They did What???

[TheGoofster]

OK, got you're attention.

I want to take a stroll down memory lane, and talk about interesting or unusual things that happened in your school when you were a kid. Things which probably (or definitely) wouldn't happen today

But, let me take a second to say Please let's not turn this into a debate about what is right or wrong in school, or an attack on what happened then or what happens now.
I just thought it would be fun to look back at some of the things that happened when we were kids in school, and compare them (without debate or arguing) with what is done today.

For example, when I was a kid in school:

- we were paddled (and yes, I did get paddled one time)
- we had square dancing in P.E. class (yes, we actually had to make contact with a person of the opposite sex)
- we played a game where you had to pass a paper plate down a line, but you could only use your teeth to pass it (that game skeeved me out, I didn't even like to drink after someone else at soccer practice).
- In P.E. we had to see who could hold their breath the longest.

I'm sure there were other interesting things that we did as well, but those are the first ones that come to mind. I don't think any of these things would be accepted today, but they seemed pretty normal back then.

So what unique memories do you have of your school?

 

[clarabelle]

We had a "smoking area" (out by the dumpsters) in HS

We were allowed to "pick teams" no matter how nasty it got -and no matter if the same person was always last to get picked.

I rode on a bus with K-12th grade

My HS history teacher had a big paddle hanging on the wall. It was decorated

 

[ckay87]

My 3rd grade teacher threw a kid against a wall and broke his collarbone. I can still see it happening, I was sooo shocked!

Don't know what happened, but I do know that she continued to teach, at least the remainder of my years at that school (3)

Nowdays, and rightly so, she wouldn't have just been fired, she'd be convicted! I don't know how she got away with that.

 

[clarabelle]

I had a HS teacher that flirted outrageously with the boys and got drunk chaperoning an overnight.
She kept on teaching

 

[Galahad]

We had the paddles and the square dancing.
We also had an optional religious education class - offered once a week - in a public school.

 

[Allison]

My favorite teacher used a baseball bat to hit the desks to get our attention.

 

[Jennasis]

My 4th grade teacher slammed the classroom door in a kid's face after stomping on his hand. IMO (at the time) she was totally in the right.

Square dancing in Gym.

Showers with no doors in gym.

Smoking area in the parking lot.

Lunch allowed "off-campus" for seniors.

 

[NotUrsula]

Our band director used to have us stand on one foot in the sun for over an hour, with the other leg held bent at an angle parallel to the ground. If you let that knee droop, he would come along and hit it up with a 2" x 4". We did these drills every day for a month in August in Louisiana; no water breaks in a 4 hour practice.

PS: We had the gun racks in the parking lot, too. I didn't mention them earlier because I was only thinking about "bad" things that the teachers did. Our parking lot DID have an 8 ft. fence w/ razor wire around it and was kept locked during the school day so that you couldn't access it without permission. However, this policy had nothing to do with the hundreds of loaded guns that were inside it. They did that so that we wouldn't go out to sit in the cars to either do drugs or have sex during the school day! AFAIK, that school has not yet banned the presence of long guns in vehicles parked on school grounds.

 

[ZephyrHawk]

-My elementary school had some really unsafe playground equipment...in fact, just about every year another piece of equipment would disappear becuase someone finally came to their senses and realized how dangerous it was...one such "toy" was a good 10-12 foot long (and at least 1 foot in diameter) wood log hung horizontally above the ground from chains...you would swing it back and forth and kids would sit on it...seriously, who gives that to 10 year olds to play with?...anyways, that one got removed after one of my classmates (2nd grade) got beaned and had to go to the hospital

- We all knew the shop teacher had a bottle...the older boys knew which desk drawer it was in

- My school had a lot of teacher affairs, I knew of at least three...two of which eventually ended up in mutual divorces and happy remarriages...

- When I was in 6th grade girls had to take aerobics and boys wrestling during winter gym...a bunch of girls protested and got to take wrestling...I didn't want to take wrestling, though, so I guess I wasn't a very good little feminist

- we had square dancing in P.E. class (yes, we actually had to make contact with a person of the opposite sex)

Oh, we had enough inter-sexual contact. I'll never forget one of the meanest boys in our school breaking a floor hockey stick against me during a particularly heated game.

 

[Mrs.Toad]

We had square dancing in gym, too, and "smoker's field" in HS, an area where smoking was allowed. Funny thing was, it was well-known that it wasn't cigarettes being smoked in smoker's field, and the cigarette smokers congregated in the "smokers bathroom", where it wasn't technically allowed, but was ignored.

 

[Loverly]

Catholic School=-we girls had to kneel down for skirt length inspection

(NO Girl could wear shorts or slacks to school in those ancient times!)

Skirt had to touch the floor....after inspection we "rolled" the skirt band
short

 

[mickeyboat]

Hunting rifles in the back of every pick-up window in the parking lot.

I loved square dancing.

The music teacher at DDs' school does a unit on Contra Dance - which is similar to square dancing. The kids love it.

