Tales from the school yard.

As there has been a lot of chat about schools.......
I imagine you may need to be aware of libel laws even after all these years.

even after all these years

harsh

even after all these years

harsh

but fair.

So glad this thread was made. Now can someone copy and paste from the memes thread?

Going into other people's classes and seeing how long you could get away with it before being rumbled by the teacher and told to eff off back to your own class - I managed double Maths once before being spotted five mins from the end

So many of us didn't being PE kit (fucking brutal mid Winter) one day our PE teacher trooped us to the stores on the pretence that he wanted us to get some kit out and once inside locked us all in for a double lesson. Within five mins it had turned into Lord of the Flies, the bad lads were on a roll extracting money and sweets with menaces.......

We all got kept inside our classrooms for an entire afternoon whilst a bomb disposal unit searched the school for a box of live rounds that some lad had found on a refuse tip and brought into school, attempting to 'set them off' using two bricks. No-one would fess up knowing who it was

We used to do "cross country" running, which was out of the west entrance to the school, run around the streets, circling to the east entrance, total of probably 2km, and do a couple of laps.
The route went passed my house at about 400m mark, so I would often stop in for a cup of tea, then pick up on the 2nd or 3rd lap, fresh as a daisy, then romp home for a strong finish.
Came unstuck when I was told I was to represent the school at the upcoming county school sporting thing in the 1800m race.

So, to veer away from the more lurid tales on the meme thread...
The funniest thing I can remember (funny to a 15 year old at least) was in RE. Our class was held in a one of those rickety old temporary classrooms with undulating floors and this one looked out on one of the playing fields. Our teacher was a genial middle aged Irish brother (school being run by Franciscan friars) who was also a boarding master (for the small number of poor bastards whose parents had abandoned them and who were forced to board). By all accounts he was actually a very nice chap and one of the few not to be done for some shenanigans. Anyway, he lived on the grounds and had a huge old St Bernard, called Bernard, who followed him around a lot of the time. One day we are sitting in our classroom rapt at some biblical tale or other when someone notices something out of the window. "Sir, isn't that your dog?" calls out Kevin. Said brother looks out of the window then bolts it out of the classroom and off over the field after the huge lolloping St Bernard, who is heading off in the opposite direction. All the time he is belowing 'Bernard, BERNARD' at it like a prototype Irish Fenton Man. He isn't an athletic chap so it takes him a long time to catch up with the hound, hollering all the way. By the time he gets within 5 meters of the dog he is a good distance away from us. Somehow this made it even funnier when the dozy old hound turned around and went for him, barking loudly. What quickly became obvious to us (and even more quickly to him) is that it wasn't his dog and it wasn't down for being chased by a red faced man in a brown habit. Perhaps it had a bad experience in the past, I don't know. Anyway, it took about 50 meters to catch up with the now rapidly retreating brother, what with them being fairly evenly matched and all. In the end I think he tripped on his habit and 'not Bernard' was on him. It gave him a quick nip and turned and lolloped off again, as if nothing had happened and presumably because it had made its point. Needless to say, he came back very flustered, caked in mud and not in the mood to joke and we spent the next 45 minutes desperately trying not to giggle. He saw the funny side later.

I had a mate who used to duck off to his house and smoke weed during the cross country. One time he just didn't bother coming back to school.
At the PE lesson a week later, our teacher beeped his stopwatch as he walked into the gym and announced his finishing time of 168hrs. Impressive.

Now can someone copy and paste from the memes thread?

FWIW:
Alcoholic head mistress, rarely left her office as that's where the drink was, mostly harmless. Replaced by a very self important careerist who went on to head the local authority education department.
PE teachers were the usual, one psychopathic rugger bugger as wide as he was tall, one who only shagged the girls in the basketball team once they got to about 15, so not a proper paedo really
Woodwork teacher who used a subject specific variant of the thrown board rubber by throwing chisels at inattentive pupils instead, metalwork teacher was always bumming fags off my big brother's classmates.
O-level Chemistry teacher with a very short fuse, which we delighted in lighting with the Bunsen burners. A-level guy was much more chilled, but we applied psychological torture anyway.
A-level physics teacher who knew less about physics than we did
Local pub had two bars, one for school kids and one for teachers.What we didn't have back in our day was drugs and armed violence.

