Nearly every class I had had at least one pregnant girl in it. (this was starting in Jr High) mostly from 25 yr old cowboys.
There was a hazing incident (which was brushed under the rug for 1/2 the school year) but suddenly when it became a big deal nationally our newspaper dug it up and started printing wildly wrong info of what happened (Like saying they inserted fingers up the poor kids ass and tried to make him have oral sex…keep in mind this took place on a BUSS)
I saw two kids for no reason suddenly start to fight in the middle of the hallway. Slamming each other around one threw the other to the floor and kicked him. Just as suddenly they stopped shook each other’s hands and walked away…to this day I don’t know if it was a real fight or something they staged for some unknown reason.
And finally a kid brought a gun to school (rumor had it he was going to kill his PE class this was years before the first school shootings too) What happened next is pretty uncertain. He went into the bathroom and shot himself. One way has it he turned the gun toward himself cocked it and it went off shooting him in the stomach. The other was that he had it in his waistband and when he tried to pull it out it got caught shooting him in the lower abdomen.
Oh there was a kid I knew that owed some local drug dealers money. He was found shot in a field the gun 15 feet from the body. Cops conclusion? Suicide. B/C who wouldn’t shoot themselves in the head and throw the gun 15 feet?
This happened a few years before I went to school. One teacher walked in on another teacher nailing his wife (also a teacher) He shot the guy in the leg. So they fired the shooter. He later opened a photography store and would give out shirts to people that said “I was shot by Mr. Larson” people started wearing the shirts to school. They banned the shirts later that year.
This happened after I had left school: A teacher said that someone had broken into her house tied up her kids killed her husband abducted her and drove off in her truck after she escaped. (the truck was found on fire a few miles from where she was) The cops rushed to the house found her husband dead and the kids still tied up. When the kids started crying and saying crap about their mom in a ski mask she ran upstairs and shot herself. Apparently this was all some weird ruse so she could continue her affair with the principle. (I KNOW that sounds like an urban ledged but I swear that’s what was in the paper)
Not HS, but in middle school (8th grade) a teacher was fired for ordering kiddie porn and having it delivered to the school. The feds were running the website, took the guy out of school in a police car in the middle of the day.
Two years later, a teacher at my high school was arrested for placing a video camera in a shopping bag and using it to make up-skirt videos of girls at the mall.
Last year, the entire math wing filled with smoke near the end of the school year. Teacher’s response? Close the door.
We have streakers at our homecoming football game. Apparently this is rarer than one would think.
My english teacher claims that during construction, a steel beam came crashing through her window, and would’ve killed a student if the kids weren’t collecting homework from her desk.
When I started high school, there were two separate gyms, providing a nice space for locker rooms for both boys and girls, in separate gyms. After a rather sizeable earthquake rendered the former location of the boys’ locker room unfit for students[sup][/sup], they moved everyone into the former girls’ locker room. They also decided (or, more likely budget constraints dictated) that 3/4" of drywall was all that was needed to divide the sections. We were pretty sure we’d gotten stuck in a bad movie script.
[sup][/sup] Many students (including myself) happened to be in that gym at the time; one student was trampled but survived. More interestingly, the basketball standards shook vigorously but did not fall. Several of these had previously, without warning, released themselves voluntarily and swung down, knocking out the basketball coach (twice).
No wonder your town lent its name to a psychiatric illness:
“The spouse abuse, the people living in tents in 35 degrees-below-zero winters and violent crime got the city a complex named for it: ‘The Gillette Syndrome.’ Researchers, shrinks, and journalists were everywhere.”
As for me, once when we were in a middle of an assembly for all the student council candidates to give their boring speeches, a rat ran across the gym floor in the middle of one guys’ speech. As you can imagine, everyone went into immediate hysterics. Even with publicity like that though, the guy giving the speech at the time wasn’t elected. Not sure what happened to the rat.
My chemistry teacher during junior year one day had all his classes add sugar to sulfuric acid. This produced a column of hard, black ash-like substance rising out of the beaker, and a smell so vile they had to evacuate part of the school. He had class after class do this, for no apparent reason that I can see to this day. He never taught a lesson on what we were doing. We just measured everything out, mixed it together, waited ten minutes, then were forced to leave the room. And that was chem class for the day.
My physics teacher’s class, besides being utterly useless, was also an exercise in oddity, not to mention pyrokinetics. This guy was known for turning on the methane tap on top of his desk and lighting it, for no particular reason, in the open air. One day he strung a wire diagonally across the classroom, suspending from it a gallon jug with about a 1/2 cup of alcohol inside and a hole in the cap the size of a pencil. Then he held a lighter to one end. A huge burst of flame shot out, rocketing the jug across the room and nearly setting the ceiling on fire.
Another time, he had one of the kids bring in a fancy potato cannon the kid and his dad made. We all went to the football practice field out back and fired that thing about a half-dozen times.
I had a great time in that class. It took me years to realize I hadn’t learned a goddamned thing about physics.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure teachers or staff sleeping with students or each other is not all that rare. As a reporter, I hear about that stuff everywhere I go.
Yep! Same thing happened at my school my freshman year, except it was a squirrel. We got out of school for half the day!
That same year, some girls called in a bomb threat. It was a beautiful spring day and the whole school got to hang out in the parking lot all day. It was actually pretty fun.
Twice a year my school has Class Competition where every grade has a different color/pattern/etc to wear. It got kind of crazy, one year we were cows, another we were nerds, and the freshmen always got some weird thing like brown or floral patterns. For some reason, all the guys saw class competition as a day to wear dresses. Okay this story did have a point…
OH YEAH! One year when the seniors were orange (not my class) one guy took one of those huge orange construction barrels from the highway, cut head and arm holes in it, and wore it to school. Someone pushed him down in the parking lot and he rolled, it was awesome. Okay, you had to be there.
