There was something like that at my aunt’s high school. The gym and locker rooms were designed so the girls had to go through the boys locker room to get to their locker room.
Eighth grade HP (honors) English class and a bee flew into the classroom via the air ducts. The teachers asks the class to stop talking about transcendentalism and to put our heads down on our desks and ask the bee, non-verbally, to leave the class room. Thirty minutes later we are bee-free and the teacher celebrated her “point”.
I just thought of another surreal experience. I’ve mentioned this story before, but I’m not sure I described it in detail.
I was in 10th grade English. The teacher had started in the middle of the semester, was new to the school, and just didn’t seem to come off as very intelligent. Hence, none of us kids really gave her a lot of respect.
One day, the class was talking and fooling around while the teacher just stood there, listening. I had a classmate who’s last name was Bycott. Another classmate mispronounced it, and I said “It’s Bycott, not Boycott.” Promptly, the teacher told me to join her outside (we were in a trailer). I thought she was going to send me to the office or something, because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Then I noticed she was really angry.
“Did you say the ‘B’ word?” she asked.
I thought she meant “bitch”, of course. So I told her no.
“Yes, you did. You said ‘Boycott’.”
“But that’s not a bad word!” I cried, wondering if I had stepped into some alternate dimension.
“IT IS IN MY CLASSROOM!!” she yelled.
Later, I told my classmates what had happened. We thought it was funny in its strangeness, and it served as further proof that the school had hired a nutcase. I kind of let the incident slip my mind until a couple of weeks later, when the teacher was running late to class. While snooping in her desk, a classmate discovered a list of “problem students” along with their crimes. My name was on the list, and written next to it:
Monstro said “boycott” in class.
I couldn’t look at her with a straight face after that.
monstro, just out of curiousity, did you ever find out why this idjit thought boycott was such a bad word?
I had this really sunny, chirpy woman as my fifth grade teacher. She always had these fun games and activities. One I remember was that she had this plastic apple with a smiling worm sticking out, that had a happy face on it and rang a bell when she shook it. She called it the Happy Apple. When she shook it we were to go to the game area.
One day she started shaking it, sunnily saying “Let’s meet at the Happy Apple spot!” as always. Then it went something like this:
“Let’s meet at the Happy Apple spot! Class, let’s meet at the Happy Apple spot! I SAID MEET AT THE HAPPY APPLE SPOT! If you don’t get to the Happy Apple spot, I’ll KICK THE HELL OUT OF YOU!!!”
Everyone was frozen in place, astonished. The other 5th grade teacher heard this and went to talk to her. Ten seconds later she was back to her normal self - no acknowledgment of what happened, in fact she never spoke of it again and we never saw that kind of outburst again.
But you better believe there was a group of us that still busted out that “Happy Apple” line on occasion - including at our most recent HS reunion.
No, but I hypothesize that she was the victim of the Montgomery Bus BOYCOTT!!
When I was in eighth grade, we hada a 30-minute “study hall” during one part of the day. While we had to be seated in our homeroom, we could do pretty much anything we wanted – homework, talk quietly, etc. I liked using the time to read. One day when I was seated on the front row reading a book, my homeroom teacher came up and kicked at my ankles.
I went to a Catholic grade school. Our sixth grade history teacher had a statue of Mary on his desk. The statue was about 5 inches tall and very unstable. Whenever a student walked over to his desk to ask him a question, there was always a chance the student would accidentally knock over the statue. When this happen - and it happened with great frequency (about 2 or 3 times a day) - he would punish the student by giving him/her this choice: A) kiss the top of the statue, or B) pay 10 cents.
We all learned to keep a few dimes in our pockets at all times. At the end of the year he gave the money to the church (or so he said).
When I was in kindergarten (can’t believe I remember this!), a boy barfed all over the floor. I can only think that the teacher was utterly flummoxed by this and had us parade in a circle around the kid (and the barf) until she figured out what to do. 
I remember feeling really bad for this kid that obviously didn’t feel well and was in the center of a circle of marching kindergartners and a puddle of puke.
I went to an all girls Catholic school in junior high. There were no male teachers at all. Yet they had some sort of monk (“brother”?) come in and try to teach us sex ed! :eek: I can maybe see that the nuns didn’t want to do it and/or didn’t feel qualified, but we had lay teachers, too! I remember him drawing a penis on the chalkboard that was shaped more like a nuclear detonation and my best friend’s hand shot up in the air: “Excuse me! It does NOT look like that!” 
Of course, you were only 11 at the time, and internet future hindsight is perfect and all…
But a little bit of superglue would have solved that problem once and for all.
WTH? This isn’t the Pit, ya know! 
I’ll never forget my 6th grade science teacher. It was 1981 and he had us listen to audio tapes of people taking LSD and jumping out of a window or huffing gas and setting themselves on fire.
I remember one film we watched, which someone shooting up and the guy’s vein came out of his arm.
