Weird things your teachers did, which they would be fired for today.....

[muriel76]

Bit of a random question, but I was chatting with an old school friend the other day and we were remembering our teacher at primary school having a new bathroom fitted and she wanted to check how the workmen were doing.

The whole class was told to 'line up at the door' and off we marched down the road to her house, with teacher leading the way (small town BTW she lived near the school!) but no other adults in sight.

We then all sat in her back garden while she chatted to the plumber!

Ok this was back in the 80s but it made me think - you would never get away with this today.

Anyone else got a similar story from before the days of the national curriculum and parental consent forms etc?!

so many!
my geography teacher slapped a boy full in the face
one french teacher used to regularly throw keys or board dusters at us
a supply teacher at our primary school used to make the boys sit on her lap and chutch their cheeks (they hated it) - the same teacher also used to spank pupils which I'm sure was not allowed in the 80s

when my mum was a supply teacher she got so mad she ripped up a boys sticker album - I'll bet you'd get into a lot of trouble these days for that

My ballet teacher was a chain smoker and would smoke the whole way through our class.

My Afrikaans teacher used to take us to her house and feed us cake during the lesson. I loved her - it was the first time my mark ever went above a C in Afrikaans.

Maths teacher used to throw tennis balls at us and the ceiling fan if he was bored.

On one school trip (teachers and parents driving us there), there was limited space in the car so they put a couple of children in the boot

Our male primary teacher made us all get changed for PE in the classroom, in front of him (although the boys got sent out...). We were 11 - he had 3 DDs around our age that he talked about a lot, and so I think considered it ok.

The same teacher took us to a building site nearby for a housing project we were doing. We had no hard hats, nothing, and just wandered round the half-built house chatting to builders who WERE wearing safety gear!

my primary 5 teacher used to send me and my pal out with her grocery shopping list and money. we'd head into the local village (about 1 mile walk( and get her weekly shop.

my latin teacher used to spit on a ruler and flick it at us if we got an answer wrong

Carebear - Did you grow up in Oxfordshire by any chance? I had a teacher a lot like your cricket teacher.

We had loads at our secondary school -

• The maths teacher who didn't know any maths and would frequently write things up on the board that were just wrong then sit at the back of the class with the boys telling sex jokes whilst the rest of us had tuition from another student.
• The art teacher who had an affair with a 6th former. He was sacked when it all came out. He had two daughters in the school at the time - I felt awful for them.
• The science teacher who used to let people smoke behind her class if she could join them.
• and the worst one was a substitute history teacher. I was big chested and couldn't get any uniform that properly fit from anywhere, my pen ran out one lesson and a boy threw a new one across the class to me. I bungled the catch and it went straight down my top. Embarrassing but funny until the teacher insisted that this boy come and fish it out himself.

Primary 4 teacher chucked a wooden blackboard pointer at my friend. It stoated off her head and it snapped (I mean the pointer snapped, not my friend's head).

PE teacher snogged my 16yr old mate in the ski-store cupboard (and probably would be fired for that nowadays).

We had a lovely ice slide down the hill next to the school house: the younger teachers used to be out there every break down sliding down it. Mind you, this was Sweden, so they're probably still at it: last time I checked the Elf hadn't made it that far north.

We had a mental latin teacher who was about 7ft tall and had long hair and a beard (think lanky Jesus). He had a large rope hangman's noose and when you got a word wrong or something he would make you stand on a chair with the noose round your neck, tie it up to the girder in the centre of the hut ( it was the 80's) and then he would threaten to kick the chair away. We all thought it was hilarious. He also had a selection of enormous ancient hardback Latin dictionaries in the store which he would drop from a great height on to the top of your head.
He was a good teacher mind but scary as fuck.

At primary school we had a teacher who was renowned for giving "The Bin Treatment" which basically entailed emptying the bin over whoever was driving her up the wall. She also once taped someone to the chair for messing about. She was legendary back in the day. Mad looking back on it.

I'm www.mumsnet.com/te/5.gif at Paddypoopants's story about the noose. Boy, did that have the potential to go wrong.

Spot the person who hasn't worked out how to use emoticons!

Y6 (1980s), teacher decided she was going to teach the whole year in French, as you do. I knew no French at all, but not only did we have no textbook to help me learn any (you had to copy overheads and draw the English translation as you weren't allowed to write any English words down), but you weren't allowed to say anything in English.
Result was every single day I got chucked out of the class to see the Head - who told me to go read in the library until lunchtime and then pretend it never happened. Just as well I was only there a year as I'd just about finished the library!

Same teacher would regularly tear up my homework as my parents refused to sign my homework diary, and then give me detention (more library) for 'not doing it myself'...

Previously - PE teachers who didn't allow you to wear the expensive games skirt that was part of the uniform until Y6, by which time you'd outgrown a couple of unworn ones. And who thought 'you fucking spazz' was an acceptable term for anyone crap at netball.

The music teacher who would strap your fingers to your recorder with an elastic band if you didn't get the notes right, or failing that thwap your fingers down with her baton as she conducted.

Various sticking misbehaving pupils to chairs with sellotape - this generally only happened to two really nasty kids so we all thought it was a great idea! And from age 7, being sent to the nearest shop (about 5 min walk across a busy road) to buy fags for the teacher and chocolate for the class. Again we thought this was great.

