So, yeah. tl;dr - I was labeled a terrorist on my permanent record for talking to another student about death metal.
This is regrettably believable. There was an incident where post Columbine a kid of 8
was suspended for pointing a chicken tendie at another kid at lunch and going, "bang."
Anyhow. Here's a good one. This may have made the local press, I forget which. At the time we thought it was hilarious but as an adult it's actually rather scary. The Saga of Dennis. To avoid powerlevelling I'll use made up names other than for the culprit in all this.
Early 2000s. Our school has a bit of a problem, namely, English teachers. There aren't enough of them. Miss Knight the extremely attractive English teacher had up and quit because the idea of a load of teenage boys deliberately dropping their pens after she's walked past to try to upskirt her, swapping ribald tales about how they'd like to "smash" her, and so forth no longer appeals, so we need to hire a replacement. Step forward, Dennis.
Dennis came highly recommended. Top First from Oxford, publications in academic journals out the wazoo about John Milton (a favourite of his, we're told, was Samson Agonistes) and other great authors. And he was available for an immediate start. So, he's hired pretty much on the spot, and checking reveals that all these things on his CV checked out. References and all that. Next week, he's in front of a load of 16 year olds teaching them about Paradise Lost. Only... there's something us kids find strange. He seems to talk a lot about "owlbears," not to be bothered half the time, and comes out with such strange gems as "if you don't know what a horse is, it's like a dog but bigger." Well, okay, we all think, maybe he's one of those vague academic types. We had a couple of those already, one of which was the infamous Dr Puritz who I'd posted about on here before and who was extremely weird and had no ability to control a class but was a stupendously accomplished mathematician.
So one day, he's got a class of 15 year olds all beavering away writing about Julius Caesar and the rhetorical devices used in Marc Antony's "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, when in comes a pair of police officers. Dennis looks slightly alarmed and freezes. He's then arrested on suspicion of child sex offences and breach of his licence conditions from prison, cuffed, and taken away in a panda car. Over the next few weeks, the scuttlebutt comes out.
Dennis was a real person. But the person who we knew as Dennis, wasn't. Turns out he was a serial child abuser and had stolen the real Dennis's identity to pretend to be a teacher to get access to teenage boys so he could have a go at them. He was rumbled because the real Dennis saw unusual credit card activity on his bill miles away from his home in Birmingham and contacted the police.