What’s the dumbest thing you ever got in trouble at school for?

Suspended for being the target of violence. I didn't even fight back but the zero tolerance policy also meant i got suspended too. It was a random event from someone who i had never interacted with so it wasn't like i provoked them into stabbing me.

"Swearing"

5th grade, first day at a new school. I'm trying to meet new kids, but I'm terribly awkward. I try to lead one conversation with some humour "Did you know the Bible says you shouldn't covet your neighbour's ass?"

Cue some other kid running off to find a teacher, which resulted in me having to skip recess and write an essay about how I shouldn't swear because it is a bad influence on younger kids.

Over the following four years I was on the receiving end of invective many times more aggressive and offensive, sometimes right in front of teachers, but I never saw another kid punished for foul language.

Not sure which is dumbest so I’ll write a couple

In senior year of high school, when I received my schedule, I realized it was a class short. I’ve always had this very big issue of “trying to do the right thing.” So I marched to the office of the person in charge of that, asking if I could get an art class to fill the period. She said everything was full and she couldn’t do that. So I said “well thank you for trying” and was getting up to walk away when she stopped me and said “No, you are not allowed to have a free period, this must be fixed right now”. I was part of the yearbook club and told her I would just use the time to work on the yearbook. She would not have it at all. So she added on the only free class, one about taxes. The thing about this class is that it was FULL of bad kids, they were all dumped there. To make matters worse, my sort of stalker was in this class as well. The first day I showed up, she noticed me and stood up in front of the class and exclaimed that if anyone messed with me, that she would mess with them. It was quite embarrassing. The class was abysmal to be a part of and not much got done. My friends made fun of me for my stupid choice there. I should have just kept quiet.

During lunch time. In 1st grade my friend didn’t want to go to the bathroom alone and asked me to go along with. When we were on the way, the girls bathroom door was wide open for some reason with 6 girls standing by the entrance. It was odd, but we kept walking to the boys bathroom, did our business and left. On the way back we say one of the girls talking to one of the lunch aides. She apparently told her we had gone INTO the girls bathroom. We were forced to stand facing the wall for the rest of the lunch period. I was more upset that my friend convinced me to go, since I didn’t really need the bathroom in the first place.

Got suspended in 8th grade for "smoking on school grounds" because I stood outside the front door finishing my fruit snacks before I walked into the school (we weren't supposed to have snacks outside designated food areas). Some rocket scientist of a teacher saw me standing by the door with my hand occasionally going up to my mouth (I think it may have been cold enough outside to make my breath steam) and said, "AHA! This child is smoking!"

She literally grabbed me by my collar and dragged me to the assistant principal's office. Multiple other kids, and an adult who must have been someone's mom, told her I wasn't smoking, but she wasn't having any of it. And the assistant principal just believed her out of hand. Wouldn't even let me finish a sentence to say something in my own defense.

They had the security guard escort me off school grounds. And I just stood there for a while looking back at the school, still holding my fruit snacks, trying to figure out wtf just happened.

I pretty much checked out mentally after that. That kind of stuff ended up being pretty much par for the course. I hung out with the metal/punk/skater/stoner/goth crowd, and that was some kind of unforgivable sin at that school. My friends and I were constantly being singled out for minor or imagined infractions and never believed or given the benefit of the doubt. I went from a 3.8 gpa to something like 0.6 that year. I'd have to sit through all these meetings about how I was "so smart," and how "I could go so far if only I would apply myself." And I'd straight up tell them what was going on, and they'd be like, "It's just a mystery why you won't apply yourself."

It's been like 30 years and I'm still mad about that shit.

I got detention for being ahead in reading. We were reading a text in class, people got turns to read part of the text out loud. And they were reading so slowly that I was way ahead of them. So when the teacher gave the turn to read out loud to me, I didn't fully know where the previous reader had left.
My neighbour whispered the next line to me, but that line appeared twice in the text.

So I started reading from the second occurence of that line but with the next line after that there was a lot of confusion in class.

The teacher told me to stay behind for detention, because of that.

Got arrested for self defence against a bully

fuck the school admin

and ACAB

Reading ahead in class. I wasn't reading ahead, I am just a fast reader. Yes, I really did finish that chapter already. Yes, when you said to read it. No, I'm not showing off.

