27 People Reveal The Most Bizarre Thing That Happened During Their University Lecture

image - Flickr / Seth Sawyers
image – Flickr / Seth Sawyers

Found on r/AskReddit.

Thanks to all who gave permission to republish their comments.

1. A guy at my college came into my morning class about 45 minutes late and looking pretty messed up from the night before. He proceeded to stumble to his desk and attempted to sit down. Instead he missed the desk, fell on the the floor and then threw up.

mastermooney

2. I have a professor that asks students who use laptops to move to the back of the room. Why you ask? Because of an incident he has since named “The Funnel of Doom.”

There was a student a few years ago who sat in the center of the room and proceeded to play Doom for the entirety of the lecture. Everyone behind him was not taking notes, they were watching this kid play Doom. He single-handily distracted 3/4 of a 100 student lecture. Hence, “The Funnel of Doom.”

otherwisenothing

3. I was in a CS class and a guy I didn’t recognize came in halfway through and sat down next to me. The professor was coding on his laptop, which was projecting on a screen in the front of the lecture hall.

All of a sudden, the guy stood up, pointed at the screen and exclaimed, “There’s a bug in the code! A bug!” The professor calmly stated, “Oh, he’s right. I missed a semicolon.” The guy then walked out of class and the professor just said, “Huh. I guess he came just to point out that one bug.”

m3gav01t

4. Guy showed up to my chemistry lab shirtless. This was well after the PPE talk.

xMosk

5. A kid in my class or up in the middle of a lecture and interrupted the professor and said, “How can everyone sit here with that beautiful sunset happening right now. I have to go watch it.” He gets up leaves all of his stuff then goes outside comes back 20 minutes later and tries to show the professor pictures of the sunset.

The professor couldn’t stop laughing. He also did many other strange things.

J3rm0ff

6. Our school has a very terrible and strange policy where the Freshman experience course has an “academic coach” who works as a partner with the lecturers. They are supposed to be present in the room and help students with homework, but in practice they just yell at students who slouch.

One student came in and the coach told him to remove his hat. The student said “fuck that” and just left.

sick_burn_bro

7. I’m an adjunct professor at a few different schools in the NYC area. One spring semester I was teaching an astronomy course. I had a particularly…enthusiastic student. He interrupted class about as often as he contributed, so it balanced out. One day, he saw a young woman outside that he wanted to talk to. So, he walked over to the window and climbed out.

Fortunately, the classroom was on the first floor. I was so shocked, I just watched him do it. He climbed out the window, walked over to the girl, chatted a bit, and then (I take this as a testament to his interest in my class) he headed back towards the window to return to class. I waved him off and told him to go use a door like a human being. He came back and I went on with class.

At the end of lecture, he stayed behind to apologize and show me his his new ADD meds. Apparently they weren’t working that well. So, beautiful woman makes the guy climb out a window, but science brought him back!

paleo2002

8. Just a TA, but there was a large Hawaiian kid who attended my professor’s Multivariate Statistics class that would roll joints under his desk.

grzesz

9. I had two students speaking arabic to each other during the final exam. It was audible to the whole class. When I informed them that the would not pass the exam due to obvious cheating, they were completely incredulous. They couldn’t believe they were not allowed to talk to each other at full volume during a final exam.

After a long discussion, one tried to convince me that they were just talking about what they were going to do that night. Bizarre. Also, they had the same wrong answers with the same exact wording.

urethraFranklin1

10. A student in my pottery class slipped with edged scoop tool and removed a large chunk of his finger flesh, but I didn’t know that at the time…. I guess he was embarrassed and didn’t want to cause a scene, so he quickly stuck the cut finger in his mouth and swallowed the blood. This must have continued for a few minutes until I made my rounds to see how the class was doing.

I noticed he wasn’t really working, or he was trying to with one hand, so i asked if everything was alright. Of course his finger was in his mouth, and his mouth was full of blood, so he couldn’t give a verbal answer, but he looked up at me with concern in his eyes. I quietly asked “did you cut yourself” and he humbly nodded yes.

