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?!

One of my old primary school teachers (in the mid 1980's) used to throw board dusters at anyone asleep/chatting/acting naughty.

We used to have the old fashioned desks with the lids that lifted up on hinges, all books and stationery was kept in the desk. If it wasn't tidy, he would launch all the contents out of your desk all over the floor, then usually chuck them out into the corridor, closely followed by physically pushing us out of the door too, along with desk.

Great teacher though - the man had respect in the school lets put it that way. Saw him fairly recently, he's retired now and a shell of his former self but he taught all the way up to retirement age and had a long and successful career with 30+ years at the same primary school.

Ahhhhhh, they were the days......

I cant remember how old I was but it was 'middle' school so younger than 13 anyway! (33 now) we had a 'maths' lesson where we had a piece of card and some thread and we had to go through numbers to make a pattern, Well i did it wrong and the horrible teacher grabbed my hand and slapped it, left a massive red mark on it then made me sit in the corner and wouldnt allow anybody to talk to me, My mom just asked one question, did you answer the teacher back, I said no so she went up to the school but she was so mad they refused to let her see the teacher lol, I think she would have slapped her! funnily she couldnt get to see her on parents evening either....

Another teacher - in the same school, we had home ec lessons and she was showing us how to cut something up, some lad was talking so she turned around to tell him off pointing the knife and waggling it at him when it flew out of her hand, luckily he ducked in time!!!

I Cant really remember anything interesting about highschool!

Px

I'm 44 now. When I was about nine I had a primary school teacher who I didn't reall get on with. On Tuesday afternoons the class was divided up into boys and girls and the girls did sewing and the boys did woodwork I HATED sewing and woodwork looked really fun to me and I was yearning to try it. I asked Mrs Bartlett if I could do woodwork instead of sewing but she said no. I would have enjoyed Tuesdays a lot more if her ideas hadn't been so steryotypically restrictive and when I look back I wish I hadn't just resentfully accepted it but had had the language and ideas to argue my case and hopefully even change her mind. When people complain about Political Correctness I think sometimes they forget or don't realise how dreadful it was before there was any political correctness at all. Times were very unenelightened. O.K. it can go to daft lengths sometimes but it was just as ridiculous the other way and more limiting.

One of my male teachers used to make you stand in a bin and sing Happy Birthday to yourself on your birthday.

Another one when policing the lunch queue used to send you to the back if you stepped out of line. Not the bullies who would shove you out of the line for fun, but the actual victim.

A male and a female teacher used to work in tandem taking us aside and asking sympathetically if we had any personal problems. Anyone who confided in them soon found their problems broadcast round the school.

Another female teacher would tell us about her sex life while toying with her cleavage. She had a broken tooth so 'sexual' would come as as 'sheckshul'.

She would also announce her crushes on named boys, sometimes they were unlucky enough to actually be in the classroom at the time. If so she'd ask them about the time their voices dropped. I can't remember what she was meant to be teaching us.

The caretaker used to walk though the girls' changing room when the teacher was elsewhere, insisting that he needed to perform some vital maintenance on the boiler. To be fair, he was sacked after our games teacher caught him.

The communal showers that we had to use after PE were not universally popular. At the end of one session it turned out that 58 out of 60 girls had their period, thus preventing us from showering

The games mistress was undaunted by this and announced that she was going to inspect our underpants

One teacher (mid 80s) made a boy in my class wash his mouth out with a bar of soap when he told the older children who were supervising wet playtime to piss off. She was a super teacher though, really well travelled and had loads of interesting stories of her youth - I am awesome at quiz machines as a result of her teaching.

At boarding school (again mid 80s) they caned the boys and if you got caught talking after lights out you were slippered.

A teacher of mine in the early 90s was 6'6" tall and as a treat for winning a game in PE he'd pick you up under your armpits and throw you in the air. It was so cool!

latin teacher who had wooden leg/false foot would boot us up the arse as we were leaving the room if he felt like it!!!

We had a biology teacher who at the end of term used to offer us Quality Street for a treat. The only thing was he used to empty the tin into the plastic dustbins usually used to store catfish and rats for in formaldehyde for dissection.

Looking back I realise he must have packed the bin almost to the top with newspaper and spread a thin layer of sweets on top to see if anyone would dare take one. No one ever did. I really liked him and I don't believe he deserved the sack for his.

We had a pottery teacher who would abuse our efforts at pinch pots as 'baked bean cans' and rant about our uselessness and his own genius.

Every week some poor child would collect their pot from the shelf only to find it had become unwrapped and was rock hard. He'd then make them throw this treasured thing they were making for their mum into the pugmill and stir it up while ranting at them for not wrapping it up properly. There were regular tears.

We all knew this sad act used to creep around after class maliciously unwrapping things but we couldn't do anything.

