Not all me....
most of these are pretty tame compared to what I've read so far, but they were funny when it happened.

In the 6th form, me and a few mates gathered some snowballs (for it had been snowing) in a free lesson and took them up to the 6th form rooms on the first floor. Change of lesson rolls around, and we pelt the lower years with them and promptly close the windows to avoid reprisals.

Until they replaced the carpet in one of the maths rooms, there was a large stain on it. One lunchtime, football had occurred, and my shoes were plastered with mud. Sat in maths, a mate points out the nice muddy trail leading from the door to where i was sat. Nothing was said by the teacher, mind.

About 5 years ago, the school got an internal email system. within a week, this had been withdrawn. A friend had discovered the bible as a single text document on the internet, copied and pasted it into an email and sent it to the whole school, crashing the entire system.

The upper 6th also got in trouble for using the metal locker stacks as dominoes. the dents were quite impressive, both on the lockers and the walls.

Now I'm at uni, and things mainly revolve around roadside furniture and alcohol......!
(MrHammerHands last checked the time on, Thu 15 Sep 2011, 12:33, Reply)

Fountain pens
were still in common use in schools in the late 1960s. Being a messy bugger I switched to ballpoints as soon as I could as it meant less ink stains on my clothes, me and my school books.

One or two in our class persisted with fountain pens as it was discovered that they were useful for flicking ink over our French teacher Mrs Moore’s dress!

Several of her dresses were ruined and she knew it was a couple of kids in our class, but couldn’t find out who despite several tearful appeals for information leading to the culprits.

I can’t remember why Mrs Moore was singled out for this treatment. Nasty eh?!
( Vambo, Thu 15 Sep 2011, 11:50, 1 reply)

Not me, but a mate
A mate of mine got suspended from school when he got caught smoking.

Nothing unusual about that, you might say.

However, he wasn't in school when he got caught smoking: he a few other lads were going paintballing one Saturday, so arranged to meet at the only place they all knew: outside the school gates. He got their first and sparked up while he was waiting, as was his right, being 17 and therefore old enough to smoke legally. He got spotted by the headmaster, who was walking past.

Suspended for a week. No amount of arguing from his parent helped.

Madness.
(ScousersPet, Thu 15 Sep 2011, 9:57, Reply)

there's always one
There was this spazzy ugly girl that no-one liked, so when she got her period, everyone started throwing tampons and fannypads at her. She got her revenge, though, killing John Travolta before he started all that dancing shit.
(McChinaman banned, Thu 15 Sep 2011, 4:05, 3 replies)

The Object of Homo
When I was in year 6 we were in a lesson one day, when a personalised pen was found (pen that had the owners name printed onto it).
The name on it was that of a fairly 'nerdy/square/spoddy/insert relevant term for unpopular kid from your youth, from the year above.
Over the course of the lesson, this pen no longer was a writing implement, but took on a new identity.
Somehow we contrived that anyone who touched the pen was 'gay', and therefore the pen was chucked between us and much hilarity ensued.

The pen became the 'object of homo', and a game that occupied us for the next 6 months was born.


Rules;

Whoever touched the pen last (later any agreed object after the original was lost) when the ball rang was deemed 'gay', and would be mocked as such until the next 'winner' was found.
Later this evolved into league tables etc to decide who would be crowned 'lesbian seagull' (don't ask) at the end of term.

Surely this would just mean you play for the five minutes immediately before the bell you ask? Risky, as the beauty was that our school rang a 'caretaker bell' to summon said to reception. These were a wildcard and so ensured a fairly frenetic pace all day, in every lesson. Even history with the nasty teacher.

The ruleset evolved over time, so much so that we had a rulebook. which all parties had to agree on, and was consulted and modified as debatable incidents occurred.

Homework diaries were immune, so you could bat the object away, but otherwise any part of you or your clothes counted. Common tactic was to battle near the fence next to the (out of bounds) park, score a hit then try to scoop the object into the field with your homework diary, meaning an unrescuable loss for the victim.
Alliances were made and broken, with more skullduggery than you'd find in the House of Commons (the pinnacle of such was when a fake pen lid was used for a whole day with 2 participants unaware, until it was revealed the real object was one of their pockets until lunch and the other guys after, and they had amassed a weighty haul of gay points).

