We had slaves day in middle school (don’t know about high school, didn’t go). Boys one day and girls a week later. Flyers would be posted all over the school announcing the day. You could make the guy or girl do anything as long it wasn’t sexual such as lifting up their skirt or top. The most common thing was having someone carry your books or lunch, but it could also be having them kneel before you on command. Some of the young “cool” female teachers would also participate, both for the boys and girls days.
Another thing I only heard about, were Kill Blacks day, Kill Whites day and Slap a Jap (actually an Asian) day… I heard about it from the high school I barely attended that was primarily military kids (I’m in Hawaii). This was one of the reasons I stopped going to that high school. I’ve confirmed with others who went other schools in the 70’s and early 80’s, that it was a thing there too. With variations according to the racial mix of the school.
In the 60’s, in Kindergarten we were given pieces of wood, a child’s saw and hammer and other kid sized tools. I hammered several pieces of wood together and told the teacher it was a swivel wing plane. The teacher said it was impossible.
Then in the 70’s, I saw a Popular Mechanics cover that featured a oblique wing plane that had a wing pivoted in the center, just like I imagined! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_AD-1
Okay, not exactly as I imagined. My thought was that the wing could do a complete 90 degree turn, essentially making the plane a missle.
1962, Catholic Elementary School where I was in 7th Grade. Female 1st Grader came home with a broken nose, the result of being violently sucker-shoved face-first to the floor from behind by Sister E.M. The cause of the injury didn’t come to light for a month or so, when the same little girl suffered the same injury, the same way, by the same nun.
It must have been hushed over because I didn’t hear about it at the time; My sister was a classmate of the victim, yet my mother didn’t bother telling me about it until many years later. No idea what happened to Sister E.M. Most of the nuns were psychologically/emotionally abusive, several of them were physically abusive (face slaps; blows to the head with hard objects) but Sister E.M. took the prize. As far as I know.
I forget how it came up, but at work one day the subject of teaching nuns came up at work. Our resident Vietnamese immigrant said, “Oooh!” and rubbed the back of his hand.
I remember we had an activity where you could actually bid on a student–I think it was called “Auction Day.” I think it was usually the class below that was made available to the class above for that kind of stuff, carrying books and whatnot.
I never made the connection to slavery until later.
My senior year of high school (mid 1990s), I was an assistant for my guidance counselor. Sometimes I was in charge of filing documents that listed students’ grades, standardized test scores, etc. I quickly learned that the sophomore class in my high school was particularly stupid–they had lots of low grades and test scores, and few sophomores made the honor roll. I also got to read the disciplinary records. The one that I remember the most was that a student was suspended for insubordination in gym class. On the disciplinary slip, the gym teacher wrote that the student wouldn’t run and told the teacher, “I’m tired, motherfucker, I’m not going to run no more.”
I’m fairly certain there was some discussion at the time, but I don’t remember what happened to the teacher in this tale, which took place in the early 80s.
Our middle school buildings had 8 rooms, 4 on each side of a narrow hallway. All 8 rooms had exterior access doors, so the hallway was never used to go between classrooms, but it did have doors to the four rooms which bordered it. This is actually where we had our first computer lab, with TRS-80s, so the hallway was not that narrow.
The rooms which did not border the hallway shared a folding wall with the rooms which did border the hallway. So the 8 rooms could be changed to 4 big rooms.
There’s a special sound when a teachers throws a student up against one of those folding walls. I remember my teacher leaving our classroom and going next door, and not coming back immediately. It may have been during an after school activity, so the time was not limited as it would have been during the school day.
I don’t think any teacher would handle a student like that anymore. It was questionable then, but now unfathomable.
Where I live, we used to throw out garbage differently.
These days, there are positives: recycling, organics, and so forth. Unfortunately throwing out non-recyclable, non-organic trash is difficult. Why? Because the trash bins have a different design. They typically have a hole for pop cans, a slot for recyclable paper (or two, if there’s none for pop cans), and an oval slot for… everything else, which frequently will not fit in the slot!
Why no open-mouthed garbage? Partly because people will just throw anything into them, but also partly because of raccoons. Apparently people became terrified of them sometime while I was growing up, and they refuse to use a design that raccoons can exploit. I really don’t think raccoons are interested in non-organic garbage (except that people tend to throw organic stuff in there anyway).
When I was a kid, our housing complex had a giant trash bin. People would walk a minute or so to toss everything into it. One day I found a raccoon stuck in there. My mother freaked out, but I just found a plank and put that in so the raccoon could get out. I didn’t want it to be taken up by the garbage truck!
I now live in an apartment building. The nearby building has an open-mouthed trash container like that just outside, and if I need to throw out something non-recyclable that is too big to fit into a slot, I have to go there. Where I live there’s recycling (in the building itself) and organic bins (outside) but literally no place to put general trash.
I’m not sure that all of the stories and poems (what message does Taffy send?) we learned as children should be acceptable now. In particular, our French teachers seemed to prefer macabre tales. (Should all ten short stories in the book really include the verb se suicider?).
So do I. My current watch is crap – it glows for an hour or two, so when you wake up in the middle of the night, it’s worthless.
I’ve heard that they weren’t discontinued because they were dangerous to wear – the were discontinued so that the watchmakers didn’t have to deal with the radium.
When I was 13, I went to Europe for a month as part of a school group. Once or twice a week we were given totally unsupervised days off. I used mine to take the tube/metro/subway all over London and Paris, with destinations that included casinos, pubs, and even joining a protest march (this was Paris 1968 after all!). On one free day in Italy, we all bought switch blades. I got two! (And, yes, I smuggled them back home.) At 13.
We had a high school field trip from small-town Wisconsin to London (well, ok, it was a week-long student thee’-ah-tah trip) that consisted of twenty kids and two “chaperones” who were less mature than we were.
That resulted in a lot of hooky-playing. One day a half-dozen of us skipped a beautiful day in Hyde Park to spend all afternoon riding the Tube. We somehow ended up in the countryside, sharing sausages, a baguette and a bottle of wine with some locals. When we got back the “grownups” just said “Get dressed up, we have tickets for Butley* in half an hour.”
…
*Harold Prince directing Alan Bates… it was a most excellent “student thee’-ah-tah trip”.
I’ll bet you got a couple canisters of aluminum (powdered so fine it had the consistency of flour) to go with those…
Same time frame, I was building pretty potent firecrackers and fireworks displays with those same materials. The stories we came up with for the druggist… we just made up symptoms on the spot: “Umm, so, I need a pound of potassium nitrate because I have… a loose stool.”
Oh, and parents were just glad their annoying fifth grader was out of the way, experimenting on “something chemical and…uh… educational” in the basement.