He was making a pot (beautiful, it has to be said) for his wife's birthday. He'd left it to be fired by one of the A level students. When it was fired someone had scratched 'Mr X is a cunt' into the clay. They were all ready to stand together and refuse to give up the culprit.

But in the end was no investigation. We suspect Mr X disposed of his Cuntpot of Shame in the pugmill himself to avoid humiliation.

Oh, a quite hearty female games teacher, the one who got the caretaker sacked, used to leave the changing room for about two minutes then dart back in and pull down the gym knickers of any girl who hadn't got changed quickly enough.

mine are odd rather than abusive, I think - from primary school

Science teacher (also head) who would lob lumps of potassium out of the window into puddles.

Latin teacher who, on walking into a lesson and finding us doing the cancan at the back of the room (why? I have no idea) proceeded to lecture us about how that was all wrong, and taught us how to do the CanCan properly

..and we used to play full-on British Bulldog on the playground (when we weren't climbing, and falling out of, trees) - with the staff - and no quarter was given (on either side)

our infant 2 teacher (so we were about 6/7?) used to have a permanent line of children snaking around her classroom to get the slipper - we would have to bend over her knee, she'd pull our skirts up/trousers down and slipper us...

The headmistress at the time would bring her strap into assembly and crack it on the floor really hard, threatening to strap us with it - I never had the strap but a couple of boys regularly did. I used to hate seeing them waiting outside her office - they'd be crying before they even went in

An art teacher used to constantly bring the conversation round to female beauty and comment on individual girls' faces and figures in a 'discussion about aesthetics to improve your artwork.'

A straight male games teacher used to bring his favourite boys to watch us bouncing around at netball etc and make comments about hookers then insist he was talking about rugby. Actually, that doesn't necessarily mean he was straight, does it?

This thread is making me wonder whether there were any non-perverts in the staff room at my school.

Beertricks that chalk circle thing reminds me of the male games teacher I just talked out.

He used to make children stand with their arms straight above their heads if they annoyed him.

I now realise that is a stress position banned by the British Army. Fuck.

Ah where to start

In juniors kids who'd been naughty had to stand up in assembly and everybody would be ordered to look at them and laugh. On one memorable occasion two boys were made to sit behind the dinner hall during break and lunchtime and sit on a chair wearing a sign round their neck saying 'stupid' and a dunces hat. We were told to go and have a good look at them and laugh.

That was in the 80's

In secondary school the art teacher who gave everybody exactly the same report, photocopied and our name scrawled on the top. He also used to hide his drink problem in the art cupboard, he was always slightly pissed

The booze cruise trip to France cunningly disguised as an educational visit, yes for £25 you, yes YOU could help teachers push trolley loads of boooze across the hypermarket carpark after being dumped in some village for a few hours.

me and my (male) German teacher were very close, which looking back was dodgy as hell a bit odd.

At dps school they had a teacher they called the mad monk because he wore robes and jesus sandals, and was always qouting the bible. He seemed to like boys a bit too much and kicked dp round the floor on more than one occasion, he killed himself a few years ago by putting his head on a railway track.

Their pe teacher was caught shagging the female art teacher in one of the cupboards, ending in a grand finale of art teachers husband battering him outside the school, aforementioned pe teacher did indeed manage to shag half the female staff, he's living in Spain now with his last conquest. (late 90's)

Dp found out a few years ago that a lot of boys had been sexually abused by a few male teachers who had 'favourites'. One in particular would invite certain boys to his house for camping trips, it all ended up in the paper when one of the boys ( now a man) reported him, turned out he'd invite them into the house alone and rape them.

Primary - our teacher in class 2 was having an affair with the science teachers husband - he used to come into our lessons and sit next to her, stroking her leg up under her skirt. They used to meet up at a local restaurant nearly every day and snog!

Secondary - music teacher, who had been sacked from a previous job for being caught with his pants down with a student, was suspected of having an affair with a girl in the fifth year. She was in the choir, they used to go into the music cupboard for a while and come out looking flushed. He was in his forties, so very ewwww!

Our PE teacher used to sit on a stool and watch us shower. We had to be naked, she would playfully slap the more developed girls on the
bottom as they left the shower. She also had a stand up row with a girl, as the poor girl refused to wear tampons. I wouldn't wear them either, but luckily stayed under her radar.

I had bad asthma as a child, and had regular hospital appointments. My mother would send the school a list of times and dates, so they knew well in advance when I would be absent. This had gone on for two years and worked well, until I went into a maths lesson five minutes late after having an appointment. The teacher ripped into me in front of the whole class because I was late (even though she knew, the bitch!) and made me do my work in the corridor outside the classroom for two weeks.

