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

• Teachers who couldn't admit they were wrong

• Time wasting assemblies, e.g. the one where the deputy head showed us her blurry holiday snaps

• Pointless rules

• Home ec and textiles - I am not here to learn how to cook or sew... I'll get a husband for that

• PE - enough said

• Bad teaching - writing notes on the board for the class to copy is not teaching

Lloydcole, we also did country dancing in PE. It was quite a giggle though.

PE - the athletics knickers (while boys wore shorts or trackie bottoms) and hockey skirts, the complete focus on competitive sport rather than (and at the expense of therefore in many cases) fitness and enjoyment, the showers (borderline abusive behaviour by teachers...if anyone ever treated my DD like that I would report).

Uniform - not in itself but the pointless nit picky stupid rules re top buttons, no jumpers without blazers, no heels over 2 inches, no socks above fourth year, no make up, no hair dye. I look back and Just still think - what the fuck? Who cares?! What a waste of time and energy getting het up about it all!

Homework - I think it’s a weird concept still tbh although accept from 13/14 on it has a place...but even then anount always seemed punitive, like putting in hours for the sake of it.

Terrible, terrible food. Just that really. No idea why it is so hard for schools to do better on this.

R.E. - more like religious indoctrination - Christian agenda, Christian teachers (seemingly unable to contemplate alternative beliefs and frankly judgemental unintelligent arseholes...) - so backwards.

Another down vote for gym knickers.

Being forced to eat broad beans (at infant school)

Being weighed and measured in front of the whole class with results being plotted on a graph on the wall of the classroom (I was a very tall and sturdy child)

Being referred to by staff and pupils as Big Dolly because there were two Dollys in the class.

PE in underwear at primary school.

Awful films warning of the horrors of VD (as they were known in those days!)

Summer dresses (at private school) in vile blue Paisley pyjama print, A-line with huge collars. To be worn with white knee socks and brown sandals.

This may sound stupid but even now as a teacher I hate many of the things mentioned on here (and aim to not subject students to the very things I hated as a kid).

I had a colleague who would insist they were never wrong and have a go at any poor soul who'd challenge them. I never get that. We all make mistakes. Own thrm and move on. (Unless of course it's five hundred million ones on basic subject knowledge in which case the students will resent being in your class and you're letting them down so sort it out please).

Having to sit cross legged on the floor. I'm fine with sitting on the floor but crossed legs is really uncomfortable after a while.

The 5th years that smoked on top of the bus and never got caught.

My Humanities teacher. Killed geography and history dead in their tracks.

When I was into cross country running and wanted to do it in the winter games, but there wasn't a girls team so they let me run in the boys: I won but because I was a girl they gave my points to the boy who came second and wouldn't put my name on the winners list.

I envy all of you who were made to have showers after PE. I went to a primary school where showering after PE was a given, and was disgusted when I got to secondary school and found that NO ONE SHOWERED. We were given a total of 5 minutes to get changed back into uniform, pack up our stuff, and make our way to the next class, which was up to 3 minutes' walk from the changing rooms. No teacher ever mentioned showering, no student ever did it, and it was just revolting. I can still remember the smell.

My biggest peeve is that, from the second I hit year 9, school stopped being about learning and was about passing exams instead. Completely takes the pleasure out of it and I imagine it's even worse for the ones that know they haven't got a hope in hell of passing many of them....

In middle school - uniform, hundreds of petty rules about which years were allowed where and when. Discrepancy between girls and boys sports offerings. Drama teacher who treated the school like a casting agency for her productions. R.E. teacher who was more concerned with converting us into Christians than teaching any actual RE. Headteacher who was drunk at school on several occasions that I noticed. Free school meals kids being made to sit on a table separate from the rest of the students. Felt like we learnt very little.

In high school there was a lot of sexism in the craft and technology department. Quite a few of our science teachers weren’t properly qualified (nor our language teachers and I suspect the humanities were a bit fudged). Staff room absolutely stank of smoke and that spread into the rest of the school. There was little to no extension work for bright kids (but it got a relatively high percentage of working class kids into Russell group unis, so that complaint may be unreasonable). There was a lot of sexual abuse of students by staff (in the guise of consensual relationships). But my high school also had a lot going for it and overall I was really well served by it.

