When going to school, you need to complete your assignments and follow the instructions in order to get a good grade.

What would you do if your teacher gave you instructions to use specific sentence starters when writing about a book?

That is what happened to the student in this story, and he thought he would try to be clever by intentionally misusing those sentence starters.

Keep reading to see how the teacher reacts when she sees his assignment.

Sentence Starters: Amateur Summer School Malicious Compliance

Backstory: I was in HS sophomore summer school retaking English because I’m a terrible student (I only failed because I cut class).

So, I’m there in English class at summer school, at a different location from my own school (construction reasons), and the teacher was pretty bland.

She heard what school I went to and said to the class “Oh good, an over-achiever” (/s).

I didn’t like that, but I didn’t fight it.

This would be an interesting assignment.

We were assigned the book “The Pigman” (by Paul Zindel, 1968). We had to keep a “journal” of what we thought of the book, chapter by chapter, day by day.

It was a crock, but again, I didn’t fight it.

These instructions sound pretty normal, so far.

However, the teacher asked us to use “sentence starters”. She said that all of our journal entries had to start with things like:

“What I liked the most/least about this chapter was…”

“The most/least interesting thing about this chapter was…”

… and a bunch of other ones I cant remember because it’s been over 20 years.

The sentence starters weren’t in the chapter, though.

You know where this is going. It’s not epic, but it made me feel great.

When she finally started reading my journal a few chapters in, she was greeted with:

“What I liked the least about this chapter was sentence starters. Anyway…”

“The most interesting thing about this chapter was not a sentence starter. Anyway…”

The teacher is very reasonable.

She just looked at me and said “ok, you don’t have to use them”.

I still got a B in the class because, like I said, I’m a terrible student.

Honestly, he wasn’t following the instructions at all in this case. He is lucky that the teacher still accepted the work and gave him a decent grade.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit think about this story.

At least he wrote one good book.

There’s always a silver lining.

This commenter must love to read.

Way to miss the point of the assignment.

The prompts were to help make the assignments easier.

He thinks he was clever, but really, he was just a bad student.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.