What's the strangest or funniest experience you've had with a pupil? Have you had a 'nightmare' pupil or parent that you just had to give up on? I've been teaching for several years now, and have had quite a few bizarre moments. Made me wonder about other people's funny stories.

SORRY - I OBVIOUSLY RAN OUT OF CHARACTERS IN THE TITLE LINE! SHOULD READ "PUPIL", NOT "PUP".

I thought we were talking 'dogs'!

W

One pupil turned up for lessons, with rather odd eyes. Said pupil kept squinting at the page and the keyboard. It transpired pupil had recently had laser treatment to both eyeballs. Which was the reason, depite having attained Grade 5 could not read or play a note. Irises were also strangely and unevenly dilated, still safe to drive, I was assured. To cap it all, the bank machine would only dispense a single £10 note, so couldn't afford the correct fee. This was explained at the end of the lesson, so it wasn't possible to give a shorter lesson. Still wanted to book an even longer lesson for the next week. Rang pupil up and said it would be best to wait until eyes recovered from surgery.

OK OP trump that one.

Well, there was the little girl who needed to go to the toilet, but asked a bit too late......

On the second ever lesson I'd ever taught, all those years ago, I had an eight year old vomit all over my parents capet and fell asleep on our sofa..poor boy complained how ill he felt before the lesson to his mum who thought he was making it up!

First ever day of teaching in school:

Me (pointing at score): So, how long is this note here?

GCSE Pupil: Er, about a centimetre?

Asked a nice smart boy the key signature for D minor and he said

'There's just a B flat but in the pieces there are also some C sharps that are nobody's fault'

Yes, they are accidentals!

To answer my own question...... I've been teaching piano to a lady in her late sixties for over a year now, and bless her, she's quite highly strung (if you pardon the pun) and gets flustered and panics over the least mistake etc. She's doing absolutely fine though and i love teaching her. Anyway, last month she was playing through a piece she was learning and i momentarily took my eye off her music to write something down when she screamed, went flying off the piano stool backwards and ran out of the room going absolutely berserk!!!! I ran out into the corridor to find her and some of the other tutors where i teach had come out to see what the commotion was about also. She was halfway down the corridor, face all red and hair everywhere. Turns out there had been a spider crawled out onto the piano from under the lid which i hadn't seen!!! Bless her she was in such a state although we laugh about it now. She insists now that i check for spiders before her lesson!!!

Spiders! Eek!!!

That reminds me of one of my organ pupils, who is organist at a private chapel which has problems with mice, despite the estate manager putting traps almost everywhere. My pupil is terrified of mice, and once ran out of the chapel when she saw one at the end of a lesson.

Several times now I've seen a mouse run across the chapel and disappear into a hole by the organ console whilst she's been playing. I've never let on, and she remains blissfully unaware that sometimes there are mice scurrying round close by when she's playing.

Oh, and big softie that I am, whilst she plays I go around and trip the traps so that the mice get the cheese without losing their lives. The estate manager is convinced it's vibrations from the organ which does it....

Awwwww. I hate people who use inhumane traps

We had a mouse problem in our house a couple of years ago, got a couple of humane traps from the pet shop (where they tread inside trying to get to the food, and it makes a door come down). Then when we caught one, we would take it down to the nearby country-park place with a lake and things. All in all I think we caught twenty something

They've all gone now though. Hint- they love white chocolate and will go for it more than cheese.


Didn't really answer the thread... mind you I'm not a teacher. Was laughing at some of the other posts though...

As far as mice are concerned you should release them at least 2 miles away as they have a habit of finding their way back otherwise.

The humane traps are not that great most of the time and sometimes there's no alternative but to use more drastic measures. I had a mouse in the house a while ago and all humane traps failed so had to get an electrocution device which worked a treat, and I hope wasn't painful. Better than the spring-loaded ones which have a habit of spattering brains all over the place!

Yeah, it was way out in the country and at least 5 miles away from any homes.

