WTF moments from childhood

[Lyannaa]

I vividly remember sitting in a circle at primary school and playing a game (facilitated by teachers). It was a variation on ‘spin the bottle’ and this boy named the girl he wanted to kiss. The feeling was not mutual from her end and she began running around and around the circle, trying to evade both the boy and the disgraceful teachers trying to hold her down. Vile. How was this a thing? All I remember was sitting there thinking ‘thank goodness this isn’t me’.

This was 1989…

My 6th form was at a boys boarding school that took day pupils and had just started taking girls; I think there were about 15 of us.
We had a bar in our 6th form common room - wine and beer. There was a huge outcry in the local community/paper when they applied for the licence. But in all honesty it was probably easier than constantly having to fish us out of the pub across the road 🤣
There was also a no girls in the boarding house rule …. 😉

I really couldn’t stomach school dinners at primary school. I threw up once before lunch and forever associated the smell of school dinners with being sick. I’ve no idea why but my mum refused to make a packed lunch for me (she didn’t work; rather suspect she didn’t want the bother of making a lunch for her 4-year-old). We had quite a long lunch in infants. I have vivid memories of sitting in the hall in front of some sort of congealed horror for well over an hour. You weren’t allowed to leave unless you cleared your plate. I wasn’t brought up like this and I just sat there crying. Eventually they had to let me leave because the afternoon session was starting.

I endured a couple more years of this and then my dm allowed me to take sandwiches!

Early 80s.

At primary if you forgot kit you did PE in vest & knickers and I mean pants,underwear.
Totally humiliating intended as a punishment
I see posters saying PE knickers were a specific attire. I’ve never encountered that. Our PE kit was t shirt and shorts

Dearie me, you’re a very aerated person. That must be exhausting to be in such a vexatious state

Yep, me too. Fire bell rang in a dance lesson in winter. All girls school. We did dance in our regulation school knickers (large, brown, cotton) but we had to line up outside with everyone else. About 1972.

From memory one pe knickers were made of a similar fabric to our pe skirt and were worn on top of underwear with a pe skirt which was a short pleated number. . They were not something any of us would be seen dead in so were quickly lost

There was no reason other than utter creepiness that we couldn't have had joggers.
The top was a thin airtex v neck t-shirt with a little collar.

If we'd been allowed a tracksuit I might have found pe a bit more tolerable.

I remember vividly the public weigh-ins, and also the communal showers. It was an all-girls school, but nonetheless humiliating - girls mature physically at different rates. Terrible memories.

You're the vexed one babes

Have a day off

Doing PE in knickers and vests at primary school. That was weird. One time I was wearing one of those petticoat things that are attached to a vest. The teacher told me I couldn’t wear that for PE and I had to do it in just my knickers. I refused and I got in trouble and my grandmother was called to school. I was really upset when she got there, was around 7 years old, and she thankfully totally stood up for me and really laid into the teacher. I have no idea why all the adults in our lives didn’t insist on a PE kit though. Seriously weird times the mid 80’s.

I remember forgetting my PE kit in last year of primary and the witch of a teacher said I had to do it in my vest and pants. It was pretty obvious that I was past the vest stage and I’m proud to say I stood up for myself and said no I won’t do that. I lived very close to the school and remember thinking - if she doesn’t back down just leg it out the gate. I knew my mother would stick up for me on this point. Although she’d have told me off about forgetting my kit. Thankfully teacher said I would have to sit on the yard and watch.

Kids getting their mouths washed out with soap for swearing at school.
With that horrible brown liquid soap in the kids toilets 🙊

I went to a catholic school in the 90s and 00s. This isn’t so much of a WTF, more STFU, but our headteacher would sometimes hold assemblies where she’d just rant about things like Emmerdale, and say how ungodly they were. One that has always stuck in my mind is one that was about cold weather, and how we shouldn’t complain about it, because some people are worse off. It was just the typical ridiculous catholic guilt trip thing - just put up and shut up. I remember thinking why the hell should someone feel guilty for saying they’re cold? It’s just a statement of fact.