This made me giggle because it reminded me of when me and a friend paused to share a joint in the fives courts half way round the run of our local inter-school triathlon.

Doping thread >>>>>

We had a potentially world class swimmer at the school at the time. He couldn't run for shit. I remember the PE teachers debating how amazing his performance was to take time out of us on the run. Great days.

The tale of the rickety porta cabins reminded me of a bleak day for a student in my school.
Our cabins had 2 classrooms, we were in history(aging, nervous wreck of a teacher- kids would regularly chant ‘dragon dragon’ at her until she wept). Anyway, there was a loud crash and a scream from next door, teacher rushed through followed by all us lot to find a student had fallen through the rotten floor up to her armpits. That was yr8 and the end of her social life in our school.

I don’t remember anyone doing anything on cross country runs but we did a charity walk along the Ridgeway(I grew up in Wantage) twice a year. All the farm kids who lived along the route would either stash cider, fags and snacks along the route to sell or just bunk off and spend the day buzzing past everyone on tractors, quads and scramblers.
The farm kids could get away with murder and skive with impunity under the pretence of ‘farm stuff sir’. It was usually them who came in with knives, cartridges, bits of animals and other weird shit.

Remember those banks of lockers that had three or four in each vertical column? Each classroom had some in.

If you emptied out a column, you could hinge the floors up to make a single vertical space which would perfectly accomodate a skinny twat like me. I'd climb in and keep the top locker door closed but unlocked.

The other kids would tell Mr Spence the French teacher that I was off sick. When the poor bastard walked close to the lockers I would violently head butt the door open and shout "Where's JOOHHNNY?!!?" a la The Shining. Scared the bejesus out of him and was well worth the detention I got for it.

We had a young physics teacher that used to get high as a kite before double physics on Friday afternoons during our a-levels. Turned up bleary and reeking of soapbar and cheap baccy. He’d either just get us to do practice papers or ramble about intense theoretical physics that he was studying. Or Star Trek. He was cool but we learnt precisely fuck all from him on Fridays. Luckily the teacher we had the rest of the week made up for it.
Our art teacher(who had a daughter in my year) was having an affair with the mother of another pupil, their respective partners were also seeing eachother. We don’t know if they were swingers or just ended up having a weird affair situation.
Either way they all divorced and remarried and the pupils became half-siblings. So weird...
The art teacher was a bit of a git, his only acceptable form of art was still life which he slavishly arranged in the classroom every morning. He used to play a lot of basketball and once scrumpled up a piece of my work(for being crap) and hooked it all the way across the classroom into a small bin on the opposite side in front of the whole class.

Mr Howitt, the science teacher and swim coach, would have us (age 11 to 13) swimming naked on Sunday mornings.

Mr Dunn, the art teacher, was fond of bare bottom spanking.

In loco parentis.

If your parentises were middle-aged bachelors with a penchant for adolescent boys...

(I'm assuming they are long since deceased. #don'tsueme)

[Edit] I just remembered that Mr Howitt smacked me round the chops for refusing to go to one of his training sessions. And the fact that I called him a motherfucker.

After I had left, but one of my old maths teachers got into trouble when the pron he was ogling on his laptop was displayed on the big screen, during the exam that he was invigilating.

We had a chemistry teacher (Mr West) who used to make fireworks and (if older-sibling folklore is to be believed) explosives. In more than one lesson he burned his eyebrows and lashes as well as his fringe off explaining how to make green or blue fireworks. Awesome guy, just wanted to get 11 year old boys into science. Also ran the gardening club which as you’d guess was 50% people who wanted to “learn how plants work sir” and 50% semi-legal lunchbreak smoko. Eventually left school into early retirement after some prick fired some rockets at him when he was bombing the hill on the way to school on his bike and he came off at speed. One of those teachers that was really missed.

