Teaching is a noble profession that, at times, is more rewarding than others.
Recently, Reddit user u/GlytchedTTV asked, "Teachers of Reddit, what was the worst thing you had to confiscate from a student?"
Here are some good ones:
1. "A senior brought her pet rat to my class on an early dismissal day. It wasn’t in a cage or anything, just in her purse. I definitely couldn’t let her go to other classes with said rat so I told her to let me keep him for the day. Oddly cute and smart, he stayed in the bottom drawer of my desk the rest of the day chilling."
2. "My wife is a teacher and one of her first-graders brought her two hard seltzers because her mom said they’re good after a long day and she deserved them."
3. "A huge black dildo. A child found it in the school’s garden and said, 'I found a ding-dong in the garden and I’m taking it home for mum.' That day, I was not professional."
4. "When I was in the seventh grade in 2007–2008, our principal was extremely against cellphones in class since they were becoming more popular for kids to have around that time. She tried everything to ensure students wouldn’t even have a cellphone in their pocket during class, including visiting a random homeroom after the morning announcements with a metal detector wand. She'd have all the students stand up, and confiscate any cell phone to be returned at the end of the day. It was pretty humiliating. One time, my homeroom was chosen as the site for the daily cellphone pat down. Well, I am a Type 1 diabetic with an insulin pump and it set off this detector. She held out her hand asking for the phone in my pocket, and I said that I’m not giving up my insulin pump since it was connected to my stomach and I need it to live. My homeroom teacher came over, whispered something to the principal, and she said nothing and moved over to the next kid. Fuck you, Mrs. Fairchild."
5. "I had to confiscate hand sanitizer from a student who decided to drink it to get drunk and threw up EVERYWHERE."
6. "My mom teaches lower elementary-aged students (K–3), and one time a student was playing with this weird box. The box was locked so instead of putting it in the confiscated bin, she put it on top of a cabinet. About an hour later, it starts ringing furiously. It took some doing to get the box open. Turns out, this kid's parent was a professional chef. So the kid had grabbed every timer in the house, set them for the max amount of time, locked the box, brought it to school, and played with it so it would get confiscated and ring loudly. The whole class erupted with laughter and screaming. A true agent of chaos."
7. "I know a teacher, who was on lunch with her class, and the lunch lady walks up and tells her that one of her students (who was either in first or second grade) just tried to buy an extra something with over $1,000 in cash she had stuffed in a tiny coin pouch that looked like a plushy pink duck. The teacher called the girl's house and the mom was 9.8 into a full-blown 10/10 panic after looking for it all morning. This was the early 2000s when it was still normal to pay bills in cash, in person. Apparently, they forgot to give the girl her allowance, 50 cents, so she took the paper money instead."
8. "The best note that I've ever intercepted. Him: 'Can I bite ur boob tonite?' Her: 'IDK, depressed'"
10. "Someone in my class had their phone taken because their Siri went off and said, 'What do you need from me, Slut?'"
11. "I'm a preschool teacher and I had to convince a four-year-old that his mom's wedding ring should go into a special box on the front desk instead of on the finger of a six-year-old girl that he had a crush on. Later, he brought in his dad's car keys and a bottle opener."
12. "I've had to confiscate a penis-shaped glass pipe with weed still in the balls/bowl. The mom asked if she would be getting it back or if the school was keeping it."
13. "When I was in the fifth grade, there was an active market in live bees. Some kids figured out that the weight of the average fifth-grader briefly stepping on a bee, in the grass, would stun it for about a minute without actually killing it. They started going out in teams to scout bees on the field, stun them, and carefully scoop them into plastic sandwich bags. They'd then sell them to other students who'd release them in classrooms to waste class time and scare people. You could get honeybees for 25 cents apiece. Bumblebees and yellow jackets cost more. Teachers and school admin started cracking down on this. Teachers literally confiscated live bees in plastic bags from students when found, and they eventually had to start having someone watch the field to catch students in the act."
14. "When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a Star Trek magazine confiscated from me because the teacher saw me looking at the foldout ship blueprints and thought it was a Playboy centerfold. He was very confused, I was ridiculed by everyone, and I honestly wished it was porn because that would've been less embarrassing. That teacher called me Kirk for the rest of high school, though, so that was kind of cool."
15. "A chihuahua. A first-grader had slipped it into his backpack while waiting for the bus to pick him up. The poor thing was just quietly sitting in his backpack that was on a hook in the hallway."
16. "My wife (a teacher) told of a first-grader who brought his new bracelet to show off to the school secretary (50–60 years old). She proceeded to compliment his bracelet and wear it around the school showing everyone until a teacher informed her that she was obviously wearing a cock ring on her wrist. Secretary was horrified, but the staff couldn't have enjoyed the story more."
17. "I taught second grade for a minute. We used to do the Shel Silverstein poem 'What’s in the Sack?' for show and tell. The kids would take the sack home, we would recite the poem to them, and at the end, we'd say, 'What’s in the sack? What is it?' The kids loved it. This darling little farm boy in my class was giddy all day and kept telling me that I will love his surprise. So when he gets up and we finish the poem, he says dramatically, 'I brought a lucky rabbit's foot.' He pulls up his shirt and tied to his belt loop is a (clean) tampon. Clearly, he has been rubbing it for luck. Before I can react, he says 'And I brought one for everybody!' He opens the bag and there are 20 unwrapped tampons ready to hand out so everyone can have their own good luck!"
