(I am a student teacher. Today, my class is on a trip to a fire station. The RCMP — Royal Canadian Mounted Police — officer is talking about bike safety, and starts answering questions from the students.)

Student: “Were you alive in the 1920s?”

RCMP: “I’m not sure how to take that. No, it was a bit later.”

(The RCMP officer gets back to his presentation. The following remarks happen in the next five minutes.)

RCMP: “Well, back when I started policing, in the 1920s, we used horses and tractors.”

RCMP: “During the Crimean war, which I fought in during the late 1800s, we used our swords to catch bad guys. Then we would ride to the police station on our horses.”

My teacher for Intro to Bioscience Technologies has scheduled a field trip to Genentech for his two classes in December, which my class is very excited about. But on the week of the field trip, the teacher finds out there’s only space for 40 students. He decides to let the other class period go, and reschedules mine.

Fast forward two months. The field trip is finally happening. The morning of, I wake up and look outside to see several inches of snow and ice. School ends up being cancelled, and the field trip is again rescheduled.

A month later, it’s March, and the teacher looks up the weather forecast. The weather has been perfectly pleasant for months, so we’re not really worried, even though there’s a chance of snow on Friday.

Friday morning, I wake up and see… snow. Lots of it. I check the school website, and it’s not cancelled. I live in a rural area at a high elevation, so I often get snow when most students don’t, so I have to miss school… again… on the third rescheduling of the field trip I was looking forward to. The class goes without me.

I think the universe really didn’t want me to have that field trip.

(My seventh-grade class goes on a trip to cities in our state with places significant to our state history. We are staying in a hotel that is a century old, and has the slowest elevators. Our grade has resorted to using both the service elevator and the one public elevator that works. It is the last day after breakfast and everyone has rushed upstairs to pack. There are about 15 students left waiting for the elevators, along with about six adult strangers. When the elevator finally arrives, we let the adults go first before crowding in, but one man gets caught behind us.)

Man’s Wife: “Excuse me. My husband has a meeting he needs to get to. Let him in, please.”

(We back up for him and start coming in after him. Keep in mind that with 50 of us, all 5’5” and under, we’ve crammed the whole group into the elevators the entire trip. We also have about 15 minutes left before our bus needs to leave. There are about six of us left when the wife speaks up.)

Man’s Wife: “Let my husband in. He has a meeting he needs to get to. You have nothing to do. Just wait and go away.”

(All of us were shocked, as we knew we could all fit, but the elevator left before we could do anything. Needless to say, the six of us were the last ones downstairs.)

(It is the early 1990s and we are getting a tour of a prosthetic limb plant as part of a group experience for school. Ages range from six to ten.)

Rep: “Anyone have any questions about [prosthetic]? Yes, you in the back.”

Six-Year-Old: “Do you make prosthetic heads?”

Rep: “Oh, sweetie, no. We don’t make prosthetic heads.”

Six-Year-Old: “But why not?”

(My son has a pet snake that his younger sister adores. She is only seven, but she already wants to work with them when she’s older. Her class has a school trip to a local zoo, which has a reptile exhibit. My daughter is extremely excited about it the morning of the trip, but comes home early with a teacher. She has been crying, and she runs up to her bedroom before saying a word. The teacher asks to have a word with me.)

Teacher: “Your daughter has an unhealthy obsession that you need to correct.”

Me: “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

Teacher: “SNAKES! It’s all she would talk about! The first place she wanted to go was the snake exhibit!”

Me: “And that’s a problem? She wants to work with them when she’s older.”

Teacher: “I hate them! It isn’t normal. I told her never to speak of them again, or I would send her home.”

Me: “Is that why you brought her home? Did she even see the exhibit?”

Teacher: “Of course not. I don’t encourage deviant behaviour!”

Me: “No, you just crushed my daughter’s aspirations to work with animals because of your own opinions about them. The exact opposite of what a teacher should do.”

Teacher: *blushes*

Me: “I’ll be speaking with the school before I move her to a better school. Now if you could please leave.”

(I called the school the second she left and filed a complaint. In the next week before I removed my daughter, the teacher tried to get her excluded for being aggressive and physically violent with the other kids, which didn’t work, as there were other teachers on the trip too who vouched for me. The last I heard, the teacher was suspended temporarily, and then moved to a role where she didn’t need to work with children, which apparently is common at that school. It has a larger administration staff than teachers. My daughter is much happier at her new school, and my son leaves the snake with her while he is at university.)

This story is part of the Reptiles roundup! This is the last story in the roundup, but we have plenty of others you might enjoy!

23 Funny Stories About Snakes And How They’re Misunderstood

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