The final week shoot out led to a fight, and we all got failry shite reports that year so it died over the summer and only made sporadic returns the next term. Great 6 months or so though.

I was pretty cool at school.
(hebangsthedrums, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 20:57, 2 replies)

Could have been a contender.
Wish I'd remembered this earlier in the week.

Some time in middle school we were tasked with baking shortbread biscuits. It certainly beat the previous cross-stitch project so I paid attention in a rare attempt to do something well. I'd duly taken down the notes on methodology and with a surprisingly eager manner, I began to combine the pre-measured ingredients that were dispensed to me.

Something wasn't right though. The mixture was just too dry to properly combine as the expected dough. No matter how much I tried to knead, mix and squash, it remained a crumbly mess. I asked for help but was slapped down with a response that I'd been given the correct measures of everything. There was no sink to even add a spoonful of water, so I reverted to my usual persona and drew the much needed moisture from the only available source. No. Not THAT source. I discreetly hocked the biggest fishquay oyster I could manage into the mixing bowl and, as luck would have it, it added just enough moisture to gel the mix.

I got on with the baking and just as the biscuits came out my form tutor passed through the room. She complimented my baked goodies, so naturally I offered her one to sample with her breaktime coffee.

I somehow kept a straight face though my friend who was aware of the 'secret ingredient' almost bit off his tongue and pissed his pants to stifle his laughter.
(Greencloud Wanted to go fishing on, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 18:01, Reply)

How cuntish does a class have to be
that by the end of third year of high school (secondary if that works for others), two pupils had transferred out to other schools due to the abuse they were getting?

One guy started with the rest of us in the 1st year and lasted until about halfway through our 3rd year, the second chap had only joined towards the tail end of our 2nd year and never returned when we started the 4th year.

Two gone in a space of a few months.
(ParaSitius is an Optimistic Pessimist, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 16:16, Reply)

Mini Cooper doughnuts
Back in primary school in the early 80's when I was about 8 or 9 there was an incident involving a bunch of teens who went to the high school next door.

It was Spring time, the weather was fine and the Headmaster had made the joyous decision that we were allowed into the playing fields adjacent to our school.

It was lunch time and I was caught up in the game of football my year were playing when a commotion further down the field started to grab everyone's attention. This is a fairly long field, a good quarter of a mile minimum and my primary school and the high school were situated at one end.

Bombing up from the far end was a Mini and hanging out its windows were a couple of kids in the recognisable uniform of the high school (Copland for anyone that knows the area) and when it reached about a hundred yards from us the driver started doing doughnuts. This captivated all us young 'uns while our teachers looked on with much concern and started to try and herd us back into the saftey of the playgrounds.

This went on for a few minutes with the 4 or 5 kids in the Mini laughing their arses off and ploughing up more field, of course in the meantime a teacher had no doubt got on the phone and dialled the magical three digits of the emergency services. Thus, two police cars shortly appeared on the field with lights flashing and sirens blaring and the high schoolers suddenly decided that their game wasn't that much fun anymore and promptly bailed out of the Mini.

What they failed to realise is that their wasn't what would be called many exits from our end of the field except for a small alley that ran up between the two schools. What followed was a foot chase as the teenagers tried to scarper and the plod chasing them down, the one memory that is firmly fixed in my mind is one copper doing a rugby tackle on one kid who just managed to slip free and disappear into the alleyway closly followed by the copper who had quicly recovered from his failed tackle.

During all this there was much laughing from us young 'uns as we found it all terrbily amusing.

That's it really, I don't actually know what happened to the teenagers in question as I really didn't care at the time as I was more interested in watching cartoons and reading comics.

