How naughty were you at school?

As a retired headteacher I’m afraid to say I was very naughty and troublesome all my school life ... chatty.. energetic .. ring leader .. truant .. but certainly made me empathise with “naughty “ children in my schools...

I was a good girl because I loved school and I knew only too well the trouble I would be in at home if the school complained about me.

We were a good class too, at an all girls' private school and I believe every set of parents were like mine: quick to remind us that they were paying good money for our tuition and uniform and they didn't want it wasted!

However, when we were we got a new headmistress whom we disliked. She found us hanging out the windows chatting up the boys from the local boys' school and read us the riot act, until one girl in the class said, "Please miss, I was only talking to my brother."

You should have seen the headmistress's face. It was true enough the girl's brother was amongst the boys, but neither she nor the rest of us was only talking to him.

I was pretty naughty, I was a bit of a joker and constantly being sent to the Head for being disruptive in class by being a clown and making everyone laugh.
I was surprised that I was still the same when I recently joined a Water Colour Class and my naughtiness gets everyone giggling.

Well with newnanny, Iamherenow and me .. and I suspect a good naughty few others seems the teaching profession is full of examples of how not to behave in school

My friend and I used to go into the little foyer where they kept the register,we used to nip in put a tick against our names then off we would go back out, we had to do it again at dinner time ..we got away with it for 3 weeks until one morning one of the teachers were waiting!! we ran off lol.

My friends mum never forgave me as we were asked "to leave" gulp!
We were in the last year though!

marydoll I went to convent school too,if I had upset the nuns my mother would have killed me ..so I was a good girl too.My mother was all of 4 foot 10 and a half but by heavens she frightened the life out of us if we did anything wrong .

Where to start! To all intents and purposes I was a well brought up girl with a policeman for a father. Primary school had classes of around 44 children and the teachers were strict. I did get caught climbing in the outdoor toilets and swore I was standing on my friend’s shoulders. Most trouble I got into there was for talking but I did get banned from the sewing machines. I had tried and tried to get it to work and it was such a basic error ( didn’t put presser foot down) that my friend and I laughed until we cried. Funnily enough I also got banned from them at secondary school for pressing the electric pedal too hard and it shooting off up the dress I was making. I had never used an electric machine before. We had an old section of the secondary school with stepped classrooms. When teacher was writing on the board a cough started in the back corner and progressed rapidly along each row. Another trick was to pat some chalk dust onto the wooden edge of the blackboard and rub the back of the black board duster into it. You could then get it to stick to the wood at the top of the board ( or any other chosen wooden spot). Eventually it would fall and crate clouds of dust. My mother always reckoned this was why I coped as a teacher. I had done it all before and knew what was happening.

Millie I think that teacher was really horrible. I can't see what was so naughty in what you did.

I was not at all naughty at school. In one of the schools I went to I felt positively sick at the way the boys were goading an English teacher - who eventually had a nervous breakdown, poor man. My friends used to tease me about wearing my beret home from school even when we were out of sight of the teachers. I liked my school uniform - and school dinners!

The naughtiest thing I did was say that I'd be away on holiday when it was sports day (which I hated) so I wasn't put in for any events at all.

I've enjoyed reading this thread, what naughty girls some of you were.
Loved the story of the Steradent powder up the nose, and the gawping disrespectfully at a Chinese funeral.
My schooldays weren't nearly as exciting. I was too scared to misbehave.

I was too scared to misbehave at junior school.

At my convent school one didn't have to do too much to get them "the nuns" in a serious stage of outrage, that could be triggered by a number of issues, not wearing the regulation boater, being seen in the local town without one's gloves...this was the 1960s, although it might just as well have been the 1860s, or worse still seen in the town without one's white gloves, eating chips (very common) because a) the gloves have to be removed b) the chips were wrapped in newspaper and c) eating in the street is beyond the pale.....and you could make that a bit worse by eating chips, without gloves and walking along with a member of the opposite sex

Other than that any form of dissent was also an anathema such as arguing the case for contraception, reading books that put the catholic church in a bad light, such as those on the Borgias and The Spanish Inquisition. They did like to cover up the dark history of the church. Of course we didn't know then about the sexual abuse scandals then. Colouring hair, wearing mascara, lipstick, tampons, yeah tampons, even married women shouldn't apparently! ......oh God I could go on forever They were shockingly ridiculous about most things.

