Gifted and Talented
Now that I am some form of functioning grown up, I have to question the LEA's wisdom and general budgeting abilities - When I had finished year 7 (so 11 or 12), I was given a place on the gifted and talented summer school. There was about 30 of us from around 1000 pupils of our age in the local area. It was a week long, and this week was to be spent in groups DESIGNING A THEME PARK.

So, we drew a map of it, drew some of the rollercoasters, powerpoints, logos, did a radio advert for it, and so on, for a presentation at the end of the week.

It was an utter piece of piss. How hard is it for 11 year olds to draw rollercoasters. Really?

However, the piece de resistance of this gigantic waste of time and taxpayer expense?

WE GOT TO GO TO A THEME PARK FOR 'RESEARCH'. FOR 2 DAYS.

Now that I pay taxes, I worry about how they are spent. Bah.
(BelladonnaAnodyne Melissa's gonna wet herself, I swear..., Sat 15 Aug 2009, 11:04, Reply)

I was a bit of a weird child...
...and decided that obscurity was the way forward when it came to school projects.

When asked in Biology to do a project on an animal, any animal (bearing in mind I grew up in South Africa, where animal varieties are rich and abundant) I opted instead for...... the quagga, a sort of hybrid donkey/zebra that became extinct in the first decade 1900's.

When asked in Geography to do a project on an island, any island (bearing in mind that massive, heavily populated and very intresting islands like Australia and our very own Blighty exist and are ripe for a good depth of research) I opted instead for...........Tristan da Cunha, a speck of a rock in the South Atlantic that is one of the most isolated inhabited (barely) outposts of mankind on the face of the planet.

What I thought at the time was something along the lines sf scoring extra marks for originality.

What I swiftly realised is that when the only literature available on an extinct donkey and a rock in the South Atlantic can be printed on a small leaflet, writing an entire, well researched and in-depth project wasn't going to happen and I was as likely to score highly as an unwashed goatskin wearing midget in a nightclub full of Pussycat Dolls style nymphomaniacs.

How I passed that year I have no idea. But on the plus side, I still have a pretty good amount of recall on the two subjects...its just that an audience now, like then, is pretty hard to find.
(Stuffed Chimp, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 10:40, 4 replies)

Design Tech and Food Tech
These two subjects are responsible for some of the biggest failures of my school career. To start with there was the gingerbread cake where I didn't read the recepie and used tablespoons as opposed to teaspoons of baking soda. It was so foul that even the dog wouldn't eat more than a bite. The only person who made it through more than a slice out of politeness was my sister.

DT we had a project that was supposed to demonstrate use of hydraulics. Basicaly using syrynges and tubing to power a small wooden crane. I spent so much time pissing around I only glued the damn thing together 5 mins before the big demonstration. Everyone elses cranes worked, to some extent. I pushed the plunger in on mine and the damn thing toppled over, falling to bits in slow motion, leaving me to pick up the gluey mess. Shortly after that however I learnt that holding a chisel to one of those sanding disk machine things makes a funny noise, and it was decided that I wasn't to be trusted with anything in DT beyond paper, card and scissors. Bastards
(Fredz A graveyard of hopes, a dump of ambition, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 9:57, Reply)

What is with the mandatory Invention Fair?
We had one of these in public school. Okay, I guess this is all right for those genius kids that get straight A's, have impeccable notes, and could probably cure cancer with a touch of their finger, but for most kids, it sucks. Who can come up with an invention on demand? Besides Edison?
I spent 3 weeks trying to invent something and ended up bringing a jar of jam with a hole in the lid so it'll drip more directly into another jar. My mom's idea. Meanwhile, one of those bizarre genius alien kids came to school with a rock tumbler he built from scratch, and was the star of the fair, despite the rock tumbler having already been invented. What the hell? I am so glad I got out of public school alive.
(mariam67, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 8:46, Reply)

Epic catalogue of FAIL
In no particular order…

CDT – we had to come up with a design brief to solve a problem, then build it. I chose a holder for a walkman with handlebar-mounted speakers so that you could listen to music while you cycled. I ended up with a snot-green and fluorescent pink fibreglass abortion that looked like a stunt foetus from the Thriller video, due to a chronic inability to use aerosol paint cans. Oh, and it didn’t have any way of fixing to the bike apart from a load of duct tape. It held the walkman well though… so well that you couldn’t get it out to change the tape.