Fact: It is the same field Pope John Paul II would land in his helicopter a year or two later in '83 when he visited Wembley Stadium to do mass and I got to witness him kissing the earth whilst being amongst the cheering throng.
(ParaSitius is an Optimistic Pessimist, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 10:42, 3 replies)

I dreaded PhysEd because I had a small cock and it was horrible being in the showers afterwards where the other girls all pointed and giggled.
( enoughblueskyforsailorstrousers, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 10:17, 1 reply)

One more.
Most of the bad things I'd done in school were pretty mundane. Getting into a fight, sleeping in class, being caught smoking, etc. About a year after the events of my last post, I got in trouble for a rather odd one, though.

My school had 44 minute long class periods, so my teacher was a bit annoyed when I showed up to class 40 minutes late one day.
Ms. Ch: "Where's your note Ithy?"
"I don't have one miss."
Ms. Ch: "Well what happened? I'm going to have to talk with your last period teacher about this."
"I fell asleep in class, and everybody left without me waking up. I just woke up and came here as soon as I could."
Ms Ch: "Which class are you coming from Ithy?"
"Phys. Ed..."

After class she told me she would've have given me detentions for lying, but that it was the worst excuse she'd ever heard and she knew I would be able to tell a better lie. Since it'd had been too cold and wet to play outside, we'd been sent to the auxiliary gym to play dodge ball. I hadn't slept the night before, so when the opportunity arose, I had ducked off to the side and climbed up a stack of gymnastics mats, and fallen asleep up against the wall. As I as about 10 feet up and all the way back from the edge and nobody had seen me go up, when class ended nobody noticed me there and they all left.
( Ithyphallophobia, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 3:10, Reply)

mr-lizard reminded me a couple pages back
of the teacher I had when I was 14-15 years old. I feel bad for her now, as I had another class with her two years after this one, and she was great. When I first had her for English, it was her first year teaching, and she was still doing night classes at the time so she could get a job with her desired speciality. Unfortunately for her, she got stuck with most of the worst in my class. It was nominally a normal class, but their were only four of us out of the 30 who could be called literate, and the rest had simply been passed on from one grade to the next because the school district could be bothered with having a bunch of kids failing classes. Aside from being idiots, they were also pretty heartless with Ms. W. I remember she left the class crying at least three times that year.

The first one seemed a bit silly, occurring while we were watching "The Lord of The Flies." It was the only book in school I disliked enough that I just never finished reading it. In particular, I hated Piggy, which it seems was a common sentiment in my class. When Drew Carey took a boulder to the head, a cheer went up across the room, along with a good laugh that the fat kid had died. Ms. W was rather upset by this response, and choked out, "But this is supposed to be tragic guys! That represents the death of innocence on the island, you shouldn't be laughing!" Naturally this only made most of the class laugh even harder.

Later in the year she tried to shame them into making an effort. We had about a month to go before we'd have to take a state test to determine if we'd be able to move on to the next year. The people who sat to my left, the kid in front of him, the one in front of me, and myself were the only four students who were passing the class. We had averages between 92-96% for the class, and the class' overall average was somewhere around a 35%. The four of us started trying to stifle our laughter at the rest of the class, but we did a poor job of it and some of the others noticed. They didn't realise we were laughing at them, though, and soon the entire class was roaring with laughter, despite most of them not having a clue what they were laughing at.

Ms. W reminded them that they were all going to fail the class, which would mean either summer school or repeating the grade. For reasons unknown, they found this absolutely hysterical, and nearly pissed themselves laughing until Ms. W ran out the room crying. Justice was served about five minutes later, when the head of the English department came in a proceeded to utterly terrify the little bastards with her tirade.
( Ithyphallophobia, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 2:57, Reply)

A pearoast I'm afraid
From the 'Caught' challenge back in June.

