To ask , what were your pet peeves about school as a school child?

[SteveAs]

Inspired by the teachers thread

Mine was , we only could have chips on a Monday
And that RE lessons in Year 10 dragged on , they were 1 hour lessons which felt at least 10 hours

Oh yes, the awful PE skirt and knickers
Music and RE lessons

The strictness of the school uniform rules. I tied my hair out of the way with a navy blue (my house colour) hair ribbon rather than the regulation black one because it was getting in my way. Got a bollocking.

Honestly, I don't remember. The things that stand out for me were the funny, ridiculous-type things, and the occasional upsetting thing. No peeves as such.

School were asked to provide the 'chorus' for a professional musical at the main theatre in the city. I wanted to audition I wouldn't have got in but was too scared to sing on my own. My friend was also scared to sing on her own but the music teacher let her be in the chorus without the solo audition. Hated the fact that she got to be in a show. Hated that she performed in the theatre for a week.Hated the fact that it seemed so unfair that she could do it and I couldn't. and even though I know I was rubbish and wouldn't have got in anyway

Having all the quiet hardworking children (like me) sat next to naughty and disruptive children.

When we were set pointless homework (yes, posters i mean you).

That well behaved polite children are just expected to be well behaved and polite, meanwhile disruptive children got to go bowling if they were not a pain in the arse for a week.

When teachers were more bothered about trying to negotiate with disruptive students so we had to endure lessons where subjects were tenuously linked to fads of the day (modern vesion figet spinners and pokemon go).

Lessons that were high on group work and low on writing. I just wanted to get on. I didn't want to do collaborative stand outside and memorise drawings for your team.

Needless to say, those experiences have absolutely affected my teaching now.

Everything Maisy said. I HATED those children, they wasted so much time.

Primary school:

• the projects. Everything we did seemed to be related to some project. When it was the Black Death, I was quite interested but we had one project about swallows which seemed to last forever.

• once, we had a man from the railways come to talk to us in assembly. He spent pretty much all of his ten minutes (or however long) shouting at us that we were never to walk on railway lines. The thing is, I don't think any of us had even thought of doing that.

My primary school had quite a serious bullying problem. It went unacknowledged as it was the middle class school with a "nice" intake. Apparently it hasn't changed. However, I don't think that is a peeve.

Secondary school:

• the toilets in the lower school (years 7 to 9) were completely foul. A friend the other day said that the way some people use toilets makes you think they should be locked up for their own safety. I totally saw his point (shit being smeared on the walls, saturated tampax / towels left on the floor when there was a bin for them).

• my form teacher for the first three years disliked clever children and found the naughty ones funny. It may be that she thought they often missed out on praise (or that she thought I was a bit of a prig).

• when I started, the school had a reasonably relaxed approach to uniform (so, while they specified the colour skirt, type of jumper, type of white shirt, they didn't care what colour your socks or shoes were). At the beginning of the second year, we all got a letter to say that we now had to only wear white socks / black tights / black shoes - which meant everyone's mum wrote in to say that they'd just bought blue / grey / brown shoes and would only buy new when they were outgrown. To be fair, that was probably just an admin fuck up.

Teachers insisting on calling me by my (unusual, foreign) name and getting it wrong rather than the (simple, commonplace) nickname I always went by.

That I had to tuck my shirt in. (Now, obviously, I think that wandering around with an untucked shirt looks sloppy, but for a 13 year old boy it's literally the height of cool.)

Jockstraps. (Don't ask.)

Spending time on pointless things in maths like quadratic equations. To this day I still can't do long division, which I'm sure would have been marginally more useful in real life, but I can still quadrate an equation with the best of them. I've never had to in real life besides helping DN with her maths homework.

Not being able to take French, Spanish and German for GCSE. I had to pick two and take a tech subject that bored me to tears.

School dinner.

Having to do gym / athletics wearing nothing but blue knickers and a vest.

• In year 10, some friends and I were asked if we would sing at an evening event at the town hall. We were asked to wear summer clothes and probably sang something quite easy. However, it ended up being quite embarrassing because it was clear we hadn't practised together, our clothes looked a bit messy and shambolic and the big private school had sent their proper choir, who wore smart blazers and did a good job. I have often wondered why the teacher who asked us left it so late to do so. Perhaps she got dropped in it.

• I had a History teacher who must have been new to teaching. She got us to all go into separate groups and research a particular part of some topic. This would have been fine except that when I asked when we cover the other parts, she looked a bit surprised and said "Oh, you exchange information". If everyone had done a good job, this might have been okay but quite a few of the kids there couldn't give a shit.

The simply ridiculous bollocks we had to attempt to learn!