CDT again – this time, we were making trophies. It was going to be really cool! We got to make the shape out of polystyrene, then it got packed into a sand mould, and molten aluminium poured in. The following week we’d have our trophies ready to mount onto a plinth. I made a shark – I can’t remember why, just thought a trophy in the shape of a shark would be cool – but I made the tail section too thin and during the smelting process it snapped off. So I had to modify my trophy (by sawing off the snapped bit) to make it look like a shark jumping out of the water… except I couldn’t fit it to the plinth, and it went into the bin.

And another CDT one – a toast rack! Surely that can’t go wrong, right? Wrong. How hard can it be to make a flat base, with 12 bits of dowel sticking up? Pretty hard when you get the measurements wrong so end up with 1 bit of dowel about a third the length of the others. Had to cut another one to match, and put them both at one end. Then I varnished it, and took it home… to find that the dowels were too close together and the toast wouldn’t fit in the slots.

Cooking now – how about the time we made Lasagne? Mine was too runny, so I spent about an hour after school walking home (usually a 10-minute journey) at the speed of a snail, trying desperately not to slop the lot out of the side of the dish.

Or how about the time we made cakes? I made a chocolate one and forgot to put the sugar in… it was like a giant cocoa-flavoured biscuit. Only not a very nice one.

Finally, my science project. I decided I was going to do something involving my guitar, which basically ended up being a couple of hours of plugging my guitar into an oscilloscope, looking at the waveforms created when I played notes, not having a clue what they meant or how to print them or anything, and handing in a lavishly illustrated 4 page history of the guitar with a page of "findings" on the end, which my teacher held up in front of the class, proclaiming “This is what to do if you want to fail your science project!”.



I’m surprised I remember to breathe, some days :)
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 8:43, 4 replies)

Curry or baby poo?
Back in the mists of time I took GCSE history. For some awful reason we had to do a short essay and project on Roman Lincoln (as I was living in Lincoln at the time - makes sense).

All went well, as I was and still am a nerdy "swotface" of the highest order, until I received the bound and illustrated copy back from my history teacher.

There was a large, brown smear about two inches by an inch on the front cover of my project... now I know Mr P liked curry, but was also aware of him having a 4 month old son.

The mystery of whether it was baby poo or curry was never solved, but I couldn't look him in the eye for the rest of my career at that school.
(Lucoire tutted and shook her head in disbelief on, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 7:14, 2 replies)

my end-of-year project for Drama
was a performance art piece, where I pretended to be a man with Tourettes syndrome and no fingers. The teacher described it as "offensive and pointless."
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 4:22, 4 replies)

Top Tip
Want to scrape a C in your A-Level Sociology?

Do all of your coursework in the pub. And then submit it while p*ssed.

Good thing I already had a Uni place.
.
..
...
Just a shame I never went.
( HSDriver was probably still at work on, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 2:18, Reply)

Ah the joys...
...of GCSE History.

Your coursework - write a project based on a major 20th century conflict that *didn't* happen either between 1914-1918 or 1939-1945.

Cue being taken out of my class - because the rest of the class saw History as an easy way out and was made up of load of lads who honestly couldn't write their own names - but had to fill a third slot in their options evening - this includes a current Premiership Footballplayer (who actually used to sit behind me and is a very nice bloke).

I was taken out because I wrote a degree dissertation level piece on the beginnings of the Northern Ireland "Troubles" and the relationship with post Civil War Ireland c1922.

I think it would also coinside with me being targetted as the only person who might have a chance at raising the passing grade - and because the only activity *in* a GCSE History class that year was when one of the vacant neanderthals in the back row let off a whole box of fireworks.

