For teachers, school is all about getting the right information out without any major distractions. For students, it’s about juggling social status, work, and growing up. And sometimes at school, there’s always that one creepy kid that made everyone nervous. But sometimes it’s more than just the “quiet, loner kid” that creeps everyone out. Sometimes it’s a kid harming others with a pencil or throwing a chair across the room. These people experienced that and even more.
1. On A Murderous Path
The one kid that I was convinced was a psychopath just quietly refused to do anything he didn't want to do. I never saw him angry, and yet I did see him hit people and say awful things to them. He was always eerily calm. He was tiny and very cute but he used to manipulate people and watch chaos unfold with these huge unblinking puppy-dog eyes. It was like he was carrying out an experiment.
ANYWAY, that was when he was about 14. He's 19 now and serving a life sentence for a horrific gang murder.
2. A Jar Full Of Bugs
One kid, I'll call him Jeremy, was pretty lonely and spent every recess alone until the new student showed up.
You've never seen two weird people get along so well. They invented a 'llama language' and spoke to me in llama language (I said that was ok as long as their homework was in English). At the end of the year, Jeremy gave him a sculpture of his friend's head made entirely of bubblegum, with paperclip for eyes and an eraser for a mouth. The other student was so thrilled and gave Jeremy a jar full of bugs.
3. Mini Morbid Shakespeare
My sister had a kid in her history class who had an almost unhealthy obsession with war. He would always look up stories of conflict periods and loved things like Persepolis and Grave of the Fireflies. So, he loved the tragedies.
But then came the first creative writing assignment and her opinion changed drastically. His creative writing assignment was Act One of a four or five act opera. It was set in a fictional country and followed a family growing up and the life of the two children. When she met his parents during the parent teacher night, she talked about it and her parents told her how he would act them out and basically wrote battle operas as his hobby.
4. Die-Hard Follower
I had a 7th grade kid last year that needed to be institutionalized. He would fixate on a girl in his class, follow her everywhere, and wait for her outside of class. She reported to us that he would sneak up behind her and just breathe or whisper horrible things like threatening her or her friends and family. He even threatened to kill her rabbit. When her friends told him to stop, he would threaten them as well and imply that any resulting injury would be the first girl's fault for not bending to his attention.
This is a public school so he was listed as a disabled student; we're not allowed to expel students with disabilities in our state. Mom insisted that we were lying, nothing was wrong, her kid was a saint, and refused to institutionalize him. It got so bad for the little girl he was harassing that she had to be escorted to and from every class.
I caught him hanging around outside my class a few times waiting for her. He was wickedly sneaky; would ask to go to the bathroom ten minutes before the passing period of a completely different core and would wait around. I would tell him to get his butt back to class or he'd be spending the rest of the day in the office for truancy.
He was very good at never getting caught. We documented everything we could but he was clever enough to never say anything in front of a teacher. The reports were too frequent and from too many kids for us to ignore them. Eventually the little girl changed schools (we kept in touch with her and she was much happier at her new school) but freako kid is still in our school. He remained creepy and abusive all the way until he graduated. No attempts of getting him help at school or at home helped.
I just know I'm going to see his name on the FBI most wanted list someday.
5. You’ll Never Leave Me
So, I am not entirely sure if this is sociopath or psychopath but I had a child that was creepily into my pregnancy for the first 7 months. He wanted to name her, talked to my belly, etc. Then one day it clicked that I would leave and he got really close to me and whispered, "When you come out, I'm going to kill you with a hammer. I hate you."
I was shocked so I took him with me to the office. The school psychologist asked why he said that. He replied that, "It will take her away. I want it to die so she stays here." He was on a lot of medication for his incredibly violent tendencies. He had tried to kill his sister before by pushing her in front of a bus. His mother kept him locked in his room at night because she had found him standing over her with a blade.
The child was a ten-year-old boy. His mother agreed to have him committed after he attempted to kill a law enforcement support dog using a pair of scissors. MHMR and CPS were both involved. I haven't seen or heard from the family since I left the district.
