8 Crazy Excuses Students Have Given for Not Turning in Homework -- and They're Allegedly True!

"The dog ate my homework" might be one of the most popular cliche excuses for why a student isn't turning in his or her assignment. But real word examples from teachers show far crazier excuses, as evidenced in a new "Ask Reddit."

On Tuesday someone posed this question on the social news website: Teachers of Reddit, what is the worst excuse you've heard from someone not doing their homework which turned out to be true?

We've pulled out a few of the top comments for your enjoyment:

• ramakitty: That their homework had been confiscated by Colonel Gadaffi's police. Turns out the kid's father worked for a Libyan bank, and the homework was about aerosols. Kid had gone to visit him during the summer break, and it was taken by the border guards.

Gaddafi (Photo: Wikimedia)

• heyheyhedgehog: Back in the day, my mom had a blind guy come to hand in his final paper, 30 pages tucked in a manila folder. "Sorry it's the last day, just finished it last night! By the way sometimes my typing is a little messy, you know, hard to line up the paper... How's it look, can you read it?" She opens the folder and there's 30 pages of neatly typed, almost invisible, uninked typewriter indentations. "Uhh... Yep, looks okay!" She didn't have the heart to say there was nothing there, so she gave him an A, and never did decide if that [person] was real unlucky, or real smart.

(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

• chryllis: My house caught on fire a couple weeks ago and we had to go through all of this crap and so I asked my teacher for an extension on a paper. She said that my house burning down was the second best excuse she had ever heard. I asked her what the best one was: Dude crashed his hot air balloon and broke his back. Yea I'll take second place to that.
• bloglib: Got an email from a student saying he was getting his arm amputated. Thats all it said, nothing else.

• yetanotherreddit: Several years ago I had a student show up to class claiming that the homework assignment had disappeared from the paper I had given him. He gave me the piece of paper and I could see a sprinkling of toner from the copy machine and in holding it up to the light could barely make an imprint on the page. Then I remembered that in copying the assignments to hand out one page had gotten stuck in the machine before it had gone through the fuser. I pulled it out and stuck it in the stack. However, he was correct. The words had literally fallen off the paper.

• maleficuslues: My friend received a note from a parent that said the child did not do his homework packet because the parent felt watching the sunset was more beneficial.

(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

• Bamboozzer: In an email Dear Mr. Bamboozer, I will not be able to make it to class this morning the horses got out. ......that's when I knew what teaching in Kansas meant.

(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

• fuzzy510: I had a major assignment that was due promptly at the start of my first-period history class in high school. I had accidentally slept in that morning, so I was running late. Despite my best efforts, I get there about five minutes late. My teacher asks me why I'm late. I'm already panicking, thinking I'm going to lose major points on this paper, and for some reason telling him I slept in doesn't sound good to me. So, in a rush the only thing I can offer up is: "Uh......because I'm fat, slow and lazy, sir." He stands befuddled for a few seconds, then accepts my paper with no late penalty.

To you believe them all? Read more of the excuses here or share your own in the comments section below.