He also had competitions on Thursdays, where it was like a bizzaro Double Dare-type of game (this was pre-Double Dare). You either answer a science question or do something challenging or uncomfortable. One of the things he had was a homemade “electric” chair. He took one of those wooden desk chairs that was held together with the metal bolts and hooked up a charge to the metal bolts that would touch your back. You’d have to tell him how many seconds you could take in the chair. One kid got to his 20 seconds and decided to keep going. His face got all red and when he finally got up, his back was red where the bolts were touching it.
The most shocking thing this teacher did during the drug lessons was burn marijuana and have us all come up one by one to smell it! I. Shit. You. Not.
Er… as someone who made it well past the age of legal majority without being able to recognize, definately, the scent of marijuana - that actually sounds reasonable to me. Given the data out there for how ineffective second-hand marijuana smoke is for transferring the active ingredients* to people not smoking it directly, I don’t see a risk for that. And it can be useful information.
*While I was in the Navy we’d been subject to annual whiz quizes, and random spot checks as well. One possible “excuse” for a positive reading for pot use on the test had been if one had been to a concert within a few days of the test being given, since there was a perception (accurate or not, I can’t say) that pot use would be rampant at such events. Mid-way through my term of service this excuse got thrown out the window, because someone actually did at least one study showing that to get a positive result for pot use via urinalysis - the ‘second-hand’ smoker would have to be pretty much in an enclosed room with almost as much pot smoke as if he were sitting inside a bong’s gas chamber.
At the back of my fifth grade classroom was a drinking fountain; within reason, we were allowed to walk to it and drink without asking for permission. One day I did so, as had a dozen other kids that day. I stood up with the water not yet swallowed and Mrs. Ford wheeled around in mid-lesson, pointed angrily at me and said “You - down to the Principal’s office: you were going to spit that water!”
It was a complete shock. I was a good, well-mannered student. No one in our class (nor in the entire school) had ever spit water. The incident made no sense at all, to me or any of my classmates. The Principal was also rather bemused by the whole thing - he let me off with a rather gentle admonition to behave well.
Nothing like this happened again. To this day I’ve never understood it.
I’m not saying it would get us high, I’m saying that an elementary school teacher was buring an illegal drug in the classroom. Can you imagine that happening today?
If you want to know what it smells like legally, run down to your nearest health food store and buy some dried mugwort, or even better a moxa stick (used by acupuncturists). Smells almost identical while it’s burning, so much so that we had to burn some for the police officer who wandered by my acupuncture clinic once while the windows were open and wanted to search the building as a result of the smell.
[hijack]Might be easier said than done for the mugwort, depending on what stores are available. Even with Wild Oats’ decent sized herb/medicinal plant selection, they didn’t have a bit of mugwort around, in any form. I gave the person in the “alternative medicine” section the scientific name and the alternative names, and she fixated on “St. John’s plant” and tried to give me St. John’s wort, even when I pointed out the scientific names were totally different. :smack: I ended up mail ordering it rather than wasting time driving around.[/hijack]
Plain old oregano from the local Safeway smells the same, too.
When I was in grade school, we had this really weird 3rd grade teacher. Mr. Warnock. He would always punish the “problem” children by seatbelting them to their chairs/desks, actually putting them INSIDE an old refridgerator box, and some other really weird stuff. This guy was a complete and total science geek, especially when it came to space. From what I’ve heard, he was actually on the waiting list of teachers to go up in the Challenger. But all this can be wrote off a just quirky teaching styles, and in fact, most of the students and teachers really liked this guy. But the one thing he did that was just WAY beyone creepy was one day a year he would wear a full spandex suit with all of the body organs and stuff printed on it. Yeah…very, very, very creepy.
When I was a senior in high school, our Latin teacher went through sleep deprivation hallucination. Big time.
He’s a pretty tightly wound guy, fun but can get carried away, and didn’t sleep much to begin with. This was at the beginning of the first Gulf War, and he had several friends over there, and so wasn’t sleeping well if at all.
We first noticed when he started trumpeting America’s technological capability, and how it will save our troops. It was odd, but then, so was he, so we didn’t think much of it. The next day, he was tense, and kept staring out the window. At one point he turned on the radio and after listening for a few minutes, exclaimed ‘See? They’re in control!’. He spent the entire class unsteadily trying to get through a lesson, or staring out the window. It freaked us right out, because this was way out of line for him. When the class was finally over he stood by the door and shook our hands and told us goodbye like we were never going to meet again. He had the next class sit in a circle and pray the entire time, and hugged them each as they left. It got a little worse for each class. Soon word got around to the administrators, and they had to persuade him to get in an ambulance and go to the hospital.
We had a sub for a few weeks, and then he came back and apologized, and spent the first class teaching us all about sleep dep, and exactly what happens. He told us about what he saw when was looking out the window (Iraqi war fortifications being built across the street), what he heard on the radio (Iraqi propaganda), what he saw at the hospital (war casualties), etc. He was kind of embaressed the first day, but was back to normal soon.