nobody really believed. He would constantly joke about having snuff films and being involved in trafficking paraphernalia and weapons. He was like 15, so nobody really took him seriously and honestly, when he started being weird, we would just change the conversation and move on.
At one point, he started talking to himself. I mean, full blown conversations standing by himself. I remember once asking him if he was alright and he would say things like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, they’re just talking really loud’ and wouldn’t go into much more detail. He would disappear for weeks at a time, and then show up again at school and act like he was never gone.
The first time I was ever actually scared of him, it was because he started texting my phone from multiple numbers asking me if I ever thought about taking other people’s lives. I probably should’ve gone to someone about that right away, but I was a kid and I was terrified so I kept my mouth shut. At one point he disappeared yet again for about a week, and wouldn’t answer any phone calls or texts asking if he was alright. One day, a security guard from my school came and picked me up from class and took me to a room in the back of the front office where two police officers were waiting for me. I was being heavily interrogated, and they told me that the kid had an extremely detailed plan to carry out a violent school shooting, hit list and all. A kid I had known for about 4 years, and it was terrifying.
While he was in jail, I started getting text messages from random phone numbers explaining details from his school shooting plan. He would also tell me he loved me every time he texted me. I still don’t know how he got the opportunity to text my phone or how he even got my phone number. Scary stuff.”
Children Of The School
“I’ve had a few kids over the years that have made me very nervous. One of my first years teaching, a middle schooler’s house burnt down and it was pretty much decided he did it… with his younger siblings in the house… hoping he would kill them. The parents said he made stuff up and that wasn’t true, but eventually, he disappeared and they ran. It wasn’t their house, either, just a rental. I’m guessing when the official report came out that the fire was set intentionally they skipped town.
The worst is probably a kid who is still in school where I work. Extremely violent. Snaps all the time. Any kind of stimulation, good or bad, sets him off and he explodes. Throws desks and chairs, get on top of the vending machine, runs from the building, tries to hurt people. He has an IEP. I don’t think the SPED department is dealing with him appropriately and the parents insist he doesn’t do this at home and it’s all our fault. He’s exactly like those kids featured on A Dangerous Son except he’s a big kid. Big enough he could easily take an adult out if he got the opportunity. I’m mostly afraid he’s going to topple over something he climbs up on and knock it over on top of someone else.
Needless to say… I’m not happy to work in that environment.”
Of The Nasty Breed
“I was in charge of an after-school program for Jr. High and High school students (13-18 years old). One time I was waiting for a 13-year-old girl to get picked up by her friend, and this is the conversation I hear from across the room while they were messing with the whiteboard.
Girl 1: [draws a swastika]
Girl 2: ‘You can’t do that, that’s bad.’
Girl 1: ‘Why?’
Girl 2: ‘I don’t know, I just know bad.’
Girl 1: ‘It’s OK, my dad has it tattooed on his chest.’
Me: ????
I was working in a semi-rural part of the US, and dad was a white guy who lived in a trailer park. I’m not one for stereotypes but I’m pretty sure the guy wasn’t Hindu. Or Buddhist.”
A Medicinal Collar
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“I subbed for this 6th-grade teacher a lot. She had this student who seemed like a harmless but obviously mentally and physically disabled kid. Whenever I saw him he was calm, drooled, and carried an iPad so he could semi-communicate. He didn’t seem 100% there at any given time, but like I said, he seemed harmless.
Halfway through the school year the teacher I subbed for decided that I should probably know to steer clear of this kid if he gets any sort of mood other than calm. Like if he is upset that it’s cloudy I can’t talk to him.
He also had an adult that followed him everywhere. I assumed this guy was a para (people that help IEP kids) but no he was a legit handler for this kid.
Took me a while to dig this kid’s backstory up but apparently, this kid has to be put into a stupor of high heaven proportions to just be at school (hence the drooling and super passive behavior 99% of the time). Apparently, he is ultra crazy aggressive and if he gets into any bad mood it means his meds are wearing off and he’s a ticking time bomb. His ‘meltdowns’ cause school lockdowns because of how violent he is towards himself and others. There is a literal designed plan for this kid if he snaps (hence the handler).
I feel bad for the kid because his life was spent incapacitated and the fact that he probably has some incurable rage issue or brain problem. But sweet Jesus the kid terrifies me now that I know.”
No Harm, No Foul
“My mom is a special education teacher (mostly kids with autism and learning disorders, middle school aged) but her program has gotten students who don’t fit into ‘regular’ classes, so they get dumped into her program.
One of the students, about 6-7 years back, was SUPER weird. He was mouthy, hated authority, and was a lot bigger than the other kids. He wrote I’M GONNA HURT MISS TEACHER in bright red sharpie on a paper he had to pass into another teacher. They called his parents into school to talk about it, and the student’s mom started laughing about it. She said that her child ‘had a weird sense of humor, but he meant no harm to anyone.’
She also had another student whose parents had him miss school on 12/21/12 because the world could end, and they couldn’t expect him to spend his final day at school.”