Actually, that sounds like a good game for communications and working with a partner. But only if done without a REAL soccer ball, which is heavy and can cause damage. Done with balloons, it would make sense and maybe be fun.
I was in the 2nd grade, back in the early '50s. We had already been warned that our teacher was very strict. She was tall and thin and never wore makeup. Her hair was in little ringlets, held close to her scalp by bobby pins and a hairnet. She always wore a starched white long-sleeved blouse and a straight below-the knees black skirt. And high-top black shoes that buttoned. This was what she wore every, single day. And nobody recalled ever having seen her smile.
One rule she had was that you couldn’t eat lunch or go to the lavatory until you had finished your morning’s assignment. Well, I was a little perfectionist back in 2nd grade, and I remember sitting at my desk, meticulously doing my work, starving and needing to pee while everyone else ate lunch. In fact I’d still be sitting there doing my morning’s work all afternoon, never getting a bite to eat and really needing to pee (or poop). I’d
finally run to the lavatory before boarding the bus to go home (and yes, there were times when my bladder didn’t hold out), then eat my lunch on the bus.
Another strange thing, this one in high school. As part of our gym class, we had to take 6 weeks of swimming each semester (the school had 2 pools, boys’ and girls’). For some reason the boys had to swim naked but the girls didn’t. Nobody liked it, but that was the rule. And if you were excused from swimming, with a doctor’s note, you had to walk around the pool naked for the entire period.
Well, there was a kid named Frank who was very tall and very thin and very, very hung. The kids gave him a hard time because of his height and weight, and a ***very ***hard time because of his length. And the guy was extremely shy and self-conscious. Well, Frank had been in the hospital for about a week, and when he returned to school he had a doctor’s note excusing him from swimming. So he started walking around the pool with his hands covering his dick, but the teacher yelled at him and made him walk with his hands at his sides. Most of the kids were teasing the poor guy and splashing water on him. I remember him walking around the pool, crying, then disappearing into the locker room.
We never saw Frank again. Nobody ever found out what became of him.
Back in either 4th or 5th grade (early 70’s), we had to play a game of softball, boys against girls.
For us boys, we had to bat one handed, with our left hand, then hop on one leg around the bases.
The girls were under no such restrictions.
The teacher lobbed the easiest pitches you’d ever seen for the girls.
The girl’s pitcher was a fast pitch softball player.
Why yes, they did kick our asses, and why no, we didn’t have any fun. I seem to remember a bit of poetic justice. One of the girls slammed a line drive directly into the teacher’s hip to bring an end to the game.
Back in 7th grade, we had a female teacher who would line up all the students in the hall leading to the boy’s locker room at the end of swimming class. The girls were always on the right, which afforded them a rather clear view of a large portion of the showers, which by that time were usually filled with the boys from the rest of the gym classes. Then the teacher would hold the door open, which required her to stand just inside the boy’s shower area, while we filed in.
Even then (mid 70’s), there were quite a few complaints about this. She eventually stopped doing it and I don’t think it was by choice.
Nowaways I think that would get her arrested.
I had kind of a kooky English teacher in 10th grade. She believed Anne Rice’s novels were fictionalized versions of real events. She required our papers to consist of paragraphs of exactly five sentences, each sentence exactly 11-13 words in length. This was on every paper, and she did definitely count off when you broke these rules. She would write comments on my reading journal entries such as “Kris, you are bullshitting me!” I once went to her house because she lived right next door to my best friend, and I asked the rather built young Aryan boy-fireman who answered the door “Are you Mrs. C’s son?” He was her husband. There appeared to me to be a fifteen or twenty year difference between them. Nothing wrong with that, but the dynamic just contributed to her aura of kooky.
She was in fact one of my (and many others’) favorite teachers. (And as well many other others hated her very much.)
-FrL-
Elementary school. Recess.
aka Hell on Earth
The one teacher had a major hard-on about kids needing to exercise during recess*. So he’d organize a kickball game every recess.
Because it was recess he couldn’t or somehow wouldn’t make participation mandatory.
But if you didn’t play you were open for general mocking, lead by the teacher. Saying things like: “Don’t be a fat slob.” “Only losers avoid playing games.” “Are you too stupid to want to have fun?”
