Sometimes, being a teacher means learning to roll with a little humor – especially when you have a student who is quick-witted and has a knack for turning words around.

So, what would you do if one of your students managed to take your directions a little too literally and twist them to his advantage?

Would you double down and try to keep control?

Or would you let him enjoy his small victory and see where it goes?

In the following story, a middle school teacher finds herself dealing with this very thing.

Here’s how it all went down.

Maliciously Funny Middle School Compliance

I’m a middle school teacher, and one of my seventh graders is an ADHD kid with a heavily active imagination.

He loves working with his hands, so he is always cutting up paper, braiding yarn, etc.

We always encourage him to clear his desk for class and at least try to keep the clutter away, and he always does it happily, although he sometimes has a little back-and-forth.

“Student, let’s start the lesson. Put the yarn away.”

“Oh, it’s not yarn; it’s technically nylon cords, so I can keep doing it, right?”

This is always light-hearted and in no way aggressive.

He knows he is being pedantic; it’s just for fun.

When preparing for his responses, I always try to phrase my sentences in a way that will be hard to counter, and yesterday, it backfired.

He was one step ahead of her.

He was messing about with paper, and he told me, “Teacher, today you can’t tell me to stop cutting paper because I’m not cutting; I’m just folding.”

He had a huge amount of folded paper on his desk.

So I said, “Very nice, student! Will you please stop manipulating paper so that we can start the class?” and smiled victoriously at him.

Little did I know, he looked at me and said, “What did you say? Stop manipulating paper?” and IMMEDIATELY proceeded to put away his notebooks and textbooks.

I knew I had been cooked and just told him he had outsmarted me again.

He kept at his desk doing nothing for about a minute, and then he laughed it off, winked, and got his stuff back on the desk – no folding paper anymore.

Too funny! This kid must be the class clown.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit relate to this story.

Here’s someone who tries a similar strategy with their students.

This is a great suggestion.

This person is so right!

Good idea, but it would probably disrupt the other students.

What an excellent teacher!

It takes a great deal of patience to deal with highly intelligent kids like him, so kudos for doing a great job!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.