odd things you did in school

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I recently had the opportunity to go to Isla Morada in the Florida Keys and we spent all afternoon in a Tiki Bar that had a Polynesian show for entertainment. The woman did one of those of those stick dance things. Then she pulled me out of the audience and made me do it! We’re talking 5 or 6 LARGE rum runners in and all I could think was:
STICK! JUMP! STICK! JUMP! STICK! JUMP! STICK! JUMP!

It was exhausting.

Someone (I think Silver_Fire) mentioned Four Square. At my office a group of people have recently started playing this. We’ve made up a huge number of new rules and distorted the game completely out of recognition, but it sure is fun! Probably the only exercise I get anymore…

42

Ahhhh, JROTC…one time the instructors let me and a friend clean out the equipment room. And we cleaned it out (we never could get the swords and rifles past 'em, though).
And we wore trenchcoats to school every friday in the fall/winter (until 4/21/99). Really creeped people out.

I did the parachute games in elementary school too.

43

I did the parachute in elementary school too, but our Gym teacher was so lazy that we did it to instructions from a record, not the teacher. He just sat there as the record played cheeseball music and record guy would be going “all the 2s run under!”

We also did a game called Red Rover where 1/2 the school got on one side of a field and the other half got on the other side. Each team would stand in a line holding hands. Then one person from the other team would run across and try to break through. If you broke through, you got to take a person back with you to your team. If you didn’t, you joined the team you couldn’t break through.

44

We played dodge ball in grade school, we played killer ball in high school. Sort of the same, but a lot rougher. It was a relieve to get put out early and save your teeth. Invariably by the end, the meanest SOB in school has the ball, and he know just how to kill someone with it and have the ball bounce right back to him. He could go around picking off his victims one at a time.

In high school on off PE days, we would have towel wrestling. Coach had a rolled up towel that was all taped up. He’d put two people in the center of the mat holding onto it. You then get 10 minutes on the timer to do what you want. i.e. if I get the towel from you in 30 seconds, I get 9 1/2 minutes to beat the shit out of you with it!. The only thing you could do was try to grab it back while you were getting beat with it.

I grew up in a small farm town. One day our PE class consisted of the coach loading us up on a bus and dropping us off in the country. We had to run back to the football field. I always wondered WTF? I think the coach had errands to do that day or something. It really sucked. He drove five miles or so out in the country and said “get out. See you later”. Dirty bastard.

I too was in band. Trumpet. The percussionists were assholes. They’d stand behind you and flick your ears and shit, and YOU’D get in trouble for talking. Our band director would go on about how when HE was in high school, the upper classman would kick the younger one’s asses for not practicing (hint hint)! He’d call it private lessons! It’s o.k. one day at one of our forced attendances at a football game, my best friend and I were playing ‘mercy’, (you know, where you try to bend the other person’s hand back until they say “mercy”) and in the ensuing struggle, I knocked my trumpet off the bleachers and on to the band directors car. Jeez he was pissed! It probably fell 20 feet or so. My trumpet was O.K., I had trouble getting the mouthpiece out is all.

45

sigh… I yousta cood spell ril good!

relief, not relieve…
and whatever else I misspelled, I didn’t mean that either.

46

This has been a tradition at my school since it opened in the 60’s I believe. It is very similar. Here are some differences:

Each class is a different team, so there are four productions. (Doing your way is probably better and it has been proposed a few times, but no seniors ever want to work with the juniors. And NOBODY wants to work with the freshmen.)

Although the scripts are original and comedic, the productions are themed. Student council chooses the themes and informs the classes what they will be performing. Then the classes have two months to write and direct and make props and scenery. For example, my senior year the theme was ‘Old Cartoons’. Seniors did Scooby Doo, Juniors did Flintstones and I forget what the other classes did. Past years have seen Disney movies, Comics, Classics, Talk Shows (hard to do and not very entertaining), etc.

Each class has a school grant of $100 (which doesnt go very far at all). So a lot of homemade and creativity comes in. Students are permitted to use personal money or funds for their play. Costumes may not be purchased or rented though. They must be hand made.

Singing… though a class could write an original song or sing an old one, they almost never do. Singing is REAL talent and takes away from the rest of the play, since everyone’s acting sucks so badly. They are usually funny or silly plays so singing would take away from that. Unless it was a funny song I guess…

They are required to have at least one musical number though. Which is usually just choreographed dancing to music. This is a good time for the fat ugly guys to take their shirts off and make fools of themselves… the crowd loves it for some reason.

… Damn this was a long post

47

BTW, it is called “Class Capers” at my high school.

