Woah! Hot for teacher!
Oh, that comment was for ad noctum’s teacher pic…
Actually, the most unusual thing my teachers ever showed me was that something in school could have practical use in the real world. Didn’t see that one coming.
Wanna get interested in literature? My Grade Ten English teacher had us reading “Lord of The Flies”, which I’m sure many of you have read … english boys abandoned on an Island … yeah, yeah, blah blah.
Well I guess Ms. Struch really wanted us to understand how terrifying it was to be suddenly in the wild, no parents to protect you, only your wits to save you, never knowing who to trust. She paced the room for a good 20 minutes, doing a dramatic monologue full of incredible imagery before tearing away the garbage bag that was hiding …
… A boar’s head on a stake.
(Those of you who’ve read the book remember the boar’s head, right?)
A real boar’s head. With blood pouring from it and flies swarming around it and stinky as hell. In our classroom.
KICKED ASS!!!
My teacher did the Oxygen and Hydrogen explode gag.
But it knocked over a beaker of acid on the pretty girl’s cashmere sweater, putting holes right through it, and sending her to the showers.
My astronomy professor wanted to demonstrate something… whatever the lesson was, it was quickly forgotten when he suddenly stood on top of the lab station in the front of the lecture hall and started winding a toaster through the air above his head, holding it by the cord end. He stood there for about five minutes, making his own toaster propeller and lecturing away, while we sat there, absolutely positive that the cord would snap and the toaster would bash someone in the head.
I know for a fact that at least one person will never smoke because of what happened to him one fateful day.
Mr O’Gara was our biology teacher. Now to imagine Mr O’Gara you must think of the original Mad Scientist. This guy had a shock of unkept red hair and wore the traditional black gown popular amoung lay teacher at our school. An illtempered man and occasionally prone to outbursts of violence against students ; he was retained partly for his small brilliance and more so because of the fact that the administration were terrified of him.
One day he swished into class clasping in his hand a round ball of a substance that looked like pumice. Porous and dark black it was an interesting looking item about the size of a baseball. he handed it to the first child in the row and invited him to take a taste and tell him what he thought. The boy took a piece(it appeared highly malleable) and tentativly nibbled on a piece. The taste was not to his liking however and he immediatly spat it out. O’Gara was having none of that and told young Dugan to try it again. Duggan complained of a slighlty chemical smell and tatse. Mr O’Gara explained that that was simply due to the formaldehyde it had been stored in. Eventually Duggan was convinced (coeerced) into swalling a small amount of the substance and immediatly became very ill and threw up on the floor.
We all remained aghast as we wondered who might be next but it appeared that Mr O’Gara had only Duggan in his sights this day. He then asked the boy if indeed it was he who had been sighted from the teachers staff room smoking just outside the school gate that lunch time. Duggan groggily admitted the fact thinking (most likely) that a trip to see the principal would be immensly preferable to remaining here with this madman.
Mr O’Gara proclaimed surprise at the reaction young Duggan had showed to the substance he had eaten. He explained that it was TAR , removed from the lungs of a heavy smoker after his death (thankfully after…obviously O’Gara had had no part in this).
Needless to say Duggan hadnt smoked again when last I saw him.
There ends my parable and lest any of you think that this is unlikely or raise your eyebrows in disbelief let me tell you that you obviuosly know very little of the irish catholic education system some years ago.
Despite the vociferous complaints from Duggans parents about the incident and threats to call the police Mr.O’Gara was never reprimanded for this incident. indeed he was indignant that this “character building” punishment for an infraction was questioned.
I have many other tales of this sort I could regale and horrify you with. The things that happened to me while in that school had however no effect on me at all …or me …or me
Oh the joys of high school…
The class was outdoor education, a mix of biology, enironmental science, and chemistry. We would check for contaminants in the creek behind our school, we did a population survey of redwing blackbirds in a wetland area nearby, and we even planned and built a nature trail through these wetlands. A fun way to learn science and how it applied to our environment, but even so the teacher was a little bit different.
For a two week period we were divided in to groups and had to perform a necropsy on a dead animal the teacher had found on a nature hike. I had to dissect and determine the cause of death of a rabbit. it turned out to have been hit by a car.
Later ion the semester the teacher was giving a lecture on what could be learned about an animal from its droppings. She had several examples that we looked at. Whil;e summing up the lecture she mentioned, “that you can use sight, smell and even taste to quantify the droppings.” As she said this she picked up a large round dropping and ate it. The entire class went silent. Then the bell rang and we left. A bit later in the year she informed us that that particular piece had been a hershey’s kiss molded in to the appropriate shape.
What a teacher…
My Grade 9 Science teacher did this stuff too…and he dumped a little of the liquid nitrogen on some tables. Girls sitting nearby dived for cover.
We played a cool trick on my Grade 12 history teacher. He went to the bathroom and we moved all our desks and his desk to the front lawn. He came back to the empty room, and then came out front to finish teaching the class. Was very calm about it.
Well, his methods may have been very unorthodox, but his intentions were good. 
If I had a kid who learned a lesson this way I would be grateful.
As for me…in ninth grade my physics teacher strung a wire diagonally across the room. He then suspended a plastic gallon milk jug sideways from the wire. This was the kind that had a screw-on plastic lid. He’d put about a quarter inch of alchohol in the bottom of the jug, glued the lid on, and drilled a hole the size of pencil through. He put this contraption on one end of the wire and held a flame to the hole in the lid. It ignited the alchohol and the thing shot across the room like a rocket, trailing a huge gout of flame. It was really cool, but to this day I haven’t a clue what the point was. He never used the demonstration as part of a lesson plan or anything. Another time this same guy brought in a potato cannon and we went outside and shot it on the football practice field. I had a great time in that class, and didn’t learn a damn thing. 
