The teacher had assigned us to pick a project to work on for 2 weeks.
I had picked replicating some basic dos application. I legitimately just wanted to know how it worked and get down to a lower level and reimplement it.
The teacher kept asserting "it already exists, pick something else". I was young and didn't really know how to explain it to her at the time and kept insisting on that project.
It turned into some big hoopla, dragging my parents into the principal where we sat and discussed options. They had no idea of what was going on. The teacher kept pushing implementing a card game, I think it was poker. I being completely unreasonable immediately latched onto, "why does it have to be gambling? Why not something useful?"
Neither I, nor my parents had anything against a poker game morally, but that really changed the tone of the conversation and we ultimately landed on a big int implementation.
She had legitimately thought it was some gotcha and was noticeably angry when I demoed it 2 weeks later. It was of course the most naive implementation imaginable but worked well beyond the expectations assigned.
I never told her I finished it in a couple hours.
Whenever I think about it, it just kills me how disfunctional that school was on so many levels. I suppose I was lucky though to have computer science classes at that age in the 90's.