6. Freddie Kreuger Goes To School
I had a fifth grader that had been kicked out of her zoned school. She was pretty quiet and liked to draw in a journal at recess. One day I caught a glimpse of her drawings and she was basically drawing comics of her torturing classmates. As I walked her to the office, I asked her why she was sent to our school and she very plainly said, “I ripped my teacher’s skin off her hand ‘cause she took my notebook".
7. Bob's Bazaar Bizarre
Taught this kid for the last two years (middle school). He was very much into antiquing and would always be asking his teachers if we wanted to buy any old things from him. He offered me everything from a parachute to a stuffed bird carcass. When posed the question, "What kind of music do you listen to when you fall asleep?" he replied with, "Gangster rap played backwards."
At the end of last year, when cleaning out his locker, we found the following: 2 HAM radios, 3 fake grenades, and a glass jar of a green substance which none of us teachers dared to touch.
8. No, Daddy
There was this one student who had a crush on me I believe. She would come to class sometimes and purposely drop something and bend over in front of my desk. Sometimes she would misbehave and I'd have to send her out and she would say stuff like, "You don't like me misbehaving?" or "Yes, send me out. Please send me out," in creepy, playful way.
9. Baby Shark
I was often substituting a special needs class with about 6-7 boys about 8-10 years old. The days were normally lively but I always had everything under control. Then there was a new boy in the class. Their teacher had written me a note that said to keep a close eye on him at all times. He had black eyes like a shark. He never showed any emotion whatsoever excluding immense excitement if someone else got hurt in any way.
Few days passed without any incidents and then, out of the blue, he stands up in the middle of class, yanks the much smaller guy sitting in front of him down with his chair from behind, and starts to pummel him in the face with his fists. I ran to intervene and ordered another student to get the principal. The attacker stood in the corner, emotionless and completely calm.
I turned to check out the crying kid on the floor and miraculously he seemed unharmed but was just shaken up by the surprise attack. I sat down on the floor to calm him down and to help him up. Next thing I know is the shark-eye kid standing beside me and stabbing me on the leg with my teacher scissors (the only pointy ones in the classroom).
It was then when I realized why the jumped kid wasn't badly hurt. Shark-eye was big for his age but he had no physical strength at all. I didn't even get a bruise from his stab; my trusty Lee's jeans stopped the blade which I instantly took from him. I threw the scissors on top of a high shelf and ordered everyone else out of the classroom to wait for the principal's arrival while I watched over Shark-eye. Boys ran out, Shark-eye looked at me curiously for a few seconds, then sat down at his desk and continued his math assignments like nothing had happened.
I asked him quite sternly what had made him attack a fellow student. Shark-eye lifted his empty gaze and said, "I heard him laughing at the school cafeteria. I thought he could have been laughing at me. Lorindól, can we play football today in PE class?"
The boy had no empathy nor remorse. The episode meant absolutely nothing to him. When the principal arrived, we went through the situation and the class affirmed my description or events as they had happened. Shark-eyes' mom picked him up early and he stayed at home for a few days. The principal told me that this was not the first such incident and that the boy was on a wait list for a hospital school class. The principal commended me for my actions (I was very young at the time) and was surprised that I had been able to keep my cool even after getting hurt even if the attempt had been pitiful.
Turned out that's my teacher superpower. I never lose it. Even when I've been spat at, got chairs thrown at me, someone trying to gouge my eyes out while holding them (more than once) etc. Luckily the years in the same school have accumulated my reputation and nowadays it's very rare that someone even dares to try to mess with me.
This incident was nearly 20 years ago but I'll never forget it.
10. Dancing With A Faker
I teach dance and had a 6-year-old I'll never forget. For the record, all 6-year-olds are terrible. Developmentally they're all starting to flex their egos and it can be a mess of personalities. But here’s a collection of things that occurred that made me realize this child was a sociopath. I'll call them A.
