We called them snap’n pops, but apparently they had other names
English class, junior year. We were reading Mark Twain’s “Huck Finn”, and had gotten to the part where the townsfolk surround Col. Sherbourn’s house with the intent of lynching him, and he climbs out on the roof of his house to address (and ridicule) the crowd. As a point of emphasis, our teacher stood up on his desk as he lectured. The looks on people’s faces as they’d walk past the classroom, stop and do a double-take when they saw our teacher up on his desk were hilarious.
In our high school during the early 80’s. We had a cop come in and go from class to class to give a speel on the dangers of drugs. With him he had a briefcase of sample drugs to show kids what they looked like. Yes they we’re real.
He was suppose to be there for the week. On the second day he did what he normally did lock up the drugs in the trunk of his cop car that was parked in the lot in a visible location, then hit the caf for lunch. He came back after lunch to find his trunk forced open, drugs gone.
I’ll add another from a post earlier in the year…
I had a teacher in high school who would take one day a year and hypnotize anyone in his classes who agreed to it. His story was that he learned this in the Army as a medic.
As I understand from the little research I’ve read, the more intelligent the subject, the harder it is to hypnotize them. That squares with what I’ve seen.
I remember his patter and the session very well. There were about 5 of us “going under” in my class. He began by having place our hands on our desk. Then, we were to look carefully at the hairs on our hand. Now look at the base of the hair. See the little hole where the hair is coming from? Now concentrate on that, and imagine it opening up. Imagine putting a small straw in the hole. Now, we’re putting helium into the straw, and it will make your hand rise up and float.
I’m condensing a bit - it took 4-5 minutes, but his voice was calm and relaxing, and I could actually “see” the small hole opening, and as my hand began to float - I wasn’t “going along” with it - I thought to myself “wow, this really works” and immediately my hand fell. I was able to step outside my thoughts and be an observer, and that ruined it immediately.
I woke up, but the others didn’t. He would never make us do anything dangerous or really foolish, but what I saw was amazing. To Johnny - a big football player - he suggested that Johnny would not be able to move anything as long as the teacher was pointing at it. Chair, desk, dollar bill on the desk- whatever. He would point to a chair, and ask Johnny to move it over there, and drop his hand. John would move the chair.
He did it again, only continuing to point at the chair. Johnny couldn’t move the chair to save his life. I saw the strain and effort he made, but the chair wouldn’t budge.
I watched him struggle valiantly to lift a dollar bill off the desk, but if the teacher was pointing at it, it was impossible.
He had a couple of girls acting like rabbits and chickens, and fun things like that, but the most amazing thing was the power he had over Johnny and a couple of other guys.
Gosh, I miss high school!
My highschool was built with a large, square, internal courtyard that had a sunken area in it about waist deep. The senior guys had a ‘muck-up day’ at the end of the school year (summer for us).
One year they got in early, plugged up the drain in the sunken area, put several fire-hoses in there and made a swimming pool. When we got to school there were about 20 guys floating around on pool-loungers and inflatable boats. 
My final year the entire class was suspended on our last day because a bunch of guys had gotten a milko’s truck (small truck with roll-up sides that used to be used for delivering milk back when that still happened) loaded up with eggs and old vegetables and raided another local school. The probably would have gotten away with it but they managed to egg the hell out of the schools’ head-mistress.
9th grade art class - A class with about 6 or 7 semi-professional potheads taught by a 72 year old women. We had a few weeks where we worked with clay making one or two items for a grade. The majority of the potheads made bongs and the teacher, being clueless about what they were, fired them in the kiln with all the other pots and vases and then graded them.
5th grade Catholic school…I don’t remember doing this, but many years later may friends swear to it…
While the nun was sitting at her desk, and as we filed into the classroom from lunch break, I gently crumbled up and piled a handful of cracker crumbs on the top of her coif (headpiece). amazingly it stayed in place until she opened her book, and looked down…the crumbs fell onto her book…they said she didn’t even look up - she just called my name for detention…either she had divine knowledge, or I had a reputation as a prankster…I suspect the latter.
