To think this teacher had it right, really

[managedmis]

Was thinking about my schooling and the last year of primary we had a teacher who just used to read Roald Dahl books to us and teach us about fossils. He also gave us boiled sweets all the time. He also used to talk about his holidays a lot.

I remember being at the time but in hindsight it was actually the best year of school!

Can you remember any oddities from school?

I remember a supply teacher who we had regularly in primary. She was very eccentric with massive, frizzy ginger hair. Took no nonsense so we used to sigh on realising we had her but she read books to us in the most amazing, dramatic way. Her expression was brilliant, I can shut my eyes and remember all the voices she used to do.
Only last week I thought of her, I have very fond memories of her looking back but like you, at the time I thought she was weird.

Our small primary school headteacher.
Used to take us for swimming lessons, then swim a couple of lengths of the pool before the session finished, while we had 5 mins to play.

He taught us science. Memorable lessons included

• sound/light when he let a firework off at the bottom of the field.
• him wanting to play us a tape of a launch of a space shuttle, but by the time he'd finished talking about things he found fascinating we'd run out of time. I don't think we ever heard the tape.
• hydraulics where he stood on the roof of the single storey school and sucked water up a tube using a syringe,

Yeah I had several teachers like that. I couldn't do long division or even knew my times tables, when I went to secondary school. I didn't actually find out what nouns, verbs, adjectives were until 6th form!

In primary I was in a mixed class. Half y3 and half y4. Our teacher was a wonderful man who mush have worked so hard to keep us all on track. At the end of year he arrange to take us on a school trip to his home town with help from parents. We went to an outdoor swimming pool had a picnic in the park and he showed us where he grew up and told us stories of his childhood. Wonderful man. A fond memory some 30 years later.

Our p7 teacher didn't give us any homework for the entire year. She said we'd get enough at secondary school.

I loved her.

Ahh that is lovely.

I remember a teacher who introduced me to the Faraway tree books. I was about 9 and she read to our class everyday. When I had children I read them these books. She was also very kind.

I had a teacher who would give us rewards to answering general knowledge questions correct and advise the parents of bright children to move their kids to the private sector if possible. I ran into him many years later. That man changed my life, not sure if he realised it but he seemed to remember me same as I remembered him.

My teacher at comprehensive school who was the only person ever to believe in childhood me. She never once suggested she thought I couldn't do it despite all the evidence to the contrary.

My 4th year junior school teacher, I guess this would be year 6 now.

Up to that point every teacher has written me off and my parents were worried. My parents went to see her on a parents evening and she was so nice about me, they had to ask if she was talking about the right person. She assured them she was.

She is the one teacher who got me to believe in myself and set my school life on the right track. I still see her around now 38 years after I left that school.

She was one amazing teacher.

At university my dad had a lecturer who was supposed to teach US history 1870-1930; the lecturer was really into the Wild West, though, and talked about that for at least 2/3 of the semester. The stories were great & my dad loved the class :).

In high school, so I was 14 or 15.
(might have been social studies, but I can't recall, it wasn't history or any subject I rated of value so not science or English or math or languages...) We had a teacher who had American Indian heritage.  She was obsessed about the injustices done to her ancestors, told us a horrific story about her great-grandfather coming home to find his wife being scalped alive, so great-grandfather killed the attempted scalper, of course. 

The thing is, the teacher had very pale skin, curly grey hair & pale blue eyes.  Her family history may have been awful but she looked less Native American than Elizabeth Warren so we never knew whether to believe a word of it.  I wonder what her colleagues would have thought of her telling us the stories.  It was all quite weird.

My reception teacher also brought her pug dog to school with her, he was lovely. This was 1981/2.

Education saved me, I grew up in a very abusive household, with sexual, physical and emotional abuse. All the teachers seemed so lovely but one especially really changed my life. He talked about how everyone had a gift for the world and how we could influence our own path and be something someday. He used to play his guitar to us and sing, he was supposed to be teaching us French. I was in my first year of secondary school, my stepfather died a few months later so I no longer lived in fear.