Too soft to be a career criminal
I think i was about 7 or 8
Myself and a couple of friends were messing around in the schoolyard at morning break,
When we discovered the back door to the kitchen was open.
And on a table a tray of the biggest chocolate sponge we'd ever seen.
It must have been 2 foot by 3 and cut into squares, probably to be served with that pink custard you never saw anywhere outside of school
(WTF was that weird pink custard?)
We looked at each other, looked around and back to the sponge.
They wouldn't notice if we took all the pieces from one side would they?
Ah the innocence of youth.
So we crept in, took the cake and legged it round the back of the yard.
Unfortunately this meant we had about a dozen slabs of cake and morning break was going to end soon.
Theres only so much dry cake you can eat in a short time and we couldnt give any away, so most of it ended up being flushed down a toilet.
Spent the rest of the morning terrified that suddenly bells were going to start ringing and wild eyed snake haired dinner ladies were going to be rampaging through the school weilding knives and rolling pins, baying for blood.
So it was with great relief when the dinner bell sounded as normal and we trooped into the dining room.
Chattering, laughing, clanking the dinner trays together, all the usual school dinner time noises.
Which ground to a halt when we saw the metal grills over the serving hatches weren't open.
And the dinner ladies were all lined up in front of it, and the headmaster standing in front of them.
I had never been so terrified in all my life and looking around to check my co-conspiritors i guess they felt the same.
Kristians lip was quivering, Susan had tears in her eyes, and me, my heart was pounding and my stomach was churning.
Confused mutterings grew until the headmaster held up his hand for silence.
I cant for the life of me remember what he then said because the combination of fear and hastily consumed cake overcame me.
I barfed and blew chunks of chocolate sponge all over the dining room floor.
And I think I may even have wet myself a little
Events that followed are a little bit hazy, but I have vague memories of grassing up my friends, detention,
line writing, lack of any pudding for a week , the disdain of fellow schoolmates, specially the ones I grassed up , the dinner ladies giving me short rations and a right bollocking from parents
Schooldays, the best days of your life eh?
(insomniac-surfer oh go on then, just this once, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 23:40, Reply)

Green 'niggers'
Apologies for the racialist heading but here's a confession of sorts. As a schoolchild, we often visited a 'youth club' twice a week.
We would often clamber around the arcade games, one of which was the Double Dragon side scrolling fighting game.

Now ... There was a part in the game were you encountered and fought against a green bloke and his two black associates, and in my total innocence I assumed the noisy backdrop of semi-inbred, small-minded howling of 'kill the nigger' behind us (as we played the game) was aimed at the green guy. And for a long time, I thought that word was just the description of a green, street-fighting pixel, boss, guy.

I got into a lot of trouble one day in the playground when I was fooling around, toy-fighting with friends, when I announced that 'I'd be the nigger and you guys can kill me'.

This still haunts me.
(mr-lizard Hell's teeth man!, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 23:33, 2 replies)

this one time on a zx81
ahh fuckit whats the point
the story will crash any way
( fluffybunnykiller Is feasting on the clitoris of life, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 22:42, 1 reply)

Sorry mate
Not so much naughty as cruel, but I once observed that a friend looked like an old man dressed as a school boy, getting him the nickname of kiddy fiddler. He still hangs out with me and now gets ID'd every time we go to the pub despite being almost 25. His nickname is now Benjamin Button.
(Mong goose, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 21:55, Reply)

Does uni count as school?
If so then the worst thing I ever did (and this remains one of the few things in my life that I'm truly ashamed of) was in my third year. I've never told anyone about it, not even my closest mates so I suppose this is as good a place as any to confess that I once used someone's death to get a week's extension on some coursework.

Put simply, by my third year of uni I had lost any remaining interest in my course (should have switched after year 1 in all honesty) and was struggling to stay awake - let alone focussed - in lectures and tutorials. By the time we came back after Christmas break I was already starting to fall behind and was in very real danger of losing the plot.

One particularly tough piece of work which I should have made some headway on long before was due in at the end of the coming week and I hadn't even started the thing. So when I got word that a lad I barely knew - but had been in my year at high school - had been killed in a car crash I saw a golden opportunity.

The next day I put on my best shell-shocked face and went to see my tutor, to explain how devastated I was that one of my closest friends from home had been killed. I spoke about how I'd spent time with him over Christmas, how I'd just spoken to him a few nights before and how we were going to meet up for the weekend at the end of the month. I hardly knew him at all, if anything I'd always thought he was an annoying twat but by the end of that meeting you would have thought we were blood brothers.

And my tutor bought it. As a result I was excused all classes for the next week (compassionate leave, if you will) and given extensions on all outstanding coursework. So I went home, locked myself in the flat for a week and worked like an absolute bastard. Scored quite highly on the piece, too.