I got a B.
( HSDriver was probably still at work on, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 2:13, Reply)

About two months ago actually,
I had to write a paper for history. Specifically on Russian History. Even more specifically, as to why Lenin's side beat the combined forces of the greens, whites, and foreign powers.
We had six weeks to write it - because it was a 2500 word essay. All's going well at 3 weeks, I've got all my resources ready to put together, I've downloaded a few E-books on Russian history, borrowed a few books from my history teacher. Methodically, labouriously, I wrote out various quotes and typed them up, ready to start writing.

By the fourth week, I had a rough draft of the first five paragraphs. All's cruisy, thinks I. I've backed up the draft onto my USB, because, for some strange reason - my cd burner has stopped working. No matter though - because I'm around at the same place as everybody else. So started writing my essay, very happy at the way things were working out.

Fifth week, disaster.
My laptop, shat itself. Spectacularly. Could not retrieve anything. Discovered that my USB had been corrupted the last time I'd saved something onto it - so couldn't get my essay from that either. And my CD burner hadn't worked when I'd tried to back up onto disk.

Fuck.
2000 words down the drain.

Did I mention this essay was worth 12.5% of my coursework for this class? fail this - and you lose a BIG chunk of marks.

In a panic, I explain to my history teacher what has happened and get an extension of a weekend. Not a week - a weekend.

Frantically, I go through everything I had that was handwritten, reborrowed all the books I had, used my mum's laptop to retype it. But somehow, I can't remember a thing I'd written. I knew the general gist of what had been typed, but for the life of me, I could not remember it.

So I type. And type. And type. And my brain feels like sluggish mush that gets fed to babies, and I get little papercuts all over my hands from flicking through my notes so quickly. By the time I finish the essay, I feel so sick of the damn sight of it, that I just print it, staple it together, and hand it into my teacher, and walked off, thinking it was crap and that I'd lost that 12.5%. I'd been so sure it hadn't been as good as my last one.

I scraped an A, and got the comment "You work a lot better under stress then you think. Relax." written at the top of my paper.
(Poppet some assembly required., Sat 15 Aug 2009, 1:39, 1 reply)

Turtle Power!!
In the first year of high school, when I should have been having my first sips of cider and trying to make my wee turn white I was obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (The first time they were "in" I hasten to add)

To introduce ourselves to our new form we had to give a presentation on our interests, either alone or in groups. Luckly two of my mates were in the form and had a similar obsession so we decided to do a joint one about nothing but our favourite heroes in half shells.

Somewhere along the way we had a major disagreement on content so I went it alone. On the day I stood in front of a group of my fellow pupils who were progressing in life and trying to project themselves as cool. I produced a vast collection of mugs, figures, posters, t shirts and whatever shite I'd had collected for xmas and birthday presents for many years.

The upshot was I looked like a right twat, never lived it down and didn't touch a girl right through high school.

Best days of my life!!! Cowabunga!
(Elmintrude has lumps of it round the back, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 1:29, 2 replies)

not a good idea
as a small child, my class had weekly assignments to bring in something for the Nature Table. this could be plants, flowers, feathers, anything from nature. my contributions included:
a jar of frogspawn
a box of grasshoppers
several beetles
the biggest spider i could find

despite my best intentions, none of these creatures lived more than 2 days after i'd brought them in.
not even the frogspawn.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 1:09, Reply)

AS Chemistry coursework gone wrong...
The idea was to make a range of electrochemical cells, investigating the effects of using different metals to get a higher voltage and whatnot.

My "brilliant" plan at the time was to make a cell using silver wire and a suitable salt in one end, and magnesium nitrate and ribbon in the other. The suitable salt I selected was silver nitrate. It was a combination nobody had tried yet, and I thought I might get more marks for being thorough... so off into the prep room I trot, to get my ingredients (and nick as much potassium perchlorate as possible, but that's another story).

Cells were built and tested, results noted, and when the bell rang for lunch I picked up my bag, swung it over my shoulder and as I turned to leave, heard the ominous BANGsplash of a large bottle hitting the floor.