I prompted him to go to the shop bathroom where there is first aid supplies, thinking it could be patched up with some gauze. Just after I dismissed him, he gagged a little and proceeded to throw up what looked a gallon of gelatinous red-black blood all over the linoleum floor, it was an instant crime scene. Everyone freaked out, most left the class because they were close to fainting or puking at the sight of it all, I mean it was a comical amount of blood on the floor. Anyways the kid’s finger was still very much cut and was just shy of actually spraying blood. I grabbed a shop rag and wrapped it as tightly as I could around his finger and told him to keep pressure on it. The rag went red in less than a minute. Ambulance was called. Kid threw up again. Classroom looked like there was blood orgy…

Respect the modeling tools.

– Anonymous

11. In my biological literature course (mostly juniors and seniors) were given over 2 months to prepare a 15 minute lecture to be presented in front of the class.

One of the students did his presentation on “mermaids” and used scenes from the Animal Planet mockumentary as part of his presentation.

This was not a joke. This kid absolutely did not realize that the mermaid documentary was fake. He honestly thought that various scenes of the cgi’d mermaids was real. How he made it so far as a biology major still baffles me.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more uncomfortable.

teaparty88

12. When I was a student, I took an Intro to Bio class that was traditionally a weed-out class. Lots of A-type pre-med kids would bring in voice recorders to record the lectures.

One day in class I start hearing this jumble of words like someone is talking over the professor. I look over and this really spacey looking girl has a collection of like 40 of those “record a message to go with your picture” picture frames, and is holding them up to record. Bear in mind these things hold max maybe 30 seconds of audio each. So she just keeps holding them up one after the other and recording the lecture 30 seconds at a time and every now and then hits the playback button to make sure it’s working. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.

jc6213

13. First year teaching and I looked out into the students and watched a girl remove a very wee little baby bunny from her purse. It hopped around her desk for a bit and was generally quite distracting

Hallwaywalker

14. Dude in my class brought his parakeet…professor didn’t notice until it started making bird noises. One of the most WTF looks I’ve seen!

mudhair

15. I teach a freshman zoology lab. More like gross I guess, but a student dissected a fetal pig while eating a turkey sandwich. One hand in the pig, one hand on the sandwich. Had to kindly tell him to finish eating in the hallway while trying not to vomit. He didn’t seemed bothered at all, and actually seemed kind of confused as to why I wouldn’t let him eat while he did the dissection.

Mind you these fetal pigs had been out for a while so they smelled like rancid meat.

cajunryder

16. Some guy came in to one of my lectures and pitched to the entire class about selling a trip to go on a cruise for a really low price. Some people paid him in cash for it and he even had a portable credit card scanner. In the end they found out he was a scammer as he was leaving and professor called security and he tried to run but they got him to return all the money.

Vqn1204

17. A girl in my econ recitation (not class, we basically did problems and stuff once a week) got called out for being wrong or something like that (not in a rude way, just the TA wanting to fix her mistake), started crying, and never showed up to the recitation again. It was really sad.

Malarazz

18. So a teacher of mine happened to be from the first graduating class of Evergreen State College back in 1967. For those of you that aren’t from the Pacific Northwest, Evergreen is essentially the hippy/hipster school. All classes are Pass/Fail and you essentially design your own degree program. It’s a very neat school but definitely not for everyone.

Anyways my teacher would love to go on and on about the things that would happen back at Evergreen in the 60s. One example that stood out was that one of his professors loved to smoke, as in constantly. He would sit cross legged in the middle of the room and smoke on his pipe, letting the smoke lazily rise out of his mouth.

When a student would answer a question he would open one eye to answer them and then closed both eyes again and resumed smoking. One day the students were listening to a lecture of his but unfortunately he didn’t seem to be making a lick of sense. A student finally interrupted his ramble with “I’m sorry but I have no idea what you’ve been trying to say” and he responded bluntly, “That’s because you’re not high!” He proceeded to pass the pipe around the classroom.

attemptedactor

19. I was in a philosophy class during my freshman year of college where the professor ALWAYS showed up 15 mins early. He was the kind that was a quirky genius and his routine was impeccable.

