What is the most random school memory you have?

Listening to Cathy's Clown by The Everleys on the school bus radio on the day Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones.
No national holidays in those days for a royal wedding!

On our last day at primary school (aged 11) our teacher did a raffle and I won 2 fold up coat hangers in a plastic pouch. They were a weird design, and far too wide for any clothing I owned. This was 1969, and I suspect they are still here somewhere, and still unused !

There was a boy called John in my class at primary school. One day he looked out of the window and noticed the clouds shedding across the sky. Horrified he called out "Miss, the sky's moving!"

nanna8

Handling mercury in a science lesson so we could learn its ’properties’. Wonder we survived, looking back. Also those tatty fraying asbestos mats on the Bunsen burners when we were heating things up. Cough,cough !

We used to flick mercury around on the lab bench.

At infant school, having double desks and having to sit boy/girl. I had to sit next to John H who was very annoying and was a terrible speller. At age 7 the boys and girls went to separate schools next to each other so we caught the same bus. He carried on being annoying. What happened to John H., I wonder.

Handling mercury in a science lesson so we could learn its ’properties’. Wonder we survived, looking back. Also those tatty fraying asbestos mats on the Bunsen burners when we were heating things up. Cough,cough !

Oh I wet myself when first starting school - I was too frightened to ask if I could go to the loo.

Having to stand under the clock in the main corridor, dreading the headmistress walking past.

Llamedos13

I remember spending a happy morning unsupervised at the butlers sink in the cloakroom pouring water out of quart bottles into pint bottles and half-pint bottles.(early primary)
I can still remember the different sounds they made when I pinged them.
I don't know if I was being disruptive or if I'd got ahead of the others, but I was given the bottles & put at the sink to learn about liquid volumes.

Being told at the age of 7 that I held my sewing needle like a cow with a poker. That teacher's remark has stayed with me all my life. She should never have been allowed near children.

Cumbrianmale56

Flippinheck

I went to a Scottish high school back in the sixties. The belt was used regularly by some teachers. I forgot my geography text book and the teacher, a male, took me into the stationery cupboard and closed the door before lashing me 6 times on the palms of my hands. Can you imagine the furore these days if a male teacher shut himself in a cupboard with a thirteen year old girl?

He sounds like someone who in later decades would be charged with abuse. Even then, maybe giving you a detention would have been enough than this. Did you ever see him after you left school and have a go, as I'd be temtped to?

No, never saw him again. Don’t know if I would have wanted to approach him.

Being sick on the floor of the assembly hall in front of everyone at the age of 5!! 🤮

The smell of overcooked cabbage when I ran round to the kitchen after the register had been taken to give the cook the numbers for dinner. Was I glad I went to my grandma’s for lunch.

Flippinheck

I went to a Scottish high school back in the sixties. The belt was used regularly by some teachers. I forgot my geography text book and the teacher, a male, took me into the stationery cupboard and closed the door before lashing me 6 times on the palms of my hands. Can you imagine the furore these days if a male teacher shut himself in a cupboard with a thirteen year old girl?

He sounds like someone who in later decades would be charged with abuse. Even then, maybe giving you a detention would have been enough than this. Did you ever see him after you left school and have a go, as I'd be temtped to?

I went to a Scottish high school back in the sixties. The belt was used regularly by some teachers. I forgot my geography text book and the teacher, a male, took me into the stationery cupboard and closed the door before lashing me 6 times on the palms of my hands. Can you imagine the furore these days if a male teacher shut himself in a cupboard with a thirteen year old girl?

My little friend peed on her pale blue dress as we sat cross legged on the stage doing a play-I remember trying to shuffle away on my bottom .

My second week at grammar school. One of the houses that backed onto the playing field had apple trees. Hungry eleven year old boys (OK, I was only ten but I did my eleven-plus a year early) looked over the wall at the apples. Young was I and foolish. I asked a couple of newbies to give me a boost and over the wall I went. As rapidly as I could I picked up windfalls and hurled them over the fence to my friends. The apple tree owner burst out of his back door and hurtled towards me shouting loudly. I ran back to the wall. Ah! No friends to boost me up. I had not thought it through. I kind of ran up the wall like a frightened cat and somehow got over it. I managed to retrieve two bruised apples from the grass. Friends? What friends? They'd eaten all the others.

One time we were having school photos done, and the photographer, not knowing the names of any of us, just called us by names he made up on the spot. (He called me Mary Anne.) One of the boys was addressed as Fred, and said boy spent the rest of the day running around going, "I'm Freddy Krueger"

The winter of 1963.
We had milk everyday it was frozen ,the foil lids were hanging off.
Teacher used to put the crate on top of the parrifin stove to defrost the milk.
Then we were given the bottles to drink with a straw
Strange taste .

My parents used our middle names for my sister and I 🤷‍♀️. At our new school aged 6 and 7 the head mistress who was my class teacher called me up in front of the class and insisted I was to use my first name , which I knew but didn’t know how to spell. She made fun of me in front of the class because I couldn’t spell my name , and made me stay in at break to write my full name 100 times. She did the same to my sister .

I can remember our school trip to France in 1980 where a girl disturbed a wasps nest outside the dorms and we all had to run like crazy to avoid the critters and stay indoors until they'd gone away. Luckily the owner of the educational centre contacted a pest controller and the nest was destroyed the same day.

I was in the school play age 5. It involved ' ladies in waiting' and we had to walk across the stage in two's holding hands. The curtains closed too early and I was left on the wrong side!

Most of the teachers I had were decent, good people, but there were a few who were horrors who would have been locked up these days. I can recall a PE teacher I had in the first 2 years who started ranting and hitting me for coming last in a cross country. It wasn't helped I was recovering from the measles, but he didn't care and was a bully to any kid who was no good at sport. ( On one occasion, he hit a pupil with a cricket bat).
I was so glad to find out years later one of my friends saw him in the street and laid him out for hitting a woman.

One memory i have is that aged 5 i was standing in the hall for assembly. I felt unwell and promptly vomited all over the floor. Luckily I was in the front row!!

Being whacked with a ruler by Miss Devlin and being told that, "Our Blessed Lord said that girls like you should have a millstone tied around their neck, and be cast into the sea."

I had been dared to kiss Paddy McGrath, who was standing in the corner for some misdemeanor.
Miss Devlin caught me in the act.
I became, in her eyes, a fallen woman at the age of 7.

There were dunces hats in my first school in Everton Liverpool a grim old building. The toilet block was away from the school in the middle of a yard not somewhere we wanted to go to.
One male teacher threw the hard blackboard duster at any child he wanted. Memories still remain of horrible people who should not have been in that job.