"Fuck" is about the only word that I could think of - I had just got about 2L of silver nitrate solution EVERYWHERE. Up the walls, all over the floor, all over me, and my lab partner, the fucking ceiling for fuck's sake. We panic, and decide to flee the scene. We were the last ones to leave, nobody saw us do it, job done. So we did.

However, upon getting outside we soon noticed something was amiss. One look at our blackened hands and uniforms reminded us of what exactly silver nitrate was used for when it wasn't being thrown all over classrooms...

That particular room was closed for extensive cleaning for some time. I'm told the only thing that gets it off is aqua regia. We did not pass our coursework.
(keyboardman, Sat 15 Aug 2009, 0:36, 4 replies)

Back when I was 20,
I went back to 6th form to get my GCSE maths and do a GNVQ in IT as I was sick of fucking around working in pubs.
One of the maths assignments we had to do was to do a survey and break it down statistically.
Naturally, all of the chavvy 16/17 years olds that I had to put up with decided to do surveys on things like "cars, and break them down by color, make/model etc".

Fuck this, said WBM, and proceeded to produce a survey on drugs. The usual questions - have you done drugs, what have you taken etc etc. Did the movie "Trainspotting" affect your thinking about drugs in any way - that kind of thing.
This survey was completely anonymous and handed out to the tutors as well.
A week later, I had collected back the surveys - our tutor had thoughtfully put a tray out so people could sneak in, put them in the tray and be assured of their anonymity.

I got an A for that particular project. I also learned which tutors I could score weed off, and they'd come to me if they were out.
Fun times!
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 23:45, Reply)

Eco power for idiots
We were all angry because weeks before our idiot teacher had confessed to teaching us nothing on the GCSE Electronics syllabus. He had instead entered us for Mechanics, but failed to teach any of that either. I had to build something mechanical for the course work and had left one weekend to do it.

I decided to build a wind turbine for the "third world". Those poor puppies don't have good stuff, so I grabbed some shit form the shed. The turbine was a paint can cut in half vertically, the two sides mounted on a cut down tent pole with duct tape. For bearings I used old bike pedals with the treads still attached. It was all mounted in a rusty frame made form industrial size Meccano for building shelves. Sadly the only electric motor I could find generated zero volts when turned by the turbine, so I had to falsify some data.

I collected the piece of crap during the summer holiday, Dad wanted his shelving back. I was surprised with my B so quizzed the useless teacher. He knew it was crap and built over a weekend, I think I told him so much. He begrudgingly had to admit that the examiners comments complimented the third world application, the ultimate excuse for doing something really badly.
(mrdirtylegs, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 23:26, Reply)

Computers
We had a Commodore Pet at school too, on which we used to do projects.

Bloody Lionel Richie, kept escaping from his cage - I think the "let's castrate Lionel with some nail clippers" one was the final straw.
(Mucky has squinted at the screen with one eye shut since, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 22:53, 6 replies)

First Year Project
I did a project at school, on Mars.

Took a bloody long time to get there though.
(Mucky has squinted at the screen with one eye shut since, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 22:42, Reply)

Industry Days
Back when I was in year 10 (around 1998/99), the buzz around Secondary schools were Industry days. These consisted of Business people from the local area, giving up a day to sit with a pile of 14 and 15 year olds who really, didn't want to be there and to try to coach us in working as a team to develop something out of Boxes and sellotape to revolutionise the world we live in today.

Generally, everything which was designed was stupid, rubbish and came from the idea of 14 and 15 year olds being bored and coming up with stupid ideas. There would always be one team who'd take it seriously (and would win a voucher for £20 for Wickes or Halfords....somewhere which didn't exactly have much relevance for teenager)and there idea would still be crap but they'd just present it well.

Generally, you'd see all sorts of Cardboard Robots, Cardboard, Androids, Cardboard Hoovers.......imagine it, someone probably made it out of cardboard, stuck some more cardboard to it and suddenly it was a Robot which would re-stock toilet paper in 3 seconds while being next door.

