(A couple of years after I leave school, I am invited back to be involved in the mentoring programme. The first time I go to meet the coordinator, I park and start walking from the main gate towards the main entrance when I meet a teacher.)

Teacher: “Excuse me. Where are you going?”

Me: “I’m visiting; I’m just going to main reception to–“

Teacher: “You shouldn’t be wandering around here”

Me: “Oh, no, I’ve just arrived; I’m going to sign in at the reception now.”

Teacher: “You’re supposed to sign in as soon as you get here and wait for a member of staff to collect you from the entrance area.”

Me: “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Teacher: “Yes, well, remember next time.”

I’ve worked at various IT support desks throughout the years and they’re always good for amusement. One day I get called in to fix a computer. Given I can’t reach the thing remotely, I walk over there.

I’m greeted by someone giving a course on reanimation to about a dozen students. She points me to the malfunctioning machine, giving no other info than “it’s broken,” and tells me she’ll continue while I work.

Given the PC has been turned off, I turn it on, fully expecting to see an error screen of some sort.

Nothing comes up, and while I ponder this conundrum, the teacher apparently notices the PC is on, and says, “Ah, you fixed it?”

Before I can help myself, I blurt out that I just turned it on, much to her chagrin and to the amusement of the students.

(My professor’s wife had a baby last week, and the professor takes a moment during class to show us a photo of him. We ask him a few questions about the baby and what the delivery was like, and it eventually gets to this:)

Student: “So, when exactly was he born?”

Professor: “Wednesday at, uh, 4:20.”

(There’s silence for a moment before everyone starts giggling.)

Professor: “Yeah, it couldn’t have been 4:19, or 4:21. It had to be 4:20.”

Me: “If that’s still a thing when he’s older, you should definitely tell him!”

(The professor had a sense of humor about it, but he quickly changed the topic back to the lesson!)

(During the two last years in high school in Germany, you pick two classes as your “major,” for which you have more hours per week and exams count most during graduation. I pick art, and since only nine other people do, and we are all genuinely interested and enthusiastic, and as this is the first art major ever at this school, our art teacher makes class a lot of fun while also educational. For our final project, he allows us to each paint a mural on sections of the walls of his classroom. We get really into it and often spend not only class hours but also breaks painting. One day we go a bit too far, though.)

Art Teacher: “Okay, guys. Class is officially over. Pack up your brushes and clean up.”

Student #1: “But I just need to finish this bit! I’ll never be able to mix this colour right!”

Me: “I just got into the zone! Let us stay!”

Art Teacher: *sighs* “Okay, you can stay for break, but after that I have another class in here, so have everything cleaned by then!”

(We promise, yet somehow forget. Not a problem, since the next class has to be shifted to another room for whatever reason, and our teacher completely forgets about us staying during break. Ninety minutes later, after finishing his class, he comes back into the room to find us still painting.)

Art Teacher: “Wait, you’re all still here?! Do you have a free period right now?”

Me: “Uh… No. We forgot.”

Art Teacher: “You forgot to go to your classes because of painting?!”

Student #2: “Oops?”

Art Teacher: “I’m going to get into so much trouble for this.”

Student #1: “Can’t we just all say we skipped class?”

Me: “Yeah, nobody knows we were in here. We could’ve just gone to get fast food or something.”

Student #2: “Yeah, it wouldn’t be fair to get you in trouble for us messing up.”

Art Teacher: “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear this conversation, but I’ll also not talk to the principal or your other teachers until tomorrow. You guys decide whatever you want to do.”

(We agreed to stick with the lie of skipping class, and we all got detention for it. Retrospectively, I have to wonder if our art teacher told the principal the truth, though, since detention mysteriously got scheduled in the art classroom, so we could just spend it painting even more. I went to visit our art teacher years after graduating, and our murals were still there.)

(We have just finished a test and we have started a new topic: probability. We are talking about complements, which are mutually exclusive events, and our teacher is telling us not to get confused with compliments.)

Teacher: “…so, never confuse your complements.” *walks up to me* “[My Name], your marks on the test were the highest in the class.”

Me: *getting excited* “What?!”

Teacher: *to class* “See? Don’t use that type of compliment.”

Class: “OOOOOOH!”

(I giggled a little, though I felt shocked and sad. Fingers crossed; I still might have gotten good marks on the test.)