"We all clapped, and then I pulled him aside and asked him if they were his. He lowered his eyes and said no, so I told him that he couldn’t give them away. I called his mom. She was super young and mortified, but we had a good laugh and I took a picture of his huge grin after his proud moment for her to use as a hilarious story later in his teen years. It was one of my favorite teaching days ever!"
18. "The weirdest one was definitely the fish in a vase they found during locker checks. It was in an unassigned locker someone had added a lock to. Inside was a live betta fish in about as large a vase as you can fit in a locker. Fully decorated. Someone had clipped a little book light to the top of the vase presumably so the fish wasn't in the dark all the time. No one claimed to know whose it was or how long it had been there, so it lived in the coach's office for at least that year."
19. "I teach kindergarten, and we were studying butterfly life cycles. The little guy brings in a 'chrysalis' he found on the porch of his house. A doobie. The kid brought me a doobie and wanted us to see how long it would take to turn into a butterfly."
20. "I'm not a teacher, but I’m half-deaf and my music teacher took my hearing aid and refused to accept that it wasn’t an earbud. Then he yelled at me for the rest of the class for not playing in tune (I couldn’t exactly tell how well I was playing since I couldn't hear it.)"
21. "I taught fourth-graders and saw a couple of them passing around a sheet of paper to each other instead of doing what they were supposed to be doing. I took the note from them and one of the kids' faces looked as if her life was over and she started crying and begged me not to look at it. I unfolded it to see what they were writing about. The note was filled with drawings of cartoon butts and they told me they wanted to have a contest to see who was the best at drawing butts. Not the worst story, but definitely my favorite."
22. "I had a student bring a live mouse to school to feed to our class pet, a ball python. He had brought the mouse in the front pocket of his pants instead of something reasonable to hold it."
23. "It was my birthday, and I’m known as the teacher who loves cats. I teach fourth grade but I see several other ages of kids in the halls and at recess. One little boy in kindergarten ran up to me with his backpack and was ecstatic, saying that he has the best present for me ever. As I eyed the squirming backpack suspiciously, it dawned upon me that I had never explicitly told this child not to bring me his family cat. I was gifted a very angry cat and had to explain it to the principal, who essentially told me to hold on to it until the boy's family could come to reclaim their cat. I found out afterward that the boy walks to school with the older neighbor kids, so I guess the mom didn’t know he stuffed it in his backpack until we called her."
24. "A gorilla mask. This kid put it on while my back was turned and I was facing the board. I laughed like hell, then took it for the day until his parents collected it."
25. "I had to confiscate a sea bass from a student who had brought it in to use in the playground at break time. He was walking around slapping people in the face with it and challenging them to a duel."
26. "I've taken a vape from a student, who said, 'My mom gave it to me for allergies.' I went, 'So I'll just give it back to her then.' His eyes went wide."
27. "We had a brand-new music teacher. Nice, talented dude. One of our students googled him the day after he started and found a totally normal picture of him. He somehow made about 500 copies of this photo and was plastering them all over school. We ended up confiscating the stack amid protests of 'What, I’m not allowed to have paper?!' It was fairly memorable for me."
28. "A goddamn tattoo machine that they were tattooing their hands with. They were in the eighth grade."
"Tattoo machine in the library. A 15-year-old brought it in and was trying to give his friends tattoos in the reference section."
29. "I've found a bottle of vodka 'hidden' in the girls bathroom by seventh-graders. Their response? 'How did you know where to look?' Everyone who came back from the bathroom was drunk so you're not as sneaky as you think."
30. "A pigeon. The student came to class as normal, but during my class, I started to hear pigeon noises. This was normal because I usually had my window open, but these sounded like they were closer. I continued to teach, then the student's backpack started to move and the sounds got louder. I asked them if they had a pigeon in there. They said yes, that they wanted to take it home as a pet, and I had to explain why that wouldn’t work. We took the bag outside, let it go, went back, and told them to go wash their hands, same with anyone else who touched it. At least five other students had touched the pigeon. Apparently, they had been feeding the pigeons to gain their trust over a couple of days, and then grabbed one when they had a chance."
31. "A copy of Fifty Shades of Grey with notes in the margins from a middle schooler. She accused me of wanting to stifle her interest in reading."
33. "We had a kid that became a nuisance for throwing beans everywhere. He would buy bags of uncooked kidney beans and shit to throw in the halls and whatnot. It went on basically through the entirety of the high school. He got his locker and backpack privileges revoked because they thought not allowing him a place to store them would help stop him. It didn't. He would have other people hold his bags of beans for him. Not sure what his end game was."
34. "Over the course of what felt like a week, this student had been collecting cherry tomatoes at lunch and saving them. Eventually, he had a handful of them. He named each of them and drew a face on each one. He had created a family of tomatoes and even began dressing them in tape-created 'safety seats.' He even had a french fry boat for a 'vehicle' to carry his tomato family to each class. Eventually, he left it in our class over the weekend and the tomatoes went bad. We had to toss them. He asked us not to call 'TPS' on him — Tomato Protective Services. I love this kid."
35. "Pencils. Because the student was eating them. He would eat the metal band holding the eraser (and I think the eraser, too). Then he would break the pencil and eat pieces of the wood."
What's the worst thing that was ever taken away from you at school? Let me know in the comments!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.