Doing advanced chemistry in secondary school we did a whole series of lectures and practicals on the reactions of the sulphides over several weeks and had a Kipp’s apparatus set up in the exhaust cupboards.
But a Kips apparatus looks a bit like a bong and it wasn’t unusual for junior classes to buggerise round with the taps and put their whole class at risk of asphyxiation.
I have a few CCs in a bottle now. Never play with it, though.
I don’t remember the details, but an intro chemistry colleg prof was doing some demo involving dipping a hot dog wiener in a beaker of a copper sulfate solution (something about electrical conductivity) making sure to emphasize that copper supfate is toxic. When he finished, he theatrically ate the wiener. (The poison is in the dose.)
My 5th grade teacher (and this was 1992, so far more recent than most examples here) was a snake enthusiast who kept about half a dozen snakes of various species in habitats around the classroom. He would feed live mice and insects to them and encourage us to watch as a way of teaching us how snakes eat and that it’s morally neutral for animals to eat each other in order to survive. I can’t imagine that flying in this day and age.
This same teacher, and his friend from another school, also did an annual field trip for their classes (segregated by gender, so the boys would go one weekend and the girls would go on another) which consisted of an overnight camping trip in the southeast California desert, where activities included playing king-of-the-mountain on a sand dune, launching homemade model rockets, doing your business outside and burying it with a shovel while your tentmate watched so you didn’t hurt yourself in the dark, being told ghost stories about marooned westward pioneers, a folk song where the teacher individually cracked a joke about each student one-by-one, and a dinner of wild-caught snakemeat chili. It was definitely one of the best field trips I ever went on in elementary school, but any one of those activities by itself would probably result in a lawsuit these days.
We had a weird dress code at our high school, so I guess this is “educational”: If a boy came to school without a belt, he was given a piece of baling twine and had to wear that as a belt. There was also an old electric shaver/razer that you had to use if you didn’t cleanly shave in the morning; no facial hair was allowed, not even for the teachers.
You should have seen the principal’s head explode when a girl (probably a B-cup) decided that a halter top without a bra was OK. The rules got rewritten to state that undergarments were required, and no bare shoulders. He said he didn’t think anyone wanted to see side-boobage (but of course the boys didn’t mind).
Do elementary school kids still get to have live animals in their classrooms? I have vague memories of that, including at least one class hamster, and a batch of eggs that hatched into baby chicks.
This is more of a specific example of an otherwise acceptable educational method;
Our middle school band teacher would play us a recording of whatever piece we were trying to learn. One semester featured selected songs from the musical A Chorus Line. One of the songs is Dance;ten;Looks;three. A small sample of the lyrics . . .
“Tits and ass.
Bought myself a fancy pair.
Tightened up the derriere.
Did the nose with it.
All that goes with it.”
The best part was when she was trying to get everyone to “punch” the notes and demonstrated it by repeatedly yelling “TITS and ASS!” while she pounded her music stand with her baton for emphasis.
She was an excellent teacher, unlike her predecessor who got fired (and I believe prosecuted) for inappropriately touching a student.
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Wouldn’t fly today? I don’t think that would have flown in most places in the past. It sounds more like a kink of the principal than punishment.
Mine was a sixth grade math teacher. I guess eraser throwing was a popular activity across the board, teacherwise.
Did it have an onion tied to it?
I got sent home once for not wearing a belt. Even though my pants didn’t have belt loops. I had to return the pants.
Not quite the same, but when I was in Grade 5 we had a student teacher for a week. One day he administered a spelling test and I got one word wrong. I don’t know why only I was the only one in class forced to do this, but he made me stay in class during recess to try to correct my error. I thought he had said poplar (like the tree) so I tried a few variations and he kept saying “wrong” and asking me to try again. It was only after a few tries that he told me the word again, and it was actually copper. I was furious, and the only thing he taught me was that some people are assholes.
