Saved By the Bell
Ok folks, I want you to delight in my destruction. The particular flavor of this revenge comes from the fact that everything that goes down is the result of a domino effect that leaves devastation in its wake.
Dedication: This story is for anyone who has ever been screwed over in a group project, and I certainly hope you enjoy it.
My Backstory: I’ve been teaching for many years, but it’s important to understand that in my first year of teaching, I got put on blast by an elite group of parents and their kids. Not a week went by without someone either demanding my job, trying to undermine me or just calling me a piece of trash.
I nearly quit halfway through the first semester, the verbal and emotional mistreatment was so bad.
This was at a school in a tough area, so I was accused of horrific things just for asking kids to stop talking, was ripped into for giving failing grades for missing work, and even enforcing the rules in the student/parent handbook got me in hot water.
My principal reprimanded me for being a negative influence on the school, and was I told that I needed to let more rules slide because he was tired of hearing from parents.
I would have parents just show up unannounced to sit in on my lessons and then tell me I was a bad educator, a bad human being, etc.
I have plenty of horror stories from that school alone, but the point I want to make is that this experience defined the kind of teacher I became going forward to my next school. I needed to be that person who was untouchable, because I needed to focus on the one job that mattered: teaching kids.
My next school was in a fairly affluent area. It wasn’t uncommon for me to find out that my student’s parents made millions, which brought its own unique set of problems.
However, my new principal was super supportive of me as long as I followed the school’s handbook to the letter because, by doing so, I was in line with the school’s philosophy and protected by law—we seriously had parents filing frivolous lawsuits all the darn time.
This school had long ago learned that caving to parent demands spilled blood in the water and brought the rest of the sharks in droves. My first year at this new school was successful for many reasons, but primarily because the school culture was easily adapted to.
By planning ahead, I was able to head off 99% of all negative parents at the pass. The few times a parent tried to rip into me at conferences, I ripped back so hard that I developed a reputation amongst the kids and parents as someone you couldn’t mess with.
Everything I did was in line with the rules, and any attempt to take me down got stone walled by my principal, who would have to say “He’s following school policy, so I’m afraid the ultimate decision is his.”
No joke, I had some parents in tears because their kid could no longer get an A in my class. I wasn’t the teacher who wanted to destroy kids, I just wanted them to be accountable, and sometimes that meant letting them fail.
Needless to say, this job became a lot of fun, because instead of waiting to be ambushed by parents, I could work on making my class fun for my students while still teaching them something.
I made ironclad rules for the classroom that brooked little argument and would adapt the following year to make it harder for students or parents to ruin my day. I have many stories like this, but this is one of my favorites.
The year this happened, I taught a high school class with grades 9-12 (that’s 14 to 18 year olds for you overseas guests). My class wasn’t necessary to graduate, but did count as a core requirement.
One of my beginning of the year rules was “I never want to hear ‘when will we ever need this?’ because you didn’t have to sign up for this class.” How I structure my class is that I try to make students accountable for their own actions. My class was built so that it had something to offer everybody.
If you tried your best, you were guaranteed a C. If you worked really hard, you could get a B or an A. I would bust my butt to help a student with any reasonable request.
The best example of this was a student was working hard on an assignment who said, “I think I understand it now, but can’t turn it in on time” to which I answered, “Then turn it in tomorrow for full credit. This is how hard work pays off.”
Other than a few hard deadlines in my class, I would do whatever it took to see you learn the material. Mess around in my class? I have already found ways to run circles around the pathetic excuses you throw at your parents for yourpoor performance.
It sounds callous, but I was the teacher who would stay for 90 minutes after school to help you catch up, to help fix your project for another class, or even to listen to you cry about your parents’ divorce.
But if I caught you goofing in class instead of doing your work (my rule was that at least 70 percent of class time was intended for homework, quizzes, etc.)
I would warn you a couple times, email your parents, and then wait and see if they even cared. If they didn’t, I would let you keep digging that hole until you were hip deep in water and begging for a ladder.
