I had a professor who, before the final, told us all, “Don’t worry; anyone who scores at least twenty-five will pass.”

Several students took this as permission to slack off a little in preparation for the finals.

The final exam was twenty-five short-form essay questions — “Write at least one paragraph.” — for one point each to be scored with fractional points.

One student, upon seeing the final, started screaming. We wound up calling 911 and having him taken to the hospital for his panic attack. In the end, because of the chaos, the final had to be rescheduled. Several students who had previously slacked off used the rescheduling as an opportunity to study some more.

The new exam had only five questions, long-form ones — “Write at least three pages or seven paragraphs, whichever is longer.” — for five points each.

I kinda hated that professor.

When I was in vocational school, I was one of the few students in my class who actually had a degree of higher education already (I decided to switch career paths after university) and was thus a bit older — twenty-two years old — than most of my classmates. As vocational school is more geared toward people from lower educational branches, I was WAY ahead of the curriculum (turns out later I could have just skipped those three years of bi-weekly classes entirely) and often bored.

Meanwhile, one of the boys in my class from the lowest educational branch was clearly struggling yet also didn’t pay attention in class. Our teacher decided to help him by sitting him next to me and pretty much assigning me as his personal tutor.

This went about as well as you can imagine: [Boy] would not listen to me, nor whatever the teacher was saying at any given time. He was disruptive, kept trying to goof off at/with me, did no work whatsoever, and even kept me from doing my own work and got ME reprimanded.

After a week of this, I’d had enough and changed seats to be as far away from him as possible. Of course, when [Teacher] entered the classroom, she immediately noticed.

Teacher: “[My Name], get back in your seat.”

Me: “This is my seat.”

Teacher: “No, I seated you with [Boy] for a reason.”

Me: “The reason is that he sucks. That’s not my fault but his. By seating me next to him, you’re actively punishing me while it has no effect on his antics at all.”

Teacher: “[My Name]! That’s quite enough! I expected you to be a good example to him and tutor him because you’re my top student.”

Me: “With all due respect, ma’am, what is your hourly wage?”

Teacher: “Excuse me?”

Me: “Your hourly wage. Just a rough estimate.”

Teacher: *Confused* “About [amount]?”

Me: *Breaking out my calculator* “Let’s see… That’s [amount] per class period. We have ten periods of this class per week, so that’s [bigger amount] for the last week of my tutoring him. For the rest of the school year, that’ll come to [quite large amount], due now. I’ll take payment in cash only.”

Teacher: “Excuse me?!”

Me: “You want me to do your job of teaching [Boy] for you? Then you’d better pay me for it. Otherwise, I’m staying right here and focusing on my own education.”

Teacher: “Go to the principal’s office. Now!”

Me: “And tell him what? That you want to punish me for refusing to do your job? Sure, I can do that.”

[Teacher] yelled at me some more, but some of my classmates who I got along with better than the rest supported me and told her that they’d confirm my story to the principal if she tried to punish me. I got to sit far away from [Boy] for the rest of the school year while he failed most of his classes, and [Teacher] never forced me to tutor any lost cause again. Surprisingly, she didn’t retaliate against me — probably because I had the best grades of all pupils in the entire school.

I have never been the kind of person to think fraternity life sounds fun. I was nearly done with college when I became friends with someone in an “engineering fraternity”, which was as nerdy as it sounds; they had a higher chance of watching Ted Talks versus watching sportsball, although they did enjoy both. They were more nerdy than your typical frat, but they still got up to hijinks.

One evening, it was about 95 degrees out (35 C). Air conditioning in the dorms and on-campus housing was inefficient and basically non-existent. One very hairy frat boy had an idea, inspired by the shaving scene in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; you could pay $5-10 and wax a strip of his leg or chest.

He got a bit liquored up for this. It was so hot that we were all sweating. A couple of dudes took their shirts off. It was finals week, I believe, and many people were already done for the semester/year and were partying.

I was playing on my DS, waiting for pizza to come, only vaguely watching the fratty nonsense going on around me. I was really only friends with the one guy there, who was manning the camera. These were pre-smartphone days, so they were using a large digital camera to film the hilarity.

So, they were waxing this large man, who was lying on the kitchen table. He was shrieking each time a strip got pulled, just like in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”. Two people were holding him because he kept involuntarily kicking or twitching.

A large man walked in, looking vaguely like Anthony Anderson. He looked around, startled.

Man: “Uhh… sorry… I was looking for… I think I wanted the next… Y’all have… Bye!”

He ran backward out of the room.

Frat Boy #1: “What was that? He seemed scared. I think the apartment across the walkway is having a big party tonight; he’s probably looking for that one.”

Frat Boy #1: “Yeah, I think he’s still running. He’s… really booking it out of here? Why?”

Me: “Y’all are shirtless with a crying, greased-up man bent over while you’re filming him. I’ve been to a couple of sketchy strip clubs for a friend’s birthday, and this is the freakiest s*** I’ve seen in my life. Y’all need Jesus.”

And I went back to playing on my DS.

Frat Boy #1: “…what?”

Frat Boy #2: “Oh, God… It looks like we’re filming torture p*rn.”

Me: “Legally, I think you are.”

I’m in high school. We’re doing a partner assignment that has to do with industrial accidents in the USA and the resulting toxic spills. It’s not a usual partner work assignment; we’re each expected to do our own report about different sites, but we’re supposed to work together where possible.

I’m putting together a section on my paper explaining the toxicity of various chemicals involved in a particular incident. The teacher comes by and glances over it.

Teacher: “[Partner]’s report on the toxicology is better; you might want to take some pointers from him.”

I WROTE [Partner]’s section on toxicology.

[Partner] and I both got As, but boy, was that an annoying comment from my teacher.

I was a graphic design student in my last year of school, but I often worked with audio/video, so many people knew me to be handy with recording projects. A classmate knew I had some skill, so he asked me to help him record narration for an animation he was working on. Not a problem, or so I thought. Keep in mind he wanted to do this in one day. He was a friend, so I thought it would go quickly.

Me: “Okay, I brought my microphone, computer, and headphones. Let’s get started!”

Client: “Thanks, this should be easy.”

It wasn’t. Every time he recorded a line, he wanted to hear the playback. Because of his own frustration, he decided to record each line three times and choose the best take later. This took a good hour.

Me: “Sounds like we’re almost done.”

Client: “Right… with the first page.”

Me: “Ummmm, what?”

He reached into his schoolbag and brought out a small collection of lined notebook paper. All together, he had six pages, front and back. The one side we had just completed had taken so much time that I didn’t think he had more.

Client: “Now we can really get serious!”

Me: “…Right.”

I worked as fast as I could to finish and get out of there so he could do all the edits himself later. The worst part was, after a couple of hours during our self assigned breaks, he would write more lines down. We started recording at 4:00 pm and finished around 10:00 pm.

Lesson learned.