It's a rainy Monday morning and you've dragged yourself out of bed. Your alarm wasn't working, so you've shoved your breakfast down your throat and rushed out of the door. As you walk into the school, you hear the ding of the school bell and you dash up the back stairwell. But as soon as you arrive at the door, you see something that surprises you: everyone is standing outside of a locked classroom door, chattering among themselves. And then you hear a slight, barely apparent murmur that begins to radiate amongst your classmates: 

If the teacher doesn't show up in fifteen minutes, we are legally allowed to leave. You begin to wonder if you just scored the winning card on the lottery. You watch the time tick by, and you imagine yourself back at home in bed. But as soon as it reaches the fourteen minute mark, the teacher seems to magically appear at the door and class resumes in the usual manner. Does this situation sound familiar? If the teacher had appeared slightly earlier, would you have been allowed to leave? Here's the verdict: 

The fifteen minute myth has been rampant across high schools and colleges all over the country-from Towson, Maryland to Cupertino, California--and for quite some time, which is quite impressive due to the fact that there wasn't much of a platform to share universal experiences until very recently. One particular teacher that I spoke to commented that she was surprised that this tale was still around, as she recalled it back from her school days. Although every single high school and college that I read about disproved the ancient student myth, I decided to find out for myself if Bow High School happened to be the exception.

I asked Brenda Mitchell what she thought of this rule, and she had quite an interesting answer: "It simply isn't a thing," she said. "Kids have been trying to pull teacher's legs with that scam for years. Some kids at my old school used to say that if five kids didn't do an assignment, then it didn't count. I just gave them all zeroes. It's just a superstition like that, nothing more." When asked what she thought that students should do if a teacher shows up late, she stated that the reason that a teacher is late most likely has to do with a parent meeting that ran overtime, or a personal emergency. She specified that "the best thing to do is probably just sit in class and get started on your work until a teacher shows up."