48

I too am a band kid… I fortunatly was a tuba player. Far superior to all others. In the drum solo part of the show. The tuba section stayed stationary for around 4 minutes, doing intricate “bells”(flashing our bells in different directions opposite to ther tuba players). So for two weeks while the whole band marched and learned their show. The tuba players put there tubas on the ground then layed on the ground with our heads laying propped in the bell. What was fun, was the track team worked out around the football field. We would sit in the shade of the tuba and make fun of the track people. Luckily one of my enemies was on the team. I’d scream “LArissa! your running form is great… How many laps do you hav left???” Ahhhh… I loved band

Wait until you hear about my college band experiences…

49

Any flute stories? :slight_smile:

50

From a tuba player???

J/K…

51

We had the dancing with the poles - it’s a South Pacific Island thing from what I vaguely remember.

We also played Assasin but that wasn’t a sanctioned activity and was subsequently banned.

We continued to play it of course - we just had to be more surreptitious which made it more fun.

52

Oh, yes. Killer. I was one of the ringleaders/organizers for this wonderful game.

We made rules to try to keep things from being too disruptive at school–no assassinations during school hours, no water balloon bombs.

This, of course, didn’t keep me from getting called into the principal’s office when some nimrods in a game I WAS NOT running got into trouble. Seems that one was driving, spotted another in another car, pulled along side, pointed a realistic looking water pistol…

…and got pulled over by the cops. Rumor has it there was some weed in the car, too.

Apparently, I made a good impression on the principal who interviewed me (not totally surprising, since I had nothing to do with the whole thing): because not only didn’t I get in trouble, he was heard telling one of my teachers that I was really bright, and would go far.

Not exactly sure where I went wrong, though :frowning:

53

We had a game called ChuCullain (an ancient Irish hero)

there was 18 to a team, indoor or outdoor. a Gaelic football (possibly as hard as a medicine ball, only smaller)
and 2 bins.
The object of the game was to get the ball into the opposing teams bin as many times as possible in a 30 min game.

No rules. Everything was allowed. we played this for PE when we were 12. The teacher was the referee.
those were the days.

54

Did the dancing/poles thing in grade school, and in Girl Scouts too. I also remember doing some kind of intricate tapping game with shorter sticks - about a foot long - you used a pair of them and tapped rhythmic patterns out.

Anyone play with Chinese jump ropes? Those were popular in my grade school too. We also played lots of four square.

In high school, gym sucked. 3 days a week we had to run for up to 30 minutes straight, and the other two days we did either weigh training or aerobics. Fun.

The school system had also come up with this classification system that broke gym classes into four groups. We got tested on how many situps we could do in a minute, how many pull-ups we could do in a minute, how strong our grip strength was, how many laps we could run in 12 minutes, and oh, the nicest part - our body fat percentages! Yes, being overweight could make you fail gym. Depending on what group you were put in you had various things to do in gym - the “lower” groups had to run more laps, etc. to entice them to get in better shape.

God, I hated gym. I was pretty skinny and decent at most sports so I didn’t do too badly, but man, I hated it.

Another odd thing we did in foreign language classes was to take another name for the class - so instead of being Joe Smith, in German you’d be Josef Smith.

–tygre

55

Getting away from band (since I quit it this year in order to be able to go home an hour and a half earlier than everyone else :)), here’s my story of the greatest Spirit Week event ever. I’ll call the story “Squirrels and Skyscrapers”, since it amuses me.

Spirit week, for those that don’t have it, is the annual competition between grades, culminating in a parade on the day of Homecoming, for which each grade must create a themed float. The theme for my story’s year was “Famous Cities”.

During the school year that just ended, when I was a junior, my friends and I decided that we had to do a little “recon” on the other grades, which involved stealing stuff (obviously). Our target was the sophomore class, whose theme was New York City. About nine of us parked a block away from the girl who was keeping the float’s house. We snuck around to the back, and opened the garage. We took two two-foot-tall cardboard skyscrapers they had created. One was left on their doorstep, and the other was brought back to our float for analysis.

About a week later, while we were working on our float, I had the idea of gift wrapping the remaining skyscraper and leaving it on the doorstep of the sophomore girl. My friend Jameson, who shall remain anonymous, said “Wait, I saw a dead squirrel outside the house, I’ll be right back.”

Yeah, you can imagine the story from here. Anyway, he got the squirrel and put it into the skyscraper (it was hollow). We gift wrapped it and left it on the porch of the senior girl with her class’ float.

The next morning, I found out through my then-girlfriend (who was friends with the unlucky senior girl) that she had come home, opened the package, and…it wasn’t pretty, I’ll leave it at that. She turned out to be a vegetarian (ouch) and was pretty upset. Of the 9 people in the car who went to drop off the squirrel box, 7 ended up getting Saturday detention. I got lucky, because my friends all agreed to downplay my role in the incident, because they didn’t want my then-girlfriend to castrate me.

The part which I am proud of is that we are the only class to ever be disqualified from Spirit Week. Our class is despised by administration. The main positive thing to come out of the stunt was a political cartoon of a squirrel destroying our float with its tail.

I invite your angry comments. ducks flying rocks

56

I forgot something…Jameson’s defense the next day was:

“Dude, I was high as a kite.”

The future of America.