supposedly in the early 80s my preschool/daycare teacher somehow change d me from left to right handed according to my family and its considered one of the reasons i cant legally write …
Drop that pencil and put your hands up!
In the 40s, high-function ASD wasn’t recognized as anything other than Funny Kids, and we were just thrown into school to sink or swim. And, like everyone, the smart ones learned how to do just fine. The dumb ones just joined the undifferentiated drop-outs.
The extreme 1% who were grossly deformed or something and whose parents wanted to keep them, were placed in an ungraded room with a specialized teacher. I didn’t know of a single child who was on behavioral drugs, we all played and learned together just fine. “It Takes a Village”.
Granted, it’d be considered better to let the students do the feeding themselves, but I don’t think I’d say that the teacher doing the feeding “wouldn’t fly”.
5th grade memories: I’m a lefty, and used to encounter the regular problems with “terrible penmanship” because a lot of lefties write with a “hook hand”(inner wrist not resting on the paper as you write, so as not to smear your letters as it goes across the page). I still do this, as I’d rather write things down than endure the frustration of it not looking good enough to read. My mother used to tell me stories about how her left handed classmates were forced to use their right hand like everyone else. I’m glad I missed that hassle. : )
I’m pretty sure this was peculiar to my 5th grade teacher, but when she felt we were getting out of hand she would yell at us in Pig Latin!
When my high school orchestra teacher would curse at us in Italian, most of us had no idea what he was yelling. But the few Italian speakers said he greatly expanded their vocabulary.
Possibly a misunderstanding (on her part or yours) based on the fact that electrons are so much smaller than protons and neutrons that they contribute essentially nothing to an atom’s atomic weight?
Happened to a classmate of mine in grade six, in the winter.
That year my class was in a portable (a small outbuilding, which looked like a shed from the outside). The student probably had ADHD (a term I had not heard back then) and was always acting out. The teacher got fed up and told the kid to stay outside the portable, in the cold. There was that time that same teacher “threw” a desk at that student. (The desk probably only rose an inch or two off the ground, so it was more like an aggressive push, but that doesn’t make it okay.)
Scuffing your feet on carpet can generate tens of thousands of volts.
One day, my eight grade shop teacher, old man Williams, cut an extension cord in half and removed a short section of insulation from each of the two wires. He then sat on a wooden stool. I noticed he was being careful not to place his feet on the floor. He plugged the extension cord into a nearby outlet and held one of the exposed conductors with the fingers of his left hand and the other with the fingers of his right hand. He told the class, “Remember boys [there were no girls in shop class back then], electricity can’t hurt you.”
I was in elementary school mid to late 70s. One of the take home assignments was to make wine using a cider jar and a heavy duty balloon on top and the “fixings” inside. After it was finished I tried a sample and YUCK! Dumped it outside and apparently the farm cats got into it as they were staggering around for awhile.
Did have a teacher (4th grade) who had a big glass pickle jar 1/2 full of ABC gum. If you got caught by her chewing gum you had to take yours out of your mouth, reach into the jar and grab a piece and put yours in. Supposedly she got the jar 1/2 full by scraping gum from the undersides of desks.
Granted the classes were strictly separate. According to my father the only time a woman was ever present during their swim classes was when one boy slipped and hit his head and the teacher sent for the school nurse. While all the other boys had to sit on the edge of the pool. At my high school a lot of equipment was kept in a storage room in the boys locker-room so the girls’ PE teacher frequently had to go in there to retrieve stuff. She would ask one of the boys’ teachers for the all clear, but they just blindly let her in unless a whole class was in there. She caught a couple of my friends coming out of the showers or on the toilet (no stall doors, had to walk past to get to storage room).
One of my friends once did some kind of science project that involved the effects of alcohol on mold growth; our science teacher kept said alcohol under lock & key and he had to specify doses to her & she’d add them herself. Meanwhile our home ec teacher let students cook with wine in class, showed us how to make homemade Kalua, used her students as free labor for her catering business, would hire student athletes as waiters, and let said waiters sneak drinks (even at faculty parties).
In PE we would climb a rope attached to the ceiling of the gym, and the only safety equipment was a few mats on the floor. Do they still do that?
Our electrocution experiment was with a hand cranked generator. A useful demonstration of how it was harder to crank when a light bulb was connected. Then the class did the thing of all holding hands and the teacher cranked until somebody let go.
In high school shop, what did every boy have to make out of a tin-can with tin snips and soldering iron? An ash-tray
And he actually survived? I mean, there are a lot of stupid things you can do with electricity that nonetheless have a fairly high survival rate, but what you describe is about what you’d do if you were deliberately trying to commit suicide by electricity (and the fact that he was on a wooden bench was essentially irrelevant).
I never said he was smart. However, he might have been crazy. The only reason I could think of why it didn’t kill him is because he was old and had dry, thick skin that did not conduct electricity very well. But he really did sit on a wooden stool and keep his feet off the floor.
But yes, if you were trying to electrocute yourself then this might be one of the better ways to do it. The electricity would flow through your chest and thus through your heart.
And both girls and boys, in grade school art class in the regular classroom, working in clay. You gave the ash trays to your parents, who were assumed to need to have some – and probably did, even if they didn’t smoke themselves, because it was standard to provide them to guests and it would have been very rude to tell somebody not to smoke in your house.
We did that too, with gymnastic mats, not crash mats. In our high school the gym ceilings were very high. That auditorium also had folding bleachers for basketball games. A cheerleader was climbing them, in the folded position, and fell, causing spinal injuries. She’s a paraplegic now.
One of my PE-related pet peeves was that they never actually taught us how to do anything. It was just “climb this rope” or “hit that ball” or “go out and play football.” The kids who didn’t know how to do these things were never actually taught how.
We did an 8th grade language arts section on slavery (growing up in Iowa in the 90s). The culmination was watching part of Roots and participating in a couple of slave auctions - one as a buyer, the other as a slave.
I loved that teacher, but looking back, I can’t imagine what the everloving fuck she was thinking.