I suppose the electrocution is ok, because it would be quick. But the spring ones sometimes don't work, and you end up with a terrified mouse in pain with a leg snapped off

That reminds me of the "Basil the Rat" episode of Fawlty Towers, when Manuel's 'Siberian Hamster' is revealed to be a rat, and Manuel contrives to keep it at the hotel despite Basil's insistence that it goes. Basil eventually finds it, and the staff try to claim that it found its way back after being released a few miles away. "Ah, a homing rat", says Basil!

Sorry, very off topic!

Oh. my lesson prior to grade 1 or 2.. and then this happens.

Teacher : Do you know who Beethoven is?
me: The dog?

erm oops? but I was like 6!

Now that is cute

We had a mouse in the house once. My children were quite small and into cute and fluffy rodents. I was too until I found the chew marks on the telephone wire. One night, the mouse was running around the bedroom, making a sound like a machine gun. Behind the wardrobes was a dried out conker which was resisting being chewed into - hence the rat-a-tat-tat-tat noise. We turned the lights on and set about catching it, in the small hours. I ended face to face with a very cute rodenty thing, which my husband urged me to grab hold of. Not flaming likely! I'd seen the chew marks on the conker, my little pinkies were off limits to micey thingummies. It ran off, we re-arranged the furniture for about the tenth time in 20 minutes, and wondered which neighbours would be the first to complain in the morning. Moving wardrobes at 3am is for some reason ridiculously noisy and requires a lot of shouting at the same time. War was declared, at least by me. I ordered a sticky pad from a nice chap in the yellow pages. He assured me that if placed where the mouse liked to run, it would stick fast, and no more mouse. The trouble was the mouse couldn't read the instructions and didn't play ball. The next morning, there was a neat row of chewed cardboard, and the sticky pad was chewed right up to the sticky gluey bit. Presumably it kept going until it's teeth stuck together instead of doing what it was supposed to do and spreadeagling itself across the gluey cardboard. We used a humane trap, and about two weeks later, we caught it. Peanut butter was its downfall. My husband wanted to give it a drink! No way I said, and released about 200yds away into a nice wet bush, where it could drink to its heart's content. The mouse never returned. The children and my husband were still on talking terms to me, and I hid the remaining weapon in my aresnal, mouse poison. None of this has got anything to with pups or pupils, but the mouse story just brought it all back.

Not a music teaching experience, but hilarious all the same... (warning: maybe this post should have a 12A rating!)

I'm 19, working in a secondary school with a science teacher. We've just finished a lesson on human reproduction with the top set Y8 class. At the end one particular student, not the best behaved and rather cheeky, but bright like all the others in the class, hangs around and catches me at the end.

"Miss, y'know when you have an erection?"

I honestly can't remember the expression on my face, but I vaguely recall I nodded while looking as serious as I could manage.

"Yes?"

"Well, where does the bone go?"

At this point, I wondered if he was trying to wind me up / embaress me. But he seemed quite serious, and was, after all, only 12. So I bit my lip and did my hardest to explain the fundamentals of a certain male organ, concluding with:

"So, it gets firm when blood is pumped in, a bit like when you blow air into a balloon at it gets bigger and firmer."

(At this point, I realised to my mortification, I had also been subconciously demonstrating this expansion with my hands.)

The 12 YO pupil gave me a horrified look.

"What, y'mean... it can't explode like a balloon can it?!!"

Still struggling to keep a straight face, I assured him this couldn't happen, at which point the situation apparently got too much for him and he ran out of the classroom... allowing me to collapse in hysterical laughter.

I still don't know if he was having me on or not, but I hope I didn't scar him too much!

Your tail (ok couldn't resist!) brought back 2 more mouse memories to me. I was woken a few years ago by 'something in the bedroom' later that morning I was called back to the bedroom by Mr B nose to nose with a mouse under the bed! We spent several hours chasing the little blighter around the room - doing far more damage than the rodent had done! Eventually managed to get it to run into an empty Pringles tube after cornering it in the centre of an upturned section of the base of the bed where the drawers should be.

Next mouse encounter was at work - was looking in a level arch file for some notes on an experiment. I couldn't find them anywhere.....then noticed several mm of paper under the clippy thing where the rest of the sheet had been munched away. It explained all the paper shreddings in the bottom of the filing cabinet and saved me the trouble of securing the notes at the end of the project!