Teaching can be tough, especially when there's a troublesome kid in class. You know who I'm talking about---that kid that always needs attention, whether it's good or bad. Welp, looks like a big heap of karmic justice was served to these 14 kids and we can't help but cheer for the teachers!
The Biter
“Not a teacher, but one time when I was in kindergarten, a kid looked me straight in the eyes, bit himself on the wrist – hard – and ran to the teacher and blamed me. That little c*nt. They sent me to the principal’s office, my mom was called down, I got yelled at and cried. A week later, the kid did it again… and the teacher saw him do it. Felt so good to have the principal apologizing profusely to me, while that little sh*thead got a mouthful from his parents.”
The Karma Payback Plan
“I had a student that was a real twerp. Always doing things he was not supposed to and purposely causing conflict with other students. He was a daily headache. One day in class he stole a candied pepper from one of Hispanic students and ate it. It was a very hot pepper ( not sure of the type). At first I didn’t notice cause he is a sneaky kid. He started to sweat and his sweat turned to tears. ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he cried, ‘my mouth, my mouth!’ I went to investigate and found out what happened. The karma payback plan was now collecting, and I refused to let him go get a drink and continued with the math instruction in hopes of teaching him a lesson. For the next few minutes he pleaded with me to go to the nurse with tears running down his face. I said ‘I do not negotiate with thieves.’ He started running around in circles. It wasn’t until he started sobbing and crying out ‘I just want my mom,’ that I finally felt bad and said,’If I take you to the nurse are you ever going to act out in class again?’. He promised that he wouldn’t, and he never did. The tears and sobbing in front if his peers broke his ego and he was a stellar student for the rest of the school year. (I teach middle school)”
MIddle School Football
“I coached middle school football. Some kids have come out of their shell by then, others have not. But at least most of the early bloomers were jerks to make life hell for everybody. The teams starting half back was one of those jerks. He gave a defensive lineman h*ll and since everybody thought he was cool they gave him h*ll right along with him. The d-lineman was a big guy but not aggressive or outgoing, still just in his shell really. He did fine out there because he was a big guy but hardly played to his potential. The little running backs took their Napoleon complexes out on the big guy by running by him and shouting ‘Pussy!’ every time he failed to stop them. Rather than fight back to make the play he would just ignore it and line up and try again the next play. One day the whole thing just clicked for the big guy and he started making plays. He learned to get off his blockers and form tackle and attack the ball carrier. It was a cool thing to see. He loved it. When he really started getting into a grove I started running the jerk half back right at the blooming d-lineman and watched him plant that guy in the ground with a thud every time. It was just getting easier as I made sure they ran the same play at him play after play. Soon, bruised and beaten, the jerk half back asked ‘How many times are you going to run this play?’ and I responded ‘Once for every time you called him a pussy.'”
The Scratcher
“Reminds me of a boy I dealt with when I was in second grade. he was a pain, totally bully, annoying, disobedient little brat. Always getting in trouble with the teacher for one reason or another. I was mild mannered and obedient. One day he is harassing me to no end in the line to go indoors after recess. So I say to him, ‘Kyle if you keep buggin me I am going to scratch your arm so bad it bleeds.’ He keeps bugging me and basically calling my bluff, so I do what I promised and scratch him down the forearm (not really bad, just enough to barely bring blood to the surface). SO then he goes whining to the teacher and she comes to me and says, ‘meghan, why did you scratch him?’ I told her I’d warned him to stop bugging me or I’d do it.. and she says, “very well. Kyle – next time I suggest to listen to her warning’. And that was it..”
Lock to the head
“Had a kid that threw a lock at my head not get expelled because ‘it just slipped out of her hand’. She got expelled a few months later for bringing a weapon to school.”
The Power Of The Punch
“Last year had a 7 year old in my class who was just a pain. He’s the only child I’ve ever taught who I’ve actually disliked. He would throw things around the classroom, pinch other children, stab them with pencils, he was rude to everyone and would always blame it on someone else. Talking to his parents wouldn’t help because they believed everything he said, even over adults who had actually witnessed him doing it. They would give excuses and say that other children were blaming him or that he was being picked on. There was nothing wrong with this child other than he had been brought up with no consequences in his life. Anyway, one break time he was harassing another child and I guess they just had enough and this usually mild mannered child just punched him in the stomach causing the horrible child to wet himself. When following the indecent up all of the other children who witnessed it (around 5 or 6) completely closed ranks and denied that it ever happened. I can’t usually condone when children hit back (it causes so many other problems) but you better believe all the adults that have had to deal with this child were rooting for the hitter.”
