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...and it never did me any harm
When I was at primary school in the 70s, teachers had some ideas about dispensing justice and dealing with bullies that might be regarded with more than raised eyebrows in these enlightened days. Take this tale of woe...
A boy, let's call him Boutros Footstamper, was pushing me around a lot, culminating in a summons to the headmaster's office, to which I was invited, along with a boy called David Williams, who was the biggest boy in my year. Headmaster marches us all to the gym, issues Boutros and David with boxing gloves, and tells them to have at it. David gives Boutros a few thumps; Boutros seems to be getting the message. Head then gets David to pass his gloves to me, and Boutros and I have a few swings at each other.
Now I doubt there's enough space on this blog to detail all the reasons why, were this to happen today, the headmaster would probably have been frogmarched off the premises and had his sword broken over his head. On the other hand, Boutros never bullied me again after that.
Any of you care to recount any completely outmoded practices from your schooldays?
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That'll be the same God who says
they can't make up their own minds about religion if they are obliged to attend a faith school, then. Always a source of good advice isn't he?
Outmoded practices?
Well, I left school with a basic ability to read, write and add up. How old fashioned is that?!
Obviously, you went to a
snob school. Like what I done.
Bible bashing
I remember a radio interviewee (can't remember who though) recalling his education by nuns in Ireland. He got into a fight with another boy in the playground. A nun stopped them and dragged them off to the school's boxing ring, saying the immortal words, "You'll settle it with the gloves, as Christ intended".
It's always the God-botherers, isn't it
Our Divinity teacher's instant mental calculation of the trajectory and velocity of a large wooden board rubber in flight was such that he went on to enjoy several successful seasons as a relief pitcher with the Boston Red Sox.
Div
Always a good opportunity to crib your Latin homework from the swotty kid you made friends with for just that purpose.
"Homework"
You oik. We had "Latin prep", us.
Actually, I didn't do Latin, niftily having opted for the modern-languages stream instead. The core syllabus (as we didn't say then) for "modern languages" revolved solely around reading and memorising random passages of the most soporific works of Monsieur Molière and Herr Goethe, who popped leurs clogues in 1673 and 1832, respectively.
"Homework" was what pater called it.
The beaks called it "prep", which was also synonymous with the supervised period of semi-silence, punctuated only by expectorant snorts and stifled giggles, over which the resident housemasters presided for the boarders.
I got 4 per cent in my German "mock", something of which I have never been proud, except in moments of idle competition, attempting to outdo one's companions with tales of excessive youthful sloth. I managed this astonishing score in the final 90 seconds of the examination. My best friend and I had been engaged in a bout of diligent shoplifting during our lunch break, and in our criminal fervour had forgotten about the "mock" until long after it had started. Legging it back to school, and managing to sneak in without being seen very nearly an hour and a half after the start of the afternoon, we had both just managed to sign our papers and write our names on the first sheet when time was called. Much sniggering ensued when the results were read out. Our German teacher, Mr. Fell, being a charming fellow and an utter gent, never mentioned this sorry episode again.
*fetches pipes and slippers*
More tales of the old days please. What did you gentlemen do in the war?
new
We got slapped in school and it was a good deterrent not to be a cheeky little bastard. Some teachers did take advantage of this as I remember one boy who was kicked in the ass a few times by a cunt of a teacher because he couldn't add up a simlpe sum. The fact that he was nervous made him mess up the question and this teacher kept kicking him.
I would love to meet that teacher now 25 years later and give him a taste of his own medecine.If you allow teachers to hurt pupils some will will take advantage and really hurt some someone.
Painty
Were you at school in Lurgan, Craigavon, Newry or Armagh?
We had a sadistic metalwork teacher...
...who would take great delight in 'measuring the width of a backside' with a metal ruler. Thankfully, I escaped his wrath, although I came close when using a lathe for the first time.
