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?!

Oh and I thought of another one - a friend was in hospital and one of the teachers took 6 of us to visit her at lunctime to cheer her up - this meant 2 of us sitting in the boot of her car as there weren't enought seats!!!

at the lucky red thighs

just remembered. 12 of us went 150 miles to the Lake District in an science teachers old black cab, luggage for a week as well. one of us was a tiny tiny girl and we joked that if she had been an ordinary size we couldn't have got the doors shut.

Hitting.
Smoking.
Sometimes telling the class to put their heads on their desks and go to sleep.

Not a teacher as such, but still in a position of control and responsibility.
On a Brownie trip to London in the early 80's I recall Brown Owl checking that no girl was wearing panties under their nightie. Hygeine thing apparently. I do not remember how she checked. I only know she did.
How odd.

We walked round to Brown Owls house in a crocodile- it was a long way - and earnt various badges by polishing her silver, weeding her garden and washing her dog. We rather enjoyed it, especially the lucky dog-washers, but my mother was furious.

Geography teacher, c1961, would saunter in wearing tracksuit and brothel creepers, hop on a desk facing the class, sit cross-legged and light a cigarette before he started droning on about capitals and cash crops. I don't know how many he smoked, or what else he droned about, because I rarely made the end of the lesson without being thrown out.

The stools in the physics lab had little cut-outs in the centre of the seats. Physics master would stand behind the boys and wiggle his finger through the hole. Never the girls, thank goodness.

Languages teacher, c1965, was supposed to be teaching us Russian, but would witter on for ever about her travels, where she'd been and what she'd eaten and drunk there. Once she lost it and started demanding proof that we knew our catechisms. She told us to read A Clockwork Orange, because it would help us with our Russian.

A young male languages teacher started seeing a fifth-form girl. She left school, with no exams, and they got married on her 16th birthday. They had been married for about ten years, and had had a few children, when a fifth-form girl caught his eye...

In one of my primary schools we had this nasty little girl who would always be making the rest of the class cry by pinching them etc. Our class teacher got so fed up with telling her off that one day she made her stand on her desk and told her to stamp & shout & make as much noise as possible. The teacher then left the room. Of course moments later the head heard all the commotion and comes storming in, sees the girl "misbehaving" and gives her a right telling-off - inspired! :o

In yr 4 primary (diff school) a boy punched me in the stomach. My teacher grabbed him, threw him over his knee and threatened to spank him with a plank of wood while we stood round them watching (mid-80's) He didn't do it of course as he was a good bloke. Still in my all-time top 3 teachers.

Primary school:

In year 2, we had a TA who would shove children's hands up her top to warm them up. They wouldn't get a choice in the matter, she would just do it. I don't think it was indicative of anything other than her general weirdness. She was also the helper with the school netball team and would make vindictive comments about some students. She once told a friend of mine that she was so terrible, she didn't want her on the team. Did wonders for her future love of sport, as you can imagine.

Same school, same year actually, we have a lovely class teacher who I honestly couldn't say a bad word about. The children used to compete in the class to give her back rubs though, which I'm sure would be seen as completely dodgy now, but was just one of those things back then. She is dead now, but I really loved her.

Secondary school:

We had an interesting maths teacher who everyone, without exception, feared and respected in equal measure. The police were called because he appeared to manhandle a student a bit too much (he didn't, he made it look like that though, to encourage the nosey neighbour across the road to make himself look stupid by calling police, genius!) and if you didn't pay attention in his class, he would throw all your belongings out of the window. You'd know how bad a class it had been by how much stuff was on the ground outside the window!

Had an alcoholic music teacher who kept his job even after dancing across the desks in one lesson and talking to us about his sex life. He was weird. I think he may have ended up in prison.

Also had a vile female PE teacher who picked on students at her will. Being a tad overweight as a student, I was one of her favourite victims. She would bully me and speak to me with menace dripping from her mouth. My mum formally complained about her twice and she got away with it. She was finally sacked for mistreating a student a few years after I left. She fought it, but she was never reinstated.

My science teacher reached over the bunsan burner regularly and caught fire to his tie. lol

a reply teacher brought he cat to school and kept it in the piano in music department in high school the classroom stank of cat piss and sweat.

We had a PE teacher who constantly fiddled with himself. He's now the Headmaster.

On a WW1 school trip to the cemeteries in France and Belgium, aged 13, we all went on a pub crawl. The only condition was that we didn't go into the same pub as a teacher, so they couldn't say they'd seen us.

Oh god, the rather butch female PE teacher who stood there & watched us get undressed & dressed every PE lesson, we were 13 & quite capable of getting dressed unsupervised...

Sleeping, we had the same on a WW1 trip to France & Belgium! I'm guessing a different school though, as my school's now Headteacher is female!