One day, he does not show up early, and a few minutes before class, a girl says to the class, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if he didn’t show up today!” and almost immediately after that comment another member of the philosophy department entered and told us that our prof had a stroke the night before. The look on her face was priceless…

Sadly, the man died shortly after.

policytester

20. One day I’m sitting in lecture in one of the top rows, and there is a girl with long hair a few rows ahead of me. All the sudden, I see something coming around her neck? It’s…a rat. A white rat. Girl brought her pet rat to class. Girl ended up being my best school friend and the rats name is Norma Jean.

5minutesago

21. In a class at my old college, a deer jumped through the window, shattering it, mid-lecture.

uhhyup

22. Macro Economics class, about 40 people total. Everyone typically sat in the same places and I felt like I had a handle on who everyone was. One day a guy came in a bit early, sat down towards the middle of the room and put a brown paper grocery bag down underneath his seat. He never took off his hood and never took off his sunglasses. I had never seen him before and he was sitting in a seat typically occupied by another student.

One of the more vocal students, we’ll call him Bob, was sitting 2 seats away from this guy. About 15 minutes into the lecture Bob started in on a rather lengthy question. While he was talking, the hooded mystery man stood up, picked up the grocery bag… reached inside… and proceeded to pull out a banana cream pie and throw it in Bob’s face! It was a good hit too, stuck to his head for a second before falling off, clinging to his glasses. The hooded guy ran out and one of the ex-miliatary students got up and chased after him, ready to fight.

No one ever found him, or heard about what happened. Bob had no idea who the guy was or what the motivation was. It was the perfect crime.

LeoTolstoyJr

23. I’m a student. This guy is at least 35+ and he acts like he runs the class and like he’s equals with the professor. He’ll just get up in the middle of class, WHILE THE PROFESSOR IS TALKING, and just walk over to the window and look out of it. He’ll stand there like he’s Jay Gatsby. Or he tries to engage the professor in off-topic political conversations. I cringe so hard.

This is why I’m always wary whenever I see someone in my class who’s over 30.

MGLLN

24. Student not lecturer. Last year in my introductory psychology course, we had a student come in and stare down the professor in a full killer psycho clown mask, wig, jumpsuit, and shoes. She stopped mid lecture and asked the clown what they were doing and the two of them just had a full on Western standoff for 5 minutes before the clown walked out without a word. This wasn’t a small lecture either, it was over 1200 people in it and we were all dead silent. My prof was so flustered after that she couldn’t continue and just dismissed us all.

FoldingSpork

25. It wasn’t during a lecture, but right after one when the teacher is gathering her stuff and students approach with questions. I was with a friend, who had missed class but had an assignment to turn in and wanted to catch the teacher at a good time.

His project is a powerpoint on a USB. Now my friend is a bare minimum type of guy, and not very creative or imaginative. He’s probably used the USB twice and for all I know, it’s otherwise blank. Well, he talks to the teacher, who accepts his project but wants to see it right then and there. My friend pops it into the classroom computer and it begins to autoplay the first media it finds, which is a wide-eyed, large-breasted girl deep-throating a chubby guy’s dick.

I laughed so hard as did his professor, who was female. She couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, but believe me she was struck by a shock only a fraction less than my friend’s. One of the funniest things I’ve seen. Unfortunately he waited at the end of the line of students with questions, so no one else saw.

Well, not sure if quite counts since it was done on accident.

MistKing

26. I fell asleep in class once, and suddenly heard laughter, and smelled strong coffee. The professor was holding a cup under my nose. I apologized, he offered me cream and sugar, and went back to his lecture.

kenaireb

27. A guy who sat in the row in front of me pulled a bag of unpopped popcorn out of his coat pocket. He proceeded to open the bag, wipe off every kernel with a napkin, then he would eat it. His teeth must’ve fucking hurt after that. Even our professor stopped lecturing for a few minutes to watch him. He was also one of those kids that would show up to class in full anime cosplay outfits. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

shutupjen

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