I had a child fall asleep in the middle of class. Poor thing didn't get a nap that day and just flat out passed out in the middle of dancing. I picked her up and placed her on the side and she slept through class. Next week A spends the whole class pretending to fall asleep. The fact that they had remembered the previous week and knew to emulate the behavior is very odd for that age.
Fake cries on a dime anytime I tried getting her to follow along with class. Absolute crocodile tears. Dry face. Isn't allowed to be the line leader because they were it last week? Fake tears. Isn't allowed to guess the Disney song because another student already guessed it? Fake tears. Anytime they didn't get to be the special kid. Fake tears.
I had them sit out once due to not following instructions (after giving a clear if you do X one more time you will sit out and then following through). Proceeds to start whining like a dog because she claims a student kept staring at them. Completely disruptive.
Turns out one of my students is autistic and the fake crying and whining A was doing for attention was overstimulating them. It was a freaking feedback circle of these two triggering each other for a whole year.
What really got me though was A came up to me and said they had a rash and need to sit out. This is after they spent 10 minutes suckling their arm to make it appear that they had a rash. Told grandparent after class and they just, "yeah, they've been doing that." UM WHAT. How does a 6-year old have the wherewithal to plan out faking a rash like that?
At the end of the year the mom gave me a gift card and a note that basically said thank you for putting up with my child.
11. Can I Have Your Attention Please
I taught kids with behavior difficulties. One kid used to try to weird people out by staring and making odd comments designed to create a reaction. He once followed me round the supermarket while I did my shopping. One day my colleague screamed. I ran to the student bathroom and the kid was growling like an animal whilst spraying blood from his mouth where he'd purposely bitten his lips. I told him calmly to rinse his mouth and clean up the blood, closed the door, and left him to it. As soon as he realized he wasn't getting the attention he desired he did as he was told. We talked it through afterwards and he never did it again.
12. You Belong With Me
I have a friend whose husband teaches 8th grade science. A few years back, one of his lonelier students calls his house and leaves a message on his machine that is just her singing a breathy, sexy version of a country love song. He freaks and tells the school IMMEDIATELY. He was so afraid that he would get into trouble with the school if they suspected he led her on in some way or was at all inappropriate with her (he wasn't). It ended up being a huge pain that included him being investigated by the school and meetings with her parents. Thankfully, she was moved to a new class. Still, what a weird kid!
13. Out Of The Blue
I worked with a student who would fit this description. The stories of the things he did are extensive. One example is that he got up from his seat to throw something away. On his way back, he walked up behind a student who was distracted working on his assignment. Out of the blue, he pushed the working student’s head forward and into the desk. He gave him a bloody nose. There had been no previous altercation or source of friction between the two. His parents were divorced and his mother was too afraid of him to have him during the days she had custody. His father would move him frequently from school to school once his behavior got so bad that the school started the process to get him into psychiatric care.
14. Trigger Happy
Not a teacher, but when I was in 3rd grade one of my friends wanted to bring me to their backpack and said they said they wanted to show me something. I agreed and followed then to the back of the room and unzipped their backpack. I could see something in it. Then he reached in and pulled out a PISTOL. Needless to say, I told the teacher, she searched his backpack and didn't find anything. He later told me that he hid it in someone else's backpack. I stopped hanging out with him.
15. Night Terror
My mom taught special ed and kids who failed the test which was a requirement to graduate. There were three brothers, who came from a bad home life. They all got in various troubles with the law, but she said the two oldest were just trying to survive and were genuinely good kids who were dealt a bad hand. The youngest however was super creepy. The two oldest tried to keep him in line, but they were just kids too dealing with issues way beyond what they should have been.
One night she was going to bed and her dog, given to her by my dad because she lived alone, wouldn't leave the back door. He usually slept on the floor in her room, but this night he refused to leave this spot. She assumed there was a deer or something outside and let him stay there, thinking nothing of it. The next morning, word spread fast that the youngest brother was bragging about how he was outside her house and watched her all night.
Administration said they couldn't do anything about it because it didn't happen on school property. Obviously, she was freaked out. Two days later, the kid was apprehended for assaulting a woman at knife point. He went to prison and she never saw him again.