The one oustanding memory I have from these days was a team spent the entire day, discussing what their cardboard robot could do. This team was the serious team but had one of the jokers from the year as an assistance and he did come into his own when it came to the presentations at the end of the day.

Teams managed to design, made and present these robots/androids on a regular basis with a small ripple of applause. Looking over to this team on a regular basis, it could be noted that things weren't going well. Apart from the one guy, stressed faces were the common theme.

As it came around to their time to present, nobody wanted to go up to present their idea. It was obvious things hadn't gone to plan.

The joker, who we shall now call Daniel (as that was his name) grabbed their project for the day, confidently stormed up onto the stage and simply stated

"This is our box"

At this point, he held a box, very similar to this (http://bubbalulu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/boxbin2.jpg)
above his head.

No other words were muttered before he put the box on the stage and walked back to his team.

This is the only time that a standing ovation has been given in an industry day. The students were in adoration. The teachers and local business people....not so much.

Unfortunately, that team lost and the winners developed something along the lines of a robot (as normal) and industry days since then have been far more monitored.
(bakircioglu, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 21:52, Reply)

I have poor eyesight
so whether I'm watching an educational video or copying down notes from a powerpoint presentation, I can find it hard to make out the details on a small screen. That's why I'm glad that my School Projects

length? the screen is about 6 foot diagonally
(tubeman trousers, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 21:12, 3 replies)

Has anyone seen the film 'Little Red Flowers'?
Anyone?

Well, like the boy in the film I was always jealous of the kids who were awarded those coveted flowers or, in this case smiley faces. I was particularly envious of the two teacher's pets in the class, who would win the prize (some chocolate, I think) every year by at least 15 faces.

So, one year I decided I'd cheat on the end of year project. We had to make some kind of water clock/timer thing. Anyway, with a little bit of skill (and a stop watch) I won and was promised a head start of TWO smiley faces for the next year.

Did I get them?
Pfft, no.

I had one more year, followed by 7 years of hell. For I'd soon discover that being short, fat, with glasses and a lisp doth make one very popular with the bullies!

Karma, society, whatever. Life's a bitch and I REALLY hated school!
(suicidalducky has too much time on his hands, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 20:47, Reply)

Rakky 1, God 0.
The project? How many different churches / synagogues / mosques etc were there in my small seaside home town and its environs.

The rest of my RE class' method for solving this problem? Get mummy and daddy to drive them round for the evening in order to locate each and every one.

The day of the assignment arrives and my class are eagerly comparing how many they've managed to score. I recall someone having a very impressive list of 30 or so.

Until I proudly unveiled my list of (and forgive me for not remembering the figures) about 79. Winner, by a country mile.

My method? Copied them out of the Yellow Pages.

Clever? Yep. Cocky? For sure. One of the many reasons I left school still a virgin? Absolutely.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 20:41, 2 replies)

Upside-down comedy breasts
stole the show.

Three of us at uni were giving a talk on health screening. We two bints talked about how men could examine their own testicles for suspicious lumps while our young male colleague sat unobtrusively beside us in a stripey bathrobe.

As I sat down and the lad stood up I glanced over at the lecturer. She looked terrified - white-faced, wide-eyed, sweating - expecting him to drop his kit at any moment and demonstrate. All eyes were on him.

When he did disrobe, it was to show a pair of joke plastic boobs, to illustrate his point that if we can catch patients' attention we can educate them about screening.

He'd somehow placed them upside down but that didn't matter, and I've never seen a tutor so relieved.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 20:21, Reply)

It was one of those women's studies classes
Or a 'gender theory' one; I can't remember which exactly, but I do know it was one of the ones I avoided on the grounds that I have a very low tolerance for preachy types. A friend was intrigued, though, so she signed up. Halfway through the term, she was so tired of the politically-correct-to-the-point-of-being-patronising-fuckwits kind of attitude displayed by 90% of the rest of the class that she decided a little something special was in order. Checking the syllabus, she made a plan.

