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?!

A male friend of mine went to a school run by Jesuit priests. The PE teacher was a priest - when my friend started there aged 11, the whole class were told they couldn't wear underwear under their PE shorts. He wouldn't believe them, so at the start of every lesson, they had to stand with their shorts held out so that the priest could look down them.

Problem for the priest though, was when they did the same automatically for the teacher the next year. Having said that, the first teacher carried on teaching so presumably he was just told off rather than thrown out on his arse.

After Thomas Hamilton murdered the children and their teacher at Dunblane, it came out that he used to do this thing with the shorts to the boys who came to his scouting events (not scouts, but similar.)

One teacher threw a pupils bag out of the second floor window as the pupil had used a school dictionary as a bat and the ball had previously gone that way.

Teacher simply said 'I'll treat your property as you treat mine'.

I remember the period register! Made sure you didn't try to get out of swimming more than once a month

And naked U shaped showers with the teacher waiting at the end with the towels. I was quite a hairy teenager and I HATED it.

Religious studies teacher [Basil] fondled everyone's bottoms. All the parents thought he was harmless as he taught RS . I hated going up to his desk and having to go through his fondling.

When we were being tested on our times tables, the teacher used to pull a hair out of our heads as he asked the question. Apparently it was meant to help us learn!

Infants teacher tied boys onto their chairs with skipping ropes frequently!
Secondary graphics teacher made anyone who talked in er class run around school block. If you were too fast or slow, do it again (some missed whole lessons running)

2 teachers managed to video themselves having sex on gym bars with ties as manacles... 8 years later the video emerged during a year 9 media project. Think it made the sun. This was at the boys school tho.

My English male teacher ran off with the drama teacher's HUSBAND!
Other drama teacher pounced fags off us in 6th form and bought us booze in pub.

Another one who remembers chalk and blackboard rubbers being thrown and metre rules slammed on to desks.

In Primary one teacher used to dangle boys upside down by their feet if they misbehaved.

In Secondary one particularly mouthy boy was picked up and slammed against the wall by a teacher, mind you given that the alternative was being sent for the cane I don't think he was as bothered as you might expect.

Form teacher who learned that a boy had a flick-knife. Map of the world at one end of the room. Teacher at the other end said "Birmingham", threw the knife, into Birmingham. "When you think you can do that prove it and I might give it back".

This was a boys' school: one instant hero to us all (age 14/15) including the boy with the knife.

Had mad French teacher in middle school who stood miscreants in the bin. And an odd RE teacher who, among other things, used to tease and provoke a girl who was frankly, extremely sexy (not in an obvious way, but she had a certain something). It wasn't for years that a friend pointed out to me that he clearly fancied her and enjoyed making her squirm. He used to have a running debate with another friend that the earth was flat (I think he was probably using it as a tool to get us to argue properly) which made for an interesting counterpoint to our RE studies!

Then there was the nutjob physics teacher who scheduled his hour-long classes to the very minute - so he'd draw up a timetable on the board, dividing the period into 3 minute segments, and have buzz-sessions every quarter of an hour. He'd clearly been to a really trite teaching workshop. We could derail the entire intricate structure by getting him to reminisce about his time as an ambulance driver, and his voluntary fire-fighting work. Loads of blood and gore.

I had a swimming teacher (not a school teacher but someone employed by the pool) whose job it was to get all us non-swimmers swimming and into the proper pool upstairs. His technique was basically to terrify you into learning. He'd yank some poor 6 yo out of the water by their leg and hold them upside-down by the ankle, their head a few cm above the water. Ogre.

And there was one who went to prison. Not the usual. This was a woman. Having been banned for drunken driving (before the days of the breathalyser, and you got a trial by jury of twelve sympathetic motorists, you had to be sloshed silly to be convicted) she was stopped driving, still banned, and drunk again. Six months. Good teacher too.

this is a fabulous thread, it ought to go in Classics.

My english teacher had a sex change and continued to teach at the school. (This was Berkeley in the 70's)

These are funny, well I can remember a primary school teacher in the 80s shaking a boy hard by the shoulders when he was talking in class.

I had a french teacher who called all the pupils 'idiots'

I can remember some of this sort of stuff from school but also plenty from when i started teaching (about 20 years ago)
The head sent a boy onto the roof to litter pick as a punishment, he fell through a sky light into the staff room where we were eating our lunch.
On a fieldtrip we convinced the kids that the use of coaches was prohibited for any activities that were part of their course work, we had them practising marching round the car park of the youth hostel loaded up with all the equipment we needed for the day, while the coach waited round the corner!
Not sure how much more i should say for fear of outing myself but the kids at this place could tell loads of stories about what happened before my time including a member of staff who was regularly locked in a cupboard by his class.