• Seems that flying blackboard rubbers were more common than I thought

• We had a "trendy teacher" who believed in self-policing in the classroom, so he'd appoint "discipline monitors" and "noise monitors". Basically, we ended up with a Lord of the Flies situation going down, with Taliban style enforcement. After about a fortnight he left (prob got fired but we didn't get told that). Never thought I'd be so happy to get a normal teacher back.

• English teacher used to say "You illiterate moron" to anyone who got anything wrong

English teacher (in the 80s) who couldn't be bothered to teach. So she dictated aloud her own essays/ book reviews and we had to copy them down. Obviously we didn't learn very much in her class.

The thing I remember best though was that her classroom always was gloomy. Thinking about it now, it must have been the atmosphere in the room, rather than the lack of sunshine outside.

She should reimburse her salary.

We had a geography teacher who thought she was socially superior to just about anyone.( I don't know why, we knew she lived in a very ordinary flat and lived a fairly humdrum life like the rest of us.)

She was very contemptuous of the girls who lived out in the sticks - about half of us - and would say 'Is there any point in meeting your parents on parents evening, Carol, I don't suppose they will understand what I say.' etc.

Prep school mid-late 70s:

• One teacher brought in his own special bottle of 'cold tea' which he used to drink all day. He also used to smoke unfiltered cigs halfway down, and leave the unsmoked halves in ashtrays to come back to.. so clued up kids would snaffle the half-smoked cigs to make new ones.

• There was a Christmas tradition of playing tricks on the teachers.. water, flour etc. Science teacher once earned our undying love by getting US.. powder all over the lab floor which exploded when you trod on it!

• That guy also once put 30,000 volts through whole class.. "very low current though"

Public school early 80s:

• Doddery exchange teacher from US who we used to take terrible advantage of. Boys leaping out the window then coming round to knock on the door. "Sorry I'm late, sir".. repeatedly. Boys would also light up at the back of the class. Teacher would eventually sniff and ask "can you smell burning..?"

My mum was a social worker in the 70s and when she was taking kids on access visits (I remember one kid of about 8 who was in a care home in London and his mum lived on the Isle of Wight and it was mum's job to drive them to and fro) they used to stay at our house on their way to wherever they were going. It was just expected that the kids would come and stay with us and share our bedroom and then partake in our delicious 70s breakfast of breakfast slices and orange juice from a can that you diluted!

And when my mum was at school, the sickroom was in the headmistress's house so if you felt poorly she'd take you to her bedroom and tuck you up in her bed!

In our final year of school we could choose our own 'PE' lesson and so we used to either go bowling or to my friend's house whose dad taught us archery! There were no parent permission forms or checks to see whether we'd gone home or that my friend's dad was safe.

We had a PE teacher who used to pull girls' towels from them and push them naked into the showers, bellowing, 'Don't be so prudish.' We were 12 and the shy ones were horrified. I truanted PE for years.
Lots of teacher-pupil affairs at our school. And a weird history teacher who flashed at one of the girls in my year. She was told off for provoking him and making a fuss about it!
Also a mad maths teacher who made it very clear she was only slumming it with us in the state system so she could afford to send her son to a proper nice school. She used to bring him into lessons when he had holidays, and asked us to bring in books and games and comics for him to keep, so he'd not be bored. When she lost her gold bracelet she had us all combing the corridors and school field for it for an hour instead of double maths.

We had a physics teacher (head of department too I think) who would threaten to practice his golf swing using the blackboard metre stick on the bottom of the boys in the class instead of giving them the belt (late 70's, corporal punishment OK). Girls he just gave lines. However I only ever saw it happen once, and the boy could hardly stand still for laughing - it was all done for comic effect. Still, today a po-faced parent would complain and have him fired. Then, it made us feel good towards this teacher (who was a brilliant teacher BTW) that he would joke around with us.

I remember blackboard dusters flying across the room and whole classes being lined up to be given the belt.. ah the good old days - did it do us any harm?
I also remember the boys gym teacher was absolutely vile , always punishing someone, and making them strip to underwear and run round the playing field in foul weather. He then got cancer, and when it was announced at assembly that he had sadly died, everybody cheered.

We had an art teacher that used to hit people on the head with metre sticks and another really old art teacher that used to go for s snooze in the cupboard!

In primary 7 we had a school trip for 5 nights to London ( from Scotland)
We ran riot around the hotel -with teachers we got locked in Hyde park , left a pupil on the tube lost another in the national history museum -were pretty much left to our own devices! Two of the teachers were having a fling -It put me off letting my little ones go on school trips!

When in the last year of primary school,about 1965 !, our headmaster would choose one of five of us big girls to look after his office while he disapeared with his secretary for 15 mins,on his return he would give us chocolate and kiss us :-))