What kind of teacher complains that a kid is reading too much?

Teacher handed out some blank pages and wanted a couple line response to something we were doing that day. I wrote it down and decided I wanted to doodle so I (neatly) tore the page in half and handed in my answer. Got points marked off for not handing in a full piece of paper (my response/answer itself was good). WTH? Since when was that a requirement for such casual assignments?

In 3rd grade (maybe age 8), when coming back from the playground, my teacher had a rule:

STRAIGHT LINE, NO TALKING, NO TOUCHING

One day, when coming back from recess, I noticed that the kid in front of me, Joe, was crying. Now, I didn't like Joe, he was a bully and had made fun of me and my friend group since the 2nd grade. But I still didn't like just letting someone sit there upset. So I put a hand on his shoulder and said, "hey, are you ok?"

Thus breaking two of the three most important rules you could possibly imagine. The teacher came over and chastised me for "playing around in line", completely ignoring Joe (who was still crying). I tried to argue, but to no avail.

Later that day, the teacher made a huge speech in front of the class about how sometimes you think you're doing the right thing, but you still need to follow the rules, and gave me a citation in front of the entire class.

Also, Joe continued to bully me.

Calling a Jewish girl jew. Wasn't derogatory, someone asked if so and so went to the local catholic school with me and I said no she's a jew. Had to watch Schindlers List and write an essay even tho principal acknowledged the teacher was wrong for thinking jew was offensive. This was in 2002.

In 2nd grade the teacher had to step out of the room for several minutes and put me in charge. If anyone misbehaved, I was to write their name on the chalkboard. One group of boys did misbehave, so I wrote down their names.

When the teacher returner, she scolded me for "being a snitch" and sent me to the principal's office.

A literal paddling for being late to homeroom in middle school. Bad as schools are now, they have been worse.

Also, wearing a mini skirt on a football game day, when the cheerleaders had to come to school in their uniforms (skirts much shorter than mine.) this is the only time my mom backed me up, she said it was stupid and picked me up I was not in trouble. Dress code should be the same for everyone, if you have one.

I used to play a rs private server called hackscape way back in the day, the client was a Java program you ad to run locally, so I threw it on a flash drive and my friend and I would play in our keyboarding class downtime.

Well they found out we were playing, got very concerned we were "hacking the computers" because it was called hackscape, and I ended up getting a week of in-school suspension. I brought this up in another thread, but an interesting extra bit of context, the vice principal I spoke to and had given me the ISS, ended up getting caught with kiddy porn and hung himself in jail a few years later.

Fun times.

I got a paddling for calling a student teacher "Mr. Ummmm... Dude" bc I couldn't think of his name. The actual teacher said that was the equivalent of him calling me an asshole.

Also

I got suspended because we were selling cookbooks for some event and I didn't pay attention to the price. I asked someone before I left for the day and they lied and told me double the price. It was 5 he said 10. I learned from a friend that I was told wrong the next day after it came up I sold my mom's bf one for 10. Principal overheard and I got suspended for 3 days. The art teacher that was in charge of the event told me I "disgusted her" and to get out of her sight.

I could probably go on. School was dumb.

Kid made himself bleed with a bobby pin and during class his girlfriend asked the teacher to talk about something private: while she was out of the room, he yelled, then said I stabbed him with a pencil.

Later on in the Principal's office, the teacher came to apologize and showed the bobby pin she confiscated that still had blood on the spot where he removed the rubber tip. She explained that she took it from him before class even started because he wouldn't stop fidgeting.

Even with proof that I was innocent, that worthless racist ass piece of shit Principal still gave me OSS. I genuinely still wish her and that piece of shit kid the worst, 20+ years after the fact.

Kindergarten, in a pencil-sharpening contest with 2 girls. Even though my pencil was clearly sharper, they ganged up on me and said theirs were, vote was 2-1. I exclaimed that “girls are toilets”, which was overheard by the authorities. Spent the rest of the day in timeout.

