Teachers Share Wildest Excuses Students Gave For Being Late

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20 hours ago

As many of us can attest to, most late excuses involve traffic, missed alarms, or "not feeling well." But every so often, a reason comes along that's so wild and oddly specific that it couldn't not be true. When u/minecraftplayer48 asked teachers, "What was the best excuse for being late that turned out to be true?' teachers and students alike replied with excuses from burning buildings and rogue goats to stolen safes and MTV challenges. Here are 27 of them:
"A kid's apartment burned down overnight. He was a little late, but still came."
"Told me he got pulled over by the cops for wobbly driving on his bike, and they thought he was drunk. Turned out he was just dodging all the slugs on the street."
"A very quiet, unassuming kid came into our German class with about five minutes of class left. We went to a Catholic school, and the teachers were all quite strict and intimidating. Classes were usually silent, especially in junior school. When this boy arrived at the end of the lesson, the door flew inwards with such force that the teacher gave an audible gasp. It had been raining heavily outside, and his hair was plastered to his forehead. His blazer was dripping and sodden. He had mud caked into his trousers up to his knees, and he was breathing heavily. The teacher exclaimed, 'Brendan! What happened?' We all stared up at him in shocked silence. This quiet, unassuming little boy let out a big sigh and just said, 'I took a shortcut.' And went straight to his seat. That line became iconic in our school for years afterwards."
"In my hometown, if you walked into anywhere late and said the phrase 'Sorry, grain train,' you were never challenged. It was extremely common for 50-plus carriage trains to run through the middle of town."
"A student once turned in work late after not showing up for two classes. Two classes amounted to a full week, so it was noticeable. The professor looked at him and said, 'I hope somebody died for you to be this late.' The student responded, 'DOES MY DAD COUNT?!' Honestly, I've always heard you can hear a pin drop and never really thought anything of it, but yeah, you could hear a pin cut through the air after that."
"A kid missed my first-period class one morning but was in school later that day. When I asked him why he hadn't arrived in time for my course, he said his cow was birthing its calf that morning, so he'd picked being in the barn over English. Made sense to me. His essays weren't going to win any ribbons at the county fair, but his calf could."
"We had an exam in my class, and the teacher got a message from a student saying he was going to be late because his car had a flat tire (the student was known to party). The teacher didn't think it could be true, so as a joke, the teacher asked him to bring the tire back. He brought the flat tire back in the middle of the exam. Needless to say, the teacher didn't expect that."
"From the UK: A student once couldn't submit an assignment on time as 'the Wi-Fi was down on the Megabus.'"
"When I was in college, my psych professor told us that the only excuse for being late was a funeral procession. For any other reason, you wouldn't be allowed to come in. A few weeks into the semester, I was headed from one building to another, which involved crossing the main road. Lo and behold, there was one very long funeral procession going by. I got a short video of it as proof, then stood on the sidewalk to let it go by. Unfortunately, the procession made me five minutes late for class. I knocked on the door, and the professor came over to start to tell me off. I showed her the video. 'Well, I'll be damned, come on in.'"
"I'm an English professor. One year, a good student showed up without one of his major term papers. He explained his safe had been stolen by a contractor who was working on their house. His laptop was in the safe, and that's where his paper was. I genuinely believed him because he had been a really good student. Over the next few weeks, he started to show up to class looking very tired. He said he was on a hunt for the person who stole his safe, and spending late nights with his cousin, driving around looking for the guy because they knew his van. Now, the student and his cousin were both recently back from tours in Iraq and had seen combat experience. They wanted to find the guy to beat the heck out of him and get the safe back because his wife's wedding ring was in the safe as well as a bunch of cash. He rewrote the paper and turned it in, apologetic that it wasn't up to his usual quality, but he still kept coming to class looking like he hadn't slept."
"'MTV paid me $200 to fill my backpack with cement and carry it around for the day.' I accepted that excuse. The student later regretted it, however, as a replacement backpack and college textbooks far exceeded $200. But he got his moment of fame, and I didn't penalize him for his tardiness. Got to live a little."
"My best friend and I used to roller skate to school, and one day we both forgot to put our shoes in our backpacks. So we skated to the vice principal's office and got to skip first period to go home for shoes. We stopped at Taco Bell on the way back for breakfast because we figured we were already excused."
"I was one of about 20 kids who were late to school. We showed up at the school office as a group, and when questioned why we were late, we said, 'The school bus blew up.' They questioned, 'So the engine blew up?' The kids: 'No, the whole bus, in flames. It blew up.' There was much conference between the teachers, all of them thinking we embellished the story. Next thing you know, one of the admin staff has the news website open, and there's a very obvious image of an entire bus on fire with a bunch of kids in our school uniform standing in front of it. Our late slip for class read, 'School bus blew up.'"
