Weirdest Schoolday Memories?

I remember a coach arriving to take us on a school trip and we arrived at an old cemetery to do grave rubbings with paper and charcoal.
Also I had to make our biology teacher a coffee one day and opened the fridge for the milk to find a pile of dead rats that his next class were going to use for dissecting.

In a biology lesson a swan flew into overhead wires and met it’s fate, poor thing. Our teacher then proceeded to dissect it as part of the lesson. I remember feeling very upset ? Hated biology after that.

When I was 12 our school entered us in a national handwriting competition. A few months later a teacher told me I was the winner and he thought the prize was a bicycle. I waited and waited and heard nothing more. I was too shy to approach the teacher as I didn't really know him. What happened to my bike? I'll never know!

I remember in junior school watching a film about a school for blind children and one of the children ring a hand bell to signify the end of the lesson - I went flying out of the school hall as I had forgotten to ring the bell myself as the film had been very interesting.

My Mum couldn’t cook or sew, and certainly could never have taught me. We had old fashioned ‘cookery and home economics’ and ‘needlework’ lessons. Very few took the subjects through to O level. We had basics drilled into us by all the means mentioned about, and sure, we mostly hated it. But thanks to the thoroughness, patience and persistence of the two teachers, I raised a large family on a shoestring.

I can make clothes, repair damaged garments and furnishings and do tailoring. I made my own very complicated wedding dress from lining fabric and upholstery remnants.

I can cook healthy, wholesome meals, bread and cakes from scratch, and rarely need to use a cookery book. I can bone and butcher game, birds and fish, and I leave very little food waste.

I can plan meals, make up a shopping list and budget.

I’ve used these life skills for longer and to more effect than any other subject I studied at school. In fact, my degree and doctorate are in a subject I wasn’t allowed to do for O or A level!

Throwing up all over my reading book and being smacked on the back of my hand because I was unable to read my line as it was covered in vomit! Aged 5!

I was supposed to dissect a frog in Biology and just couldn’t do it. Not sure how I got out of it, but remember the teacher telling me I was the only person ever to get an ‘A’ level in Biology without ever doing a dissection.

Not strange memories, but we certainly had some weird school customs. On "School Birthday" (celebrating the time the school was founded) we all had to wear a little bunch of Michaelmas daisies. Most of us found them on the way to school growing in the gardens of derelict houses. We also had a ceremony each year where the whole school had to line up to receive "Beer Money"! The Head girl got a guinea! It was a throwback to the days when the Trustees of the school (The Worshipful Company of Brewers) would inspect the school and give all the pupils a mug of beer. As I said, very weird!

How about this ! First piece of knitting I did at school. A coathanger cover !!!! Still in wardrobe.

l loathed needlework. I took so long to finish my cookery apron that I eventually had to smuggle it home for my mum to do it. I never finished my skirt and would never have worn the hideous thing anyway.

When I was about 13, all the girls had to go to the hall to hear a talk, given by a woman who had written a book called, "In Search of Charm." She told us all about the necessary skills to be young ladies, including deportment. I remember three of the biggest show-offs, including Jenny from our class, being chosen to swank up and down with books balanced on their heads. Presumably it was hoped that we Comprehensive School tykes could acquire Finishing School qualities in one afternoon. She had also written, "Charm Is Not Enough" which made me think "So why bother?"

Funny how things come back to me as I read through these posts! Domestic Science (so called) was my pet hate and I think the teachers felt the same about me. We had to sew a buttonhole for the sewing teacher and I took mine out to be marked - 4/10, I think, and that was perhaps a bit better than my usual. To test her, my friend took my buttonhole to be marked as hers. She got 6/10. I never did manage buttonholes successfully by hand, although when I bought a sewing machine of my own, 15 years later, I found I could almost understand how to do them. [❤️Velcro!]

Actually( and I’m not sure if this is weird or more probably something else) our form master made us line up and pull our skirts up to prove that we were wearing stockings and not tights , which were not allowed as they were seen as unhealthy. Hmmm! ?

Kate1949

Did anyone else have to dissect frogs in their science lessons? ?

Not a frog, but we did have to dissect cows eyes and other 'bits' from farm animals. One of the boys in my class was a son of the local butcher so these were always readily available.