If you got free school meals you could collect a ticket(same as those purchased by others) but you had to stand in a queue each morning break so everyone knew what you were there for.I didn't collect .
Communal showers.

sproglet teachers are expected to use 'hands down questioning' otherwise the same students answer all the questions and we can't prove to ofsted that all children are making progress. I always warn my classes that I'm about to do this, so they should be extra-prepared.

Just remembered:

The terror of going to the loo at school in Year 7 - there'd be older students smoking, waiting around to pick on people, people who would use their locker key to slide open the lock on the door while you were in a cubicle...

And 'Home Ec' in the 90s. Wished I'd learned how to cook properly rather than 'design a sandwich'/'design a pizza'/rock cakes/'design a cooked chilled product'

School dinners, it took me ages to like shepherd's pie and mashed potato after those "delights" they served at school.

The headteacher who allowed one of the boys who had been fighting over me to join me at Spanish lessons at the neighbouring school. It was clear after one lesson that he didn't speak a word of Spanish and killed all interest for me.

Being made to go swimming. And if you genuinely had your period or were pretending to and wanted to get off PE, you had to go into the PE teachers' office (smoking den) and be aggressively questioned about its intricacies by a vile bitch in front of the two male PE teachers.

PE kit- out in a hard frozen field in an artex t-shirt, games skirt and games knickers. We were graciously allowed to wear the thin school jumper on top
(Last week I had a great run in the snow in two pairs of thermal leggings, 3 long sleeved tops, two buffs for my neck and head, gloves and a cap)

The gum collection under desks, particularly when it got onto clothes.

Blazers. No thermal properties. Restrictive. I still hate wearing suit jackets.

The One Way System. The school had massively expanded over time so had a One Way System to manage many of the crowded corridors at lesson change. Yes it was there for good reason, but very frustrating to have to do a lap of the school instead of going a few metres up the corridor. I can remember being late in y7 because of struggling to get from A to B in a small window of time. I've not known one in the many schools I've worked in.

My secondary years were dominated by building work, blocks being rebuilt and portacabins of a multitude of ages... they spent the 90s trying to make it structurally sound bit by bit then got the lot razed and rebuilt in the 2000s. Only a couple of the most recent blocks remain. All that money and disruption for such a short life!

Smokey toilets, that is something that is much better these days!

Team Games. Licensed bullying.

PE and maths

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 hmm

Equations are very useful. there's lots of times when you're trying to calculate something in real life but it's all presented "backwards" and being able to manipulate it confidently makes life much easier.

just ask the fucking maths question and don't baffle me with ridiculous backstories. Another useful skill, being able to pick out from masses of info that there's quite a simple sum in there.

We're really bad as a nation dealing with numerical information, especially such things as risk (Should I give up eating X because it's linked to cancer, although it's also linked to a reduction in heart disease?) or the validity of survey results. We're doing everyone a disservice by not being able to teach it better.

A new one to add to all the PE grumbles.....

In my 5th year (would be Y11 in today's money) out PE teachers decided we should learn how to do "proper" dancing. We had mixed lessons in the gym - boys sat on one side, girls on the other. The teachers would demonstrate the dance - waltz, quick step or whatever and then we had to pair off to do it for ourselves. Except pairing off had also to be done "properly" with the boys crossing the gym to one of the girls and saying "May I have the pleasure of this dance?"

Think that sounds nice? Think again. It just resulted in a mad rush to be the first to ask a popular girl (and a girl when asked was not allowed to refuse!) Gradually the other girls would be asked and ultimately the male PE teacher would march the remaining boys in an arm lock across the gym to ask one of the plainer girls who had to sit there and look as if they didn't give a damn that they were only being asked under duress :-(

Seriously I remember one break considering how far I would have to fall down the stairs to hurt myself enough not to do PE but not badly enough to mess up my O levels.

Pervert teachers in communal showers, which was the same for everyone at school in the seventies (worse for girls, apparently). The continuous bullying that schools simply ignored, despite suicides. Teachers with zero experience of life outside full-time education passing judgement on pupils' career choices and/or making ludicrous suggestions of paths to be followed, along with utterly stupid assertions about academic requirements ("You need Latin to study medicine", etc.).

Not much of this seems to have changed in the intervening 40 years, except for the shower thing (I think). I deal a lot with sixth-formers who have been told things by their schools about academic requirements for university courses that are downright wrong, despite being easily checked.

Having to have naked showers after PE. Made worse by the fact that someone of a different religion was allowed to wear a swimming costume and the rest of us couldn't! How fucked up was that?! This was about 35 years ago mind.