And then I would toss you a rope instead. You could still climb it if you tried hard enough, but a lot of kids would just cry until that hole caved in and buried them.
I also utilized my school’s online grading/assignment system for nearly all of my assignments, which meant I could document when a student looked at the assignment, how long it took them, etc.
All of this allowed me to see what my students were doing, when they did it, and also if they were plagiarizing.
This was one of the tools that helped me make important decisions about leniency, and also allowed me to say things at conferences such as “of course the test was hard, your child didn’t attempt the nine homework assignments until 11 pm the night before the test.”
Being able to prove that a student wasn’t trying made it impossible for blame to be laid unfairly at my feet. It also meant the worst kids avoided my class. Bonus. However, this year, something magical happened.
Every other year, I would get a wave of kids who just wanted to screw around and blame everyone else for doing poorly.
At the end of the year, students would trashtalk me, my class sizes would drop the following year, then I would receive high praise from those kids, so everyone would sign up, so on and so on. But this year, not only did I get a giant wave of knuckleheads, but they came with parents who loved to Make Trouble.
I had already heard tales of some of these parents. Other teachers were just dying to hear stories about our interactions, because these parents were very much Entitled.
They would name drop lawyers when they didn’t get their way, try to badger teachers into giving their kids extra credit, and would largely deny any wrongdoing on their kid’s part.
These were the parents who would get called in because their student was busted cheating, then accuse the teacher of making the class too hard, therefore validating their student’s need to cheat.
So about these knuckleheads. It was a group of roughly seven senior boys who all shifted their schedules to be in the same period with each other. The other teachers could not believe that I had all of them at the same time, but I just shrugged it off.
Every week, the staff lounge was dying to know how I dealt with their shenanigans, but for the most part, I had shut down most of their stuff from day one.
I actually got along very well with them, despite their constant goofing, because they had mastered the ability to appear busy and didn’t distract my other kids. Then came the first group project. My class size was just right for seven groups of four to form.
The idiot collective formed two groups of 4 by pulling in a kid who had been absent on the first day of the project.
These two groups crashed and burned on this project super hard for several reasons,
But the biggest were that a) they screwed around during class time and b) put off a two-week assignment until the weekend before and then dumped all the work on everybody else, which resulted in everybody doing minimal effort.
I handed out the bad grades and was immediately pulled into parent conferences with several of them (one at a time, obviously).
Every meeting was the same. “My kid did all the work, so he doesn’t deserve a bad grade” or “My kid didn’t understand the assignment” to which I handed over my hyper specific rubric (which is a checklist for how I grade things—I never wanted to be accused of grading based on not liking a kid).
These exchanges largely went like this: Patent: My kid did all the work and I don’t think it’s fair it should hurt his grade. Me: Here is the work your student turned in. *hands it over* Here is my rubric which I printed and emailed to your student the day the project started *hands it over*
As you can see, I have itemized the grading for ease of use. I would be happy to go over the grade your student earned. Parent: *Reads through all the evidence, looks at kid* Where are the missing parts?
Student: Uh, my group members were responsible for that. Me: I can’t grade what I never received, so I can’t reasonably just raise your kid’s grade. Sorry. Now, good news for all my students.
I make assignments worth more throughout the semester with the idea that kids who screw up early on can make it up later by working hard. I seed Extra Credit throughout the semester and all of these parents are disgruntled, but happy to hear that their entitled embryo can still get an A in my class.
Now, the end result of these meetings was that it clearly wasn’t my fault (remember, I had all this data to prove that I made every effort to contact everybody, etc.)…so it must be the other kids’ faults. So these parents all decide that their perfect angel is no longer allowed to work with their previous group mates.
Like a cancer, this failure of friends distributes through the rest of the class. Like the genius that I am, I make my students write a group contract for every project that details who does what and when it is due. Why is this important?
Because the contract provides me the documentation necessary to allow me to dismiss a bad group member and give them a zero without their parent ruining my day. So here is where the problem begins manifesting.