He'd told me to take 2 thou (pre Metric) at a time off the piece of metal I was turning and then turned his back on me to supervise a classmate. I misunderstood what a 'thou' was and turned the handle that controlled the lathe 2 whole units (i.e. probably 2 hundredths). This resulted in a huge, thick spiral of metal whirling round and getting longer and longer. I had to duck down to avoid it slicing my neck or face and managed to hit the red stop button from my crouching position on the floor. You should have seen his stare and his barely concealed rage. He didn't hit me though...I think he knew that a very nasty accident had been narrowly averted and that it was his fault for not supervising me properly.
I have no idea why children are not routinely
taught how to use a lathe anymore. I mention metalwork to younger colleagues and they look at me as if it is some form of alchemy, outlawed by the church in the 16th century on pain of being burned at the stake.
Metalwork.
I'm a Design Technology teacher, and the reasons are:
1.
we're all too scared of getting sued. Despite acres of Health and Safety provision, you simply can't guard against the odd nutcase kid who decides to throw a hammer into the motor just to see what'll happen. And there are a fair few of those kids around.
2.
After decades of the Government meddling with DT to make it more 'economically and culturally relevant' it's moved further and further away from being about craft skills. A DT lesson now is more likely to be a discussion about what contribution Islam has made to industrial design than making a tablelamp. I exaggerate slightly for comic effect, but not by much.
3.
Due to the ongoing teacher recruitment crisis, (which has been scandalously covered up over the years) Your average Metalwork teacher is as likely to have a degree in Textiles or Graphics as Engineering or Industrial Design. Or Medieval Botany for that matter. He or she will have been given a few hours training on a lathe during their PGCE. Their understandably reluctant to teach it, so they don't.
I firmly believe that the skills required
to carry out running repairs to firearms and tunnelling equipment should be part of any modern boy or girl's education. Where will we be when civilization collapses, without the skills to fashion assault rifles from Land Rover parts and burrow into Government bunkers?
Don't worry...
that's what Ray Mears is for.
I did metalwork at school
and sure enough one kid cut his finger off using a vicious-looking electric saw.
We were caned/slippered for just about anything: long hair, dirty shoes, no tie etc, and ritual humiliation was the order of the day.
One day I was summoned to the headmaster's office for wearing Cuban-heeled Beatle boots to school.
I was made to stand there while the head and his evil deputy walked around me appraising the offending footwear.
The consensus was the boots were "too exotic" for school wear and I was sent home to change them.
Perhaps it is believed that
it will 'turn' them off technology?
Give em a few hours routinely drilling things, grinding things, milling things. That will teach them about boredom.
I remember my first job as production engineer, having to turn out post office stamp handles in a grotty basement in Clerkenwell on a pre-war turret lathe. Character-building?
More like aversion therapy.
I remember someone
Simon Hicks possibly, cutting their wrist while filing down a piece of metal in an ill advised manner. Walked over to the teacher holding his arm, said "Sir", released the pressure and sent blood spurting about six feet across the classroom.
They were passing round the smelling salts after that one.
Traditional boarding school in the late 50s/early 60s.
The full gamut of Latin, Ancient Greek, fagging, gatings, lines by the thousand, exeats, caning, endless punishment runs and buggery.
It made me the man I am today :-)
I should think the buggery
made you an upstanding citizen.
"Upstanding citizen"
Upstanding schoolboy at least. I'm given to understand that buggery can make sitting down quite tricky.
There was the occasion the chemistry teacher shot
young Smith (names changed etc etc ).
It was the day after school sports day and Mr. Jones had been, as per, the official starter. Next day, as the chemistry lesson was about to begin, be called out to Smith: "Smith - come here!" Smith sauntered, in his usual rather smarmy way, to the front of the class.
"Smith," says Mr. Jones, "I hate you."
"Sir?" says a suddenly worried Smith.
"I hate you. The class hates you. The whole school hates you. And I'm going to shoot you." At which point, Mr. Jones pulls the starting pistol out of his drawer. We, of course, had not clicked that it was a starting pistol. Neither had Smith, who was trembling.
"Bye bye Smith," says Mr. Jones. Who then pointed the pistol at Smith and pulled the trigger. BANG! Smith fell over, clutching his chest, as a horrified class sat there dumbstruck. (Literally.)
