Teachers are used to dealing with challenging behaviour, but talk on the TES online forum reveals that they weren’t all angels themselves when they were on the other side of the desk. Turns out that some of today’s teachers were beastly pupils.
Professor Dumbledore, for one, recalls encouraging an ageing science teacher to keep adding lumps of potassium - which reacts violently with water - into a water tank until the glass shattered. “Poor old bloke was mortified,” Professor Dumbledore adds, perhaps a little contritely.
Tafawke remembers turning the world map at the back of the classroom upside down to see how long it would take the teacher to notice - it was a few days - while sparkly_duck was among a group of miscreants who put the clock forward by five minutes to see if the physics teacher noticed. “He didn’t, and let us out early,” says sparkly_duck. “We did the same the next week, and the next week.”
While disclaiming any personal responsibility, thebigonion says “classmates” used to take the metalwork teacher’s hearing aid and melt it in the forge. The biology teacher had it worse - having to cope with thebigonion’s “friends” throwing pieces of dissected animal around the room. Coffeekid’s was a more direct form of defiance. “I threw Sister Moira the Vs, but nobody saw, least of all her,” she says. Discreet rebellion is the way to go: gets it off your chest and nobody gets hurt.
Facebook gets a bit of a rough deal, what with warnings over befriending pupils and posting Friday night lairy pictures, but some posters are stepping up to defend the poor vulnerable social network on its downward spiral to world domination.
For pinkflipflop, Facebook is a handy way of keeping track of parents: “We have been prone to a nose at some parents’ pages,” she says. “They have no security settings on their pages at all, despite regular reminders from school about Facebook security.”
For a more wholesome pursuit, magic surf bus wants posters to name their favourite roller coasters. Air and Oblivion at Alton Towers top Gardening Leaves’s list, while impulce was also a fan of Air, although not so keen on the same park’s Rita. “I was told I did a ‘death rattle’,” impulce says. “I found the launch physically painful and couldn’t breathe most of the way around.”
That all seems great fun, but death-defying rides don’t have to be flash. Madenglishgirl extols the wooden roller coaster at Great Yarmouth. “You can’t beat it for sheer terror.” Now that sounds like proper excitement.
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THIS WEEK’S POLL
- Would you challenge a pupil who used “gay” as a term of abuse?
YES: 83%
NO: 17%
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