5th grade music (singing) class. We're practicing a song for an upcoming assembly. It's cheesy. An excerpt:

We can fight all the evil, we can fight all the hate
If we do it together, it won't be too late
If we do it together, it won't be too late

During the song, two adjacent kids start laughing every time it says "We can do it together" because "do it" = "have sex" even though most of us don't know what it entails at this age, myself included. The teacher glares at them but does nothing else. Several other kids including me chuckle at the scene. This goes on for 3 weeks.

Now comes the dress rehearsal. Today is special because two 5th grade classes are having a joint rehearsal. All of us are a little giddy because there are double the kids crammed into the same space.

In anticipation of getting caught up in the infectious laughter, as the words "do it" approach I hide my face behind my sheet music. Suddenly, the backing CD track cuts out. I lowered the paper from my face she was already halfway to the clown kid sitting beside me. Except.... she comes to me. In this abrupt silence she explodes at me, point blank, index finger brandished:

"YOU NEED TO GROW UP! IT IS NOT ABOUT HAVING SEX!"

She singled me out. I was embarrassed.

Only after class did I learn from my homeroom teacher that the two instigators had recently been given a very stern talking to, such that the music teacher thought it was resolved until my hiding face gave her the impression it was not. Thankfully my homeroom teacher understood and I received no further consequences other than all of this living in my head for the next 30 years and forever.

For calling myself gay. My teacher just assumed I was using it as an insult and referring to myself as being terrible. It took a visit to the principals office with the teacher and going "No. Seriously. I am an out of the closet homosexual. Ask anyone in that class." They ended up apologizing but I was just kinda pleased they were taking it that seriously in the first place.

I had a shirt with some random kanji and a cartoon anthropomorphized beer mug and cigarette on it (probably said complete gibberish but it was 2005 so who can tell). Anyway, I got chewed out by a teacher about it being inappropriate, meanwhile some other kid was walking around with a literal Jack Daniel’s shirt without any repercussions.

I let a classmate of mine borrow my car. She asked if she could use it to run a quick errand. I was just trying to be nice. I didn't know her parents had grounded her from driving or that the school had a policy against letting other students use your vehicle. In hindsight it probably wasn't a smart idea but I was 17 so I didn't think about it that much.

A simple, "please don't do that again" would have been more than sufficient but instead I got a two day suspension.

Reading a book in English class. Had a high school English teacher that was out sick half the time and spent literally all of the remaining time they were actually in to teach us, reading through the assigned novel for the curriculum. (barely 20% of the curriculum overall) I was/am an avid reader so had the novel finished on my own in about a week and a half and got bored of listening to the terrible accents and voices being attempted by the teacher so Brought in my own book from the library and hid that in the cover of the prescribed novel to read. Teacher caught me and sent a letter home to my parents. Absolute nonsense!

Two kids were playing catch with a milk carton to see who it would burst on. One kid missed and it hit me and burst. I was blamed for it and the teacher tried to make me clean it up no matter how much I explained that I didn't do anything wrong. Fortunately, those two kids owned up to it and they cleaned it up but the teacher was super upset about it and still insisted it was my fault. Idk if she had some sort of vendetta against me or if she just couldn't accept that she was wrong and doubled down.

In eighth grade, part of being in student council was helping an assigned teacher with various tasks during study hall. Well, when that teacher didn't have anything for us, my friend and I would go help the librarian with various tasks instead. We were "caught" and given detention (my first and only). So dumb.

When I was in second grade, my teacher saw me bend a paperclip once. For the rest of the year she would scream my name every time she found a bent paperclip and insist I must have bent it. One time she took away a snack I had because there was a twist tie on the bag and she insisted it was one of her paperclips I stole and bent.

Another time she got mad at me and insisted I was chewing gum when I was actually just eating graphite from my mechanical pencil. I don't think I can really blame her for that one though

I got my first and only detention for skipping the annual school 1.6km run around the local lake to go study in the library.

Two classmates got into a fight in class and I bailed out of there because I wanted no part of it. The teacher got mad at me for bailing and said I should've done something. I was 12, what do you think I could do?

For continuously saying "eyyyyy". TBF it was really annoying, every time I was scolded I'd respond with eyy whoaaa eyyy and it escalated from there. It was pretty funny to see the explanation on the write up without context though.

I got sent to the principal's office in kindergarten for saying my teacher had big hands after another kid called them "bigfoot" while they were standing on a step-ladder. She apparently was insecure about her massive, gigantic, galactic-sized hands.