At primary school, we frequently did experiments in practical science: lots of people my age say they never did. Some memorable ones were a teacher bringing in a real ox's heart, which she dissected with a sharp knife, and lambs' lungs; she told us the butcher suggested that we children might like to blow them up. None of the children were brave enough, so she did it herself.

I was in the headmistress's reading group in year 2, and she used to rant furiously about the books we had to read from, in that the stories were always about boys out having a good time with their father, while the girls were at home helping Mother. This annoyed her so much, that she used to make us swap the names when we read them (which would be names such as Peter, Mary, Joan, Simon, etc.) Mumsnet would have been proud!

Another teacher gave us a great lesson in compass bearings (something I find many secondary school pupils simply can't grasp), and directional hearing. The playground had a compass painted on the ground, so we all went outside, and bearings were written on the ground in chalk: 000 for north, 045 for north east, and so on. In turn, we stood in the middle of the compass, facing north, before being blindfolded. Another child would stand on a bearing, and clap. The child in the middle would say the bearing where they thought the person clapping was. The harder game was to start facing a bearing other than 000, or to be spun round first and have to work out which way you were facing from what you could hear. It became a playground game.

We also had a memorable theatre trip, in 1990, to see a play called "the secret of Theodore Brown", which was probably specially written for school groups. It was about a black Catholic family in south London, and the play began with the sounds of a motorbike hit and run, with the stage in darkness apart from a scary-looking motorbike. Later, while his mum was church cleaning, 11-year-old Theodore was bored and messing about in the church; he hid in the priest's side of a confession box, and while he was there, someone thought he was the priest, and made a confession, from which Theodore learned some vital information about the hit and run (in which a child was seriously injured). But he couldn't tell anybody, because his mum had always emphasised "what's said in there is between the sinner, and God", so most of the play was about his tremendous dilemma. Later we spent a lot of time talking about this play, and analysing it. I recently got a copy of the script, and thought this was a pretty big play for us at the age of 9; it was funny and serious in equal measure, with lines such as "People are in this church praying for the little girl, and then you come bursting in like the Devil himself! Now go and apologise to God."
(teenager awkwardly kneels at altar) "...Sorry, God".

My Year 5 primary teacher had a special bookcase of her own children’s books that she’d bought: she’d lend them out and tell the pupil she was lending the books to that it was because she knew they were very clever and such a good reader and would take care of her lovely books. She’d then sit you down one-to-one when you returned it and ask you to tell her what bit you’d enjoyed the most: the bit you’d enjoyed would always be her favourite bit, too.

In hindsight I now realise she lent the books out to virtually every pupil in her class and told them how clever they were and that the bit they liked was the bit she liked. But at the time, when I was 9, it felt like the most wonderful thing to be trusted with the teacher’s own books and to feel you liked reading the same things she did, such a motivator to read and absorb.

I haven't got any memories like this but love all of these and hope my children will have memories of inspiring teachers!

Like many primary schools we had Space as our topic in 1985/1986 leading up to the challenger launch and visit from Halley's Comet.

We built a space ship out of cardboard in the middle of the classroom. It was bizarre, those of us who had listened to the lessons knew it was a bad choice of material, those who didn't really thought they could become rocket designers.

There were several teachers at my primary school who I remember to this day.
The head teacher who fostered my love of books by making me librarian. She took four of us out of classes for a week to catalogue the library and took my suggestions for some new books and ordered them
The group of teachers that took us on school camp and taught us how to work out gradients using using practical maths, and how to measure the height of a tree.
The dinner lady who would take a whole class back to her house and let us run around her garden and climb the trees.
This was in the 1970's at a city primary school in a deprived area.

My fondest memories of primary school are that we would sing and sing and sing. In assembly, in the afternoon, when we should have been doing maths. Peace protest songs, sea shanties, the Beatles ( always the Beatles!), old English folk songs, Caribbean calypsos, and songs from the American south, hymns, silly Kylie and Jason performances. Collective singing was such a joyful, levelling experience that is being ebbed away in favour of fronted adverbials and such nonsense. It's a sad loss to children's mental health and their cultural heritage.