Sorry about that, Brian.
(DazMack1979, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 21:50, 5 replies)

RM LAN Manager (warning: nerd comprehension skills required)
For the computer geeks among us... does anyone remember this? Maybe not quite the naughtiest thing ever, unless you were being judged under the withering glare of an IT teacher, but favourites at our school included:

1) Bypassing the decidedly shonky quota management system. This little backdoor went unnoticed for quite some time, with several of us using it to escape the irritation of having to decide which coursework you'd delete so the bastard system would let you log in. (The school did a nice line in selling emergency floppy disks.) Or at least, it did up until I copied an entire CD-ROM to my user area and the school server ran out of disk space.

2) Crashing the Windows 95 RMLM client on logout, leaving the computer locked with no usable desktop and no login screen. This was merely an amusing trick to get the teacher running around the IT room resetting machines until one day I found two related facts; if you found some way to set a desktop wallpaper while you were logged in, it would remain after the LAN Manager crashed. And if you pressed PrtScr before logging in, you could set the login screen as your desktop wallpaper. NEXT LEVEL.

Challenge One was to see how long someone would try to log in to the frozen PC for, and once they gave up, how long a stumped teacher would scratch their head at it.

Challenge Two was seeing how much you could deface the login screen before anybody noticed something was up. Turning the RM logo upside-down, removing the password textbox... my biggest success at this ("success" being defined as someone sitting down without immediately going, "sir, someone's ruined the computer") was loading the login screen in to Paint Shop Pro and tilting everything by an angle of 15 degrees. Someone tried logging in to that for a good five minutes.

3) The way our version of RMLM stopped you accessing any settings you shouldn't was to run a background task that closed any window which said "System", "Properties" or "Control Panel" in the title bar. Yes, I'm serious. Good luck changing the properties of your Word document. Turned out that by repeatedly opening and closing property dialogs at speed you could get it to kill random user processes, including, if you were lucky, itself.

We were surprisingly responsible with this sense of unbridled power, as it happened, maybe because most of us were under some threat or other of suspension of network access by this point, although after we showed it to some kid in the year below us he used the new knowledge to open up a command prompt and delete most of the files on the C:\ drive (for some reason RMLM required a local install of Win 95, where I'm sure the older versions booted from network from Netware - memories may be hazy) which made the network administrator various kinds of not happy.

I wouldn't say I gained a reputation, but when a blown fuse took out a room of 486/25s and they wouldn't turn back on, the teacher spent quarter of an hour interrogating me before finally admitting I had nothing to do with it and sending for the caretaker.
(Timberwolf, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 21:27, 2 replies)

Just don't do drugs
My mam was rather easy going throughout my teens. It worked quite well too. I didn't get up to too much crazy shit and very rarely brought trouble to the door. She only instilled in us the one mantra (title). "I can cope with drinking or smoking but whatever the fuck you get up to, don't piss around with drugs.

A couple of years on, I'd recently started high school - year 9 then - and she'd landed us with a new stepfather figure and stepsiblings. Now all 5 co-residents of mine smoked. I could have been visited by the spirit of Roy Castle. I made the stupidest decision of my life, if you can't beat em and all that.

Roll on another year and i'm a regular ten-a-day man. I'm even selling smokes at school to supplement my pocket money. I won't say mam was pleased about it, more that she accepted it a lot easier than I imagine most parents do.

Anyway, my timetable was changed at school, meaning that instead of the usual double PSE then break, I now had a single then single chemistry. By force of habit, I finished PSE then fucked off for my morning cig. In plain view of the chemistry lab. When I turned up late (after unwittingly being watched amble back by the whole class) the teacher was violet with temper and I'm packed off to the year head. Following the obligatory 'guilt wait' and smoking lecture the reprimand went thus;
"I'm going to call your parents" (expecting a grovelly please don't)
"Ok"
"Does your mother know you smoke?"
"Yes"
"I bet she doesn't condone your filthy habit though, does she?"
*shrugs*
"Where did you get the cigarettes?"
"My mam bought them for me on the way to school."
"GET OUT. YOU MAKE ME SICK! etc etc"