We had a supply PE teacher who used to like to make us wrestle, after a while he got bored of that and decided to make it more interesting (for him at least), but putting us in groups, the new game was to get two of the long benches (the ones you used to sit on for assemblies etc) stand them on their end, two boys would have to climb to the top, whilst the others supported it, and then attempt to knock the other boy off the top...

Speaking of Ampleforth, last year my mother had been watching a documentary about paedos at boarding schools, and out of the blue asked me if I had ever been abused.

No, mum, but, you know, 35 years is a bit of a long time to wait before asking, really.

Awks if dad was in the room, no?

My woodwork teachers(and especially the old boy technician who ran the workshops) were awesome and by far my best memories of school. The two main teachers were best mates, a folk duo, took us on regular mtb trips along the Ridgeway, actually taught us how to make stuff and treat tools with respect. They also ran the warhammer and rc clubs.
The technician was a retired clock-maker and engineer. Turned up to school every day in a 1920’s Bugatti rain or shine, had industrial-era mutton chops. Taught us how to superglue wounds, dig out splinters and once I settled on doing guitar-making at university he spent at least 2 lunchtimes a week for a year patiently teaching me how to do marquetry and mother of pearl inlay. I owe those guys a lot.

A fat lad in my year blacked out and collapsed during a 'cross country' run (we had huge playing fields we shared with the local girl's school so it was just round the fields). We thought he was joking (we were all watching as we'd all finished). Teacher crapped it.

Years later I found out he got done for possessing child porn (twice!).

Another lad got run over outside school. He was hit by a car. Bounced off and hit a lamppost. His nickname after that was ping-pong.

Dumbest thing I ever saw a teacher do was from a replacement Geography teacher we had one term when I was 10/11. His name was Mr. Gauci and having introduced himself at the start of the lesson, he said he was going to get to know us by pointing to us in turn at which point we had to say our name and also what our father did for a living.

So he works along the classroom, row by row, and one boy is going red. When it's his turn, he just says his name.

Mr. Gauci: And what does your father do?
Ben (very red in the face): I don't know, sir.
Mr. Gauci: What?
Ben (loudly): I don't know, sir!
Ben bursts into tears.
Mr. Gauci:
Mr. Gauci:
Mr. Gauci turns to the next boy: Right, your name?

A few desks down the row, another kid is beginning to cry. Mr. Gauci doesn't pay attention and doesn't stop. He puts that second kid through the same humiliation aaaaaaand continues till he's done the whole class.

If you happen to know a retired teacher called Gauci, do break his leg.

My high school teachers were an interesting bunch:

Head of year 9 - locked up for noncing

PE teacher - eloped to the Cayman Islands with a sixth former. We took great delight in interrupting lessons to ask teachers what happened to him

Physics teacher #1 - left after a fairly uneventful year, I was out with friends six months later and saw him on the other side of the road. We shouted hello, to which he mooned us.

History teacher - capable but fantastically lazy. Never marked homework. Taught a fantastic half lesson when Ofsted came round, before returning to his usual approach of handing out photocopies and failing to collect the homework when the inspector left. Was able to bend the laws of time to see the pupils out at 3:15 and be at the pub, a mile away, by 3:16.

Chemistry teacher - caught a wasp in mid air and crushed it in his bare hand. We didn’t mess around with him after that. Sadly had a bad motorbike crash when we were in sixth form. His supply replacement was locked up for noncing.

Physics teacher #2 - had a mullet and was a big fan of prog rock. Took us all to the pub on the last day of sixth form, on running into the headmaster on the drive, cool as anything he declared ‘just taking these lads to the library Mr D’.

Physics teacher #3 - really wanted to be one of the boys. Went skiing with one of my friends for several years after we’d left school.

IT teacher - one of those people that isn’t wired quite correctly but you can’t quite pin it down. Once tripped over in front of me in the playground, dusted himself off like nothing had happened and carried on. I can only presume it happened quite regularly.

The school had a fledgeling website, however knowledge of web security was not strong. I found out if you accessed it from a school computer and used IE’s File>Edit option you could make and save what ever changes you like. We made a few subtle ones that went unnoticed for a few weeks before someone ruined it by changing the headline news story to ‘Head Teacher visits the Cannes Porn Festival’

Best days of my life...