Weirdest Schoolday Memories?

I loved infants and junior school, I have wonderful memories, so many.

Secondary school was entirely different, I disliked it with a passion from day one. We had an RE teacher called R Taylor, we called it SE because all he talked about was sex. I was 11 and totally innocent.

Ergh yes the bottled baby - in the cupboard in the science lab.

Until I read a thread such as this, all these things are long forgotten.

Kate1949

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

There were some seriously weird things in jars in the Science lab, bottled animals etc. and worst of all actual human foetuses bottled in glass jars. One of them was quite large too. Can you imagine that today? We were horrified and fascinated in equal measure, but found it pretty creepy.
I was good at Biology O Level but when I saw what was in the Science lab and heard we had to dissect frogs I decided not to do A Level. This was 1966.

Kate1949
I too was useless at needlework. I was one of three girls who were not entered for the CSE exam at secondary school. The only "needlework failures" the school had ever had up to then.
Funnily enough once I left school, I developed an interest in dressmaking. I'm still not very good at it but I get by.

Oh yes Grammaretto I was useless at needlework. We had to make a peg bag, an apron and then a dress. I was told off for putting the sleeves in upside down

In my case it was a bullock's heart Kate1949 possibly why I became vegetarian. and failed biology o level

I was also put off dressmaking for years because it was such a faff. All those linings and tailor's tacks to make a horrible skirt I never wore.

A humiliating failure was in Latin class when I was told to read out my translation and to insert blanks if I didn't know the vocabulary. I began "Caesar blanked the blank with a blank...." at which point the teacher stopped me and turned to someone who had done their homework.

I'm not sure this counts as weird but here goes. On our way home from a school home economics class my sister and I were at a zebra crossing and she dropped her pie from her basket. The motorist gestured to it as he didn't want to drive over it. Shamefacedly she went back to retrieve it.

End of year exam I had to make the same pie and I dropped it upside down as I got it out of the oven due to nerves. The pie - lemon meringue pie - I called it bogey pie and have never made it since.

Oh yes Witzend You've reminded me that we did eyes as well. Yuk.

No, Kate1949, but a bullock’s, eye, for physics!
Horrible.

When I was maybe 7 and somehow on my own in the school grounds, some random mother came up and gave me a brown paper parcel to give to a younger child in a form below. In a (to me) strange foreign accent she told me that instead of white knickers under the regulation navy, she’d dressed her daughter only in the navy ones (or vice versa, can’t remember now.). So would I pass the other pair with explanation to her form teacher?

Even then I thought it seriously weird! Who on earth wore 2 pairs of knickers to school?? And how embarrassed I’d have been if my mother did any such thing!

I remember being very little and standing in line with my spoon for malt! Also being told to lie down and sleep at midday - something I found impossible to do.
Also saying the Lord's Prayer every day and wondering when we were going to Temptation!

In primary 4, I came 3rd in the end of term tests.
I duly turned up at the prize-giving in my best dress, as was usual for winners. I sat there and got nothing because 3rd prize was awarded, in her absence, to a girl who had been away from school for most of the year, with serious illness.

One sex education lesson at an all girls school. We were told to make sure that our petticoats didn’t show below our skirts as it would drive the boys mad!
I’m pretty sure lots of girls let their slips slip after that!

I think that’s why I gave up biology!

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

I was at boarding school in Schleswig Holstein during the Cuban missile crisis. We were only about 30km from the border with East Germany. Everyone in BAOR at the time was on the alert in case the political situation escalated. We had to practise getting up in the middle of the night, grabbing a blanket each and being ready to be ferried to the nearest RAF airbase to be flown out...

It was a bit hair raising.

In junior school our teacher promoted a class competition, I do not recall much about the actual competition but I do remember coming third. My prize? A box of fireworks! I was eight years old!

I married for the second time in 2015 to someone I knew slightly at school. My best friend's brother was his best friend. He found me through Friends Reunited and he occasionally posts on Gransnet from his home in France using the moniker of olddudders.

We didn’t date at school and had no idea back in the Sixties how significant we would become to each other several decades later!

These are making me smile, hope you're all enjoying the thread

First year secondary school we had a horrible maths teacher. He would write out a problem on the blackboard, tell us to stand on our chairs. We could sit down when we had the answer. I used to wail until about half the class had sat down before I did. He then asked random pupils the answer. I sat in fear and trembling in case he asked me. I almost always didn't have it.
I hated maths ever since.

A mad headmistress who made us stand with our back to a full-length mirror and bend over. If we could see our knockers (sorry - knickers!) in the mirror we were sent to lengthen our skirt.

Grammaretto, I too was sent to look at the clock, a big one on a landing. This was because I couldn’t tell the time at an age when virtually everyone else could. I waited until someone came past, and asked them what time it said, using the excuse that I didn’t understand the Roman numerals. Actually, I couldn’t tell the time at all. They always told me, and I went back with right time, but I suspect the teacher knew of my little trick.

I was taught by nuns we had maths with the head mistress I liked her although she could be strict
One day she was reaching up to write on the board when her knickers fell down She handled it wonderfully, stepped out of the knicks picked them up and said ‘they don’t make elastic like they used to ‘ and floated out the classroom amid hidden giggles, behind hands and a huge release of laughter after the door shut

I remember Log tables midgey. I began to smile straight away, I guessed what was coming.
In our first science lesson, aged 11 the science master made alcohol from potato. The alcohol was passed round for us all to taste. I can't imagine a class of eleven year olds being offered alcohol in a science lesson these days.

Logarithms! Aargh!!!

Never ever understood them, I seem to have muddled through life without them.