As for the drugs, the eldest stepbrother introduced me to, and I still deeply love, weed. Other b and c stuff I consider shite and I have no desire to even sample class a. So it sort of worked.
(Greencloud Wanted to go fishing on, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 21:17, 1 reply)

Not a brown labrador in sight...... (pearost)
I must have been 10ish (the time Sean Connery likes to go to Wimbledon). I detested school with a vengeance. Hard to believe now, but I was The School Swot, always coming top in my year group, if not the school for French, English & science, winning prizes left right & Chelsea in the process.

Not only was I an uber-swot, I came from The Posh Estate. Meaning it was the only private estate in teh pit village (it was a Leech house). The rest consisted of council estates and pit houses. Nothing wrong with that; however, my peers' other prerequisite was the total lack of the ability to breathe nasally.

Therefore, Young Tourettes was ostracised at best, ruthlessly bullied at worst. The only relevance of which was my constant insatiable search for excuses to stay off school. Tonsillitis was good; glandular fever was even better (that got me out of P.E. for 6 months to boot!). Genuine childhood ailments, followed by a long spell of good health. Meh!

Then I played a blinder. Literally.....

From whence the inspiration came, I have no idea. I was forever daydreaming, allowing my eyes to drift off out of focus; leaving the Real World far behind and choosing to spend the majority of time in my own Special World. I was doing this one morning as I descended the stairs. Half way down, a half-baked plan came to me. Leave the eyes out of focus and pretend to be blind!

Fuck me all ways, my folks fell for it. I scored 4 or 5 months off school! (Wouldn’t happen nowadays, oh no, I’d be packed off with Extra Visual Support. But this was the 70’s.) My mother helped me to dress, cut my food up (chips at 3 o’clock, Spam at 8 o’clock, fried egg at 12. “Where’s the Ketchup, Mam?”
“Eeh, sorry pet, it’s at 6 o’clock”).


I was duly taken to *see* the GP, who referred me to an eye specialist in Newcastle. Of course, he couldn’t find anything amiss and suggested I visit an optician. Throughout the exam, I kept up my Oscar-winning performance. However, when the optician started putting different lenses in the frames, a potential problem hit me. If I came away with fuck-off jam jar specs that really would cattle my eyes. So in my 10-year-old wisdom, I decided to say the “weaker” lenses helped. 15 minutes later, I thought I’d been rumbled. The optician told my mother all the lenses he’d inserted had been clear glass! Stinky Poo! How was I going to wriggle out of this? He turned to my mother in all seriousness and said, “Your daughter has nothing physical wrong with her sight. Her blindness is psychosomatic. Can you think of any possible triggers or causes?”
She thought for a moment then proclaimed, “Yes! She read that Shiela Hocken book, “Emma and I” – she was really moved by the story and empathised hugely with the blind lady!”
“That’d do it”, replied the nice optician.

And lo, I had another few weeks off school, while my eyesight *gradually returned*…….

Little fuck-sock that I was.
( Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 19:11, 2 replies)

I was falsely accused of putting a crudely-drawn cock on the wall.
It's not my fault I have a funny shaped cock.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 16:19, 1 reply)

More on my being a teacher...
I was probably less well behaved as a teacher than I'd ever been as a student. As I said in the last post, my lack of qualifications didn't matter: getting results did.

Naturally, I never planned any lessons; I took a quick look at the syllabus and decided to busk it. I did once set some homework, but then the realisation dawned on me that I'd have to mark it; I never did that again.

The syllabus said something about American politics. I taught that by putting some Public Enemy and REM on the stereo, and initiating a debate about The Simpsons. I massively upset some members of the Lower VI by showing the Brass Eye paedophile episode. Well, it's political comedy, isn't it?

I was a bit more successful with the philosophy: in fact, when I suggested extra lessons during the lunch hour, just about every member of the class turned up. One of the other teachers thought I'd given a mass detention; when I explained that everyone was there for the hell of it, she didn't believe me.