Denae

 

[Jsme]

Picked teams
Parachutes in PE
We have a circus come and audtion us to have our own circus
Paddling
Smoking Pot in the Bathrooms
Smoking Areas
Squaring Dancing in Music Class
Naps in first grade
Dances after Football Games in High School
Cheer team did not know how to do flips,i they only did cheers
No tears or marking on clothes
Pants were at the waist or above it (haha)
Shirts covered our bellies
Students were respectful to school personnel
Admin really punished students
Gun Safety in Middle School

 

[xoprincessmomxo]

We had square dancing. Hated it! I was so shy, it was mortifying having to hold hands with a boy!

We played a game called Heads Up 7 Up when the teachers needed to fill up time.

We had actual wooden teeter totters at our 4-5th grade school where the big thing was to get off when the other kid was at the top and let them fall. They also blocked off the street as the playground was across the street from the school, so they had these big gates that the teachers would swing shut when it was time to go play. They just closed this school down last year because of declining attendance in our small town.

In our elementary school, at least once a week teachers would have to chase bats out of the 3rd floor classrooms. That school also closed down and a new one was built after asbestos concerns.

The local cattleman and pork producers still come to our local school a couple of times a year and provide free meals to all of the students. Best lunch of the entire year!

When our local soy plant opened up in town, the entire school got to sample soy ice cream. For most of us, it was the first time we'd heard of such a thing!

 

[Allison]

Our football coach was pretty much sleeping with one female student or another every year.

Lots of kids knew about it and I know teachers had to have known also. This was a very small community.

Nobody did a thing about it.

We had another student who dated the gym teacher her senior year and her parents helped keep it hidden.

 

[sdarwkcabemanmy]

When I was in first grade, my parents were in the process of a nasty divorce, so I was sent to live with my grandmother who sent me to a local private Baptist private school. I hit a kid over the head with my bible one day on the way to chapel and got paddled for it.

When I was in 4th grade, we were playing some dumb game where we had to run back and forth across the gym and touch the walls. I wanted so badly to win that I slammed my arm into the wall and broke my elbow. My gym teacher didn't believe me, so she waited until the end of class to send me to the nurse's office. When I came back a few days later with my arm in a sling (I'd had my surgery by then to fix the problem), my math teacher didn't believe I'd actually injured myself as badly as I said I did because I 'just had a sling'. She said if it was broken (which it was, in two places) I should've had a cast.


When I was a HS freshman, I took a computer-aided drafting course as an elective. My teacher said "Girls don't belong in this class." to me on the first day and I was the only girl in that class. It was a fun class though.

 

[KristaTX]

When I was in high school, we had a hypnotist come a couple of times and hypnotize students onstage and have them do silly stuff. We also had a snake guy come and bring snakes and take them out of the cages. I remember a cobra even. And I remember a huge boa constrictor (python?) being held up by about 10 kids.

Do they still allow things like that? It doesn't seem like you could hypnotize a minor without the parent's permission. But it sure was funny to watch our classmates roam around like chickens or strut around onstage like George Michael singing "Faith" .

 

[Darcy03231]

We had square dancing in PE too! Also had a smoking area in the high school. In 4th grade my brother was distracting himself and the class too much so his teacher put his desk in a corner of the room in an empty refrigerator box. He spent the whole year in the box (and he ended up doing really well). We still laugh about it. A teacher today would never get away with that.

 

[ChrizJen]

-My elementary school had some really unsafe playground equipment...in fact, just about every year another piece of equipment would disappear becuase someone finally came to their senses and realized how dangerous it was...one such "toy" was a good 10-12 foot long (and at least 1 foot in diameter) wood log hung horizontally above the ground from chains...you would swing it back and forth and kids would sit on it...seriously, who gives that to 10 year olds to play with?...anyways, that one got removed after one of my classmates (2nd grade) got beaned and had to go to the hospital

Aaaahhhh, the unsafe playground equipment!

We had a merry-go-round on the playground that kids were always getting their legs caught under. There was a gap of about 6 inches between the pavement and the merry-go-round. Finally, one kid broke his leg in several places after getting caught under it, so they removed it.

Then there was the "H Bar". It was literally just a horizontal bar, about 4 feet above the pavement, braced between 2 vertical bars (hence the name "H Bar".) Well girls would fancy themselves gymnasts and do sophisticated "dismounts" from the H Bar. After a few landed on their heads, they shut that one down too. Guess they never thought of placing some sort of padding under the bar instead of removing it altogether.

Aaaah, those were the days...

 

[xoprincessmomxo]

When I was in 4th grade, we were playing some dumb game where we had to run back and forth across the gym and touch the walls. I wanted so badly to win that I slammed my arm into the wall and broke my elbow. My gym teacher didn't believe me, so she waited until the end of class to send me to the nurse's office. When I came back a few days later with my arm in a sling (I'd had my surgery by then to fix the problem), my math teacher didn't believe I'd actually injured myself as badly as I said I did because I 'just had a sling'. She said if it was broken (which it was, in two places) I should've had a cast.

This sounds like what happened to my mom! Back in the 60's, she went to a little one room school house in the country and broke her arm on the playground. She was crying, of course, and the teacher got mad at her for faking it. She dragged her into the school room, sat her down, and made her cut with a pair of scissors. She did, and since she was able to use the scissors, the teacher decided she was not actually hurt and made her stay the whole day. It wasn't until after school when my Grandma went and got her that they found out it was broken. I believe that my Grandparents had a not so nice chat with that teacher.