"Oh don't be such a wimp," says Mr. Jones, "get up boy!"
Smith got up, returned shaken to his desk and never, ever mis-behaved in chemistry again. Priceless.
You couldn't get away with that now
It's political correctness gone mad.
This reminds me
My secondary school was of the boarding persuasion. In one of the houses there was a boy called Jack Numpty, who was exceedingly unpopular, both with his housemates and the staff. At the end of his time in his junior house, when he'd have been about 13, the housemaster gave everyone in the house in his year (about 20 boys) permission to beat him up. Which they did.
And another memory. There was a teacher called John Hargreaves, who, how can I put this, had some very challenging views about the teacher-pupil power balance. He was once driving along one of the roads which ran along the back of one of the boarding houses; as he drove past a group of boys, one of them must have thrown a small pebble into the car's path. I didn't see that, but I saw what happened next: he stopped his car, got out, walked right up to the boy, a scrawny lad of about 14 (and JH was a broad bastard) and muttered into his face something along the lines of "if you ever do that again I'll make you sorry". A grown man was threatening to beat up a schoolboy. He really was a psycho.
And you tell the kids now and they'd never believe you...
Priceless.
Our metalwork teacher threw at file (a metal thing, not the one you put papers in) at a fellow pupil and hit him just under the eye. Big scar.
The PE teacher told our Goalkeeper there was nothing wrong with his leg, lifted it up and stuck it under the tap in the sink. Then berated the lad for crying. In fact, he'd broken it and was in crutches for months.
Not a damn thing happened to those two tossers. God, I hated that place.
Bert Trautmann finished a Cup Final.
Your goalie mate was a wimp. Stuff and nonsense!
Lunchtime boozing
I am a teacher now, and of all the stuff that's changed, this one's about the biggie. Friday Lunchtime, they'd all go and get tanked up, and Friday afternoons were always spent in a gentle fug of Watney's and tobacco breath and silent reading. If you showed up for school with alcohol on your breath these days..
although attitudes to boozing at work have changed massively, of course. i started off my working life as a local government civil servant, and the town hall had a subsidised bar, with the whole staff moving over en masse at lunchtime for four pints and a cheese roll. I also remember our family doctor, Dr Stevens, often discussing your tonsils with you with a fag on and a whiskey on his desk.
Teachers fighting in the playground
In my school, (Circa 1976)the teachers were either psychotic WW2 veterans with tin legs and shellshock or aimless aging hippies with acoustic guitars. It was a strange world of sudden violence and impromptu singalongs of ;\'Mellow Yellow'. The most memorable event of my schooldays was when Miss Shell, a classic wet-dream 70s uberchick given to wearing tight denim shirts with an inch of black lacy bra showing at the cleavage, somehow showed up as the supply Drama teacher in our sleepy northern new town school. Mr Jackson and Mr Scott both spent a painfully obvious and pathetic term publically wooing her within the school before having a very decent punch-up in the playground on the last day of term.
Being Bad At PE being absolutely unacceptable
Several of the PE teachers at my school were actually quite well-known sportsmen, this being in the days before being good at kicking a ball around wasn't an automatic passport to having your own line of moisturising products. We were not in any way a school of any academic renown whatsoever - it was the kind of school that sent everyone en masse to the shipyards for interviews every May, unless you looked likely to get 2 GCEs, whereupon you were destined for a life as a clerical assistant in the local council - (See above) - and I always found it difficult to get my head around the idea that being rubbish at Maths was acceptable, but not being interested in kicking a wet ball around a muddy field in the rain for what seemed like an eternity twice a week was seen as some sort of awful transgression against all that was holy. My worst memories of childhood are all about some moustachioed rugger hearty yelling in my face about what a disgrace I was. It put me off sport for life.
It's
an odd boy who doesn't like sports.. (just give him a nice cold shower).
Mr Roberts Militia
I remember our history teacher, Mr Roberts, going around the 4th and 5th year classes (we didn't have a 6th form, too poor), trying to raise a posse of big lads to ward off an attack from a rival school's gang!