These seniors begin bouncing from group to group like cancerous ping pong balls, wreaking havoc. I let students choose their groups, so these seniors are desperately integrating with anybody that will have them.
Because of my class size, every group has at least one coddled child to deal with, and these children just end up rotating until all of my students have worked with one of these seniors at some point. Now I am getting constant complaints from parents of other kids about these boys.
Their kid wanted a good grade, which means they ended up doing all the work while the senior slacked. This is usually after the fact, at which time I bring up “I would love to yank that leech out of your grade pool, but you have to use the contract.”
Students don’t want to say anything because they fear retribution from the seniors, but I can’t do anything because I will be accused of harassment.
The contract can provide me with the leverage I need to prove that these kids were doing no work, because these seniors have been playing their parents for years.
I make my class utilize Google docs, because the changes are time stamped. No joke, I’ve had students produce all the work the morning of a parent meeting to try and lie their way out and make me look like a piece of garbage, but that time stamp is a godsend.
Luckily, my class is balanced. A bad group mate can make things hard, but not undoable, and parents are appeased that I have an out for their kid, but disappointed that their kid doesn’t use it.
Every time I announce a group project is on the way, some of these seniors sucker up to the other kids to the point that it is expected that a spot will be made for them.
I’m talking buying kids lunch, bringing them gifts, etc. Seriously, the day before a group project starts, all of the seniors now sit at separate tables from each other so that they could pull the “I’m already here, let’s be in a group” card (which works most of the time).
The strain on class morale is difficult, but I am biding my time. The other students are grabbing at Extra Credit opportunities constantly so that their grade can absorb the blow, and parent complaints are completely mitigated because I am still offering every chance for success.
My principal has a copy of my syllabus in his computer so that he can quote student policies that the parent signed off on.
It’s not uncommon for him to hear “I don’t read that, so it doesn’t apply” but he reminds them that the clause above the signature line says,
“My signature denotes that I have read this document in its entirety and agree to abide by all the rules” or something similar and that this should be a lesson to the parent and the student that when you sign something, you should read the fine print.
So right now I have seven slothful seniors, but I shall name the worst of these Larry, Curly, and Moe. The fallout affects all of them, but these three are the ones whose parents have a boner for Making Trouble.
Every time they threatena teacher into compliance, I imagine they sit around in a room, laughing at how they got their way yet again with a lowly teacher.
I know that anything I do will be heavily scrutinized once the grades start falling and I need to be able to shrug it off because I have other stuff to do, and I refuse to be the smiling topic of discussion in their celebratory conversation.
However, a special note about Larry—since he turned 18, his parents now travel nonstop and are impossible to reach. Larry is now just a huge jerk, because his parents no longer care about what he does.
I closely monitor their grades in my class, but also in others. This may sound sketchy, but I routinely do this with any of my students who struggle with the material so that I can identify if the issue is my class or all of their classes.
Students have been known to fake their grades using Inspect Element and I got tired of hearing “But they have As in their other classes.” because then I look like the liar.
Anyway, after a check, I speak with the other teachers. It isn’t hard to find out that these boys are doing minimal work in other classes, and I actually discover something worse about Larry. He has been finding ways to get other kids to do the work for him and then disseminating it among his friends.
Other teachers have been threatened into lowering test percentages in their class, and guess what? He and his friends are enrolled in these classes.
Despite failing these tests, homework and project grades give them a comfortable cushion so that most of them are floating at low Bs. I can’t prove this (they are using Snapchat) but when I bring it up with their teachers, the teachers don’t feel like trying to prove it and duke it out with the parents.
Now, they are gaming other classes for minimal effort. However, their only recourse in my class is to keep rotating through groups and leeching off of their hard work to maintain Cs and Bs, and the other kids are too nervous to utilize the group contract to get them fired.
Remember how I mentioned that I steadily increase the value of my assignments to keep kids working and give them a chance to fix their grades? Well, it was about to come due.
Me: *Random Day in Class* Hey everybody, I was looking in the schedule and realized that your last project before finals may stress you out unnecessarily. Would anybody mind if I dropped it? My class: *Tired of getting banged on Group Assignments* Nope, drop it, Best Teacher Ever!