Our infant teacher used to grab you by the shoulders and shake you, hard. Normally for messing up a spelling, or for apparently not trying hard enough in PE. In many ways, she was a good teacher who got results, and I genuinely think she thought she was doing what was best for us - like at NASA, failure was not an option in her class.
She really needed to control her temper, though. Fewer children would have wet their pants, if nothing else.

At high school, we had an insane science teacher. The first time we witnessed him losing his temper, in all its high-pitched voiced, foot-stamping glory, we were terrified. However, he used this little act too often for it to be effective long-term, and we soon just found it funny. He taught us things that I now know to be completely untrue as well.

Headteacher no.1 - spanked people with a gym shoe. It was called 'getting the gym shoe'. Made girls sit on his lap for a weekly session called 'read to Mr. X' in a small room, with the door closed. Boys did not have to do this. Had another weekly session called 'Mr. X's Gym club' which was one hour of anarchy using gym equipment. Injuries and fights were a constant whilst Mr X sat at the side of the hall staring into space.
Headteacher no.2 - had torrid affair with Mrs. B, another teacher and had an altercation with Mr. B in the playground.

God, that shower nonsense. I'd be grateful to any games teacher who can tell me there is a non-pervy, non-humiliation explanation for it.

Why does everyone have to strip naked then march into the showers and then back out again?

We had shower cubicles but no curtains. I can kind of understand that because they'd probably get torn down and you want people to be quick. But we weren't allowed to wrap up in towels for the naked walk - why? Why didn't they install a row of coat hooks outside the showers?

You weren't supposed to run - sensibly - but girls always ran. One slipped and was spreadeagled naked on the wet floor.

It meant that you did as little as possible in games so as not to get sweaty and then spent seconds in the shower afterwards so you weren't even washed properly. How does that help anyone?

Now I'm quite happy to be naked at the gym changing rooms but from 11-16 I definitely wasn't.

It really was a free for all. I'm glad teachers can't behave like they used to anymore!
At senior school, I had my head smashed against my locker by my psychotic form tutor. He was absolutely barking mad with huge temper issues & used to physically abuse most of the class. Sometimes he would completely lose it & just start hurling furniture around the room. One of the more "delicate" boys puked on the floor once during one of his more terrifying tirades.
We also had a biology teacher who used to ask girls to lift up their blouses so he could focus the video camera on something white!!!!!!!
The music teacher eventually ended up in prison because he had boffed so many under-age girls.
My first year form tutor used to ask the girls to sit on his knee for cuddles!!!!!!
At primary school the teachers were allowed to hit us with rulers on the hand & the really viscious ones used to hit the back of our hands with the edge of the ruler - nice!
Oh the joys of a catholic education.

my brother is a true "gifted" individual - IQ off the scale.

He was always backchatting teachers and playing pranks, and one day the PE teacher had enough and laid into him with the cane. Not just 6 of the best, more like 15-20.

My brother was very subdued at home and could hardly walk. Mum demanded to see...dad called home from work...head teacher phoned....meeting the next morning with Head and threats of police involvement. PE teacher never touched another pupil, and new policy implemented so head teacher gave out all punishments.

Which actually worked well in my favour, when a hysterical volatile history teacher screamed at me and a friend and sent us off to see him for the cane. WHen he heard what we had done (basically nothing) he lightly tapped us both on the hand, winked at us and sent us on our way.

We were fairly stunned, and from that moment the history teacher lost all her power.

In the mid-to-late eighties/early nineties at primary school there was one teacher who liked two things and two things only - history and cricket. I think I was 8 or 9 when I was in his class and then got him the following year too as they had a shuffle round. There was many a day where he'd decide the weather was too nice to do maths or English and instead he'd take us out into the yard to play cricket all afternoon, from the end of lunch right through until home time. He would even knock on other classroom doors and try talk the other teachers into bringing their kids out to play against us. When we weren't playing cricket we were learning about history, as a class we once spent an entire day building a replica of Archimedes Screw, another day it was a model of the Parthenon or a model of our region's river complete with bridges, landmarks, and towns/cities marked out. He gave us all new names on the first day, remembered them, and called us by them all year. He was great.

Another primary school teacher would make troublemakers sit on the floor directly in front of her "so I can kick you if you misbehave".

A group of us were taken on an outdoors weekend, somewhere in Yorkshire I think it was, we were 9 or 10yo. On the last day of the trip we were going "orienteering". The bus dropped off 20 primary school kids and our teachers in the middle of nowhere (there wasn't even a proper road), said they'd meet us at the rendezvous point, and drove off. We're stood there with no maps, our normal clothes/shoes (not a hiking boot in sight), and no packed lunches. The orienteering culminated in us rock climbing down the side of a waterfall, merrily led by the teachers, with no safety equipment and one wrong step between us and a long fall not helped by us horsing around and attempting to stick various body parts over the side and into said waterfall.