Of course, if one gave in to the exhortations to play, the abuse continued: any poor or bungled play would result in scorn and filth from the mouth of this teacher. It is left as an exercise for the reader to imagine how the other students responded with this superlative example of sportsmanship, civility, and sensitivity.
Of course, while the other teachers wouldn’t participate in this little passion-play, they wouldn’t let students stay inside during recess. Nor to go where this yahoo couldn’t see them. Sometimes they’d even help this bully round up the less interested kids. (Of course part of that might have to do with the fact that he had to have been the most senior teacher in that school at that time.)
In ninth grade “integrated science,” the final consisted of reconstructing rodent skeletons. Said bones were fragmented within owl pellets. Owl pellets possess possibly the foulest odor on the earth. I was the only boy in my group.
In retrospect, lobbing a few of those pellets at the teacher would have been well worth a failing grade.
We had a whackjob math teacher in high school. His name was Mr. Vanes.
Every single day he would talk all about his horrid experiences in WW2, and would continue talking about it until someone asked him if he had ever killed anyone.
Only then would he do his job and teach math.
We didn’t learn much that year about math.
We did learn quite a bit about WW2, though.
Yeah, but I’d enjoy that kind of ball!
Yeah, not a balloon or even beach ball type ball. Definitely the hard kind of soccer ball. I got my own “Ow, my nose!” Marcia Brady moment there! Really wondering what the hell was going on in when that lesson plan was being written up.
When I was in fourth grade, I went to this local Christian camp with my best friend. It was the most bizarre experience ever. I was a somewhat religious kid, so none of the Jesus-talk freaked me out. It was our counselor. The guy was weird. He was incredibly introverted for a camp counselor, just this quiet guy who would sit in the corner and sort of mumble what the next activity was, as if he had something else on his mind.
He wore this t-shirt that said,
Some people call me a dreamer…
Maybe some day you will join us.
Having never heard John Lennon’s Imagine, the guy just seemed all the weirder for wearing that t-shirt. It sounded so ominous.
At the end of the week, when night fell, they built this great big bonfire, and for some reason I remember everyone throwing books into it. Burning books. At an elementary -level church camp. I don’t remember why we were burning the books–don’t remember outrage, it seemed to have nothing to do whatsoever with a moral crusade, and we were also supposed to be saying the things we were thankful for–but there we were, huddled together, throwing books into a fire for no apparent reason that I can recall.
I don’t understand why this did not horrify me, given my love of books at the time, and to this day.
It was just such a weird experience. It feels like a dream.
When I was in elementary school (second and third grade, if I’m not mistaken,) if you got caught saying “potty words,” you had to spend 15 minutes in the potty. (I went to a Montessori school where grades 1-3 were all in one big classroom, which had a bathroom.) You had to go into the bathroom, and you could not come out for 15 minutes. Other kids were not allowed to use it while you were in there. You weren’t locked in, but you weren’t allowed to come out.
One day during recess (in 3rd grade, I think,) my friend Miguel and I decided we would form a “gang.” We brainstormed on a name for a while, and decided on “The Bang Gang.” Just because we liked how it sounded. The teacher heard us talking about it later, and made us sit in the potty for it.
Later I asked my mom and dad, “why did they make us sit in the potty. ‘Bang Gang’ isn’t a potty word, is it?” My dad said - I’ll never forget it - “they probably thought you said Gang Bang. A Gang Bang is when a bunch of men have sex with one woman.”
I really thought my teachers were idiots after that.
hmm…
There was the substitute teacher when I was in P5 (about 9 years old) who told us about the time he was in New Mexico and saw a UFO. I thought Peyote was the name of his horse…“I was in the desert, riding high on Peyote”…it makes sense when you’re nine.
There was the history teacher who as a GCSE (age 16, national exams) coursework piece got us to watch the X-files episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK”. Then we had to compare and contrast the two with primary and secondary source materials and say what we really thought happened in Dallas. You got extra marks if you came up with a weird conspiracy theory.
In the early 50s when there was a national fear that the Russians were going to launch a nuclear attack on the United States and grammar school children practiced duck and cover moves, practicing hiding under their desks for when the bomb fell, I had a teacher who used to punish misbehaving pupils by telling them “For the rest of the day you have to sit next to the windown so that when the atomic bomb falls you will be hit by the glass splinters.”
In second grade I saw a teacher exhibit a fit of apoplexy.