I never excelled at maths and struggled with more basic numbers so instead of covering this (which is useful in life such as money division multiplication etc) they taught us equations

Also, stupid maths questions in exams 'queenie has 17 apples and 49 oranges, Donald and Rupert each wanted 49 oranges so Donald beat the shit out of Rupert over the fruits, how many teeth did Rupert have left'- just ask the fucking maths question and don't baffle me with ridiculous backstories.

I hated maths.

Another one here who, aged 5, was put into a class of 7 year olds. Misery!

Warm/frozen school milk. Yuck!

Swimming in an outdoor pool in freezing temperatures.

School hats. Navy velour pudding basins. Ridiculous.

School dinners. Meat and two veg which would have been OK, except I was brought up as a veggie and they weren’t a thing in the 50s/60s.

Nora Nit Nurse - she was sooo rough!

Learning times tables by rote. But with hindsight it was a really good way of learning them

But on the whole I loved school, particularly grammar school.

Mixed ability sets in English. They managed to set for maths, science, and MFL, so why not English too? It drove most of us up the wall because nobody was benefiting from it.

Small town attitudes to bullying.

Really shoddy food, and the fact that if you were FSM everyone knew because you had to go line up to see a specific lunchtime supervisor and pick up your ticket, then go back to the lunch queue with it. Nice.

For 4 years of middle school it was annoying that none of the teachers could tell me apart from this other girl in my year who was my doppelgänger.

At primary school, the dinner lady who clearly hated children, particularly me, and was responsible for some of the greatest miscarriages of playground justice ever that I'm still bitter and twisted over. At secondary school, communal showers after PE. And the PE beforehand, come to think of it.

Teacher wrote forrest on the board, and bollocked me when I corrected her and insisted she was right.

ParadiseCity

Gump?

Boys being excused for bullying me because they were 'bright'

Group work
PE lessons - awful teachers who humiliated you and being forced to do netball
At primary school, being made to read every book in the reading scheme in order despite being very good at reading and bored to tears (bloody Tim and Tobias books!)
Being sat next to disruptive boys so they'd supposedly behave when what they actually did was picked on me

At my school none of the girls ever showered after PE. There were communal showers there but never once in five years did I see them used (or even looking like they’d been used some time in that five years!). I used to wear my pe t shirt under my shirt as well. God we must’ve stunk!

Boys spraying lynx constantly

Coursework, I hated having to redo it over and over, I would still rather sit an exam than do coursework

Boy girl seating plans, except in my German class where there weren’t enough boys and me and my best friend were both at the end of the alphabet so got to sit together. In general though utterly pointless for about Year 9 onwards when girls and boys have stopped finding each other gross. And as a well behaved girl I very much resented having to be a good influence on a badly behaved boy.

My class got banned from doing science practicals for a year because someone stole a timer. We didn’t do many practicals in the other years either. My science teacher fatger tells me about experiments “you must’ve done it!” And I remind him the most exciting thing we did was dissect potato.

Mixed ability teaching. I hated it then and I still think it’s a terrible idea now. My favourite lessons were maths in year 7 and 8 when we were properly set. But the rest of the time even maths sets were a farce and the school was vehemently mixed ability for everything else. I got very sick of having to wait for others to catch up and having people mess around constantly. I still firmly believe it’s a terrible idea. The high achievers coast and get bored and disengage, low achievers struggle and get bored and disengage and mid level achievers are ignored, get bored and disengage.

Everything about PE in the 1980's ( I actually found out imy quite sPortugal in my 20's). Having to stand up when a teacher came in the room. Shit standards in teaching. Being told what to do in general.

Ha ha! Gym knickers! Awful things!

I went to an all girls grammar school. My pe teacher taught us Country Dancing so that we would know what to do if our husbands were promoted and took us to fancy dinners. I. SHIT. YOU. NOT!
Feeling thick because you were in the bottom set of maths, French and science. When my dad asked why I was doing so badly in chemistry I told him that I hated the room - think dark, stuffy science lab with long wooden benches and he thought I was being ridiculous! Fast forward 30 years and as a teacher the first thing we have to is create a positive environment for students.

I fucking hated school!

Oh and yes the shirt tucking police

I was a clever, well behaved girl so I usually got away with it but it was so annoying being told to tuck it in (and as a short dumpy girl with big boobs it looked worse tucked in than it did loose!)

Having to ask before removing my jumper if I was hot. There were a few sadist teachers who would say no. It was fucking torture and fucking pointless.

The showers
Netball
Having to wear a navy coat so we wouldn't 'be mistaken for pupils from the comp'
Bright boys getting away with hell
Having to wear a skirt in winter