Tales from the school yard.

I can top that for shitness.

3/4 of Shed 7 went to my school.

And the lead singer of The Seahorses.

When I was at school, a long time ago, a teacher was disappeared.
We came back from holiday and he wasn't there, his name removed from everything as if had never existed, his classes taken by supply teachers.
We later found out that his crime was that he had written a polite letter to the newspaper suggesting that homosexuality be de-criminalised on social justice grounds. He had been well liked and a popular teacher.
The lesson in homophobia worked. One of my classmates is now a very senior church man who is notorious for his opposition to gay marriage.
The only other famous person from that school was Errol Flynn. About 90 years ago he was expelled for theft, or for seducing one of the kitchen staff.

He was also the one who failed to blag into the local night club by forgetting to work out in advance which year he would have to claim to have been born in to back up his claim to be over 18.

I did this in an Oxford pub aged 15, and the landlord let me finish my pint of cider before booting me out

John Cleese was expelled from my school.

Martina Topley Bird was in our school choir.

And fuck there was a ton of wrong shit at my school.

Teacher who tried it on with a boy who had developmental issues. Teacher was sent on 18month sabbatical in South America until the kid had left the school.

Recently a teacher was jailed for taking indecent photos and other crimes during the time I was there. This was despite many reports of inappropriate behaviour.

Teacher who was in love with a school matron, but not reciprocated killed himself.

Teacher who was very eccentric had his life ruined when he was accused of murdering a tennant and the press went into overdrive also accusing him of being a peeping tom.

The amazingly racist art teacher who would always tell stories during his class that featured a “blonde haired blue eyed aryan Roman Catholic” boy as the hero and the villain would always be called Ramdass but emphasised as rammed ass.

Teacher who would send pupils during class to the tuck shop to buy jelly babies but not to have any black bastards put in the bag. At a public event he apologised the headmaster wasn’t present as he was in chinky chonk land. He was also keen on throwing board rubbers at pupils, one day the intended recipient ducked and it smashed out the front teeth of another pupil.

The head of the music department who professed his love for a pupil and showed her the a level exam paper - even better was that his own daughter was in the same class but he didn’t help her cheat!

We had some violent teachers, when two of us told a friends mum about it she reported it to the school. We were then forced to apologise to her for telling lies despite the fact she had seen the bruises on me.

There was a kid left mildly brain damaged after another pupil purposefully threw a shot putt at his head.

The list goes on and on.

Teacher who was very eccentric had his life ruined when he was accused of murdering a tennant and the press went into overdrive also accusing him of being a peeping tom

I don't want to name names but 2010?

Yep

Tom Penny’s dad was our art Teacher. Looked like Tom does now but in blue cords and hush puppies.
Same voice it’s spooky. Mr Penny had similar demons to Tom, he didn’t really teach, he just created a place where kids who wanted to draw and paint could do so without getting harassed by the kids that wanted to headlock each other and huff their farts.

One day he decided for some reason to engage the class as a whole. He took out a pencil and paper and drew a portrait of one of the girls in the class. Total silence for the half hour it took. The picture of course to our eyes was at the same level as a da Vinci or Raphael sketch.

The problem with our school was that in general the teachers were average - some cripplingly so, but the kids they were primo cunts...lord of the flies would have been a fuckin holiday

@yetidamo and I were talking about both Penny’s last week, we skated with Tom once or twice when he was just a 12 year old ripper. He was ridiculously good then

When I was about 10 or 11 I used to get up to all kinds of relatively low grade mischief while waiting for the bus after school. This culminated with me being caught red handed by the Deputy Headmaster on the railway line lining up pound coins on the running rails because when a train passes over them they get stretched out in a cool way.

I remember the feeling of absolute horror when I saw that Mr Smith was peering over the fence and could see me. He didn't say a a word but was obviously absolutely seething and he just stormed off back towards the school looking even more purple than usual.

This was a Friday night so I spent the whole weekend freaking out that the phone was going to ring and I was going to be suspended and in a whole heap of trouble. The call never came.

On the Monday morning I was absolutely convinced that I was going to be hauled into the headmasters office but instead, the entire school was summoned to the dining hall by the headmaster. This was it I thought. I'm going to be made to stand up and be shamed in front of the entire school. I remember feeling sick with worry to this day.

Turns out that it wasn't about me. Mr Smith had dropped dead from a heart attack while getting out the bath on the Friday night.

He had actually written my name in the detention book for a full month of detention but they let me off for a reason I'll never quite understand.

Does this mean I may have killed one of my teachers?