"I was the student. My neighbor had a really social goat, and she figured out how to escape her pen in order to come over and hang out. She escaped and followed me to the bus stop, and when the bus came, she tried to follow me onto it. I couldn't actually get on the bus without her being right behind me, so I had to get off, bring her home, and call my dad to bring me to school."
"After 9/11, my small-town high school received bomb threats every week for two months, and they decided to make us attend school on a Saturday. About five others and I showed up for our classes, and every teacher said something like, 'I can't wait for the excuses on Monday.' Most of the excuses were something along the lines of 'family plans' or whatnot, but one kid was made to read his dad's note aloud to the class because our first-period teacher thought it was hilarious. In the most down-south accent you can imagine, it went something like, 'My son ain't too smart, but he knows you ain't supposed to get punished for someone else being a dumbass. Bought him a six-pack, so he was drunk. Y'all can mess off.'"
"Today, a child missed my first hour class. Notes said car accident on the way to school and would be coming late. The kid comes for the second hour and has pictures on his phone of the rollover accident! What the heck, kid? Go home. Rest. Take care of yourself."
"This happened to a classmate when we were in college, training to be teachers. She missed a really important class — she came for the last 10 minutes or so — because her neighbor knocked on her door while in active labor and asked for help just before my classmate was supposed to leave for class. My classmate then walked back to the neighbor's house with the preggo neighbor and delivered her baby in the living room while on the phone to 911. The paramedics came, and the mom and baby were fine. However, my classmate needed to go home to shower and change before coming to class because she was covered in blood."
"When I ran a preschool in West Philly, one of my teaching assistants told me, 'Sorry I missed yesterday, my friend shot my mom.' Naturally, I was a little speechless. They then said, 'Oh no, it's OK. He was aiming for someone else.'"
"'My car got hit by lightning.' It did, in the school parking lot. Her tires were melted to the pavement. She had to go out and deal with the tow truck, call her parents, etc. It was pretty dramatic."
"A guy in my college class missed class one day. The next day, he came in with his eye covered up and medical paperwork in hand. Apparently, he got pecked in the eye by a chicken."
"One of my good friends went to the Royal Military College of Canada, where they wear their uniforms to class, and there are often tourists visiting the campus. Apparently, it's so normal to be waylaid by tourists looking to have their photos taken with students in uniform that all they had to say when they walked in late was 'tourists,' and the professors would let it slide."
"Me. My bus hit a bird, and the whole windshield was cracked. We had to wait for another bus to pick us up."
"When I was student teaching, I was late because there were a bunch of chickens in the middle of the road. They wouldn't move at all. This is in the middle of a city of 200,000 people. Freaking chickens. I finally got to school and profusely apologized to my mentor teacher. When I told her why I was late — thinking it sounded ridiculous — she said, 'Yeah, those chickens are jerks. They surrounded my car in the McDonald's parking lot last year. Don't worry about it.'"
"A student told me he couldn't do the work because he was delivering oil from 3 p.m. until 11 p.m. — in middle school. He wasn't lying. His dad had broken both of his shoulders and one clavicle, so his grandma and pregnant mom were 'switching off driving' (pretty sure he was doing most of it at night), and he was hooking the tanks to the oil. I called all of his teachers and had his workload lightened and got permission for him to come in an hour late each day, as he was providing the only income for his family of eight, since he was the oldest. I also tutored him so he could pass seventh grade."
"In high school, I biked to class. One day, I hit a rock and ate absolute crud. I obviously got to class late. Before I could say a word, my teacher stopped class and said, 'Thank you for finally joining us. Why are you so late?' I raised my heavily bloodied hands and elbows. It must have looked bad, because she audibly gasped and rushed me to the school nurse, apologizing nonstop the entire way."
"School sporting event. A kid on our team was late because someone stole his windshield wipers, and it was snowing out. He kept having to pull over to the side of the road and wipe off his windshield."
"I had a student whose father had died and had not done any homework or prep for his geography class. From what I heard, the geography teacher scolded him, but the student didn't want to say anything (presumably because it was a sensitive issue). Instead, his best friend shouted at the teacher, 'DON'T YOU HAVE ANY SHAME? HIS FATHER DIED LAST NIGHT.' The teacher replied, 'I don't care.' There was an audible gasp, and I was in the next room. Needless to say, that teacher is no longer employed here."
So, would you have believed these reasons for being late? Alternatively, have you ever heard (or used) an out-there excuse that was true? Drop your stories in the comments below.