Me: Okay, well just so you know, I’m going to move our next project back a couple of weeks and extend the deadline by a week. Also, since I cancelled the last project, this means that the next project will now be worth roughly 20% of your final grade, so do your best. Screwing this up could ruin your grade.
My class: Whatever. So in one step, I have inflated this assignment and also moved it. I send out an email to parents and students letting them know about the change to the syllabus and the assignment. Get no responses other than happiness that I am removing stress from the end of the semester, etc.
I actually did this primarily because another teacher (who was a huge jerk) plunked down a monster project that same week and I knew it would burn out my students prior to finals, so figured a break was in order. Win-win for me, really.
Now why did I move it? Well, there’s the rub. The Friday before the project started, I announced at the start of class, “Okay, I am introducing the project now so that you can get into groups today and we can do it first thing Monday morning without delay, since this project is so important.”
This announcement elicits a room full of grins. Why? It was Senior Ditch Day. Our school didn’t condone a ditch day, so the kids tried their best to keep it a secret, but I found out a month in advance.
All seven of these kids were absent from class, which meant that I had just given the entire room freedom from these weights.
Immediately, groups are formed, and even better, I had a couple kids transfer out of my class, which meant, numbers wise, these knuckleheads will have to work on this last group project together (in two groups).
I emphasized that everyone needed to get to class as soon as possible so that they could start as soon as attendance was called. My original intention was to light a giant fire under all seven of these chumps, to get them to actually put in the effort they had neglected to do all year.
Most of them had grades in the low C range (except for one in the low Bs). As a bonus to all my students, I put an extra credit portion on this project so that they could recoup their early semester losses, but also allow these seniors to do very well if they put in the effort.
This wasn’t meant to be a revenge tale, but an attempt to give them one last lesson in responsibility.
Before the end of the day, I send out a parent/student notification that the project had been started and that any absent students needed to contact their classmates to establish groups before Monday morning.
I’m sure you can guess what happened next. The next Monday, the seniors come traipsing in seconds before the bell to discover that there are only two tables to sit at. Whatever, they take their seats.
Me: *After attendance* Okay, everybody has a copy of the rubric, so go ahead and get started. Rest of Class: *Immediately pulls out rubric* Seniors: *looking around frantically*
The seniors quickly realized that they have been played, and the arguing starts. First thing that happens is that Larry, Curly, and Moe decide that they now belong with whoever they happen to be sitting with and scoot their chairs over to sit with different tables.
I catch this right away and tell them that the groups are already at maximum size (4 people per group). The other four seniors are already fighting with each other because they know that none of them will actually do any work.
Larry (who thinks he’s God’s gift to everybody) tries to sweet talk me and his group into special privileges and allowing a group of 5. Now, I see some of the other kids wavering and I know that Larry is putting pressure on them to argue his case.
I designed this project for specifically four people and had a job for each one, but I extended a separate offer. “I will let you join, but since there will be five of you, I expect double the work.” Literally, I told them they would have to do the project twice.
Larry tries to argue, but I point out the roles I have established and inform him that if four people could do it once, having five should make it easier to do it twice. Sounds like a jerk move on my part, but I have now intimidated the other kids into saying HECK NO and even have them put it to a vote.
Unsurprisingly, Larry is the only one who votes that this is a good idea, and when the other kids catch wind of my offer, they physically shoo off the other seniors trying to pull this deal as well.
You will all be delighted to hear that the rest of the period for my seniors is spent arguing over who will work with who. They end up forming three groups and I nod my head, make sure they have the rubric, and then wish them the best of luck.
Being the smart teacher that I am, I email Curly’s parents and Moe’s mommy that they have chosen to work with each other. Moe’s mommy shows up to argue with me all the time, but has quickly learned I won’t take her baggage.
At a previous meeting, she even laid into Moe and told him “I’m tired of fighting all these battles with your teachers and I’m starting to think that you’re the problem,” but I suspect this is for show. Curly’s parents email me back and say they will make sure Curly writes a group contract.