Couple of my fun memories of high school:
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Popular (and smart, and funny) guy graduates a year ahead of me. My senior year, in English (taught by an old, crusty guy beloved by all) said guy shows up mid-class. He was visiting home from college. Old, crusty magnificent bastard of a teacher does a double take, strides over, and slaps this guy full in the face. Like a real slap, the guy’s head snapped and he reeled a bit. Then the old teacher embraced him, and said in front of us all, “Why the hell didn’t you visit earlier? We missed you!”
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Same English class, same crusty old teacher. Another kid (this one more of a clown, liked by all, but not a good student) had pizzas delivered during class. There’s a knock on the classroom door, professor opens it. It’s a Dominos delivery guy. Teacher stands back, furious. Arms crossed, glaring at the guy. The clown calmly pays the delivery guy and puts the stack of pizzas on the teachers’s desk, and sits back down. Teacher glares for a few more seconds, then stalks over to his desk, opens a pizza box, and takes a slice. “All right, come get some pizza, everyone. And if you ever do that again, I’ll fail you.”
…god I miss that teacher. He died a few years back, and I still get teary thinking about him. He’s probably the one teacher I ever had that I would have loved to have had a drink with once I was an adult. But he died when I was in college. Great guy.
My home town has three high schools: the Jesuits, the public HS and the vocational-training HS.
Second-hand but confirmed story from the public HS: one time that a teacher, fed up with the misbehaviour of one of the students, told him “either pay attention, or take the door and leave!”, the student did exactly that. He said “ok,” rose from his desk, took the door off its hinges and left. According to the brother of one of my classmates (the brother was at the public HS, we went to the Jesuits), the teacher said that pretty often and the class’ pranksters had filed a bit off the door and oiled the hinges so it would be easy to take off.
nava’s story reminds me of one of my own: two guys in junior high were in a feverish competition to see who could screw with our chemistry (and home room) teacher the most. After one guy loosened the screws holding the chemical cabinet in place, causing it to fall on said teacher when he yanked it open, the other guy removed the screws (or whatever they were–pins, I guess) from the rear door hinges to the classroom, creating havoc when someone tried to exit that way.
I promptly decided to make these two guys my two best friends for the next few years.
I heard of one incident in driver’s ed the year before I took it (that was a 10th grade class at that school), where one student found a film about car wrecks vomit-inducing. I knew the kid in question, and consider it plausible from him.
I think the year before I took that class was the last year the film in question was shown. (I don’t remember the title, if I ever heard it.)
Ah yes, another one. This was actually in a community- rather than school-sponsored Drivers’ Ed course. This was in the US (Newton MA) BTW.
Anyway – the day before he was scheduled to cover the dangers of DUI, the instructor was caught by police for, you guessed it… DUI! :smack:
Of course, by the time class started, everybody knew what had happened.
His reaction? “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Ah well…
In my freshman Architecture class, there was a guy who was always wisecracking and playing practical jokes on people. Nobody ever took the guy seriously. One day he came rushing into class, breathless from running, and announced that the President had just been shot. Everyone said “yeah, yeah, tell us another one” . . . until another kid showed up and reported the same thing.
It was November 22, 1963 . . . 49 years ago, today.
Well, that’s certainly an amusing little story.
One day in Grade 7 the teacher was taking a poll of the class.
Teacher: “Are there any 13 year old boys in the class?”
Class: silence
Teacher: “What, there are no 13 year old boys here?”
The guy beside me: “We’re not boys. We’re MEN.”
Teacher: rolls eyes “Fine. Are there any 13 year old MEN in the class?”
…half a dozen boys raise their hands.
Our high school was an ancient fortress of a building, towering three stories over a busy intersection. Speaking of towering, it also had a tower up to five stories, with one small classroom at the top. Now, it was ancient enough that it had no A/C, so all the windows on all four sides of this cupola were wide open on warm days.
