I am eight years old. Our music teacher seems like a nice woman until, in one class, she tells us we are to memorise the lyrics for six songs by next week, word for word. As we’re eight, our class is afraid to protest. During the week, we are all terrified, and my parents agree that the teacher is requiring too much. However, it being a different time and place, merely a few years after my country has become independent from the Soviet Union, people simply are not used to challenging authority.

The dreaded day comes. The teacher hands out empty papers and assigns us to write the exact lyrics to one of the songs. We are all quietly panicking, but we start writing down the lyrics as well as we can. She tells us to hand the papers over and that she’ll return them after lunch. It is a long and scary lunch break, but finally, it ends. She enters the classroom with our tests.

During that horrible week, no one has paid attention to the date. The first of April. She has not corrected or graded anything, only written, “April Fools!” on every test.

Painfully, I see later that I actually managed to write down the exact lyrics, word for word. The fact that she did not even bother to give us all As for effort really bothers me.

My mom and I are big fans of a classic rock musician who’s known for giving very long concerts. He’s American and rarely comes to our country, so we naturally jump at the chance to go to one of his concerts in 2016, despite the concert taking place on a weekday. The concert is amazing, but it doesn’t end until almost two o’clock in the morning. I am fifteen years old and have school at eight o’clock the following morning.

As we shuffle out of the venue, I spot a familiar face near me. It’s my history teacher, whose class I have first thing tomorrow morning!

Teacher: “Nice concert, huh, [My name]?”

Me: “Yeah, it was great. See you in a couple of hours!”

We then went our separate ways home. He brought me a cup of coffee the next morning.

I’m in an English Studies class and the teacher is known for his jokes and sarcasm. We’ve just done a creative writing task based on an image prompt, and we’re discussing one of the stories.

Teacher: “Have you ever broken a bone?”

Student: “Yeah. My leg, playing football.”

Teacher: *To me* “Have you ever broken a bone?”

Me: “I do parkour, so… many.”

Teacher: “I’ve only ever broken one.” *Absolutely serious* “It wasn’t mine.”

In the fourth grade, I became obsessed with the discovery of “mermaid babies” — babies who are born with webbed feet and/or hands, or with their legs and/or feet fused together. Every week in my class, someone was required to present a news report on any topic we wished, and of course, my topic was on this interesting phenomenon of mutations.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm following my week to present led a lot of my classmates to get annoyed and skeptical with me. One kid even came up and basically called me a liar and a fraud because her mom told her mermaid babies aren’t really mermaids but babies with their skin fused together. She got especially annoyed when I just gave her a confused look and went, “Duh, it’s not like they’re born with gills or something,” and walked away.

I finally gave my presentation, starting with a short fictional story I read about pregnant women laying by a “mermaid lake” who then gave birth to actual mermaids. I made sure to mention that the story was just a legend — incorrect word but I didn’t know that — and wasn’t real, before diving into my actual findings about a baby who had to have surgery to separate their legs.

I’ll never forget the look of awe on my teacher’s face as she listened to me speak. And after I was done, she set her grading clipboard down and asked, “So… Wait… Are these real mermaids? Like, can they breathe underwater and everything?” 

I stood there, dumbfounded for a second, before replying, “No, Mrs. [Teacher]. Mermaids aren’t actually real; it’s just the baby’s legs stuck together.”

I wish I could remember what I wrote and read to my class. It still bothers me to this day, wondering where in my presentation I went wrong for her to ask me that.

I am an American teaching English in China and my current class is a small group of preteens. One of my students is an eleven-year-old boy who is legally blind. He sits at the front of the class, I reverse the colors of the digital whiteboard to white writing on a black background, and he can more or less make it out.

I’m playing a game where I quickly ask the class questions on something we just read and call on students to answer them. When they answer correctly, I toss them a piece of candy.

Me: “What was Moe’s secret ingredient? [Blind Student].”

Blind Student: “Salt!”

Me: “Very good!”

I toss him a wrapped candy and he makes no attempt to catch it. It bounces off his face and lands on the floor. He fumbles around for a few seconds until he finds it while I stand there frozen, contemplating what I have just done.

Me: “Perhaps I should not throw things at blind children.”