Kid I knew ripped the IT dept account and password out of Windows using a boot disk and told a few people including me.

You could use the account to remote access any computer on the network. I used it to set a friend of mine’s desktop background to an image I made of the world’s ugliest dogs. Teacher caught me and I fessed up.

Got yanked into the coordinators office and got a big spiel about how the account could have been used to access exams and reports and whatnot. Surprisingly didn’t get in that much trouble since I didn’t really use my great powers for anything crazy. Had to write a letter of apology to the principal and got detention for a bit and that’s it.

Kid who ripped the password didn’t do any time from what I remember. Don’t think I ratted, or at least I hope not.

Rhyming words with pitch. I was in 2nd grade. And I wasn't trying to get away with saying bitch, it's just a word that my parents used and it popped into my head.

Girl who sat next to me told.

There are a lot of choices, but one I was talking to someone else about today was the time we were doing the pledge of allegiance, and I did it in a language that wasn't English. I started doing it in an indigenous language, and after two lines the teacher was like "TINA, NO!!!"

Making a fireball with the schools powdered coffee creamer.

Fake-eating an electrical plug. The plug was both not connected to any power - I was "eating" the end that goes into the wall - and also never even close to actually being in my mouth, but the teacher was apparently at just the right angle for it to look convincing and freaked enough that he decided to call my parents and give me lines

The drug dog hit on my car right before Christmas break senior year. It hit on my box of Claritin D, so I let them search it. They used tweezers to pick flakes of what they called weed out of the floorboards, and I got sent to alternative school for 19 weeks.

Well, the school handbook said that the max punishment was 6 weeks, so we appealed it. The principal and superintendent were new and wanted to make an example of me, so that was a bust.

At the same time, I had submitted all of my stuff for my Eagle Scout rank, but still hadn't had the final board of review.

Right before our school board meeting, we got a call from one of the member's wives. This school board member was also the scout master, and he hated me. She said that my behavior wasn't befitting of an Eagle Scout, and if we kept appealing they'd revoke it, and those few flakes of weed would turn into 2 ounces (felony possession).

Jokes on them, though. In alternative school they just sent all of my work for the rest of the year, so I did it in like 3 weeks and didn't have to go anymore. I did have to shake that board members hand when I graduated, though.

One day at 5th grade recess I was just walking by myself when some kid jumps on my back and starts choking me. I reflexively bent forward causing him to fall. I was suspended for a week. He got nothing

Putting my arm around my girlfriend's shoulder while we were sitting at an assembly. I wasn't doing anything inappropriate, we were just sitting there. But the principal took me aside at one point and told me to stop.

Was a boy in kindergarten and my teacher told my parents that I was retarded because I couldn't read. Had been reading to parents since I was three. Turned out she just hated boys.

Changing the CRT resolution from 1024x768 to something actually useful. They made us walk back to the computer lab to switch it back.

I got suspended for getting punched after a kid kicked my lunch down a hall and called me a retard.

I got in trouble for not singing during rehearsal for our 2nd grade Christmas concert. I remember this because I was definitely singing and it's the first time I can remember getting in trouble for something I didn't do and having no power to do anything about it. I actually love singing so much that I ended up singing in any group I could join in highschool and college. Really though, that teacher just didn't like me very much 🫤

We had a strict no-candy policy in my elementary school. So I ended up selling candy between classes for the local candy man. Teacher found out and gave me a slap on the wrist.

One, 2nd grade Roman Catholic school, telling a bully of mine that he's going to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, got detention for that.

Two, getting detention for skipping/running back in from a fire drill. I think that was 3rd grade.

Gah my school was fucking stupid.

Grade 3, I was saying "fuh" like the first sound in "fuck" and Katherine told on me for saying "fuck" even though I didn't say it. Tragically, her story was believed and mine was not. I never forgave her. I also never saw her again after Grade 5, so whatevs.

Telling other kids to stop talking because, if they didn't, they'd get in trouble.

Smoking. Dumbest fuckin thing...

Not doing the Hokey Pokey correctly. Yes, corporal punishment was still a thing. Yes, it mentally scarred me.