So what’s the problem, you ask? Well, the only class up there was Ol’ Miss Betsy’s Adv.Writing class. And Betsy was cripplingly afraid of heights. Any student that got within six feet of any window got screeched at by a frightened crone (whilst grabbing her desk with one hand and her heart with the other).
So, of course, while we nerd kids ate lunch up in her tower, and waited for her to climb the stairs to her little garret, we plotted. Some were complicated, like the dummy that we launched out her window. But the best was the simplest. She entered her room to see my friend Marcus hanging out the window and doing dance moves out into thin air (fifty-five feet above two busy streets).
She screamed and rushed back down the stairs “to get the police!”(?)
When she finally returned (by herself), the class was disquietingly quiet. We did keep glancing over at the aforementioned window, so she steeled herself and inched her way over until she could peer out… at Marcus.
Who’d slipped down the stairs behind her, and was sprawled in the gutter below.
(Ol’ Betsy never set foot in that tower again after that day. Our class met in a Physics classroom from then on, and they locked the tower, which was “condemned for safety reasons”)
Told to me by a friend who taught in this high school - happened about 10 years ago:
Female teacher tells her class to be ready for a major test tomorrow morning that will involve a long essay question.
Class wiseguy raises his hand: “What if we’re sexually exhausted?”
Teacher replies: “You’ll just have to write with the other hand.”
Senior year, photography class. Three things you need to know to understand the context: 1) The class was in some remote, oft-forgotten corner of the building, where not much went on. 2) The seniors in the class (myself included) had the worst case of Senioritis, and spent most of the time goofing off (the teacher didn’t seem to mind too much). 3) This was 1988- relations between the races were ten million times better than they were in 1968, but still, black kids and white kids didn’t fraternize with each other nearly as much as they do now.
So in the class we’re assigned to these study groups. My group includes a black girl with razor-sharp wit, no boundaries, and no filter (imagine a 17-year-old Wanda Sykes). One day, out of nowhere, she asks, “Hey! Homie! You ever seen a nigger’s [yes, that’s what she said :eek: ] tits?” Not knowing what to say, I told the truth: “Not in person.” Next thing I know, her shirt is above her shoulders while she’s pulling down her bra, showing me the goods. Being a 17-year-old male, I immediately sported a chubby. She started shouting “Homie’s got a hard-on! Homie’s got a hard-on!”
Good times.
My high school has been around since 1912 so a few incidents became legend.
Teacher had a habit of walking into class 5 minutes late and alway stamping down the papers in the wastebasket with her foot whenever she entered the classroom. Students took the wastebasket, emptied it, filled it most of the way with water, and floated some crumpled papers on top.
Typing class was about to get new typewriters, but the substitute teacher didn’t know it. Third floor window is open. In the middle of class student anounces he’s sick of typing and hurls his typewriter out the window.
The building was added to several times so is a hodepodge of styles. Out the third floor window of one classroom straight down is the roof of a second floor addition, but you can’t see it looking straight out, you have to look down. Again with a substitute, abruptlly in the middle of class a student anounces he’s “sick of life” and jumps.
This was a private Christian school, so you don’t have the steady stream of kids getting in trouble with the law. But 4 of them did during my time their. Over an extended weekend they “borrow” the car of a friend of one their mothers and head to Reno. They get as far as Wyoming where they’re pulled over for doing 85 in a 65. They spend a weekend in jail while one of the parents flies to go get them. The mother declines to press charges and they’re back in school after serving a weeks suspension.
This didn’t happen when I was at school, but it happened in my sister’s class.
There was this really annoying guy who would bug my sister in her class. One day, he happened to wet his pants in class. He left the class, and the teacher told the students in the class not to tell anyone else in any other classes.
So, after class, one guy went and starrted to tell his friends in other classes about the pants-wetting incident. He told one of his friends. Then he told another person. Then he started to tell a third person, but - the third person already knew!
News travels fast.