That hasn’t changed. There are still people who’s goto explanation for differences of opinion / differences of fact is “the student is stupid”. Some of them are teachers.
Corporal punishments were very common and happened every day. Some of the nuns were brutal. My kids are grown, but had a teacher struck one of my daughters the teacher’s best option would be if my wife talked me into just pressing charges…
In 2nd grade we briefly had a substitute teacher, an older woman, who walked into the classroom brandishing a smallish cricket bat. She didn’t hit any student directly, but would smack it hard on the desk if a student wasn’t listening / was goofing off. Our regular teacher was very earth mother, granola crunchy. We’d spend the last 30 minutes of each day curled up on pillows while she’d read Shel Silverstein or other poems.
The sub was gone by the third day.
Our 4th grade teacher, Mr. Kleven, would make us get up in front of the class and go through the times tables. He’d heckle, laugh at us, make comments to other students if we’d mess up, never ever gave us anything positive if we did well.
Not an educational method, but in the realm of not flying today: My 10th grade English Lit class was held in a pod behind the school. If our teacher set us to reading or became annoyed with us, he’d prop open the door and light his pipe up. This was 1984ish. That’s beyond the daily updates on the Poland Solidarity movement, which often took up at least 1/4 of the class room period.
My first grade teacher would pull a kid out of his/her desk and start whaling on them with a paddle. When I lost a worksheet she stood over me with a paddle until I found it. My nephew had her years later, and she was almost as bad.
A school librarian gave tips on armpit farts to a group of boys (they weren’t cupping their hands to to create an air pocket). Oops, that was me.
In 1976, our physics teacher was a heavy smoker. He’d inhale, hold it, and … nothing visible would ever come out. Smoking in offices became verboten here around 1990, so I suppose it was around then that teachers here were forbidden to smoke in class.
I bet the kids loved you!
First grade teacher told us on the first day of class that she had all our names on cards and the name on the top card would get to lead the class to the bathroom at break time. I wanted to be that person badly (didn’t we all). Then she told us if we did anything wrong or talked on the bathroom break, our card would be moved to the bottom of the pile. Ahh.
Therefore I was good, oh so good. My name came up early on and I lead the class to the bathroom. My name never came up again. In winter, I asked the teacher why my name never came up any more but my best friend had led the class five times. Please tell me if I did something wrong? The cruel, old bat (I now know she must have been late 30s" wouldn’t say anything but “Well?”
She also made a child who couldn’t last until the bathroom break, sit in her pee for an hour.
So, what do you think I learned from her? This six-year-old learned to distrust teachers. Many, many years later I was working in customer service and someone at the school called with a request. I mentioned I had gone to that school. She asked who my first grade teacher was and when I replied, she said, “Oh, she is retiring next week.” I replied “Good, she was one of the most vindictive teachers I ever had.”
Yep, they still do. The feeling is mutual in most cases; I can at least find something to like in all of them.
In second grade, I chewed my pencils something awful. My teacher tried to remedy this by standing over me, all strictness and severity in her gray-haired old lady form, and inform me that all of the little pieces of wood I was ingesting were making their way to my appendix, which, being the size of her pinky, would undoubtedly erupt and do me serious damage. I hope that mixture of intimidation and horrible biological misinformation has been purged from the educational world, but I sadly doubt it.
In a less accusatory context, she once informed the class that electrons weighed so little that scientists didn’t even bother to measure how much they weighed. I was born in 1984, so not even she should have been old enough to get that one wrong, but the whole notion of particle physicists disregarding a particle for being too small is the real laugh line in that one.
In the fourth grade, my teacher was much improved, both in terms of personality and lesson plan; her eccentricity which would not fly today (one of a whole flying circus of eccentricities which would still fly proudly) was starting each and every class by having all of us kids sing a rousing rendition of Dixie. Making it worse was the fact I went to grade school in Missouri, which was a border state, so she didn’t even have the white sheet of “local history” to hide behind.