Teaching is a tricky job when you have a class of naughty children, but usually, the teacher knows how to get them to fall in line.

Substitutes, though, are a different story.

This teacher had a clever idea for how to get back at a chatty class who gave the substitute a hard time.

Find out how she kept the kids busy!

Find That Word!

I was a middle school teacher, and because I was pretty strict and ran a tight ship in the classroom, I was given many of the kids who were disciplinary problems.

I accepted it and managed to whip most of them into shape.

Things weren’t as easy with these kids.

The problem was, when a substitute was scheduled for the class, they were AWFUL!

I would assign punitive homework, but wasn’t very effective.

But I came up with a scheme…

She knew how to deal with them!

I knew the sub, and briefed her beforehand.

Using an online site, I created a word search using the vocabulary words we were working on. There were 20 of them.

However, I made a slight modification to the letters in the word search diagram, and one of the words that appeared in the list of words to find was no longer there.

The stakes were high for the kids!

The class was told, while the word search worksheet was being handed out, that anyone who completed it correctly would get a homework pass for not one, but two days.

This was a huge incentive.

They were also told that anyone who went off task (like talking to another student) before it was completed would receive two extra homework assignments.

Things were fine at first but…

According to the sub, the first 20 minutes in the 40 minute class went well; everyone was on task.

Then someone said they were done.

The sub checked and it was missing one word. She handed it back.

A couple more students tried the same thing and were told it wasn’t correct.

The class did well in the test!

Overall, they were well behaved. At the end of the class she collected the worksheets.

When I returned they all wanted to know where the word was. I simply put up the answer key to the unmodified word search worksheet.

And that was my petty revenge for their awful behavior to the previous subs.

Clever! This teacher found her way around managing a noisy class!

But did she go a little overboard with her revenge?

Let’s find out the views of folks on Reddit!

This user doesn’t support this teacher’s teaching methods!

This user supports the teacher and thinks she did the right thing!

This person got reminded of their own teacher back in the day!

That’s sad! This user hated school because of noisy kids.

This man shares his wife’s teaching experience.

Teachers know how to discipline a noisy class.

This teacher got harsh once so the kids would remember it for later!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.