Every student has been there. The moment the teacher asks for an assignment and you realize… you absolutely did not do it. That’s when the excuses start. Teachers at North High have basically heard every explanation imaginable. Some are reasonable. Some are questionable. And some are so ridiculous they end up legends. Technology is probably the most common thing students blame. Madame Asvestas, the French teacher, claims that there’s one excuses she hears more than all the others.
“It glitched,” French teacher Madame Avestas said.
According to students, Google Classroom glitches. AP Classroom glitches. Their computer glitches. Somehow, it always seems to glitch right when an assignment is due. For Ms. Castagna, the most frequent excuse is even simpler.
“I don’t know how to do it,” science teacher Ms. Castagna said.
Confusion strikes a lot of people right around homework time, and things never end up getting turned in. But even she has heard some more creative ones. One student once claimed they couldn’t do their work because they had left their iPad in Miami—although, in this case, the student was not lying.
Other teachers have collected equally strange stories.
One anonymous student swore they couldn’t finish an essay because their little cousin had changed all the keyboard settings to Japanese and they “couldn’t figure out how to change it back.”
Another insisted their dog had stepped on the power strip and turned off the entire computer right before they hit submit.
A different student claimed their siblings used all their printer ink. Sometimes excuses turn into karma. One anonymous student insisted to their teacher that their homework wasn’t done because the power went out and they had no internet. To their dismay, the following week they came home to construction on their power line and their Wi-Fi actually down. And then there are the excuses that come straight from parents.
Mr. Zak received an email one morning from a mom explaining that her kid’s assignment would be late because he had choked on his toothbrush while getting ready for school. It was so specific and strange that no one even
tried to question it.
Students also get surprisingly imaginative when they run out of normal explanations. One claimed their little brother accidentally submitted a blank document “as a prank.” Another said they finished the work but their backpack got soaked in a mysterious puddle on the bus. Someone else tried to convince a teacher that they got punished and their mother took away all electronics.
Of course, these are just a few examples. Teachers have also heard about mysteriously deleted files, alarms that didn’t go off, siblings who messed things up, and group projects where every other member vanished into thin air. One student even argued that they couldn’t complete an online quiz because their cat kept walking across the keyboard and exiting the tab. Another insisted they couldn’t study because their house was “too loud due to an unexpected visit from seven relatives.”
To be fair, real problems do happen. Computers break. Wi-Fi stops working. Life gets busy. Teachers understand that. But after years of hearing excuses, they can usually tell the difference between an actual issue and a last-minute panic story. In the end, most teachers agree that honesty works better than creativity. Saying “I forgot” might be embarrassing, but it’s probably more believable than blaming a worldwide Google Classroom meltdown or claiming that a hamster chewed through your charger at exactly the wrong moment. Still, as long as there is homework, there will be excuses. And as long as there are excuses, teachers at North High will have plenty of stories to laugh about.