Don’t drink his coke
“5th grade, a boy joined our class by being held back (again). He often cussed the teacher, couldn’t control himself, and due to being 2 years older (but no bigger) than the rest of us, he bullied people. Until one day he bullied the wrong person. He drank my coke. Now, I didn’t get many cokes in school because I rarely had the 50 cents for the coke machine to get one, we were poor, I got free lunches poor. I told him to replace my coke, he said no. It was ON. I had him on the ground slamming his head into the floor, his nose was bleeding from hitting the floor, and our teacher, who was THOROUGHLY fed up with his shit walks in the room, looks at me, looks at him, walks back out and CLOSES THE DOOR behind her. He bought me another coke, and we were best friends after that. I (mostly) kept him out of trouble and helped him in class and he didn’t get held back again.”
“Well my mentor teacher paired this smug…”
“I interned in a class with this kid who always thought he was smarter than everyone else. He was pretty smart, but not by too much. He always got paired with kids not as smart as him, so he would always be really smug when dealing with them. We learned he got that from his parents, during a parent teacher conference. His parents praised that boy up and down and thought he was the smartest kid in the school. They built him up as that and they got him thinking that too. Then they went off on my mentor teacher. She ‘wasn’t providing him with higher enough education, she was bringing him down, she was terrible.’ The conference ended when my mentor teacher left the room crying after the verbal lashing. Well about a week later, there was an event where parents came to watch their children in class. It was to watch them do math games with other students. Well my mentor teacher paired this smug little bastard with the actual smartest kid in class. The one who was working on more advanced classes after school. The kid got shamed. His parents were so flustered during the event. They were very visibly nervous and upset looking as this kid got destroyed game after game. They left before it was all done and took him out of school for the rest of the day.”
Come on, Kevin
“I taught a comparative anatomy animal dissection lab section back in college. I had one kid in a section (let’s call him Kevin) who never listened to dissection instructions and just dove in with a scalpel, dicing and chopping and generally mutilating most of the internal organs. His first karmic warning came when we were dissecting squid, and he got squid ‘juice’ on himself. Smelled awful for the rest of that class. However, he kept on ignoring instructions and hacking away… and this time, karmic justice struck on our very last dissection project, the fetal pig. Kevin really wanted to see the pig’s brain. Kevin couldn’t get through the the skull, so he started whacking away at it with the butt of a flat pry knife. I told him to stop, but he had to give it one last, mighty thwack… Crack! The skull breaks, and rubbery piglet brain bits come flying out everywhere… mostly over Kevin, splattering him. Unfortunately, while protesting my refusal to let him dice this piglet into pancetta cubes, Kevin had his mouth open. Thankfully, preserved pig brain, ingested orally, seemed to have a calming, subduing effect on Kevin for the last couple classes.”
Interesting Approach
“When I was younger the teacher got tired of the kid who kept disrupting the class and she gave extra homework to EVERYONE in the class EXCEPT the troublesome kid and made all the student write ‘Thanks for the extra homework, [name]’. Somehow he stopped believing he was cool after that.”