For the assignment of a mini-lecture on gender and appearance or the like she entered dressed in a suit, started giving her presentation. . .and then began a striptease, continuing the mini-lecture all the while. Quite Pythonesque, aside from her being a very pretty girl who looked nothing at all like Terry Jones -- can't say I complained when she asked me to help with the rehearsals. I'm told some of the most obnoxious ones were terribly offended (as she'd anticipated), but the professor saw the humour. The rest of the class saw slightly less than they'd probably have liked to see! And no, I have no pictures. Not of that one, anyway. . . .
(louveciennes , Volvospotter, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 19:53, Reply)

Cracking Eggs
One speech class assignment was an 'expository' speech - wherein a demonstration was required. I decided to demonstrate how to cook breakfast. I brought in my mother's electric griddle, a couple pounds of bacon, a gallon of OJ, and 2 dozen eggs. I gave a nice speech, if I say so myself, but the hit of the presentation was my egg-cracking technique.

I crack and deliver eggs with one hand, I always have, since learning the technique from my dad. So after cooking up the bacon, I started cracking the eggs, two-at-a-time (one in each hand). It caused quite a sensation, and the admiration and envy of all my peers (in my mind, anyway). Plus, the breakfast was great, teacher was pleased, and I got an A+.

To quote Dirk Diggler: "Everybody has one special thing, you know?" Mine is, apparently, cracking eggs.
(danalan Pretty good, for an amateur., Fri 14 Aug 2009, 19:30, Reply)

The sum total of my religious education.
Our secondary school was a rather 'traditional' one. It was stern and austere, and did not have time for silliness and frippery. The general feeling seemed to be that any form of religious education counted as silliness, and as such, despite it being a mandatory part of schooling, we were given no lessons or any kind.

As the school was a grammar school, it clearly felt itself above government guidelines on such things, and felt it could provide oxbridge fodder... I mean, well-rounded individuals... using the school's own tried-and tested method for RE provision, the 'RE project'.

Essentially, we were given a full school term (outside school, no lesson time) and told to produce something 'religious' or to do with religion. As our school was populated with vast numbers of brown-nosed, pugnacious little squits, who always did everything they were asked of and more, the results of these projects were usually fairly impressive. One year, a couple of kids collaborated and coded up the "Encyclopedia Judaica", a CD-rom resource of all things Jewish and Jew-related. One kid brought in a scale matchstick replica of a hindu temple, and so on and so forth.

Coming from a fairly anti-religious family, this project was resented in the Serotonicity household, and whilst diligent work was encouraged and insisted-upon in other subjects, the RE projects (we had to do one a year for 3 years as I remember) were always left until the last minute. The weekend before the deadline arrives, and some project has to be completed. A flash of inspiration, and a busy weekend of industrious work, including much by my long-suffering father, for the project required some not inconsiderable woodworking skills, and the thing was finished.

It is to my immense sorrow that I do not possess a picture of the finished article; the action man crucifiction. Three crosses, expertly crafted, sitting proudly out of a rolling papier-mache hillside. Each cross replete with its own action man figure, clad in an elegant loincloth. The central, and Messianic, figure was also equipped with a crown of thorns (made of tangled wire-wool if memory serves) and a realistic-looking flesh-wound to his side.

It was, quite simply, magnificent.

Length? Biblical proportions...
(Serotonicity was a naughty boy on..., Fri 14 Aug 2009, 19:15, Reply)

The most ill conceived school project ever
I majored in Anthropology in college, and for my senior project I had to do a paper or project on material culture in the modern world. I chose to do mine on Russian prison tattoos. I was not what you'd call a "motivated" student, (I finished 22nd from the bottom in my class) so it got to be a couple days before it was due and I hadn't even started.

