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

God, all of it. It was like having to attend a fucking zoo on a daily basis. A zoo with crap keepers who put different species in each others' pens and then sat back to watch the carnage. It was a posh grammar school too. FFS.

I have to agree with MereDintofPandiculation. You're never really going to encounter a situation in real life where someone tells you to multiply one number by another, but you're pretty likely to encounter situations where you have to work out that's what you need to do.

Corporal punishment.

I remember very little of my school days which is not surprising since I was a child of the 1940s/50s.

I do remember at Infants School being forced to drink milk which had sat in the sun for most of the morning and had therefore warmed up. I tried explaining I didn't drink milk at home but the teacher didn't want to know and it took me projectile vomitting two or three times to convince her it wasn't a good idea.

Good thing at Infants was after lunch camp beds and blankets were laid out in the classroom and we all had a post lunch sleep

Bad thing at secondary school was not very good teachers and a headmaster who roamed the school swishing a cane in front of him looking for the slightest misdemeanour by any poor child in his path.

Total lack of sex education - we were shown an extremely grainy film on one occasion in the Nissan Hut in the playground which if I recall talked about amoebas. None of us were any the wiser after watching it.

So incredibly boring-
All the homework that no one wanted to do, and that no one wanted to mark... what a terrible waste of time and spirit-

The naughty kids getting trips out and rewards and the good kids having to help tidy up etc... unfairness

School set a sewing challenge and I adored sewing. We had to dress a doll in a hand sewn 18th century costume.

I sewed that dratted costume for weeks. It was very good for a 12 year old.
My friend also entered, she was a only child who usually had everything done for her, always had.

She won the challenge, I came close second.

I knew her mother had given her a lot of help. It was obvious as my friend didn't sew and the dress was perfect and cleverly cut. Her Mum sewed well as she made her clothes and clearly (in my mind) thought she'd help with the homework.

It still infuriates me. The teacher didn't want to know that I'd worked on it for weeks by myself.

Oh the unfairness! It still annoys me.

The PE knickers with tight elastic annoyed me too.

Everything.

Especially the hideous uniform that got me regularly taunted on the bus, pointless homework (I genuinely enjoyed learning, but not make-work), gym knickers with tiny knicker-revealing skirts (but woe betide anyone whose uniform skirt showed a glimpse of knee), assorted petty rules, and assemblies for the sole purpose of being shouted at.

Agree with the people who mentioned humiliating FSM procedures. I just stopped eating lunch altogether and told friends I didn't get hungry during the day.

The whole experience made me skip school as often as possible and leave altogether as soon as I could. I'm doing an MA now, decades later, but it's despite, not because of, educational experiences in my teens.

While doing my PGCE I moved back home and worked in a local restaurant. I served two of my ex teachers who were still there. I didn’t give too much away but alluded to not really enjoying school that much. The teachers admitted that some of the other teachers were “pretty scary!”

School Dinners

That certain staircases were off limits to lower years. My private school was converted from an old country mansion and you could only use the ornate staircase in the formal entrance hallway if you were a teacher or 6th former.

Lower years all had to use the same two narrow old back servants staircases ... which meant that during lesson changes you had 150 odd students trying to fight their way up or down to their next class using two narrow staircases while a maximum of 30 people used the wide staircase. This was even more infuriating when one lesson was in a classroom just off the top of the main stairs and your next class was in a room just at the bottom of the stairs but instead of just zippjng down the staircase you had to detour through the entire building, fight your way past 100 other students to then turn up at your next class and be screamed at for being late when the teacher saw you come out of your previous class on time

melj we had the 2 staircase thing going on at my (private ) school! The "posh" stairs were really slippery too, through lack of use.

The wierd liver meat which had rubber band type things in it (what was that? I'll never forget that). And the pink cake for pudding. And being told to eat everything on my plate because of 'the starving children in Ethiopia.'

Oh, and Hymns from that blue little book? 'Morning has broken' anyone?!!

Oh my gosh, and at senior school being weighed every term in front of everyone?? In my gym nickers? ... trauma!