16. A Hairy Character
Someone in my primary school class told me that he keeps a bundle of his hair in a box buried in his backyard. Looked him up, he is now a wig manufacturer.
17. I’ll Take A Stab At It
"I can't be trusted with knives. My mommy hides all knives in the house from me because I've tried to stab everything and everyone. I know if I stab an animal or a person too much they might die. This would mean I'd go to prison and I don't think I could make it in prison. So, I want to find a body and stab it over and over again. This way I know I won't get in too much trouble cause the person was already dead."
18. Spidey Senses
I’m a student, not a teacher, but in 9th grade some kid who was in special education decided to climb his classroom's doorway like a spider and accidentally got stuck. So, you had some kid with mental disabilities stuck at the top of the doorway screaming his head off as you go to class.
19. The Footguy
At a certain state college in LA County, there was the infamous toe guy, which I will call Footguy. I've never spoke to him (I've seen him), but my friends unfortunately did. Now Footguy had been making trouble in the campus for quite a while - he would hit exclusively on the Asian girls on campus and say messed up things like things like how he could tell that a certain person was say, Chinese or Japanese based on their face/foot, then talk about how he thought one race was superior. Then he would proceed to try to take a picture of their feet and of course very few girls would actually consent.
Over time it seemed more and more of my friends told me about "a creepy guy that tried to take a picture off/touch my feet". Apparently, he would often target girls during lunch or in the Asian-Pacific Islander center (although they couldn't kick him out). Soon he was mentioned on a couple of unofficial campus forums including the campus confessions page where we found out that the administration was now on to him, and that he was calling it "discrimination against my autism."
Time passed and news of Footguy seemed to die down. But then one day, a law enforcement bulletin was sent to all students, which broke the news. A girl was chilling on a bench outside the gym, when Footguy came up to her and started recording himself talking to her. This time though, he got down and... started licking the girl's toes. Needless to say, we soon never saw Footguy again.
20. Ouija-nuinely Concerning
I had a friend in grade 8/9 and she is honestly the most psychotic 12-14-year-old I've ever met. A few people mentioned that she could have been sexually abused when she was younger or have some kind of personality disorder/mental illness which would explain a lot.
She once cut "Lucifer" into her leg.
She was able to get away with playing Ouija in the middle of class and whenever she played alone, she would get whatever "ghost" that haunted the room fall in love with her. If anyone else played with her, the ghost would always threaten(?) the other person playing by spelling out something like "pencil" and then "pain." Later during the week, this girl jabbed the other person who was playing with a pencil. Then she ran to the cross in the room (this was a Catholic school so there was crosses in every room and there was usually more than one) held it upside down, and then hugged it. A few seconds later, she would look up and claim that she was possessed by the spirit in the room, but her savior, Lucifer, saved her.
In grade 9, she had a huge crush on our homeroom teacher. She literally worshipped him more than she worshipped the devil in grade 8. She tried to seduce him a few times in front of the class, which was always really awkward. She once somehow found his address? I don't know if she found it online or if she actually followed him home secretly but she posted photos of him at his house on Instagram. I don't think anyone said anything to the teacher or if he ever found out about her stalking him.
21. Stick It To Ya
I had a student while I was doing my student teaching (8th grade). He was constantly in trouble, but during the times he WAS in class, he just stared off with the most vacant look in his eyes, it truly scared me. It was downright creepy.
One day he was up at the whiteboard writing some stuff (I think it was correcting sentences) with a bunch of other kids who were doing the same thing. I wasn't watching the kids at the board, and all of a sudden, I hear this blood curdling scream and look over - he had brought a hypodermic needle and had stuck the girl next to him in the leg.
He had been holding it in his hand the entire time, just waiting for the opportunity to stick someone. It was, of course, terrible, but the girl turned out okay. The worst part, besides that, was how he laughed when security came to get him ... Ugh, I'm shuddering now just thinking about it.
