I had a
high school Computer Science teacher who was a big fan of assigning
dictionary writing as punishment. This was given, to be done in
detention, to any
student who did not have his
homework done at the beginning of class. The first homeworkless day got you 1
column, the second, 2 columns, numcols=(2*numcols) every time. This even got to the point where one guy had
sixteen columns of dictionary entries to copy, and he had to come in for detention every day until he was done.
This teacher formerly would open the dictonary to a random page and hand that to the student, however one afternoon he opened the dictionary to a page that contained some, well, inappropriate words for a school setting. The student told his parents, and the teacher got upbraided by the administration. After this incident, he chose a few pages that he assigns to EVERY student coming in for detention, since he knows exactly what is supposed to be on the page, he can also tell whether someone has skipped entries.