I got whacked in the face by my French teacher (when I was 9)..
after he asked what the word for a worm was and I answered "un squiggly". Apparently that was the wrong answer.
He was right to whack you - everyone knows it's
une squiggly!
Le Bon Chemin!
I was struck across the head very forcefully with the teacher's copy of "Le Bon Chemin" for translating Paul's pen as Paul's stylo.
I was also slippered across the backside three times for mis-correcting a spelling mistake.
Wouldn't happen today!
At Primary School
in the early '70's we had a young male student teacher who taught art and crafts.
He was very popular with us. Amusing, encouraging and friendly.
But he had one habit that, looking back now, marked him out as quite strange. If any of us trangressed, even in a minor way - perhaps making a mess of cutting out some cardboard, he would pull at the short hairs just above your ears. Until you shrieked with pain.
He would laugh at this. And because we liked him we would all laugh too, even if you were the victim.
Don't remember too many bad things about teachers.
At the comprehensive I attended, all the teachers seemed to be pretty much OK. No chucking of board-rubbers, no random acts of sadism. Our metalwork teacher, Mr Wrenn, a lovely man, was treated with great gentleness by all the kids. His youngest son was killed in a hit-and-run accident cycling home from midnight mass on Christmas Eve 1979 and he had to watch us all growing up in the way his son never would. Mr Lambert, the other metalwork teacher, was widowed at around the same time and was also looked after by one and all.
The kids were, however, mental. The kid who nearly burned down the maths block. Another who, waving a kitchen-knife, chased a younger kid around the school before being rugby-tackled by the youngest and fittest PE teacher and then jumped on by several burly prefects. Another who raped a girl in the school chapel. He wasn't expelled. The girl remained at the school. The girl who prostituted herself to local biker gangs at lunchtime to fund her heroin habit. The boy who was caught in the sports-hall shagging the caretaker's dog.
If any of these had happened today, they'd - quite rightly - be all over the papers. The rape thing was particularly dreadful. Back in the late 70's / early 80's, though, shoulders just seemed to be shrugged.
You should write a book
You never saw any of that on Grange Hill!
The 'belt'
My geography teacher, at Ayr Academy since you ask, circa 1974 dispensed summary justice to the entire class 'for talking'. It was a Scottish thing. Wouldn't happen today, you know..
Was it a tawse?
A bit of sadistic leather designed for the purpose?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawse
Oh god
The proper name is a tawse but in schools I attended it was uniformly referred to as 'the belt'.
I recall two teachers in particular. One was the only male teacher in my primary school, a manic war veteran with a glass eye, and he wouldn't let a morning go past without administering his fearsome belt to at least one boy. I honestly think he just enjoyed hurting children, and had found the perfect job to facilitate his true vocation.
The other was in secondary school. He kept his tawse curled in a metal sweet tin, itself kept in a drawer of his desk. When a boy was to be belted, and it was always the boys, another child would be made to stand at the teacher's desk and use two pens to tap out a slow beat on the sweet tin as the miscreant paced the perimiter of the classroom. When they reached the front of the class there would be a drum roll, then a pause, and WHACK! This performance was repeated before the other hand was tanned.
Being belted is a bit like having your hand slammed in a drawer; for the first couple of seconds you think it's not too bad, but then the blood flow returns and your whole hand feels as if it's been dipped in fire. The pause before beating the second hand was the most sadistic bit of this whole grim little execution scenario, and even the hardest kids would be in tears when they got back to the desk on their second lap as the first hit was taking its maximum effect.
That evil bastard must have wanked himself to sleep with joy for a month when he devised this punishment.
The showers...
It my boys' school, we had a PE teacher who would take a shower with all the 11-year old boys. Wouldn't happen now. Would it?
We had one of them too
It was maybe the first or second night of the very first term: there we were, 20 or so nervous 11-year-old boys in the dormitory, thinking it was about time we got our jim-jams on. Housemaster gives us a short speech about the importance of not being embarrassed about each other's bodies, and proceeds to strip naked, encouraging us to do likewise, before leading us into bathroom wash area and showing us how to wash.