Also if they didn’t like your hair, they’d take it out. There were no official rules on hair styles for most of the time I was there, but braids weren’t allowed, even for the black kids. There were couple of times I remember when people with braids were called to the headteacher’s office and she’d make them remove them there and then! It happened to my friend who had just come back from holiday, she was absolutely gutted!

For some reason in the Junior school I went to, in Year 6 the boys got to get changed for PE in our classroom. Us girls had to go to the very small library that was in the dining room. It was enclosed but had no door but it was just shelves, so easy to see over by adults. So we had literally no privacy! This was in 2004/5!

If we did something wrong we had to stand at the front of the class with our hands held out while the teacher rapped our knuckles with a ruler (primary school, late 70’s).
secondary school - had to ‘stand on a square’ with our hands on our head during lunchtime

A weird game in primary school (year 5/6 I think it would have been), it was after school and we had a girl in our year who was bullied a lot, for some reason many people didn't like her much, there was something vulnerable about her. She came into the classroom to get something she had forgotten and two of the boys and one of the girls decided to pin her to the floor to take her underwear off to see what was underneath. Why they wanted to do that I don't know. They had shut her in the stationary cupboard for a joke but she panicked and started crying so they told her if she would let them see her naked they would let her go. So they tried to strip her underwear off, she fought back but they wouldn't stop. I was the one whom had to hold her down .Nothing else happened but she was hysterical . I think her mum was told and came to the school and complained but the teacher concluded she was making it up. It was weird and I pushed it to the back of my mind until recently.

How absolutely horrendous and traumatic for that poor girl. Disgraceful she was accused of making it all up. I hope she is okay now.

School disco aged 11-14... our teachers encouraged a selection of girls and boys up on stage for the "lovely legs" and "best chest" competition. We had to cheer for the girl with the best legs and the boys took their tops off so we could cheer for the boy with the best chest. They did it every year. Utterly ick to me now as an adult.

Definitely that was all sorts of messed up ..poor girl.

When my dd was in year 1 (probably 2015)
I complained to the teacher that my daughter was at the bottom of a list that was pinned to the wall for all the parents to see. Poor thing was an August baby so just turned 5 then and she's dyslexic.

The teacher said it wasn't a list of ability but a list of what band books the kids were on. Same thing. God knows why she had to put it on the wall.

Looking back it was disgraceful. I would not participate in any kind of bullying these days but at my school it was very normalised, bullying. I would hope schools would handle incidents like this kind of thing better now. Then again you read about bullied kids taking their lives and wonder if things have changed at all? Schools talk about safeguarding but maybe it's all talk.

I am still in touch with the lady, we are in our 40s now (time sure does fly). She isn't really ok but I don't know how much of that was due to the incident or how much of it is to do with her having had a 💩 upbringing with her parents as a child and some medical issues. She is in treatment for complex PTS D but I assumed that was to do with her parents, one of which was a bit of beard bellend. Of course I didn't know at the time when we were kids that she had an abusive parent, it all came out later. She had some kind of breakdown and hasn't worked for a long time.

@GoldenGuinea It sounds like it’s an amalgamation of traumatic events. I hope she is able to find peace.

In sixth form, our biology a- level teacher invited some of the class to his house for extra revision practice. I really don’t remember much revision going on, although nothing seedy( to my knowledge) occurred. Our parents knew about it too.

Yes I hope so too.

Other WTF things:

a level biology teacher inviting students round to his house for a BBQ after the exams. Nobody went because he had a tendency to be creepy. This was in all girls secondary.

My grandfather and his weird tickling games. Between the legs. I look back now and think WT F. How he would call us sexy, as little girls even.

boys being allowed to do metalwork but girls not. Primary school, 80s.

Urggh I remember PE pants, purple huge things. We had to do cross country running through the streets in purple pants 🤣

Final straw with that school was when 4 of us got into some trouble (rather not mention why) and I was expelled because I came from a single parent family. This was in the 90's. Thankfully I did finish my education.