We used to do lots of singing too and at every opportunity would have lessons outside in a small field next to a fairly busy road - this was an inner city primary. Didn't like the sadistic teachers though who would use the ruler or give us a clip around the head.

In secondary we had an art teacher who loved putting on music, mostly prog rock (Blood, Sweat and Tears) and punk and we'd express ourselves artistically. Loved that.

My history teacher was amazing. He knew how to capture and audience well and when we were studying parts that were a bit dry he'd throw in a gory anecdote or tale from the time to drag you back in. He also had a dictation voice and often would carry on talking in it until you realised you'd written down some complete nonsense then laugh (not in a mean way, come across mean when written down but wasn't in reality).

My English teacher used a lot of the issues in books to talk about life lessons - not just things like To Kill A Mockingbird and racism but things like Pride and Prejudice and how some women knowingly make relationship choices for security (Charlotte Lucas etc). A lot of her relationship advice (having a running away fund, not doing the ‘pick me dance’) is straight out of the Mumsnet Guidebook. She was fantastic.

I loved the primary teacher who went off script. No point doing maths in a thunder storm when she had an opportunity to teach us about lightening. But she was passionate, educated, scary as hell until you were in her class, then you knew you were one of hers and school was just brilliant.

I had a wet wimp of a woman the following year. I hated school then.

The good ones stand out, because there weren't many of them.

Yes, the singing, with the words displayed using an overhead projector. As well as hymns, some of the songs we sang were:
Both sides now
When I'm sixty-four
With a little help from my friends
Lots of songs about the environment, or optimism; there was one which had the tongue-twister of "be enrolled upon the lists of optimists, and disregard the pessimists". (Too many S's to sing!)
Puff the Magic Dragon: the teacher explained to us why it's a sad song.
Jamaican Alphabet, a song listing tropical fruit. D is for Dumplin', an' duckanoo, duckanoo. There was a spoken bit at the end, which the children often tried to do in a Jamaican accent. (Would this be done now?)

In reading lessons, I liked it when we talked about the stories. In years 1 and 2, we'd be asked "could this be a true story"? Usually not, because of talking animals. I remember one absurd story of a farmer who was so fed up with his dog howling at the moon outside at night, that he threw his alarm clock out of the window at the dog. The dog thought the clock was the moon, and ate it. The teacher said nothing about the animal cruelty, and asked us "why did the dog think the clock was the moon?". I gave an answer my grandad would have been proud of: he wasn't using his brains. The answer that we were supposed to give was that the moon was shining in the glass of the clock.

Class assemblies were fantastic, and the children were very involved in planning them: they'd often involve a short play, which would be written by the children. Once we did Victorian times, including a scene from a classroom, complete with corporal punishment. The teacher would not normally take part in the assembly, but would signal to children who needed to speak louder.

The climax of the year was the year 6 play, which was always musical, with the songs written and arranged by one teacher: the school were lucky to have such musical talent.

My year 6 teacher had an interesting way of assessing our reading skills: during the daily afternoon silent reading, he'd talk to us individually, ask us about the book we'd chosen, and get us to read a few paragraphs from it, while he sat beside us and took notes, and asked us questions about what we'd read. The classroom had a very high ceiling; when he moved from one child to another, he held a chair for himself high above his head.

I love these threads about school memories, as I remember my own school years very vividly.

My Year 6 teacher. Every afternoon was devoted to a large-scale craft project like building a huge Norman village, unless the sun was shining and he took us out to play cricket. He had extremely high standards for us. He would shout out someone's name and a times table at random times during the day and heaven forbid anyone who couldn't answer it! Every single one of us knew our tables. He also spent time teaching us things like collective nouns. He trusted us and gave us lots of responsibility to use things like woodwork tools or do simple science experiments.

Most amazing P6 teacher. I’m of the generation where some men went into teaching after wartime service, and I later learned he was a lleutenant commander in the navy.
He was a lot of fun and if we would do dictation with him, and he’d make up stories Like about us all making a big bogey together and rolling it down Butser Hill. He was fabulous