This was not last year.
Isn't that how
the "free kick stance" came about, as naked teenage boys were made to line up for a communal shower by a sadistic PE teacher?
We didn't think much of it at the time (other than embarrassment at knob size), but looking back it was all a little creepy.
Miss or Missus?
"In my boys' school, we had a PE teacher who would take a shower with all the 11-year old boys."
It's not the canes and the occasional sadism...
It's the attitude of many teachers that truly did us harm. I can immediately think of at least 5 teachers in the crucial age 12-15 period that seemed severely unhappy, bored and even rather bitter about their lot.
The good teachers stand out because they loved their subject, were engaging and got the class interested and involved. Looking back, I feel that these qualities should be expected of a teacher - in our school, this was a pleasant surprise.
Also, in my Catholic school the priests and nuns were generally terrible teachers and the "lay" teachers were the good ones.
My school made the headlines in the mid-80s
when the female deputy head strip-searched a few of the senior boys for drugs. I was a few years below and never heard the "full story," but apparently the whole thing was handled rather incompetently. Apart from the publicity, the students knew that some sort of search was coming and discretely dumped their stash.
And there was the story about the Indonesian Language teacher who did time for chaining his wife to their bed and raping her after he suspected her of cheating on him. That made the papers, too.
My own performance was less eventful, although I did get suspended for leaking the student lists for the coming year's classes - in retrospect, I can't see what all the fuss was about, although it was decided to hang me out to dry. I didn't just get suspended from classes, I had to spend a day at a desk located outside the Head's office. I'm happy to say that it all worked out quite well: I finished an assignment I didn't think I'd get done in time, in one of the most productive school days I ever spent.
Endless Hours of Fun
Enjoy...
http://www.playgroundlaw.com/
I got punched in the face...
...by my Technology teacher. He was already under strong circumstantial suspicion of being un fiddleur des kiddies, on account of his tendency to invite boys back to his home (a caravan parked on the school field) and offer them sherry, so I think the Head was only too pleased to finally have a hook on which to hang him.
In retrospect, I think he was probably a deeply lonely man who had found the only niche in life that would have him: teaching. That was too often the case, and led to the whole "can't do, teach" trope. You just got a lot of people who weren't quite right with the world using the education system as a shelter.
Still, he punched me in the face. I probably deserved it, but still. Oh, and he did it in front of an entire class.
I'm a teacher now, and while that sort of local colour is almost entirely absent from schools now, so is the widespread incompetence and disaffection that plagued schools for decades. Teachers now are genuinely better than they've ever been.
Now, if we can just sort out something approaching a forward-looking, engaging and empowering curriculum which combines tried-and-true solid teaching with a bit of 21st century zip, we'll be sorted.
I won't hold my breath.
As is so often the case, Roger Waters nailed it...
"When you're one of the few to land on your feet
What do you do to make ends meet?
Teach.
Make 'em mad
Make 'em sad
Make 'em add two and two
Make 'em me
Make 'em you
Make 'em do what you want them to
Make 'em laugh
Make 'em cry
Make 'em lay down and die"
"Jesus, Jesus, what's it all about?
Trying to clout these little ingrates into shape.
When I was their age all the lights were out.
There was no time to whine and mope about.
And even now part of me flies over
Dresden at angels one five.
Though they'll never fathom it behind my
Sarcasm desperate memories lie."
Sad and desperate and moving and horrific
all at the same time. The Final Cut is a fine little album. It's like a more mature version of The Wall. One of my favourites.
More violence
I'd forgotten this until very recently: a boy called Clive, about 12, was having an animated discussion with a teacher called Robert Durrant, a bearded ex-seaman by the look of him. Clive kept repeating something along the lines of "...and I'm just saying it's a free country..." - and Durrant just punched him in the chest, pretty hard. It's hard to believe, even now. Today, he'd probably have been sent down. Then, precisely nothing happened to him. He did leave the school at the end of the year, probably not a coincidence, but still. It's not unlike the practice of sending priests suspected of being (or indeed known to be) child molesters to another parish.
