Mr. S
I had a science teacher called Mr. S (whose name sounds a bit like Hutch's partner) who was a bit of a hoot. He always wore dark glasses, and spoke in a thick Belfast accent. As we were on the Continent, this was a bit of a novelty so we initially found the accent amusing.

Anyway, he was the one who taught us sex-education aged 12. I suspect he was Catholic enough to feel uncomfortable about this. When we got to the topic of ejaculation, he was nervously saying things like "you know when you play with your penis" to a bunch of wank-virgins as if it was the most casual thing for one of your teachers to say, and when the inevitable laughter happened, he seemed to be a bit put off. He also tried to explain the concept of 'feminine wetness' but gave up when one of the girls repeatedly said "but mine doesn't do that" despite his initial protestations of "have you tried moving your legs around?". To top it off, he had this piece of sage advice for us - "Don't jump into bed with anyone just yet".

He also had a reputation for making his science-experiments go wrong. One of them failed spectacularly. He was attempting to show us the distillation process for crude-oil. After some of the components had dribbled out of the tube in an orderly fashion, by the time the temperature got to 80°c, the oil spluttered with a life of it's own and squirted out the end of the tube with great force. Fortunately, nobody was burned, but the hot oil went all over the clothes of the 'trendy' kid, so from his point of view, it must have been as bad as being burned. In fact, one day when our topic was energy, he promised us we'd spend the next lab-session burning stuff to see which substances produced the most energy. I was looking forward to a cocktail of teenaged combustion-sillyness and puberty-fuelled laughter, so was understandably disappointed when the school closed down that day due to broken central-heating.

He also taught us Maths for a bit. This time, it would be his calculations that went wrong, and if a calculator gave an unexpected result, his eyes would pop out like a cartoon character's eyes.

While not one of my most inspiring teachers, he did teach me more stuff that's useful in my career than any of my other teachers (or for that matter, university lecturers), and he's a good bloke and the sort of person I'd want to meet up with for a pint or two.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Mon 2 Feb 2009, 16:37, Reply)