Had I thought that this would be a long-term job, I'd've taken it a bit more seriously. But I was pretty sure I was only a stopgap, so saw no need to bust my balls working. So what happened at the end of term, when my utter disregard for the norms of teaching, and discernible lack of talent, came to light?

Yep. The results were good, and I was invited to apply for a permanent post and a promotion.

Gotta love the independent sector, ain'tcha?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 15:13, 2 replies)

Shady
I was a schoolteacher for a few months in 2004. The school in question was desperate for someone to teach A-Level Politics and A-Level Philosophy after the previous guy had got a better job somewhere else. I have no teaching qualifications, and had no schoolteaching experience. But - hey - in the independent sector, noone really cares about these things as long as you get the results.

It was a generally happy school; the one blot was the Principal, whom everyone - staff and students alike - loathed. (He has since, I believe, gone on to ruin a school somewhere in Argentina.)

It being the summer, the time came for the Upper VI to stand down for study leave. Unbeknown to everyone, a couple of them had either contrived to be locked in at the end of their last day, or broke in later - I'm not sure which. Whatever: the following morning, the redbrick of A Block was decorated with graffiti that spelled out in clear, not to say day-glo, terms exactly what the general opinion of the Principal was.

I was based in another building on the other side of the road, but it didn't take long for the news to travel. Having nothing much else to do, I scuttled up to the other site to have a gawp at the damage. The Principal was standing there with a face like thunder. Spying me, he made a beeline, and started making pronouncements about how disgusting the episode was and how the perpetrators would be publicly birched, hanged, immolated, and birched again for good measure.

We were standing in the quad, and there was a lot of pupils in earshot, so I had to agree that such behaviour could not be condoned - and I actually believed that, too. But the devil in me won out. As I walked away, I said loudly, and in a manner designed to be heard by as many as possible, "Still, it could be worse. At least they chose quite a nice colour."

I believed that as well.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 15:07, Reply)

Failure to understand...
I used to have packed lunches, and, as with most teenaged boys, I wasn't a huge fan of cherry tomatoes, which my mother insisted I have. As a result, a number of amusing pranks were initiated, none of which had any significant consequence apart from one notable day, when our sister school was visiting to promote the joint choir tour with our school (yes, I know, posh school). Our tutor room overlooked the main entrance, and they were having photographs taken for the local paper. Naturally, the intelligent thing to do was to throw tomatoes at the assembled choir members (who were clearly gay... ahem). However, I didn't realise that my fellow classmates were aiming to miss. My only shot hit the photographer plum on the top of his balding head. I've never received such a bollocking in my life, especially from my parents, who, it turns out, found the whole situation bloody hilarious.
(plasmaman, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 14:34, 4 replies)

When I was about 9
my teacher said "can I hear you talking, browser?"
I said "I don't know, BUT I WAS TALKING!!!"

Everyone fell about, even the teacher; it was a strikingly sharp retort to an ill-thought-out attack.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 14:21, Reply)

Not so much me... well I was there...
When I was in third year high school (Is that year 10 for our English brethren?), my high school introduced an "activity week", during the period when the years above would be taking their exams. One could choose from daily activities ranging from chess to step class to cooking to football, or weekly activities such a trip to Alton Towers, an art project of some kind or a hostelling and hillwalking trip. I was then in Scouts and so signed up right away for the hostelling and hillwalking: it sounded great, the chance to go up a Munro, and visit Ayr and Glasgow and Pitlochry. Plus being in S3, we'd be the top dog-cool kids compared to the wee S1 and S2 kids, so a bunch of us signed up for it.

With about six teachers to look after us, we bussed it all the way from the north of Scotland to Ayr, and into the youth hostel. After playing some rounders and some walks around the beach, we boys braved the the older girls dorm. Wouldn't you know, they had a shitload of booze with them - Mad Dog 20/20, Hooch, cider, maybe even some vodka. After partaking, everything went silly, dancing to the music from a pair opf headphones, girls flapping up their tshirts, exposing (trainer) bras and saying "What's everyone looking at?", drunken snogging, more drunken snogging, and maybe some more adolescent drunken snogging. (You know the kind where everybody's going round everybody else? It was like that).