Speaking of which, one teacher at my school did molest a boy - in his sleep. As the story was told to me, the boy woke up "with the goods in Mr X's hands." I don't remember anything being done to him either. He was the archetypal sad bachelor who would probably have found it very difficult to survive anywhere other than a cloistered all-boys boarding school.
A pretty good school
Our PE teacher had an affair with a girl from the 6th Form but apart from the duty of care aspect it wasn't that shocking - he was probably only about 24 himself.
Our woodwork teacher kept control with a golf club - a wood, obviously. You'd get its handle in the ribs for minor transgressions and its head on yours for serious ones.
Another teacher used to watch us shower. I always believed this was a hygiene thing, making sure everyone had a proper wash. He may even have intimated that himself. Not sure he really needed to video it, though.
None of these things were considered worthy of censure at the time, and all three, as I recall, were pretty good teachers.
I'll see your PE Teacher's affair with a 6th form girl,
and raise you a "ran off to Paris with a sixth form girl", which is what our Art teacher did, which impressed us no end. Particularly as she was perceived to have been the hottest thing on two legs at the time.
PE Teachers
And their attachment to hygiene have popped up a few times.
We had one who gave a lecture to us a s first years that boys should not wear underpants beneath their shorts (as it was unhygienic) and that he would check if he suspected that they were. And he did.
He also taught RE, another home for perverts. He had a colleague, an actual ordained minister, who very clearly sported an erection beneath his trousers during lessons. Yet none of us ever said anything about either of them to anyone in authority.
Happy days, indeed.
We had one of those PE teachers
He'd check we weren't wearing pants by pulling open our shorts or tracky bottoms. And after the lesson, watch us shower.
We thought comparatively little of it, at the time; but now I realise what a sad, creepy little shit he was.
I'd like PE teachers to have a right to reply.
And I say this in all seriousness.
I do wonder if they were taught that young lads had to wear correct underwear for support/hygiene purposes. Who had to wear a jockstrap? And that, back in the day, when personal hygiene wasn't what it is today, that they had to make sure that, at least a couple of times a week, kids had a decent shower. Perhaps the teachers were feeling as uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do as those whom they were observing.
I say this because I remember our PE blokes being very uncomfortable and half-hearted about their getting us all into the showers.
Oh Christ.
I can't even go into it.
My school days were fucking Hellish.
Much of the above.
That's all. :(
Chapel and a deranged Latin
teacher kicking a dustbin around the classroom is a very clear memory plus hateful cross country runs. We didn't even have the energy to look at any mucky books. Regular standing in the corner, especially during Maths with a ruler smack across the back of the knee and on the positive side, learning how to write in a straight line using a ruler up against the wall.
Some of the above...
1) PE Teacher who liked to join in in the showers
2) French assistant (female) and French teacher (male) "going for a swim" and getting caught
3) Mad deputy head who hid in the gym horse to catch pickpockets, watching through the holes used as handles, then knocking himself out as he leapt up in triumph to apprehend them.
4) Science teacher joining as he had been caught with a sixth-form girl at the nearby girls school. Reader, he married her.
bloody school
I left school in '97 (sixth form attached to the school), so it was interesting to see the gradual shift in attitude.
When I was at Primary school, we were smacked on the legs if we were too noisy, and I recall - unfondly - one lad, who is one of my best friends, getting a firm over-the-knee spanking from a female teacher.
Presumably, my mate and his wife regularly recreate this moment in aching detail, as he does walk in a bandy-legged fashion.
Rose-tinted glasses aside, I honestly don't recall any parent ever complaining, but I'm sure someone must have.
In high school, at the turn of the 90s, there was a surge of younger teachers with their progressive 'let's be chums with the kids and talk about their feelings' attitude, which resulted in us taking the piss for years. By the time I left, teachers barely shouted at kids, let alone go near them.
I trained to be a teacher 3 years ago, and we were told, in very vivid language, "Never touch a learner!!" I never have, to be fair.
