Teachers use Reddit to share the greatest ways students have misinterpreted class assignments

Students seem to have their own interesting take on the topic of 'euthanasia'

It seems more students are left scratching their heads when faced with school assignments than you'd think (General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

Some students have long-been stereotyped for not paying attention in class and of being serial daydreamers during times when they should be sponges, taking in as much of the teacher’s knowledge as possible. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes it’s not. We’ll all have been guilty of it at some point.

When assigned work you’re not entirely clear about, where the usual response would be to clarify what’s being asked of you with the teacher - or even consulting with friends - it seems some students don’t always follow this usual rule if one Reddit thread is anything to go by.

Teachers and students alike have been taking to the online bulletin board community to share their experiences of the times classmates spectacularly misinterpreted assignments to charge on ahead and do their own thing.

With hundreds of users posting their experiences, these are the ten best incorrect, yet brilliant, assignment misinterpretations we could find:

1) The typist

I had a teacher tell me a 12-page assignment needed to be in ‘type-print’. Now I had never heard of this, so I just assumed he meant printed in a matter - so exact - that it looked typed. So I ended up handwriting the whole thing as meticulously as possible that it looked typed. I was so proud of myself. Until the teacher told me no - he meant typed.

2) That essay question

Told my students to write the essay question at the top of their page. Half the class wrote: ‘The Essay Question’.

3) Lost for words

I had an English teacher who would frequently do dictation for that entire class period. Way too many kids would literally write down ‘ellipsis’, ‘semicolon’, ‘parentheses’, ‘hyphen’, etc, before they realised they were punctuation marks and not words. This was in 12th grade.

4) The film buff

My professor at uni told us about a time he assigned an essay on ‘the male gaze in film’. He got an essay back about ‘the male gays in film’.

5) A bugging issue

In college, I was in a classical mythology class and we had to read ‘The Metamorphoses’ by Ovid, an ancient text which puts together a bunch of myths into a cohesive story.

Instead, some kid in my class read ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Kafka, a 1915 short story about a guy who turns into a cockroach.

Before class, I overheard him talking to his friends: “Yeah, I actually did the whole reading. But why did we have to read it for this class? Dude just turns into a bug. It was weird.”

6) The manicurist

My art teacher wanted 12 thumbnail sketches (small rough idea of the picture) of our ideas for a painting. One girl drew her thumbnail 12 times.

7) Animal sounds

As a preschool teacher, I asked my students to tell me the first sound in ‘dog’. Almost everyone responded: “Woof.”

8) The woodsman

In first grade, we were assigned to go home and answer a few questions on loose leaf. Not knowing exactly what that was, I wandered about the woods near my home searching for leaves big enough for my writing. My mum’s reaction when she asked why I was writing on leaves was priceless.

9) That euthanasia kid

In debate class, we had to debate euthanasia. The kid who was supposed to argue for it went first.

He started talking about how necessary it was, and how terrible it was that we didn't use it more before. He was giving all these examples of people that needed to be euthanised: people who needed amputations, people with cavities, babies. It became very clear very quickly that either this kid was a monster - or he was talking about something else.

The teacher asked him: “Are you talking about euthanasia or anesthesia?”

The kid replied: “I have made… a terrible mistake.”

I still quote that to this day. Cracks me up every time.

10) That other euthanasia kid

It may be the teacher’s fault for not having this one written down and only speaking it verbally, but he gave the class the topic ‘euthanasia’. One student turned in a well done paper about ‘youth in Asia’. Teacher was an a****le, though, and made him re-do it on the correct topic.