22. Thanks, But No Thanks
I had a kid tell me he wanted me to be his trophy wife. It was weird because he was my top student and never gave me trouble. Two year after he graduated, his old classmates come say hello and told me he was in love with me. I mean, I figured...
Nice kid, though. Hope he's doing fine.
23. The Hit List
This was in middle school like 14+ years ago, so I don’t really remember everything. The guy was a little unbalanced to begin with. He never seemed dangerous, but certainly odd. I was friends with him for a bit, but after a while, even I didn’t want to be around him. One day he just disappeared. I asked some other people about it, and they told me he was expelled because they found a list of people he wanted to kill in his locker. Now that I think about it, I do wonder if I was maybe one of those people.
24. Quite A Pickle
It’s around 10 am and we have our math class in a portable, which aren't cleaned by the janitors very often, maybe once every 9 weeks because I go to a very cheap school that doesn’t have a lot of funding. This guy comes in. We'll call him Brad. Now Brad, he’s a big freak. He creeps everyone out a lot and has maybe two friends.
I walk up the ramp and sit down in my usual seat, get my stuff out, and class carries on as usual. About midway through class, I look over and see Brad. His bag’s open and has the most unnecessarily big pickle jar in there and is trying to pretend he isn’t eating. Our teacher doesn’t allow eating in the class because of the janitor’s not cleaning portables often. He grabs a pickle, ducks his head down, and goes in and takes a bite. When I tell you, he slurped that pickle I mean it was like very suggestive noises.
Now at this point, I’m not the only one staring at him, as a good 1/3 of the class is just looking at the absolute mad lad. At this point, our teacher is still trying to go over the lesson since she hasn't noticed yet. This is when all chaos breaks loose. He goes in for another bite but, oh dear god, this dummy dropped his bag. Normal pickle jars are glass so it obviously shatters everywhere.
So here we are in class and Brad has glass and pickle juice all over him and the floor and our teacher is in shock. She writes up a clinic pass for him to get the glass cuts cleaned etc., buzzes up to the office for the janitors to come down, stops the entire lesson, and is trying to figure out what just happened. Brad went to the nurse and ended up getting a few days detention for eating in class and disrupting the class. The rest of the class and I ended up just sitting there like what did we just see?
25. More Than Just A Troublemaker
I had a high school freshman who was a very boisterous kid and youthful for his age. One day he was being disruptive and acting up, so I asked him to step out of the room with me while my co-teacher continued the lesson. I calmly explained to him why I had taken him out, why his behavior was disruptive, and asked him to be more mindful in the future. He seemed attentive to me and to understand where I was coming from. Then, just as I was about to go back in with him, he says to me:
“Okay, I’m gonna start crying so everyone thinks you yelled at me".
I immediately put the brakes on. I asked him why he wanted to do that, why he felt it was okay to lie like that, and why he wanted to make me seem like a bad person when I had been very polite and thought we had had a good interaction. He didn’t have any good answers with me, but we had already spent enough time out of class. I got him to agree to go in quietly and we went on with the lesson.
Needless to say, it was a sign of things to come. He turned out to be a gossiping, backstabbing little social monster. The more mature kids learned to keep their distance from him, and he cultivated friendships with other kids who enjoyed his acting out and emulated it. We finished out the year on reasonable terms, but as he went on to other teachers with different classroom styles, his behavior worsened and derailed many classes.
26. It’s A Sister Thing
Not a teacher, but I go to my district's primary school for extra service hours for my college applications. I visited a second-grade class every Monday one year. Both my sisters were in college so I was talking to a student who was crying about her sister going to middle school and how she wouldn't play with her anymore. I comforted her and told her about how my sisters were far away at college but I still talked to them all the time so her sister would still be with her and play with her, she was just going into 6th grade when she was going into 3rd grade.
The little girl then asked if she sister would go to college someday and I said yes if she wanted to. The little girl looked me in the eyes and told me she would have to make sure that her sister would never be able to go to college and she could live under their bunk bed and eat the worms she went into detail about how she would keep her sister trapped under the bed and only feed her bugs while smiling.