There was no way I was going to be able to write a 20 page paper in a couple days, so I opted for the project instead. What arose in the next couple of days has become the stuff of legend at my school, and the professor still uses my video as an example in class. I decided to videotape myself getting an authentic russian prison tattoo on my ass. Words fail to describe the experience, so I'll let the video do the talking.


www.vspworld.com/vsp/?p=20

Oh yeah, I got an A.
(raulduke, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 18:06, 19 replies)

Ok class, pay attention. This is your assignment:
Don't use 'cue me' 'cue them' 'cue anything' in your posts ever again. It's pointless and irritating. If I come accross it in a post I stop reading and head over to the next one.

Stop it. Now. Thanks boys and girls.

Cue new guy getting reamed by regulars. LOL.
(The Boy Monders I have ginger bits in my beard., Fri 14 Aug 2009, 17:27, 6 replies)

It all started with a crude drawing...
Advanced Higher biology. Painfully boring for me, which was odd, as normally I really enjoyed that subject.

What did keep the lesson exciting, though, were the shenanigans that myself, my classmates and the teacher got up to. Nothing particularly violent or extreme, just a series of funny remarks or interesting occurrences, such as one lesson, just after mother's day, one boy announced (In complete honesty) that he had given his mum a pearl necklace, much to our amusement.

But I digress..

I sat next to a boy called Tony, who was incredibly quick witted. Because of this, we regularly spent our entire lessons attempting to put each other off in whatever way we could. Insults, physical abuse, all that lark. One day, I decided to draw a crude little spider on his paper. He commented that it looked like a potato with a face.

And so the journey began...

In secret, I asked another one of my friends to bring in some glue, a marker pen, a woman's magazine, and other arts and crafts things. Over the course of an hour, we crafted a Potato Spider.

I presented it to Tony in biology, at which point out teacher got a look at it. Tony was happily bewildered, but my teacher decided it was such a brilliant piece of work, that it should be hung from the ceiling! (Or at least the overhead projector)

And there he stayed, watching over the classroom, providing the younger pupils with a source of intrigue, and slowly rotting into a shrivelled potato.

I ended up getting a C in that subject. Probably because of things like this.

And here, my fellows, is a picture of the finished article!
(Charlie-M, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 17:05, 2 replies)

Ahem
During my younger years I spent half my time at school and the other half being taught at home thanks to my mothers financial situation. I will admit that I was happy with this way of things as I got to mess around with my own thing when I was with my mother.

Where was I…..oh yes school projects, we were studying space (ooh that’s original) and our class were given the task of building a rocket or spaceship design (my guess is that our teacher (Mr Robertson) needed a few hours kip and thought it would be a good idea to stuff me and my mates off into a room to build up some crap).

I was naturally in my element as I would spend countless hours at home dicking around creating robots and spaceship designs that never really amounted to much. I eventually came up with an idea of a space station. While the others ripped off your basic rocket design (loo roll with cardboard fins) I was a pedantic little sod and spent more time writing up info on the space base itself, the diameters, number of floors, canteen etc etc. In the end I had hardly any time to perfect the design so slapped paper mache onto a baloon, added a few towers and painted it.

When Mr Robertson came back he was pissed at my attempt. He mentioned that the design was ugly, dull, lacking in effort and an insult to me and him. I went home upset and hoped to prove the miserable old fucker wrong.

Fate was on my side, after a few years I got the chance to prove him wrong by testing my actual scale “ Ugly and Dull ” death star on the world he had retired to (The bloke doing an interrogation to this lass we had caught earlier mentioned it was her home planet , but I was more bothered about teaching that old coot a lesson (Bwaa ha ha you weren’t mocking me then when you and thousands of others cried out in pain were you Mr Robertson!!))

Love Darth

(Actually now I come to think of it I should have put some wire mesh over the part we were using as an exhaust port (In reality it was the part I left open to pop the balloon that I made my papier-mâché mould with)
(mon bison powered by magnets, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 16:58, Reply)

Brekky
Our home economics teacher told us to think of a dish to prepare in class the following week. The lesson was at 9am on a Tuesday morning, so while the other groups cooked their interesting and exotic dishes, we sat there having a delicious fry up!
(Dr. Scambolic, Fri 14 Aug 2009, 16:41, Reply)