Oh, teachers. We know they mean well (or at least, most of them do). Unfortunately, they are human like the rest of us, and so even the best of them make mistakes. Some of these are small, like calling a kid by the wrong name or forgetting to grade some tests. Others are a little more troublesome, like losing said tests, or giving a class waaay too much information, or throwing a student under the wheels of a bureaucratic bus.

I have compiled student stories of these traumas, from the humorous to the “Oh god, what just happened?” Enjoy, and perhaps take warning. This could happen to you too.

“A teacher talked to me for literally 18 minutes into break about college and time management after class, and then when it was 10:08, she said, ‘You’re going to be late, you should hurry.’ (I had tried leaving after she had finished some of her sentences.) So I hinted to her that it would be nice to have a pass so I didn’t have worry about being stopped by an administrator and given Saturday school, by saying, ‘Yeah, my class is on the third floor at the opposite end of the school …’ And she responds with, ‘Well, you better start runnin’.’”

“A teacher almost gave me a referral for throwing a snowball at him while he was teaching class.”

“I had to send off a letter of recommendation to a college. I had an extra letter from him, but it wasn’t in an officially sealed envelope. So I came to his office that morning to get him to officially seal the envelope. He looked at the letter with the school letterhead and his signature on it and said, ‘How do I know you didn’t change this?’ And he rips it up and asks me to come back during lunch for him to print me out a new one. I know there are ‘official logistics,’ but ironically, he lets you read the letter beforehand and make any change you want.”

“A teacher once gave me zero points on a three hundred point test because I wrote my heading wrong.”

“In eighth grade, my science teacher threw a glass beaker at me. He was pissed off because someone squirted water on his back with a micropipette. I think he kicked a chair at someone that day too.”

“Freshman year, I didn’t do my homework one day, and as the teacher was walking around collecting it, she turned to me and said, ‘Well, I see that once again you’ve come to class empty-headed.’ That was the day I learned what a Freudian slip is. After I didn’t do a few assignments, the same teacher asked me if I had a learning disability, if I had ever been ‘checked out’ by a psychiatrist, if I was in any ‘special programs,’ and if I had diabetes.”

“In seventh grade, my teacher sent me out of the classroom for drawing on my own pants.”

“A teacher called me a whale once.”

“We asked our teacher about her weekend, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it. Then a student said she couldn’t talk about her own weekend, because thankfully she couldn’t remember it. Ignoring the obvious illegal implications, our teacher stared ahead and said in an ominous voice, ‘I’ve done some things I’d rather forget.’ What could she have done?”

“I was attempting to leave school early to go to a Running Start appointment, and in preparation I had taken my physics test a day early. The teacher told me that I was free to go as long as I got my absence excused. Unfortunately, my mother had written the time of my appointment on her note, so the administrators in the attendance office wouldn’t let me go, and they were insisting that it wouldn’t take more than three minutes for me to get to Seattle Central. I argued, saying that I had done all my work, had taken my test, and had the teacher’s permission, so there was nothing for me to do in class. The response I got? ‘I don’t care if you have anything to do! You just have to be in that classroom.’”

“A teacher told me I had reached my capacity to learn in Pre-Calculus class.”