There was a boy in my class (Peter) with parents who were extremely liberal in their child rearing skills. They allowed their son access to things the rest of us didn’t yet know existed (circa 1965). One day the teacher left the room for some reason. We were supposed to sit quietly.
The boy sitting behind Peter kept hitting him on the head with a pencil. Peter turned around several times, taking swings at the kid. The 4th or 5th time he spun around, the teacher walked back into the room. Peter screamed at the kid, “CUT IT OUT YA DOUCHEBAG”.
The teacher went absolutely apeshit. She couldn’t catch her breath. As she dragged Peter to the principal’s office, we were all going crazy trying to determine what we had just witnessed.
Maybe some day we will join you.
When I was in 8th grade, I was walking down the hall with my friend Adam. We walked by a science teacher who was built like a freakin’ tank. Without warning, reason, or provocation, he angrily pushed Adam to the floor.
Both of mine involve using kids as mechanical letter-writers.
In first grade, the teacher had us write letters to a Mr. S___, telling him to stop smoking. Later, I found out, she married him.
In 8th grade, our teacher was a major Green, and made us each write five letters to various companies. The odd thing was, she already wrote template letters, with arguments already enumerated; all we were supposed to do was to copy them and send them. Eventually, the companies replied, politely but pointedly noting that the similarity of the letters indicated a spoon-fed agenda. Not noticing this jab, she posted them on the blackboard, proclaiming victory. (This teacher was also notable for marked ideological bias when grading our “argument essays”)
This is less strange, surreal or creepy and more batshit stupid.
When my math teacher was dividing $500 by some number I don’t remember, the answer was supposed to have a fraction of a penny in it. Since you obviously can’t divide a penny, you have to add a zero to $500 and make it $5000. It works then.
Why does anyone bother with High School?
A friend of a friend, Lyn, went to the same elementary school as I did, but is a year or two older than I am. She is legally blind and left handed. She was punished by her (my) kindergarten teacher, forced to write with her right hand, had her glasses taken away as punishment, and generally mocked. She was from a very low-income family. Eventually there was a huge fuss made, Lyn was pulled from that class.
The next year (or year after, Im not quite sure) I was in kindergarten. Same teacher. I am left handed. So was a statistically significant number of classmates (Im thinking about 6 out of 14?) There was a poster on the wall with the names of “Our Lefty Club Members” on it in big green kindergarten block letters. There was a special coffee can that had green handled scissors for us lefties (never mind they didn’t cut worth a darn, and I prefered to use right handed scissors upside down). We had someone come in and help us with our printing. It was a very Lefty-friendly environment. Did I mention my Dad worked for the gorvernment, and we had students whos parents were teachers, a dentist, an accountant, and in general we all lived in a rather “nice” (not super rich but solid upper middle class) nieghbourhood?
Another friend of mine, a year younger had the same kindergarten teacher. Said that the teacher kept putting her pencil in the right hand, trying to get her to switch. Her dad was a grad student at the time…(eventually became a university prof)
Not saying…but… retrospect? Was my kindergarten year a result of “sensitivity training” and it kind of wore off by the next year. Or was geography destiny?
I’m in California, so along with your regular fire drills, we also get earthquake drills. When the bell sounds, drop under your desk, cover the back of your neck with your hands, etc.
We’re in Trig, and Mr. Hansen is at the board explaining something. No one was listening to him. No one ever listened to him. We were seniors in Trig – too stupid for Calculus, but wanted/needed another math credit to get into a good college. Every teacher’s joy.
Then, the earthquake starts – one of the rolling ones, not a pick the building up and drop it one. We all pause, look at each other, and someone begins to dive under his desk. Mr. Hansen, mid-proof, turns to the class and says, “NO ONE MOVES UNTIL I’M DONE!”
We sat there frozen as the earth shook, watching whatever he was doing at the board. The earthquake ended before the proof was done.
When I was in 9th grade (I think) I had this total dingbat civics teacher. She was clearly high on something at all times. Anything went in that classroom. So one day my boyfriend (a few years older than me–in high school–I don’t know why he wasn’t in school that day) knocked on the classroom door and told her he wanted to talk to me. She said, oh, of course, you just take the rest of the period and talk. She was quite emphatic–really, we should talk. So we left. Not nearly as amusing or interesting as the other stories here, but there it its.