The principal in my highschool was a 1st cousin of my Mother.
He took a special interest in me.
I had to be seriously sneaky to get away with stuff.
I had a keyboard class. I never went to that class. My friend did my keyboard work as well as her own.
She was good and fast. I made an A+ in that class.
I still have trouble with keyboards, Karma is a bitch.
We had a junior high science teacher (called “Shakes”) who drove a crappy old station wagon with a wooden kitchen chair in place of the driver’s seat. I’m pretty sure one or both of the car doors were missing, as well.
That’s how we learned it. Right at the end of the alphabet song, we’d do a singsong “and sometimes y and w.” Of course, the majority of the teachers were Irish nuns.
I always learned “and sometimes Y and W” but no one ever gave me an example of a word where W was actually used as a vowel. It might be one of those things like the tongue map where it’s just common wisdom that was never questioned. Looking back on it I think it’s doubly weird that not only did we not get examples, I don’t remember any of the kids or myself ever asking for examples.
I don’t think that the existence of one semi-rare counterexample is enough to justify always tacking on the “and W” to the incantation. There are plenty of other seldom-used non-norse/german/french/latin-derived words that we can slip into our conversation without inserting major exceptions in our core language pedagogy. For instance, take the letter “L”. It would be once thing to mention once or twice that it can sometimes be pronounced as “y” when part of a word that came to us through Spanish such as “llama”. It would be another thing to, when teaching the alphabet go, “Okay, kids, when you read a 'K”, it is pronounced ‘kuh’, like in kick. ‘L’ is pronounced “luh’ like in ‘land’, but sometimes like ‘yuh’ like in ‘llama’”. And there are probably several more semi-common words that contain an “ll” that I am just forgetting, even if the barrier is that they are more common than “cwm”.
The Y and W thing may be referring to semivowels, as in “will you wipe your wet yellow wellies?” more than documenting “the rhythms of the cwm.”
(Edit: in which latter case I think you can make a solid argument that the M in “rhythm” is a vowel.)
It wasn’t weird, but in today’s schools 60 years later, it would be grounds for dismissal and possible arrest. There was a Christmas party for the 9th grade class, which was well-attended. There was dance music, decorations and mistletoe. There was also a young and good-looking biology teacher whose name I forget who was mooned over by most of the girls. It happens.
So at some point during the festivities he was talking to one of the girls when someone came up with a sprig of mistletoe. He grabbed the 15-year-old, dropped her into a theatrical swoon, and laid a big one on her, then stood her back up. The look on her face was stunned surprise and I thought she was going to pass out. Girls and boys that age back then rarely had experience with that sort of adult action. He was laughing, as was everyone who wasn’t in shock.
I think I’ve mentioned before, Ms. Jackson, my 5th grade teacher who used to berate us in Pig Latin.
In 7th grade I had an english/lit teacher who had favorites. We all dove under our desks one day in class from an earthquake. She yelled at us that she wasn’t finished talking, and didn’t believe any of it until one of her star students said the building was shaking. This could have been a silly, bonding moment, but believe me, this lady was NEVER wrong about anything.
At the same school I had a math teacher that made a deal with the class- if we did well on the next math test, we could watch him feed one of the classroom’s live snakes. (Lunch was a mouse.)
[Off-topic] No, for W it would be the various diphthongs such as -AW, -EW, or -OW, which are very common in English. Typically Y & W are consonants if the first letter of a word, and vowels if anywhere else.[/Off-topic]
Aren’t they typically consonants whenever they’re the first letter of a syllable? (e.g. hardware, nitwit, bailiwick, yesteryear)
Yeah.
My oddest experience with a teacher was in fourth grade and is not appropriate discussion for this message board.
Could have been worse. They could have had a mime class.
In high school, my history teacher really loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’d see him heading to the parking lot at lunch, and he’d see me. “Hey, Spoons,” he’d call out, “Wanna get some Kentucky Fried?” Well, it was a damn sight better than what the school caf was offering, so sure. We’d get in his car, get some KFC from ten blocks north, and get back to school in time for next class.
The same teacher … Wait. First understand that I lived in a jurisdiction where you only had to be 16 years old in order to smoke. And I, at age 16, smoked. And that same teacher always bummed cigarettes off me. “I’ll pay you back later,” he said, but he never did. Well, I figured that if I wanted a good grade in history, this was the price to pay.
Then came the last day of school. He tossed me a carton of cigarettes (they were even my brand!), and said, “Thanks. I’m paying you back.”
Heh. When I went to high school in the 70’s there was no age to smoke.
In fact, there was a designated place for students to smoke and it was in the student handbook, so it was official.
