What is the most random school memory you have?

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.

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 .

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?

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 !

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.

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!"

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 !

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!

Being sent to the Headmasters office after I returned to school following an accident (at school) where I ended up getting stitches in my head.
I thought I was in trouble but the reality was he just wanted to check I was OK and ready to be back at school.

Luckygirl3

Sitting on the bus to school aged 5 (yes, little children used to do that on their own!) And realising I had forgotten to put any knickers on!!

I can’t have been more than about 7, but well remember the mother of one of the younger girls approaching me at break with a small brown paper parcel, which I was to pass to her daughter, or her teacher. As she said, it contained the white knickers her mother had forgotten to put on her that morning, under the uniform school navy knickers!!

Even at that age I thought the mother was ridiculous, not to mention loopy - and if the daughter had been me, I’d have been horribly embarrassed at the facts of my underwear and my OTT loopy mother being publicised!

It had rained all day long, and the village where I lived flooded . Parents had been contacted to come and collect their children. My mother walked with her friend to collect us (neither had cars, nor were there any buses to near where we live. Several people turned up in cars taking their own children plus any who lived nearby. No-one lived in our directuion so we ended up waiting at school until the rain had stopped enough for us to walk home.

In the last two years if our junior school (1961-2) we spent a good hour each afternoon flattening silver paper for some charity. Some of this was fine but the milk bottle tops from school which had never been washed were horrible and my hands always stank as there was nowhere at school to wash them - the boys toilets behind the air raid shelters, did not have any sinks

When the whole class got the belt on the hand for copying work.

Another one about nuns. Being made to stand up in front of the class for the whole French lesson, whilst Mother Frances Xavier told me (and the class) how useless I was. I'd lifted up my pen again when she told us to put them down.

Never forgot the Biology teacher who totally and utterly humiliated me in front of the class. I had to call out my mark from the work that had been set to us and I answered something like 8 and he said pardon and I repeated 8 and again he said pardon and this went on until the class started to whisper 8 SIR. I was going hot with embarrassment and felt so small as I was never a child to cause trouble. Many years later I came across this teacher when I was in my 50's and told him off for upsetting me so much. He said he was sorry and humbled and agreed I was an easy pupil.

One of the girls really did'nt like me, one day when the Teacher was absent she started picking on me, I'm not very brave so for a while I did nothing but then I snapped, I turned round and slapped her, she grabbed me by the hair and we both ended up n the floor, I knew I could'nt win so I just colapsed in a heap on the floor, someone from the back of the class shouted "Avis you've killed her" so I just played possum until the Teacher got back.......she was expelled.

The headmistress at my first primary school punched boys in the chest if she was annoyed with them. As a girl I was safe from that but I was terrified she might see me and used to cower when she came into a classroom where I was.

Thankfully I left that school aged 8 to have another headmistress who had her favourites but also children she couldn't stand. One of these was a little boy she would humiliate in front of the whole school. I heard when he was an adult he went to prison: I always wonder how much she contributed to his downfall.

Why did these people become teachers?