The next year, in out first day in Chemistry out teacher had all ten groups in class mix sugar and sulfuric acid. This produced a column of hard pumice-like substance rising up out of the beaker, and gave of some kind of horrible smelling gas that made your eyes water. The cumulative effect of ten groups doing this at one was overpowering. Everybody had to leave the room. What was really funny is that he had every other chem class that day do the same thing. The school almost had to be evacuated. You could smell this hideous stink all over the building. Again, I have no idea what the purpose of this demonstration was.
Very cool teaching method devised by a 9th Grade Global Studies teacher I had (Mr. Miner was his name).
To demonstrate why Mercator maps are distorted, he cut a globe in half and smashed the northern hemisphere flat against the blackboard. Students thought he was insane, but then they thought about it for a sec… “Hey, I get it!”
I guarantee that no one in my HS forgot that particular demonstration.
I was just thinking that I really didn’t have anything interesting to share except the dead drunk guy’s brain that a doctor brought in to our 3rd grade class one day.
But then I remembered freshman year Bible class at my high school (Christian school, of course).
Our teacher, Mr. Whateverhisnamewas, thought it would be good to show us an animated Bible story video that he had rented at the local Bible book store. Well, apparently he hadn’t previewed the video before he showed it to our class, because at the beginning of the tape some miscreant had recorded 2, maybe 3 seconds of an adult film. I don’t remember all the specifics, except that there were three people, all quite naked, and two of them were doing it doggy style. We all absolutely lost it, and the best part was that the teacher didn’t see it! He was turned away for those couple seconds. We kept begging him to rewind the tape, but he didn’t. We never told him, but boy did we tell everyone else in the school.
I kept hoping that would happen again, but sadly it never did.
This was burried way back in my memory, but I wish it wasn’t. Then maybe I could have avoided a similar situation in my class. I was teaching a rock and roll class to 7th and 8th graders this last school year and didn’t think I needed to preview a tape. Well, I showed it and the video was talking about all the “perks” that go along with being a rock and roll star. There was a quick scene backstage at some concert where a charming young lady pulled her shirt off to briefly reveal a lovely pair of well-tanned breasts. Yeah, most of my kids lost it. (They are junior highers after all.) A few were mature about it, saying that they’d all seen that before, but most weren’t. I preview all videos now.
So there it is. I was showed porn in 9th grade and I grew up to be a teacher who shows boobies to my 7th and 8th graders. I feel so icky.
(…and thus ends the longest post of my SD experience)
Well, my teachers never showed me anything too interesting, none of them were overly bright. In 9th grade my science teacher showed us the whole dry ice and shattering objects thing, he showed us a bottle of really kewl orangey, mettalic-ish swirly liquid stuff in a bottle too. He never would tell us what it was. My science teacher showed us the brains and several internal organs of a lamb that he had been carrying around in his lunch box/cooler. We even made bottle rockets in my other junior high science class, those were fun and we got out of class to play with them too. So other than funny stuff in jars and animal organs, othing really special.
It was probably just oil and water.
Our Chemistry teacher once tried to teach the class how to make a smoke bomb (I think it was sugar/saltpeter, but I’m a bit off thoughtwise at the moment). Anyway, the imbecile student he had holding the beaker above the flame dropped the mix… the beaker shattered and the whole mixture went up in smoke.
It made a nifty bright-red flash for a split second, then fell to the table smoldering. Slowly, very slowly, the room filled with a thick, sickly-sweet smoke.
Needless to say, class was adjourned for an early lunch.
pepperlandgirl,
oil and water don’t mix, so it couldn’t have been that, this stuff reminded me of nail polish but it was too liquidy to be nail polish either. He found it in a catalogue too but the catalogue wouldn’t tell us what was in the bottle either, I was dissapointed with science for a while after that.
Oil and water don’t mix, which is exactly why it could have been that. You put some sort of dye in the water, and fill the bottle up halfway. Then, you fill it the rest of the way with clear oil. What looks like the surface of the liquid is actully the interface between the two liquids, and since the top layer is oil, not air, the water looks a lot more viscous.
My 6th grade science teacher, Mrs. Peterson, did the liquid nitrogen thing. She also cultured bacteria.
My current radiography course has many x-rays that we use to learn various pathologies. The one I remember the most (aside from the abdomen with enough gas to float the Hindenburg) is the child (small feet) with eight toes. On each foot. Must cost a bundle in nail polish.
(For the record, the identifying information is cut out of each film and destroyed.)
Robin
This is a little off the subject of teachers, but my first job was as a file clerk in the radiology department of a Children’s Hospital. Three very dramatic images that I’ll never forget stand out:
A head X-ray of a child with a pair of scissors sticking into his eye.
A chest X-ray with the perfect profile of a Monopoly battleship midway down the esophagus.
Most interestingly, a child born with mermaidism, where the legs are fused, forming a single flipper-shaped appendage below the waist.
I also did the electrolysis/hydrogen fire thing. And an experiment with putting various chemicals into a bunsen burner and seeing what color the fire turned. We turned it all sorts of crazy colors, it was awesome.
The science teachers also showed us what happened in vaccuum tubes, but I already knew what was gonna happen.