You see, Curly has sold himself as the best student ever, and clearly he will do the work and fire his classmates. Moe’s mommy immediately requests a meeting with me. Per school policy, I do not have to respond to an email for 48 hours.
I wait until hour 47 and email a noncommittal, “I would love to meet, when are you available?” and wait for a response. I then wait another 48 hours to inform her of a time the following week that works for me.
Now, some of the other senior parents have emailed me angrily demanding why I let their kids choose to work with “the bad kids” again. I had to inform them that I didn’t expect all of them to be absent.
Immediately, some of my seniors get burned at home because they ditched and their parents tell me “Just try to help them pass,” which I agree to. Some of them need this class for graduation, after all. Moe’s mommy, on the other hand, shows up ready to wage battle.
She starts by demanding that I put Moe in a different group. I decline, because the project has now been going on for a week and it wouldn’t be fair. She demands that I add him to another group. They’re all full and students have already done the lion’s share of the work.
She demands that I let him work by himself with an extension. I gladly offer him an extension and slide a copy of the rubric over to him…and he goes white. At this point, he knows that he is never planning to do any of the work. In fact, I know that his group hasn’t even started.
I have a copy of their group contract, which was hastily scribbled in pencil with no due dates on it. He starts arguing with his mom that he would rather work with his friends and that he is upset that he got stuck in this situation.
Contemplating this, she accuses me of deliberately waiting until that day to screw the seniors over. After all, it was a school-sanctioned event and I’m being a jerk about it and she’ll go to the board with her story. Wrong. The joy I get from all of my prep work is shutting down stuff like this.
All seven of the seniors hung out on ditch day at her house and told her that the principal had given them the day off. Even better, they called in and pretended to be their own parents so that it was an excused absence. He is immediately busted and his mom flips her switch and jumps all over him.
You see, she can keep pressing me on this issue, but I now have evidence that he pretended to be his own dad, and this is a suspendible offense.
I buy myself into her graces by telling her that I had no idea that Senior Ditch Day was that Friday, but I gave her kid a free extension on the homework that was due because I thought seniors deserved their own traditions, blah blah blah. She buys it.
Also, I can prove that I emailed him (and her) and gave them plenty of notice before Monday morning that they needed to pick groups before something like this happened. Obviously, once I found out about Ditch Day I tried to give her precious treasure a heads up, but I don’t know why he didn’t take it.
So she makes him open his email. When I saw it, I nearly burst into laughter. My email is sitting there, unopened, and I have won this battle. She thanks me and takes him home. Class morale is now super high, unless you are one of the seniors.
A week before the project is due, neither group has actually started and the H.M.S. Class Average is about to hit an Iceberg. Then the project comes due, oohhh boy.
It comes as no surprise that my enterprising seniors have turned in easily some of the worst work ever. One group got into a text argument the weekend before it was due and made one of the kids do all the work. Moe and Curly are in this group. The other group (with Larry) has also turned in a steaming pile.
I make sure to grade these two projects first because I know the fallout is going to be big. All the seniors dropped at least one letter grade. A couple drop two. This is four weeks before graduation.
Larry appears to take his F minus in stride (they got something like a ten percent on it), so I know he’s plotting something. Curly’s parents demand a meeting and so does Moe’s mommy. Curly’s parents are super upset that they got a bad grade and demanded to know why.
What they didn’t know was that I had already met with the student who did the entire project (poorly) and his parents. I informed Curly’s parents that I had seen the text exchange between the seniors that pretty much ended up with “You freaking do it.”
Curly refused to turn over his phone to his parents for confirmation. I also show them Curly’s project and hand over the rubric. Mom and Dad are not happy. You see, Curly has been blaming everyone else for his mistakes since the dawn of time and his parents have bought in completely. Until today.
Dad pointedly asks “Which part did you do?” and this causes Curly to spout actual tears. I then pull up a spreadsheet of all of the group project scores from the year and have highlighted his scores, which are among the worst.
