Helicopter Parents Force Teacher To Assign Extra Credit, She Maliciously Complies By Assigning Impossibly Lengthy Tasks

This tale of academic helicopter parenting meets its just desserts is like the mullet of anecdotes: business up front, party in the back.

We all know those schools, right? The ones where every kid is a precious snowflake bound for Harvard and every parent is the metaphorical snowblower, clearing any obstacle in their child’s path. These are the places where an ‘A’ is just the starting point; if you’re not also solving world hunger in your free time, are you even trying?

So, what happens when a teacher at such a school gets hounded to distribute extra credit like Oprah hands out cars? She takes a creative route to shut it down, that’s what. Shared on Reddit’s r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by her husband, this educator decided to hit the parental units where it hurts: their calendars. Oh yeah, she handed out extra credit assignments that were the equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture while translating ancient Greek.

The result? A collective sigh from parents too drained to even argue. Assignments went untouched, time and energy depleted, and one can only hope a lesson was learned.

If you’re wondering what the internet had to say about this, let’s just say the comment section was a mixture of applause and cathartic “I told you so’s.”

The moral of the story? Sometimes the best way to combat entitlement is to give people exactly what they ask for, and then sit back and watch them realize they didn’t want it in the first place.