Once trained as a volunteer reading assistant
and was told never to touch a student as in guiding them from class to class which I found pretty depressing. Surely there is a difference between a helping hand and a beating one ? I understand the ultimate aim is child protection and to protect children from evil intentioned people, but I have known good teachers who have been suspended for raising a hand (not even touching) against unruly students. That cannot be right either.
"Running off"
It's only in education circles that a newly-forged relationship (between teacher and pupil) involves "running off".
My mate - a school sixth form History teacher - got himself into all sorts of difficulties when a departing sixth former declared undying love for him and stalked him outside his home. The only "running off" done there were excuses to his wife: 'she's obsessed', 'honestly, nothing happened', 'she's a loony', 'I hadn't noticed but now you say, yes she does have a nice figure'...
My cousin
"ran off" with one of the Catholic priests from her chapel.
And reader, they did marry, not only that have a very successful marriage, two lovely daughters and one grandchild.
the shame and scandal at the time was horrendous for her family
Sadly...
I'm the only person who'll run off with me. And even I have a headache most nights.
We had
an English teacher by the name of Mr McWilliams ("Did I tell you I went to Glasgow University with Alistair MacLean? I did?"). Anyroads, on the first day of the first term for all the newbies, attending his class for first time, he would gather all the form round a desk at the front of the classroom. He would then proceed to spin a drawing pin on said desk, and as quick as something very quick indeed he would batter the drawing pin with his tawse/belt (which he kept over his shoulder, under his gown)and embed it several feet (or so it seemed) into the desk. Silence. He would fix us kids with a withering stare and say "Do we understand each other?" Guy never had a moments problem from anyone, ever. Damn fine Teacher he was to. His nickname was Jacob The Grub. No idea why, perhaps these things are long lost in School History. Other nicknames were Booshams, John The Boot, Batman, Renee The Beak, The Pencil Tiger, Johnny Too Slow, Leys The Lathe, Lurch and, the best one, our Latin Teacher, The Glomain' Roman. He liked to go for walks at dusk , you see.
There was one lad at primary
school that the form teacher took an instant dislike to. I guess we were around 10/11 years old and he regularly tied the boy to a tree outside the classroom and seemed very pleased with himself when it rained. He was a sadistic sod who "slippered" us for the most minor misdemeanours.Fortunately only happened to me once, and when I got to boarding school I was the only one in my house year not to get the cane...too clever to get caught see! By the end of my school life there was a rebellion against the canings and we would sneak into the Housemaster's study and snap it in two :-)
We also had the standard gay vicar who would come and massage your neck when you were sitting at your desk during divinity lesson.
Happy days!
In 7th grade
you got to choose between basic and advanced maths, and a majority chose advanced, but it only took a month or so for all the girls to change to basic maths instead.
Not because the maths was too difficult for female brains ( I could see smug smiles forming on the lips of the male Massive there, now wipe it off! ) but because the creepy maths teacher would be very hands on...
He would walk around in the classroom, stopping behind a girl, putting his hands on her shoulders and slowly let them slip down her chest, stopping just short of a handful.
Slippery remarks were also common every time he talked to us girls.
We tried complaining, but every time we took complaints to the headmaster they were ignored because they all involved his best mates on the staff.
So we gave up and moved to basic maths, all except one girl who was flat as a plank and a bit of a tomboy...
Curiously..
It was similar to us in the maths catch-up group. All blokes. Because it was taken by Mr Daish, who did bugger-all maths-wise but used to teach us innumerable filthy limericks and barrack-room songs. When girls turned up, he'd be all sensible and do maths and stuff. Bo-ring!
I got punched by a another kid in Metal work class....
....this would've been around the mid 80's - I was about 12/13 at the time. The teacher did nothing, just told everyone to calm down. I went home with a black eye.
I nearly got suspended for filling up a plastic bag with water and chucking that upon a teacher from the floor above. Same time period. My good reputation got me off, not so the ruffians who I was involved with ;o)
I also remember teachers hitting unruly kids on a few occasions and also a few teachers smelling of alcohol during the afternoons, post their pub lunch.
Times have definitely changed.