I was GOOOD but was once given 100lines to write saying 'I must not hit the boys'...…..wonder what I did !

I loved school and was very good, my mother would have killed me if I'd been naughty and my dad would have been 'disappointed '. The only naughty thing I remember doing was sitting reading 'Rebecca' under the desk in biology lessons (which I hated). Teacher didn't catch me though.
I made up for it later though when I was a student! Climbing in and out of college after hours (didn't get caught). Missing a whole morning's lectures when I had been having too much fun the night before. But my work was always handed in on time.
And then I became a teacher - and yes I was naughty when after many years of experience successfully teaching reading and maths we used to be sent on yet more courses to learn the latest 'new' methods of doing the same. I used to sit at the back and plan my next week's lessons, which was much more profitable.

Same here Bellasnana....too easily embarrassed unfortunately.

We had a skeleton called Elvis for our science lessons. Two friends and I went early to the lab and stole Elvis. We wheeled him down the corridor and hid him in a cupboard in the next classroom. We had a very short lesson that day as everyone was despatched to search for Elvis. He had not left the building, just the science lab. We blamed the class who had been in there before us, no one found out it was us. Elvis was eventually found and from then on, the lab was locked.

We were once given a dead worm to dissect in a biology lesson. I tied mine in a bow. Unfortunately the teacher saw it, and I ended up being sent to the headmistress!

Looking back I was fairly good, but punishments for small infringements was common then.
I do remember being caned on the hands for being late for school twice in a row when aged about 8.I went to school on my own and it was a bus ride and a long walk away.
Later, as a teenager, being given lines for things such as poorly done homework.

So wrong to get the cane for being late for school - especially as it wasn't your fault and you were only 8. Shocking I think.

I don't remember, in any of the schools I attended, hearing of any girls being caned for misbehaviour.

I do recall, in one junior school in Romford, that little boys were often given the slipper - in front of the whole class. I found it quite sickening. And it was often the same little boys who received this punished, so it didn't even work.

I don't agree with corporal punishment and am really glad that it is no longer allowed.

Yes, it was shocking really, but the norm at the time at my school certainly (Catholic school, and very strict.)The headmaster who did the caning went much easier on the girls, but the boys were savagely caned.
Boys also were bashed on the ears, were pulled to the front of the class by the ears, and had the blackboard cleaner hurled at their heads.

I enjoyed infant and primary school, both were little, village schools and we used to walk across the fields to get there. Then came Secondary school, which was OK-ish til I got to year 4 and the leavers class where I was bullied by a girl called Linda Somebody or Other who would take my pens, pencils and rulers, unthread my sewing machine in the sewing class and find any excuse to 'meet me in the cloakroom' at the end of the school day, mostly to try, with help from her gang of friends, to smack me around a bit or shove my head down the toilet. I hated my last year and was glad to leave.

How dreadful. I'm so glad I was never bullied at school. It must be very frightening.

I too was a goody goody. I can tell you about a fellow student though who left her blazer on the bus. It was taken to the school where a teacher went through the pockets. Our headmistress summoned the whole school, about 600 of us, to the school hall and said that a blazer had been handed in, with the girl's name on it. She said that "an item" had been found in the pocket and that the girl's name was known, and that she should go to the Headmistress' office to collect it. To this day 60 years later I wonder what the "item" was, whose blazer it was . and what happened to that girl. And why did the whole school get told about it?

I was quietly subversive rather than naughty. The worst thing we did as a class was torturing a student teacher. She was trying to teach us geography and somebody laughed. Unwisely she made the offender stand on her chair, which set someone else off. You can see where this is going, in ten minutes she had most of the class on their chairs, all of us in hysterics, and she was nearly in tears. Our geography teacher was so furious when she came to the rescue!

Well, I have to say that in that instance the student teacher deserved it because I think it was wrong of her to humiliate a pupil by making her stand on a chair in front of the class. I don't suppose she tried that again!

I remember having to stand on the school stage at the end of assembly and having my skirt measured in front of the whole school by the headmistress. (Actually it was only folded over at the waistband, 14”seems to ring a bell). If it was done to humiliate me I’m afraid it had the opposite effect.

I feel quite angry at some of the injustices other posters have mentioned. On his first day at primary school a dinner lady mixed my brother’s main course and pudding as he was being too slow and ordered him to eat it. I desperately wanted to rescue him but was only 7 myself.