27. Tiny Terror
Not a teacher, but my wife is. When she was about 8 months pregnant, she had a kid try to kick her stomach, try to stab her with scissors, and threaten to kill her regularly. She’s a kindergarten teacher.
28. Stiller Than A Statue
I wasn’t the teacher, but I was sitting next to this kid. One period all he did was stare at the wall. He didn’t blink, move, or make any sign of life. When it was the end of the period, he got up and acted normal. It was the strangest thing that I have ever seen.
29. Is That A Threat?
This story is from a friend. As the new teacher he got stuck doing after school detention a lot his first year. He didn't mind because he always stays late anyway with paperwork. Now at some point he had only one student for detention and he says she is the worst human being he's ever met. She told him that he will start marking her as having attended the detention and all future detentions or she's going to say that he hurt her. Luckily for him there are both cameras and microphones in the classrooms. So that never happened and he did report it to the principal. She was later expelled for bringing a blade to school and cutting another girl’s ponytail off in the bathroom.
30. Don’t Cry Over Spoiled Milk
I had a child who enjoyed stalking and terrorizing younger children at daycare. You could see he got a wicked kick out of it and we were basically powerless aside from taking children away from him. He was beyond awful. A colleague looked after a child who was so jealous of his younger brother that he was slowly poisoning him by adding household cleaners to the milk. Then his parents tried to get him to have milk one day and he refused and admitted there was cleaner in it...at four years of age.
31. On My Worst Behavior
I had a six-year-old the size of a nine-year-old pin a four-year-old to a wall and it at least looked like he was trying to feel her up. I walked up behind him and shouted, "What do you think you are doing?" He immediately backed off and started stuttering trying to explain himself. He would say some messed up stuff, too. One time, he walked up to me, a six-foot-tall, bearded man, and said, basically, "Hey mama, let me suck on those."
I hated that kid. If you told him to do anything, he would intentionally do something to go against what he was told. His parents spoiled him rotten and let him do whatever he wanted. He got away with anything because a former teacher had inadvertently injured him and his family who are filthy rich threatened to sue the beans out of the school.
He basically had immunity from discipline at school and parents that let him do whatever he wanted. He hated me because I wouldn't put up with him. I never hurt him but I would put him in a hold so that he couldn't move fairly often because he would constantly sucker punch other, smaller kids, for just about any reason at all. Even if he just wanted the toy they were holding. Kid was a little sociopath with parents that were rich enough that they enabled the behavior.
32. Dogged Ways
Not my teacher and not in my class, but this kid who is literally the creepiest kid. He followed my friend home and tried to get into his house after he locked the door once. Apparently, he was caught touching himself in English class. They were watching the Of Mice and Men movie and he was caught at the part where the dog is shot. Super creepy.
33. The Girl Who Cried Anaphylactic Shock
This is about a girl that we’ll call Abby.
So, I’m driving a minibus of students home from a basketball practice when suddenly Abby starts screaming, “did that have peanuts in it!? I’m allergic to peanuts!” She begins hyperventilating and crying and actually makes me pull over so she can get off the bus and throw up. We’re about 15 minutes from the school and I’m literally having a panic attack.
So, I call the principal and ask what should I do? Do we have an Epi-pen on hand at the school, etc. She seems confused and puts Abby’s grandmother on who tells me she wasn’t aware her granddaughter, who is claiming she can barely breath, HAD any allergies. When we got back to the school, I was about ready to faint and the principal brings out her registration paperwork to show me.
No listed allergies. She isn’t allergic to anything. It was all an act. The hyperventilating, the crying, even the throwing up, was all for attention.
34. Art To Die For
My 7th grade teacher said she found a bunch of drawings of her in a student's desk depicting the multiple ways he would kill her.
35. Violent In-Cell-Vency
I taught a 15-year-old boy who was really creepy. He submitted a creative writing story that was fiction in which he graphically described how a white, blonde woman was being assaulted to corrupt the purity she feigns (which was quite scary as a white, blonde woman to read). When confronted by a vice principal, he started ranting about how he hated all the girls in the class because they were all awful (even though none listed had ever had an interaction with him, positive or negative).