At Primary, being seated in class according to how well you did in weekly tests, with brightest on row 2 on teachers right, moving to the less able towards the left with the official "dunces table" at the front of the class. Sadly same 6 children always sat at the dunces table...poor poor sods.

I also remember the swimming period register, and the cane. I can remember going into the head's smoke filled office for an interview and commenting on the dried blood that was on his table edge. He proudly said that was from the canings.

I also remember the naked showers, the humiliation of pe knickers and the brutal (yet now funny) comments on my report cards..such as "would do better if she ever came to class" and "lazy". Still, I can't help but feel that the pc versions of reports we get today have something to learn from the blunt but honest reports I used to try to hide from my parents!

Despite all that, they truly were the best days of my life!

One geography teacher who had recently "accepted Jesus as his lord and saviour". He'd talk a lot about god and sin and very little about geography at all. If you weren't into doing the geography bit all you had to do was ask a question about god, which would set him off on a speech lasting the whole double lesson.

Very short, obese butch lesbiab English teacher who used to swear like a sailor. I have never heard anyone with such shockingly bad language. Great teacher, though, we all loved her.

Sister Mary Bernadette used to take people's shoes away if they were naughty so they could 'walk as a penitent' in just socks all day.

Dr B the biology teacher put a Bunsen tube down a sheep's trachea on the day of heart and lung dissection and blew up the lungs, sending a fine spray of blood over the front row.

Predatory Lesbian teachers
Miss PE who regularly stole the towels after the shower sprint
Miss English and Miss History who shacked up together and let the whole of the 6th form round to their flat for a piss up
Miss Biology who came to the 6th form common room piss ups regularly
Miss History who was as old as the Egyptian Mummies she loved
Mrs Art who only gave good marks to people who copied her style
Mr RE who had an affair with a 5th former

then again we did put clingfilm TIGHTLY over the male teachers toilet on April fools - wet trouser legs all round ....

Maths teacher who would regularly decamp lessons to the pub ...

I had a teacher, a woman who was in her late 50s I would guess who would sit me at the front during the stories so that I could stroke her feet at the time it seemed normal now i think WTF. Also why did I spend my early childhood with a strange attachment to a middle aged womans feet

I had a geography teacher who used to climb up the blackboard to demonstrate the national grid, even though she was at least sixty. And I worked with a teacher once who had a very large shiny bald head, which a boy on his class once drew on ( and when remonstrated with said "but I wasnt the only one"

I went to school from the early 80s onwards.

At primary...
I remember being smacked by one teacher for eating an orange in her classroom one lunchtime. It was banned as she didn't like the smell.

If children were really naughty, they were pulled up in assembly before the whole school, had their trousers pulled down and their bottoms smacked. In front of everyone.

At Secondary...
We had one really odd science teacher who was colour blind and totally eccentric. He had the top boy and girl in his class who was his 'cherubim', and then he had the children in his class who he didn't like and they were his 'whipping boys'. If anyone misbehaved, the whipping boys got the punishment. If you were naughty, you could get demoted to being a whipping boy and then have to suffer the punishment for everyone else's naughtiness. Further, when he did punish the whipping boys, he used to hit you on the head with a spatula. But if you put your hand on your head to protect it, he would whack you in the stomach instead.
I was never in his class, but for some strange reason we all wanted to be.

We had an English teacher who would tie a particular girl to her chair by her long plaits. Just plain bullying, but none of use spoke up, glad it wasn't us

Boys were regularly assaulted, heads slammed into radiators and blackboards. My SBs were boarders from the age of 7 and were repeatedly raped by masters and senior choristors for years. Not sure you could get away with that now :(

LOL vikingblood
We had a physics teacher who'd jump up on the desk at the front brandishing a wooden metre rule like a conductor's baton and get us going " F - F - F - F - physics is fun" in a kind of auditory mexican wave around the classroom.

Children being taken swimming in the local river, complete with rapids slides.
Teachers taking their dogs to school, and children walking them at break times.
Removing frogs from the indoor pool before swimming lessons.
Camp fires in the school field.
'Lazy' afternoons, where lessons were cancelled and as long as you kept out of sight and out of hearing you could do whatever you wanted.