Hard to say what was the weirdest. In my first year at secondary I was ‘employed’ by a team of psychologists to go round to every class with them to help with the tests they were doing. This involved setting up equipment and showing them round . I was out of class for a week and they treated me like one of the team even though I was only 12. I only thought it was weird years after because I was so young . Another weird one was when I was in the 6th form and there was a bomb scare. All the children were evacuated except the prefects who were told to search the building for stragglers whilst the staff looked after the children. I pointed out they WE WERE CHILDREN which was regarded with a disgusted sniff and the threat of confiscation of a prefect badge. Weird ? Well I thought so.

Gwyneth

Yes kate1949 we did a lot of dissection at school including a rat but it was the bull’s eye that really got to me. I passed out in class and have had a real thing about eyes ever since!

All the dissection that was done was revolting and why necessary???
Firstly, many children would be repulsed by having to dissect things, secondly what is wrong with detailed pictures or slides on a screen? Or even a movie?
I can't see why actual animals and eyeballs had to be cut up, I really can't.

At junior school in the '50s, someone decided that the school trip would be to walk up Skiddaw near Keswick. Of we went on coaches with pack lunches inappropriate foot wear and clothing. We were dived among the teachers and used at least three different routes, not all the easy paths.
All sorts of mishaps happened along the way to the top. We then walked down.
We all made our way to the coaches and returned to West Cumbria. As we got off the coaches one woman started screaming where was her son. Teachers had to go all the way back and luckily he was wandering down one of the wide paths he had found.
When I taught myself I was so conscious of all the preliminary work and form filling of risk assessment that any trip entailed. Did it not exist in the 50s and what were our parents thinking to let us do it? It wasn't even mentioned in the local newspapers.

Final year at junior school we went on a school journey for 2 weeks to staying in Cliftonville in Kent. Educational trips included a visit to the last colliery in Kent where we went underground and a chicken processing plant where we saw chickens stunned, electrocuted and then decapitated. Can u imagine this happening today?? We had to keep a journal with essays and pictures and i won a prize awarded by the School Journey Association. I really enjoyed that experience. The visit we made to Richborough Castle started my lifelong love of archaeology and Roman history.

I was reasonably accomplished at sewing so was equally miffed/amused to end up with a C+ - ‘Neatness and accuracy are 2 skills which you must practice (sic).’

Our first project was a cotton waistslip. My seams were never straight enough so there was much unpicking. We were made to pin exactly along the seam line, then tack along the seamline (trying to avoid stabbing ourselves ) and then we machined on top of the tacking so unpicking meant having to go back to the begining every time. I was told I would have to re-do mine at home. Well Mum did them for me. Next class...I had to unpick them again. All these years later I have no idea whether they were still bad or ifthey were in fact fine but the teacher knew that I hadn't done them myself.

Yes kate1949 we did a lot of dissection at school including a rat but it was the bull’s eye that really got to me. I passed out in class and have had a real thing about eyes ever since!

Yes Kate1949, although I couldn't bring myself to do it. Once the teacher dissected a rabbit in front of the class!

I was at junior school and it was Easter we was putting on a religious play about the temptations of christ and I was playing the devil I wore red tights and a red polo neck jumper secured under neath with a safety pin! Unfortunately half way through the play the pin did in fact ping ? but the show had to go on you never saw anyone leave a stage more quickly than me!!

My dd1 had to make the exact same cookery apron I’d made nearly 30 years previously. She loathed sewing, so I ended up doing most of it.

I was reasonably accomplished at sewing so was equally miffed/amused to end up with a C+ - ‘Neatness and accuracy are 2 skills which you must practice (sic).’

I don't think anyone at my secondary school wore white pants under the regulation navy ones.
We had the choice of wearing navy shorts or the pants for gym, as long as they had a strip of wide red ribbon sewn down each side.
I had shorts but many didn't.

It was quite usual to have a class interrupted by a message from a gym teacher, which was brought by 2 girls (always the same ones) from the year above me.
They were in their navy pants, and stood at the front of the class while the teacher read the message.

In my sons school one of the teachers was quite short but exceedingly well endowed in the chest area. One day she wrote something on the blackboard with chalk but when she turned round she inadvertently it off with her chest.

In the last year of primary school, we had to make an apron for the cookery classes we would have to suffer the following year. Fabric was scarce in those post-war years, so our 'cookery' apron had a little triangular bib, offering little coverage and more like a French Maid's pinny than a cook's. Fortunately, I was able to 'inherit' a proper apron from my older cousin who had just left school. No idea what happened to my little pinny!