Very annoying
“I moved to a new city in 1st grade. At the time, I was ahead of the curve, reading-wise. I learned to read early and was really fucking good for my age at that point. Reading was my favorite thing to do. So you know quiet reading time was my fucking jam. Except the kid sitting behind me, we’ll call him D, was annoying as f**k and did his best to distract any and everyone around him during silent reading time. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just shut the fuck up and let me enjoy my book…and honestly, I started to really hate him. Also, having just moved, he was the first black person I had ever met in my life, and I might have been brought up to be a little bit racist (a flaw I have worked to correct since I realized it). ANYWAY, eventually, after a few months of close surveillance, I solved the mystery of why D had to be so goddamned annoying during my favorite part of the day: he was bored to tears because he couldn’t fucking read. And I mean he literally could not read, he could sound out some easy words but he was pretty much lost for the most part. And the teachers weren’t really doing anything about it… So I taught him. Before school, during recess (on days when when couldn’t play outside of course – we were little kids, not college students), during reading time, waiting for the bus. We practiced and practiced. I brought him my phonics flashcards from kindergarten. My mom sent me to school with two sets of whatever supplies we needed that day – one pack of markers/notebook/pair of scissors for me, one for D. I got to know him better, and learned about his home life. His mom had two jobs and didn’t get home until after most kids are in bed. He took care of feeding and bathing his younger brother. His dad was in jail. He had a rough life. Hearing about his made me closely examine my own. This was my first real lesson in racism as well. My teachers always seemed exasperated with him, like it was his fault he couldn’t read and not a reflection of their performance as a teacher. They seemed to leap at the opportunity to give him a demerit or send him on a trip to see the principal even for minor infractions, like ‘not paying attention’ (read: looking out the window because the public school system had failed him so badly he couldn’t even begin to keep up with the material). I noticed they treated several other kids this way, all of whom were black. There were troublemakers of all races and backgrounds, but I remember noticing, at an early age, that the rich white ones never seemed to get in half as much trouble as D always did. By the end of the year, D’s grades had soared – and not just in English. It turns out, with the right support system and school supplies, anyone can learn anything. He finished the first grade with an A in English nothing below a C+ in the other subjects. I remember him hugging me tight and saying “I’ve never gotten an A before!” But most importantly, he could read. He had joined the world of the literate. He was just so excited. All he needed was a little attention and some help getting school supplies. So that’s probably not what you were expecting, Reddit, but my story of misbehaving-kid-gets-karmic-justice is just a little bit different than the other ones. Life dealt D a shit hand and he succeeded anyway. He got ‘what he deserved’ – a fair chance at an education. Hope you’re still out there reading, D. Wherever you are.”
The attention grabber
“In high school we had this little sh*t kid named Brandon. I only had one class with him but that class is where the story happened. It was 11th grade Geography, and our teacher was one of the nicer teachers I can remember. Brandon would always push her buttons like I’m sure he did to everyone. He would never take it too far, I think he just loved the attention of getting the whole class to look at him or laugh at what he was doing. He would make little noises, tell stupid jokes during lecture, pretend to sleep and snore, and any other stupid irritating shit that you could think of. Our teacher, she was quite a patient lady but you could tell by mid year that she had enough of his sh*t as anyone. She couldn’t even really punish him because Brandon loved that kind of attention and it made him all the happier. The few times he got too much, she would give him detention and a couple times sent him to the office, which just made him more giddy(we had a very tame office staff and they would keep him in the office for an hour or something and just let him out). She tried everything and you could tell she was at the end of her wits. A few weeks after 9/11, some kid thought it would be funny to call in a bomb threat. They cleared the school and went locker by locker. They found nothing of course, and we went back in. As soon as we sat down in that geography class, an office staff member came into our class and went up to our teacher and whispered something into her ear. I still remember the calm look on her face. In the most professional way, she looked over at Brandon and said, ‘you’re being called to the office.’ She went on with the rest of the class completely normal. They had found quite a bit of weed in Brandon’s locker and as a result he was expelled over it.”
Nuns are strict
“I was in pre-k in the early 80’s at a private Catholic school. This one kid, Amy, would always bite the other kids. I don’t remember exactly how it went down but I guess one day I came home crying or had a really bad bite mark or something and my mom was PISSED. She took me straight to the Superintendent, not the principal, and showed her what happened. The Superintendent, a really old nun, did not put up with that sh*t. She called Amy into her office and bit the f**k out of her arm. Amy started crying but she never bit anyone again. Old nuns in the 80’s were hardcore. Note: I am not saying what happened was right, just that it happened.”
It takes time for karma to come around
“I teach college students to be teachers. My first year doing this, I had a student who was always late, turned in the bare minimum of work, always had excuses. I told him he had to improve because if he did this on the job, he’d get fired. He kept coasting and the other profs let him get by. First teaching job? He got fired. I laughed (in the privacy of my office) and I’m not sorry.”