At primary school.... Class 2 so would have been 6-7... so that's approx 1984. Our female teacher used to make us strip COMPLETELY NAKED not even underwear allowed on and run 2 circuits of the school field to dry off after swimming in the outdoor pool.

The whole school could see you, and everyone dreaded getting to that class.

Thinking back I'm sure the noose wasn't attached properly - but we were 11 and he seemed mad enough to do anything.

Nothing compared to lots of these, but a couple of minor things that I still remember or have been dredged up.

I was in my final year of high school and taking PE, which was optional for your final year. What I was doing there rather than have a spare (ie a 90 minute break every day for half the year) I don't really know. It was co-ed for this class and the idea was to learn "Life" sports, things you could play for all your life. This included golf, at which I was rubbish. The teacher was male, well into his 50s and just shorter than me with a big graying ginger beard. He came up behind me, wrapped his arms around mine on the golf club like a stealth hug in an attempt to show me how to do a proper golf swing. All the guys in the class were sniggering and ended up howling as he kept it up, especially with remarks of, "Hold the shaft tighter!". I was mortified. Although I understood the innuendo with the whole thing, I honestly think he was just trying to teach me a proper swing and had no thought of how it must look to the rest of the class. He was a bit barmy from having fallen off a cliff about 5 years earlier when out orienteering with another class. He survived the fall of 7 stories and I think he either went a bit la-la sometimes.

Funnily enough, his wife taught me math in junior high school. I was sat right behind the class troublemaker, probably in an attempt to be a good influence on him. This meant that I occasionally had to duck and dive as she threw chalk at him for talking.

Other than that, I think the rest of my school years involved teachers whose craziness wasn't obvious enough to me to remember!

Third year juniors had an evil teacher who just beat us all regularly. She was one of these two-faced witches who was lovely to your mum but a complete twat to all the kids.
On one memorable day I had a very bad cold, temperature, shaking, the full works, and she cracked my hands with a ruler until they bled

We had a couple of teachers who had affairs with fifth and sixth formers, though I didn't find out the extent of it until long afterwards. They kept their jobs of course.

We also had one teacher in particular who was quite violent - would really whack a boy (not the girls, though) if he got something wrong in class.

Also a teacher who used to come out with the most disgusting innuendo all the time, and would leer at the girls. Horrible.

Most of the stuff people describe on here would get teachers sacked nowadays. I think teachers today are much better than they used to be years ago (or at least you get fewer crap ones), even if schools in other ways have got worse.

I had to do the naked shower walk as recently as 1996 and they had a 'period register' too, even into the 2000s!

I am absolutely amazed and appalled that people have been made to shower naked in school!

jefraggle, you are young, aren't you!

Oh yes, the period register.

I'm 29

Late 80's my primary school teacher threw a book at my head. He also dragged a girl out of the class by her hair. She was 8 or 9 (same as dd1) as a child I didn't think of it as that shocking but now as a mother

Primary - had a teacher who used to chase the boys around the class to get to them so she could belt them. They used to push desks over and throw chairs into her path to keep her from catching them. She couldn't control the class at all. And we had her for 2 years! This was the 70s and we did very little work those 2 years.

Secondary - where to begin? A mad French teacher with a full length broom handle that he'd throw at you if you stepped out of line - this was after the belt was banned.
An alcoholic English teacher who suddenly disappeared from school and never came back.
A PE teacher who slept with several girls throughout his teaching years. And we all knew about it, we even knew who was his 'girlfriend' at any particular time cos she would be the girl babysitting for him and his wife. This became public about 10 years after id left school when one of his fav boy pupils confronted him about it at a party. His wife (who was there) was devastated and he got a serious punch in the face from the boy who couldn't believe his wonderful teacher could have done such a thing.
A maths teacher during the teacher strikes in the 80s who taught no maths instead opting to tell us all about the reasons for the strikes at great length.
A geography teacher who thought herself quite gorgeous and got off on sitting on a desk with ther feet on a chair and her legs open, wearing a skirt. There was many a boy took geography to olevel just to get her as a teacher.
There were so many more nutty teachers at my school that I could go on for hours about them. But I guess that was the 70s and 80s for you.

I started secondary school in 1992 and changed schools in 1994, neither school even offered post-PE showers never mind naked showers.

In my first year of secondary school we did a science module on human reproduction, purely the mechanics and biology of it rather than emotions, etc. The teacher made the mistake of telling us we could ask any questions we wanted. One girl took it on herself to ask everything, looking back I worry about where she was getting her information from. The teacher answered her questions honestly using scientific terms but would most definitely be sacked these days for telling thirty 11 year olds about such subjects as rimming, swinging, anal sex, and various other practices I've never heard of before or since.

I once had a teacher with narcolepsy which made for some interesting lessons.

A student teacher at my primary school was on her first day of her first placement and had absolutely no control over the more unruly children in the class. Our class teacher decided that the best way to remedy this was to send her into another room with them and leave her alone to sink or swim. The children all hid while she was out of the room making her believe they'd wandered off and gotten lost. She never came back for her second day. Very supportive of our class teacher.