A couple of times a year, someone would ride their dirt bike (motorcycle) through the school during classes. You just needed someone to hold open a door on one end, pop a wheelie and hit the door on the other end and you were out. (Nope, wasn’t me.) You’d be sitting in a class and suddenly hear a motorcycle coming down the hall.
There was also streaking. You could come out of a stream bed at the 50 yard line, run across the field buck naked and past the south goal line and then disappear back into the stream bed. No one ever got caught.
At the end of one school year, some guys went out into the parking lot, picked up a teacher’s new sports car and brought it into one of the school buildings. They kind of banged it up in the process. I’m not sure if they were caught though.
Just before another school year, I read in the local paper that one of the students went swimming in a nearby river and drowned in a whirlpool. Turned out, he was supposed to be in my science class and his name was still on the roll call list. The teacher called out his name and someone told him that he had died. The teacher thought the kid was joking and said, “Yeah, sure!” Each day for a week or two, this routine continued. Then finally the teacher stopped. Must have found out it was true.
You may have heard of this one. It made national news a few years ago. Not in my high school but in a middle school not five miles away, teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau seduced and trained a 13-year-old be her boy toy. She went to jail but started seeing him again when she was out on probabtion. Back to jail she went and I think she’s still there. They had two kids together.
As I heard much later from one of my old HS teachers, there was a LOT of sleeping around going on between staff members.
There was the Vietnam Vet English teacher who gradually got stranger and stranger until one year, with about a month left to go, he just walked out of the classroom and never came back, not even to pick up his last paycheck. The teacher I talked to said they’d heard he was living in a little cabin up in the woods.
One kid, a couple of years behind me, was a bully, a thief, and an all-round asshole. When a new kid started at our school, asshole grabbed the new kid’s walkman and told him “I’ll give it back for a dollar.” New kid just got up and walked away. Then came back about 15 minutes later carrying a 25lb barbell plate wrapped in a sweatshirt, walked up behind asshole, and proceeded to beat the unholy shit out of him. Asshole left school in an ambulance and came back two weeks later. New kid left in a police car and never came back. A number of teachers said they’d rather have New Kid.
A pupil from another high school, which was using our grounds for their athletics carnival, was skewered through the thigh by a javelin. When the ambulance arrived they couldn’t get him in with the javelin still in his thigh so our Industrial Arts teacher had to saw the long bit off.
A recent graduate/dropout (male) murdered a preteen girl. Okay, this isn’t necessarily all that uncommon - people die. However…this particular murderer was into Satanism, and (in the mid-'80s when this happened) everybody knew that Satanists never acted alone. Add in a few bored kids who decided to spraypaint pentagrams in an abandoned building, and you’ve got full-blown Satanic terror.
Then Boston’s tabloid newspaper got a hold of the story, and dedicated a two-page spread to it, headlined TERROR TOWN, telling all about how this small town in Maine was terrified by the evil Satanists lurking within.
This happened a couple years before I entered high school; the main thing that annoyed me about it at the time was that they wouldn’t let the town’s cable TV company add MTV to the lineup because it would encourage the Satanists or something.
High school (or lukio, the Finnish equivalent) wasn’t a time of weirdness, really. Well, one thing I remember is that once, in chemistry class, this one guy I knew rather tangentionally said “I wish that something would happen that would kill really, really many Americans.”
This happened on September 10, 2001.
Oh, and there was a constant repair going on which pretty much began when our class started the school and ended when we graduated.
Now, the junior high… I remember this one Finnish class. Basically the idea was that everyone brought an object and told about it, and most people had brough plush toys for some reason. There were this guy and a girl, both on a constant verge of failing their classes, who got in a scuffle over a plush toy while the teacher was away, I don’t remember the exact details of the scuffle but it ended with the guy pushing the girl against the blackboard rather hardly. Then the teacher got in and the class continued.
Suddenly, after a 10 minutes or so, the girl started crying and convulsing and fell on the floor. Someone got the school nurse and the girl was taken to a hospital. She didn’t return for a half a month or so, and when she returned, she told how she had became a Satanist and a drug addict while in the hospital.
Oddly, all of my moments come from Junior High. (7th through 9th grades)
Our social studies teacher, whom we all knew was apeshit nuts, started growing mold in coffee cups on his desk. He never mentioned this to us, we just started to notice the array of cups appearing during the semester. I’ll get back to him in a second.
I’ve been looking for a link to provide, but I can’t find one for this-- One kid I went to school with (Southern Hills, Boulder, CO. mid-80’s) got together with a few friends and killed his mother. Strangled, beat, and shot her with a bb gun. I had ever heard of him until the news broke. I can’t even remember his name at this point.
That was a year after I both won the science fair and recieved an “F” in my science class.
Mr Hahn, the psycho social studies teacher, didn’t last more than a year or so after I got out of that school. He ended up holding the Boulder PD at bay for a few hours by taking his mother hostage… We knew he was nuts a long time before that…
He curled his moustache with his own earwax, fer chrissakes!
Someone made it a point to ride a motorcycle around the school courtyard during class. He was dubbed Motorcycle Man. Every afternoon, we would hear him coming and the whole school would run to the windows to watch him. We all thought he was the coolest thing ever ! This went on for months.
No one knew who it was, the school knew it wasn’t one of our students, but they didn’t know if he was an adult or a kid or what. The cops would come, but Motorcycle Man would always manage to get away before they caught him.
One afternoon, we was walking home from school and Motorcycle Man pulled up behind us. He took off his helmet and all of the kids were shocked to discover that Motorcycle Man was the boyfriend of the school nerd. That was me, the school nerd.