Next day, we drove to the leisure centre, went ice-skating, went in the fun pool and slides and then went to the cinema. Happily, in the evening, there was more alcohol. The teacher in charge, who I'll call Mr Graham, was a big bastard, an ex-rugby player with a massive nose and moustache. Our dorm was still being noisy when we'd been ordered to go to sleep (having done the toothpaste-on-the-pillow trick to some unlucky sod), so he burst in wearing a pair of paisley Y-fronts and a head torch, demanding we GO TO SLEEP. Dumbstruck, we did so.

Wednesday we went to Glasgow, where we went "shopping", i.e. ran around shopping centres being annoying little bastards then went to McDonalds, then drove to the next hostel in Pitlochry. We pooled our cash together, got the oldest-looking girl to put on a bit of slap and then went to the cheapest looking booze shop. RESULT! Twenty cans of cider and a bottle of vodka. The small sleepy town of Pitlochry that night was visited as though by a rampaging group of adolescents, throwing empty cans at passing cars/people and cider up the back of passing strangers, running amok with ghetto-blaster blaring, and generally being can't-handle-their-booze young-pup arseholes. Back at the hostel grounds, there was more groupy-groupy-feely-feely, then back at the girls dorm one of the teachers came up to tell us to BE QUIET.

Trouble was, he was already drunk, slurring, and Australian. So other kids were behind him, giving the "tosser" and "V" signs, rather limiting the effect of his speech. Then other (slightly more sober) teachers came up, trying to find two of the girls. They weren't to be found. And for good reason: they were with some local likely lads, being given knee-tremblers up some back alley (ahem). Which meant Mr Graham the next day had to take them to the doctors for some morning-after pills.

Next day, hungover, we climbed a big fucking mountain.

Friday we went home.

Good times.
(McChinaman banned, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 7:38, 1 reply)

Mortal Sins
I lied - to be popular and interesting.
I cheated - in junior school as I couldn't remember my address so wrote it on a note. With a parents help!
I stole - I have a book from the secondary school library.

There were others more and less severe but that covers most of the major sins.

I didn't learn to spell very well though.
(CarlosNotlaw Is doing the opposite of you at, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 7:20, 2 replies)

Horrid
We had to use the girls' changing rooms at the school pool because the boys' ones were being repaired. We duly awaited the girls to finish changing before we all trooped in. We were maybe 14 or something.
Someone found a girls' swimsuit hidden behind a bench that had (a lot of) period blood in the gusset, and he started flinging it around. Pretty soon a group of boys were chucking it about - I remenber clearly there were blood smears on the white tiled walls. Then the game got stupid and the gang cornered my best friend who was always getting bullied, and they started chucking the horrid cozzie at him while he cowered in the shower. It really was like that scene from Carrie.
Anyway I lost my rag (ahem) and stormed in, grabbed the unclean garment and rubbed it in the ringleader's face. A fight ensued which culminated in me sat astride this guy, hitting him in the face very hard indeed whilst still clutching the swimsuit of shame. I got suspended for two weeks.

Well you asked.
(Leemondus, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 3:18, 5 replies)

From Norwich it's the quiz of the week!
When I was around 6 or 7 I used to go to a private primary school in Farnborough. The school was okay (as far as I can recall) but I have some distinct memories about the place.

First was the headmistress won a car on Sale of the Century, not a shitty Austin Allegro or Leyland Princess but a Ford Mustang. Awesome prize in hindsight. Second was this headmistress had a bunch of afghan dogs locked in a shed in the school grounds. I don't know why they were there or why I did this but during playtime I let them all out and they ran all over the place, out the front gate. Apparently they didn't like being locked up given their break for freedom. I got a complete bollocking for it. I don't even know if they caught them all but I wouldn't be surprised if some got run down.

Random other thoughts about the place - there was some savant kid there who could draw amazing pictures at the age of 7 but he'd eat biscuits even after they had been dropped in horseshit. An Iranian girl school smelled of wee. And I bit some girls with some vampire teeth.
(MagicMoose, Mon 12 Sep 2011, 19:58, 1 reply)