The purpose of this was to use data to prove that their son, frankly, never does the work. Curly is absolutely destroyed by this. His parents kick him out of the conference because they are tired of his excuses and ask me what they can do.
I tell them I would be happy to offer one-on-one tutoring and that he can still pass the class if he does his homework and gets a B on the next exam. They agree to this, we all shake hands, and they leave.
Curly’s story largely ends here. He never shows up to tutoring, and I email his parents. After three emails, his dad finally responds with, “His mom and I have decided that he needs to learn to be an adult and are leaving him to his own devices. Thank you for your efforts.”
Curly will spend the rest of the semester doing little to no work. Because he is grounded at home, he is now just watching YouTube videos on his phone during school. The ripple effect is glorious. Because now Curly is doing this in all of his classes.
I speak with his teachers and they all email that he has quit doing work in class and get the same reply I did rather than the vehement responses they are used to.
When Curly fails his classes, he still graduates, but his parents have informed him that they are no longer paying for his college and it’s time to get a job. Moe’s mommy, however, flips her lid and demands answers.
Unfortunately, Moe is in the same group as Curly and she gets the same answers from me. Strangely enough, once she’s exhausted every effort and attempt to somehow blame me for this, she admits that she knew Moe was part of threatening the lone senior and that he should be ashamed of himself.
She deliberately tried to play me but outed herself once she knew that I already knew everything. Super annoying, but I agree to help tutor him one-on-one too, which makes her happy. So Moe’s mommy is emailing me every few days now.
“Is my son doing his work, did he get help with his homework, etc.” Non-stop, but she knows better than to fight with me. And then there was Larry. Larry is unusually chipper, and is no longer doing his work.
I find out that Larry is supposedly going to a college where he just needs to maintain his GPA over a super low number. He claims an F in my class won’t change anything, so I make sure he doesn’t distract the others.
Moe shows up only occasionally, but strangely enough, Larry pops in “just to say hi” whenever Moe is getting help. I can’t fathom why he does this, but suspect he is up to something and already have a backup plan in place.
You see, Moe’s mommy is nuts, and I make sure that there’s always another person in the room with me when I tutor him. Anyway, Moe’s mommy is constantly checking in. I start waiting 48 hours between emails (cause I can) and she starts dropping by in person unannounced to check on him (me).
She’s been acting cagey lately and I’m starting to suspect something. It’s freaking Larry. Larry is a friend of Moe’s, so he’s been in her home feeding her made-up stories to convince her that I have been emotionally mistreating Moe when other students aren’t around.
Stuff like I was calling him names after school, etc. and then telling her, “you can even have the school check the cameras to see that I’m there.” This starts a whole thing where she is now demanding answers from admin. BUT! I’m smart.
Admin asks me about details regarding my interactions with Moe and I end up sitting down with my Principal, Moe, and Moe’s mommy. She details that Moe is struggling, might not graduate, and that she believes that I have singled her kid out and wants his grade raised.
You see, Moe is dumb and lazy, and his mom is just as bad. When Larry went to her with his story, she never bothered talking about it with her own son.
He just agreed and went along with it, so I asked Moe point blank to please describe what has been said during our sessions and then offer to leave the room so that he can tell the principal without me there.
She tells me to stay because she wants me to hear from her son what I’ve done to him. What neither of them knew was that I was a mentor teacher. That meant I had a first year teacher as my mentee and I had her working on grades and such in my room after school on the days I agreed to meet Moe.
She was young, so Moe thought she was another student and never questioned it, and couldn’t even remember that she was in there.
My Principal already had statements from her detailing my interactions with Moe, and Moe was unable to give any actual details and suddenly forgot what had been said to him.
This lands Moe’s mommy in hot water with admin, and she blames the whole thing on Larry and becomes visibly upset that she fell for such a stupid ruse. This results in an email cautioning teachers from being alone in a room with either student.
Suddenly, after school help evaporates for both, but hey, I always have someone in my room, so whatever. After that meeting, Larry is now suddenly super concerned about his grade. I rationalize that he was hoping to burn me out of my job and then use the fallout to get a free passing grade.