He then wrote me an apology letter where heaps of the lines were aggressively crossed out with :) drawn next to them. At the last confrontation by a vice principal, he got really aggressive, walked out and punched the school fence several times. Unfortunately, he wasn't expelled.
36. Love Notes
It was the summer the cicadas were really bad. We were on a field trip at the pool and one girl about 13 ran up to one of the male instructors and gave him a folded-up piece of paper. He mentioned that he's gotten love notes from younger girls before. When he opened up the paper it wasn't a love letter. She drew a pentagram and had smashed a cicada at each point of the star.
I personally thought it was hilarious.
37. Not Just Baby Talk
I was an assistant at a licensed care center. There was a room (3-year-olds) that was problematic. There were four children that were very problematic out of the 10 regulars who came every day. One of the boys caused chaos because he thought it was funny. He laughed when he hit someone or when he ran around the room throwing chairs and knocking play sets down.
One time, I was putting him down for a nap and he looked me square in the eye and said, “I want to tie you up".
Hearing a three-year-old whisper that to you with a tiny smile in a darker room is definitely concerning.
38. Urine Trouble
Back in the day, I was a student in a school in Belarus. Our teacher used a rag to clean the board and occasionally when the rag dried out, she would ask one of the students to go to the bathroom and wet it. And one time this kid returned her the rag soaked with his pee... She casually cleaned the board and didn't even noticed.
39. Big Sister Problems
I was asked to babysit a 9-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy a few weekends ago. I'd never met the kids, but I figured the 9-year-old and I will just hang out with the mutual understanding that she doesn't need me there, and the 3-year-old might need some redirection and to just be kept occupied. Boy was I wrong. The 9-year-old was a straight up manipulative little tyrant.
She gave the boy "jobs" to do when playing play-doh and then tore him up telling him how bad he was at every job she gave him. She chased him around the house with a sharpened pencil. She roughhoused with him until he got hurt and ran upstairs crying, and then she chased after him laughing going "aww I'm really sorry." And so much more.
I'd never met a child so starved for control, but I really question where this is coming from because 1.) I gave her nothing to push back against. If she was being controlling because I was treating her like a child, I would have understood. But I wasn't. And 2.) It was clear her parents weren't extremely strict with her on a normal basis.
Anyway, my first clue should have been when the parents offered me a higher pay per hour than I asked for. Even with the chance to make $100 in one night, I'm never going back.
40. Adopting Violent Habits
My mom was a teacher for several decades and she taught some real winners. There's a kid a few years younger than me that she had and she never explicitly said anything bad about him because he was the son of one of her friends and lives in their neighborhood, but that kid was straight from a horror movie. He's adopted and one of the first things he did after his parents brought him home was to shut the family dog in the refrigerator.
One time he sneaked up to my parents' house in the middle of the night (we live in the middle of nowhere, so this is terrifying in and of itself) and tried to break into our house (my parents usually left the doors unlocked at night and I would go around after they went to bed and lock them). When that didn't work, he cut the electrical wiring to our outside lights, so it was pitch black outside and we couldn't see anything, and then slashed the tires on my car and tried to break the windows.
He used to just beat other kids, especially younger ones, whenever the mood struck him. That dude is like 30 now and he's still a total piece of garbage. Like, he still lives with his mom and he's gotten her house swatted at least 5 times because he deliberately goes online into spaces where that's a thing and antagonizes people, then takes off to leave her to deal with the fallout.
I'm hoping to be an adoptive parent myself one day and sometimes I have nightmares about this kid because as far as I know, his parents really did try super-hard to help but it just never worked.
41. Sitting On The Edge
The teacher asked everybody to turn in their homework and this weird kid asked for an extension because he was “absolutely swamped” for the last week. The teacher said no, and instead of just being ok with it, this kid picked up a chair and threw it across the classroom at the teacher. It hit her on the forehead and she had to get stitches, kid was expelled.
