I smell smoke!

I'm not a teacher, but I'm guessing that they prefer a class full of honor students versus the alternative, but sometimes those smart kids use their big brains for evil instead of good.

When I was a senior in high school I took a Calculus class. The students in that class consisted entirely of the top 20-30 in that grade. The teacher was a very nice woman, although she had a tendency to go off on tangents. She had a clock sitting on her desk, and she once mentioned that the alarm on it sounded very similar to the fire alarm our school used.

A few months later we had a substitute teacher. Before the class started (and before the teacher was in the room), someone came up with the idea to set the alarm to go off during class. (I would credit the person who came up with the idea if I could remember who it was. No, it wasn't me.) When the alarm went off, the substitute asked what it was, and we innocently replied that we thought it was a fire drill. And one of the students, who had a very prominent nose, started sniffing the air and shouted, "I smell smoke!"

The substitute wasn't sure of the fire alarm process, so she told us to do what we normally do. We hadn't really thought that far ahead, so we just went outside. While we were heading out the teacher in the room next to ours told our teacher that there hadn't really been a fire drill, so those of us who had made it out of the room were sent to the office.

We didn't do anything too terrible, so we weren't going to get in a lot of trouble. But it was even less of a problem since both the principal and assistant principal were out of the office that day. The only two staff members working at that time were the secretaries, my mom and Mrs. Biddy, who also had a son in that class. When they were told what had happened, they both just rolled their eyes and sent us all back to class.

Of course, there were other consequences. When our regular teacher returned the next day she gave us a 1 question pop quiz. You either made a 100 or a 0. But I think most of us in the class thought it was worth it.