I did a few years at a very average boarding school which was relatively strict and then did A levels at a local 6th form college which was a more informal style
I was quite excited as the year before I joined the college was in the press for having a drug problem.
No uniform, older kids drove themselves to school and there was a smoking area for the kids we called the fag pit. It definitely encouraged smoking as the "cool kids" hung out there but it was a great place to hang out in the summer. This was back in '97

What is it with school boys and fire ?
A group of us 14/15 year olds were mucking about with matches one school lunch time down the old railway embankment that has houses and back gardens off it. It was summer and very dry.
It rapidly got out of control so we legged it back to the school at the same time as 2 fire engines were heading in the opposite direction.
Someone identified us/me. Hell broke loose - letters to parents - much grief.
My dad went through the motions of severe reprimand but probably recognised something of his own youth.
But he did give me that look of 'it wasn't you was it ?' when a third of the school burnt down a few months later.

So I went to a very catholic boarding school with attached choir, boys only. In Germany.

We had a chemistry teacher in the last two years (K12 and K13) who was quite young and fresh from college. She was quite fun, distilling alcohol in class when nobody attended, making stuff blow up to get the pupils attention and so on.

Officially she was single but inofficially, and we all knew, she was lesbian and was with a girlfriend whom we met on some partying and drinking occasions. Really lovely couple the both of them.
Quite the "scandal" in a catholic school funded by the church.

Imagine my surprise, when ten years later I find out, that the whole lesbian thing was actually another cover-up because she was having an affair with a classmate of mine, who then changed school going into K13 to make things legal. Also he was the ugly fat kid of the class. Quite mind boggling actually...

What is it with school boys and fire ?

At out school (and probably most schools, to be fair), every year group discovered the fun things that you could do with fire, water, and knives.

The only differences being in which order they were discovered.

Bearing in mind this was a boarding school, so the crap we got up to was pretty much 24/7, it's a miracle that the fires were only ever small scale, there was only one major (indoor*) flood, and only one person got stabbed.

But then, our science lessons included throwing fist sized blocks of sodium, calcium & potassium into the outdoor pool.

* Someone removed the boards from the drain gate in the trout ponds, effectively diverting the river into a load of playing fields.

I bought a Japanese sword, we would cover it with lighter fluid and set it ablaze. Lights would be turned off and as it arced through the air globules of flames would be sprayed everywhere. Someone would often spray deodorant so the sword became a flamethrower. Amazing no serious incidents occurred though we did have trouble explaining the circular burn in the Lino floor.

It's pretty hard to work out what events at my school were bullshit and what actually happened. We know for sure the various affairs between teachers and the ones who liked pupils a bit too much. At secondary school the worst example (and reading these stories, we got off relatively well) of that was my form teacher who told the girls to wear skirts when it was warm as it was more comfortable for them. What he meant was he could stroke their legs when marking their work.

I know for a fact loads of parents complained over several years but the head told them the teacher was too good to "throw away" on a bit of silliness from young girls. It was only when the head left, we got a new headmaster and when the teacher tore the back of a kids ear (off to hospital for stitches) dragging him up the stairs for some arbitrary rule break that they decided enough was enough... and punished the kid. But they clearly bollocked the teacher because he was good for the rest of the year and then went into semi-retirement as a PE teacher at a local private school.

This thread is the ultimate advert for home schooling.

is there a disproportionate link between fixie skidders and private/boarding schools?

Those and grammar schools, by the sound of it. But their nature means those schools are more likely to produce unusual/eccentric stories (and people confident enough to talk about them with the assumption they're interesting), so they're going to be disproportionately represented even if the actual proportion is small.

this is the most middle class forum on the interwebs after all

I was thinking about this. It's probably a link between private/boarding schools and people who move to London and can afford to stick around.

what's bad about that?

Aside from the mundane sexism of not caring what the mothers did (which isn't what makes the story stand out), I can only assume you've missed the point that the kids didn't know what their fathers did because they didn't know who their fathers were.

And there's nothing bad about that, but society (still) often thinks there is and the teacher humiliated a kid, reducing him to tears, and then repeated the mistake because insensitive idiot.

In fact, we all knew their situation and I never saw any of the other kids use it against them, which made a class of 11-year olds more sensitive than the teacher.

Ok. Just the way you wrote it didnt make it clear to the reader that that was the case!

There was a thing for a while when we were 14 or so. People would hold their index and middle finger together and curl them to form a sort of spoon. They would then fill the spoon with snot and spit and then flick it silently onto someone's back. This reached a peak when one lad filled one of those tins below during a lesson. The recipient of its contents was not happy.

Utterly grim.