42. Spit Shine
This 7-year-old knew that if the little kids put toys in their mouths, we'd wash and sanitize them diligently. When this kid got mad, he'd go over to the Lego bin and slowly spit one fat loogie into it before mixing up all the pieces. He'd then spend the rest of the day revelling in the knowledge that some poor teacher would have to wash and dry 5,000 pieces of Lego.
43. Scary Chick
When I was younger, I went to some family gathering way out in the country. There were tons of distant relatives there and lots of cousins I didn’t know. One girl, probably 4 or 5, was scary. All of us kids would try to play with her and she would just act strange.
But one thing I really remember was someone was showing us some baby chicks letting us hold them and pet them. My mother had just explained to us, "Be very gentle, they’re babies, etc., etc." Well this little girl is holding a baby chick on her palm, looks right into my mom's eyes, and just squeezes this chick until its eyes bulge. They stopped her and to my knowledge the chick was fine, but I'll never forget the look in her eyes. Immediately after this happened, her dad scooped her up in his arms and she just looked back at all of us, smiling maniacally.
44. Gotta Go Fast
In eleventh grade, there was a girl (let’s call her Carol) who was crazy about the cartoon Sonic the Hedgehog. To the point where a teacher threatened to fail her on a writing assignment if she turned in yet another Sonic fanfiction.
Instead of actually doing work properly, she handed in an angry letter to the teacher as her assignment. Can’t remember what the specifics of that letter were, but I do remember it was such that she got suspended for the remainder of the year. When she came back in grade 12, she had to apologize to everyone in her homeroom for her actions the previous year. It’s in this apology that she tells us she had a brain tumor the size of Quebec. The kid from Quebec, naturally, yells at her for comparing Quebec to a brain tumor.
Carol did a lot of other stuff besides the angry letter that year. She mentioned in her apology that: She got a girl in trouble for vandalism so she (Carol) could get the lead role in a school play. She dressed up as a grim reaper for some old person's funeral and accused my friend (whom she never had any prior connection to) of tricking her into thinking the funeral was a Halloween party (since this happened in May, the excuse was made of toothpicks).
She got a zero on a term project for math because she accidentally submitted a poorly written and creepy Sonic fanfiction instead of her assignment. She threw a temper tantrum to get the teacher to change the due date. Nothing came of it.
And that's just the stuff she admitted to.
45. I’m Going To Speak To Your Manager
My mom is a teacher and she has plenty of these stories but the one thing that sticks out to me is the one time she reprimanded an 8-year-old girl for being aggressive to the other children. Nothing too serious, just “NAME, please let go of OTHER CHILD, you’re hurting him and he doesn’t like it". The girl turned to my mum, looked her up and down, and said, “I’m going to make sure you lose your job. You’ll never teach again".
My mum said that the threat didn’t scare her because my mum had done nothing wrong, but the way the child said it shook her to her core.
46. That’s Not Comforting
I had a student who wasn't the best behaved, but hadn't caused a ton of problems yet.
Then a rumor started going around school that he had slain the neighbor's dog. I don't remember why, but it’s obviously concerning. Another student said to him, "hey, they say you killed your neighbor's dog. Did you really do that?" or something to that effect. And this kid immediately said, "It didn't die." Nothing else, no emotion or explanation.
47. Famous Last Words
Principal took me outside the class for a while to talk about something, the minute I came back everyone was silent and one kid was standing at the board, marker in one hand and razor blades in the other, one jammed into the marker cap. No idea why he would do that apart from "holy, he wants to see me cut my hand off." He was suspended if I recall correctly.
Yearly project for 10-11th grade, the kids had to assign themselves into groups of 4. They all ended up in their groups apart from one kid who remained, the stereotypical loner kid at the back. I asked him if he wanted to join any group he saw or make a project of his own, and he just looked into my eyes and said "I don't care, they'll all soon be dead anyway." (?????)
I had to take him to the principal and he simply said, "I didn't mean it as a threat, I just relish in the fact that one day each and every one of them will be actually dead." I just... I still remember this to this day and it's been like 7 years.
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