My Junior year I took a conservation course. Three times a week the teacher would give us poker sticks to go out in the school yard and pick up trash. We’d hop in a car and smoke, go to Randys (a local burger Joint), and drink beer (no joke) then dump garbage from the trash can into our bags and show teach what we collected.
We all got A’s.
It was such a great gig that my Senior year I took Conservation 2 and the same thing happened. We should have gotten a Nobel Prize for teenage scams!!! 
I went to an all-boys Catholic school. My senior year, I started out in AP English with Ms. M, who taught me honors English sophomore year. Our first reading assignment was Wide Sargasso Sea. I wasn’t too much a fan of the reading list, so I asked to be moved down to regular honors English. A few weeks later, my classmates that were in AP English began chattering that Ms. M. had them all write a rape fantasy as one of the assignments, I believe in relation to Wide Sargasso Sea (which I had not read). And I read some of their pieces, and they got quite … graphic. I though it was odd at the time, but not as odd as thinking about it now, thirty years on, that a teacher at a high school, a Catholic high school mind you, would give her students an assignment like this.
Early 70’s, Headmaster and grade 5-6 teacher retired at end of grade 5. New bloke started in grade 6. Different cat.
He had a thing about people sitting properly with their feet in front, several kids had a habit of hooking their feet around the front chair legs, so after a couple of times pulling kids up verbally, he decided to walk around the classroom during silent reading and the first kid he saw with feet in the wrong place got kicked in the ankle. He also had a habit of throwing the blackboard duster at the head of kids who weren’t paying attention.
High school deputy Principal, malignant little midget, used to walk around the school grounds with his corporal punishment method of choice, the cane, in his hand while he walked. The cane is about 3 feet long, thin whippy piece of dried bamboo. If he caught you doing something deemed improper, it was off to his office for 4 of the best. Stand upright, hold out hand palm upwards with fingers extended straight, he’d lay the cane on your finger tips then lift it up over his head slowly and whip it down quickly aimed to just hit the tips of the fingers. It seriously stung, worse on a cold morning.
It was a badge of honour to take his best with no reaction, just to piss him off. Sadistic little shit.
Mrs. G. my 11th grade English teacher taught with humor and originality, but her humor became way more outrageous on the last day before Christmas vacation.
My year she had us all make up buttons beforehand saying, "Hall Squad’ and when we should’ve been in her class we instead went through the school accosting any students we saw, asking for their “hall numbers.” She instructed us to ask, “were you absent or late any day last week?” Whatever day they said, we told them, “that’s when they were assigned. You have to go ask for a late hall number.”
We sent kids all over the school seeking late hall numbers - to the guidance office, the nurse’s office and (most of all) to the office of the school newspaper, since she was the faculty sponsor for the school magazine.
Best teacher I ever had !
Oh shit. I forgot the year of the frog.
Primary Biology. 9th grade. Mr. Stover
Ex-military guy.
Very strict.
I was immediately put on the front row, after he got the slip from the office all my teachers every year recieved. The one about me being severely diabetic.
(I was persecuted for my probs 
)
Coming in November, Mr. Stover kept telling us about frog dissection as soon as the frogs came. Must of been a shortage of frogs that year. They finally they came.
We all knew we’d be killing frogs the next day.
There was a creek behind my house. Me and 2 friends gathered common frogs. I think we had about 100 frogs in a bucket. As I walked a block to school I carried them to the outside door that led to the science hall. Went around walked in the school entrance
Walked to that door brought the bucket in. Dumped frogs out. Walked into Mr. Stovers room and dumped all the frogs in the hall. And smooth walked away.
I was suspected. Never proved.
I can be a keen liar when I want to be.
We had to dissect rats, and they arrived already deceased and in jars. We were in pairs, and I was with a particularly squeamish girl (I was a girl, too, and a bit squeamish myself), but she refused to even touch the rat. Then, I found an ectopic pregnancy, and the teacher didn’t believe me until she checked it out herself. Bitch.
On edit: the worst part was our scalpels were really dull and making the cuts was difficult and emphasized the ickiness.
This intrigues me. Maybe I’m way off, but is this a possibility? Either drama or speech class would have been impossible for you, and if you’d been excused from every oral assignment, some kids would’ve complained. (“If Beck gets to skip the monologue, so do I!”) On debate team, you go to meets but simply don’t compete. The plan all along was to give you an A instead of subjecting you to a cruel exercise in futility.
No?
I think he was afraid of my Daddy.
Hey, I graded papers for him. I worked.
Everyone in my highschool knew I enjoyed special treatment.
I hated it. I wanted to be like every other kid.
Eating lunch in the nurses office, everyday was just sad.
Getting called up to check my glucose was humiliating.