Obviously it doesn’t work, so screw Larry. I have kids who actually want to succeed. My free days are now on days I know he works, and he never shows up for tutoring anyway. Now that other teachers are hesitant to meet with him, he is unable to cut deals to raise those grades either.
Moe’s mom makes a last ditch effort and tries to convince me that the parents of the seniors have scheduled a meeting with my boss to have me fired for giving their kids a bad grade and that she would be willing to put in a good word for me if I meet with her first.
I’m sitting next to the principal when I get this email, and he has no idea what she’s talking about. I tell her I’d be happy to meet everybody but that I would probably eat my lunch during such a meeting and that I hoped people didn’t mind the smell of fish.
I got a “No, seriously, they are threatening to sue you,” but I had the perfect response. I feigned stupidity and informed her that I couldn’t be sued for eating fish during a meeting.
She now realizes I don’t care about anything and can’t be threatened. Again, there’s nothing she can do because I am simply following policy. The last few weeks are frantic for these seniors.
One by one they fall, because they’ve done little to no work for a couple years now and they have no idea how to apply themselves. Other teachers are emboldened by how hard I shut them down and finally hold them accountable. A few of them just barely manage Ds in my class, and the rest fail.
I get a few last second squeaks of “What can I do to raise my grade?” but have now documented that none of them attempted the extra credit assignments and that was their chance.
It’s hard for a parent to get angry at you when you can prove you actually tried to give their student extra credit, and can then prove they never opened the assignment online.
These guys are now failing some of their other classes, too. A couple have breakdowns in my class and leave crying. Their friendships are fracturing with each other because they now all hate each other for what happened (which they will get over during the summer).
My last test came and I made it an online multiple choice test. It was easy enough to have the questions and answers shuffled in random order, meaning they couldn’t cheat off each other.
You see, I knew for a long time that they would sit next to each other to try and cheat on the exam, and Larry had blown a ton of money on a tutor to try and carry his friends.
This throws them all off, and when Moe’s mommy accuses me (again) of trying to trick her kid with a much harder test, it was easy enough to shoo her away with a simple email.
Larry passes the exam, but his grade moves up to a meager D minus. Here are the final results. Of these seven seniors, one didn’t graduate and had to transfer schools. His parents were embarrassed that they paid to fly the whole family out for a graduation that he didn’t get to take part in.
Two of the seniors lost all of their scholarships and could no longer attend the schools they wanted. Their fallback plan was to attend the same school together and become roommates, which they did with three of the other seniors, including Moe. Larry’s college was not happy with his final GPA.
I’m not sure what his long game was, but it sucked. The college kicked him out before he could even start, and I found out his huge web of lies extended to his parents too. He toured Europe over the summer and tried to surprise his parents by coming home instead of going to school.
Apparently, they kicked him out immediately after because they were selling their house to get a condo somewhere else (remember, they travel for work all the time now so wanted to downgrade). Last I heard, he made up a story that he joined the forces but got released due to sickness.
Curly’s parents relented and decided to pay for Curly to go to college after all. Curly got kicked out halfway through the year (he got busted more than once for underage consumption) and then they kicked him to the curb after living at home for a year and refusing to get a job.
Last I heard, he works in a vape shop. Moe went to school and used his book smarts to try and pay other kids to do his work for him, since his mommy is rich. When that failed, he faked his grades to get his mom to keep footing the bill. Eventually, the school kicked him out and he moved back home.
The story his mommy told a friend of hers (who I ran into at a school function) was that he decided that he would rather be an entrepreneur than go to college and that he bought a drone to film weddings with.
Last I heard, he was acting as a distributor for his weed dealer but had moved up to selling acid on the side. His mommy thinks he is working weddings. But there was one happy ending. One senior went to college with his friends and immediately realized he needed to change.
He quit hanging with his friends and, last I heard, graduated with honors in a lucrative field. He emailed me once to thank me for challenging him in high school, because it prepared him for college, so that was nice.