anti drugs poster
We had two weeks to complete an anti drug poster and my 15 year old head was full of great ideas.There was a prize and these posters were to be displayed in the main hall of the school and all. Like pretty much everyone else on the board, i left mine until the last minute and ended up tracing the cover of Radiohead's 'the bends' and writing 'gives you a buzz?' underneath it. It was supposed to be deep but it was rubbish. As my teacher pointed out '' em...its a bit more like a pro drugs poster...and its rubbish''.

I honestly don't know what i was thinking.
(BarryChuckle, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 12:10, Reply)

Humanities
Over 2 lessons In my GCSE humanities class, in preparation for a project studying equality with regards race we were shown the (at the time) 10 year old film Soul Man starring Hollywood 'legend' C. Thomas Howell...

Says a lot about my humanities teacher really.
(stubbledchin, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 11:37, Reply)

Gay
The greatest school project I ever did, was this giant explodi...oh get a grip, I was far too busy having sex with girls and that to do actual schoolwork. Losers.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 11:36, Reply)

English project.
When I was in year 7 were given the task of writing a story about our school being under siege. I think a viral outbreak was involved somewhere along the line (this was 15 years ago, so am struggling to remember the finer details).

No prizes for guessing how many of us decided that the unpopular teachers would be the ones to die in horrific ways. Obviously we changed the names of said teachers, by spelling them backwards.
(ToysForBigBoys would spread her legs for Nick Clegg., Thu 20 Aug 2009, 7:37, Reply)

The Bloody Head
I would have been in my second year of highschool. Being a normal boy in year 8, I was obsessed with drawing gore filled scenes, people being disemboweled and so on (all with loving attention to detail I should add)

Anyhow, we were tasked with making an art piece based on the senses.

My friend and I decided that pain was such an intense feeling it should clearly be a sense in its own right.

We spent the next 2 lessons crafting a soggy lump of paste covered newspaper into an approximately 1 foot long face, bulging out from the cardboard it sat on. We then made a cardboard meat cleaver and various other items, painted them, then lodged them in the still soggy face. Added a little bit (lot) of red paint here and there, and presto... we'll let it dry.

Only the teacher didn't let it dry, and stuck it on the wall in the corridor immidiately, alongside the other works. The paste and paint mixed to cause a smear of red to trickle down the wall which got wiped clean several times over the next few days by a janitor.

Ofstead came round about 3 days after the heads unveiling. I was gutted to find a gap on the wall where it once stood, only a faint trace of red remained as a reminder. Damn censorship...
( chulk607, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 4:53, Reply)

Cockbrush has reminded me
Of my GCSE electronics project. It was meant to be a burglar alarm. It ended up being a black box with a button on the side. If you pressed the button then after two and a half minutes a small red light would come on, accompanied by a strong smell of burning.

I can quite clearly remember sitting at my desk with this... thing in front of me, the day before marking day, wondering where it all went wrong.
( MatJ LOOK, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 0:10, Reply)

cultural studies
not a project as such, but a great skive.
Wednesday afternoons, as anyone at a British educational institution will tell you, are the sole preserve of those good at sports. Until the age of 16, me and my kin were very much forced to accept our positions leaning against the goalpost of the muddiest outpost of our school fields whilst the 'special' team attempted something looking a bit like football. I was ruthless in the half-arsedness of my participation, and couldn't wait for the day I joined sixth-form, and the extra 'options' i could have instead of freezing my dick off in an itchy, muddy, polyester reversible shirt (which we'd be forced to turn inside out as soon as they were muddy enough).
Come sixth-form, we were presented with a crappy hand-written option form suggesting we either spend our wednesday afternoons on the field again, in the library, or doing community service.
NO FUCKING CHANCE.
such a hastily scrawled option sheet was begging for an alteration, and so it was that myself and a few others got away with 'cultural studies' for almost two years. no-one noticed, not even the teacher who would drive us into town and drop us at the pub, immediately next door to a museum or some other place of cultural relevance, whereupon we would spend the rest of the afternoon getting smashed for 99p a pint, or whatever cheap deals were available that day.
thinking back on it, i guess no-one cared. still, happy times.
( the brass moustache putting the ass moust in brache since, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 22:36, Reply)

Aliens
When I was 12 years old my class was given a term project entitled simply ‘Aliens’. Our homework was to create something around the theme of extra-terrestrials and I wanted to go the whole hog, design my own creature from a distant world and present the final piece as a model of the fantastic monster.

Even though it was a month long assignment I left it til the night before it was due in. I set about bastardising a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Plaster of Paris kit; I.e use the turtle figure and then stick antennae, fins and all manner of spacey shite onto it afterwards.

I completely ballsed up the Plaster of Paris mixture. I added far too much water and I had no time to go and get a new kit and start again. Instead of the Lucas Arts collectable figurine I’d envisaged I was left with a bowl of grey lumpy gunge that looked a bit like semolina.

Undeterred by this unmitigated disaster, I simply scraped the substance into a clear plastic bag and tied it in a knot.

Cut to next day in class, I unveiled the bag of crap to teacher on a piece of paper with an arrow pointing towards it with the words “Alien Food” written in huge letters.

It got a Gold Star and was the first thing on the class display every entering parent saw at the very next parent’s evening.

Mugs.
(CharlieSomethingElse, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 22:06, Reply)

I found a floppy by the uni computer I was using.
I inserted and opened it and had a quick look at the documents inside. One was a job specification, with a list of all the things the candidate would be expected to do/have. To this I added 'dress in rather sexy ladies' clothing' and put the floppy back where I found it.

I hoped that as it was such a small change the owner of the disk would think nothing had changed at all, and it would go un-noticed until it was time to hand it in.
( Bob Todd whee, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 21:45, Reply)

First post
First post, sorry for lack of funnies.
I was a good kid at school except for the the unfortunate fact that I never did homework. Not because I was a disruptive kid or anything, I was pretty bright, got my exams etc, but I was the laziest person ever. Not doing homework however well-behaved you are tends to get you noticed after a time, and after a couple of years I had more detentions than the truants who smoked weed in town and knifed each other. And of course the dreaded parents evenings rolled around.

A couple of weeks before parents evening I'd start making an effort, and one year became especially memorable. I had a DT project that I was supposed to have done over three months. I'd done some basic design work, and had planned to build a guillotine. The night before it was due in me and my father were cutting wood, and sheet metal, and produced a not bad little speciman. However next to the other projects I knew it would look pretty poor, so I nicked a barbie doll from my sister, and a couple of sachets of ketchup from the school canteen, carried it in to demonstrate. Everyone was watching very very intently, and I thought it might not be so bad.

Halfway through I realised this looked pyschotic. (I had stuck a printout of Robespierre's head onto a stick- geek, lazy and now pyschotic) but carried grimly on, with my ketchup smeared barbie and working guillotine. I stumbled through until the end, when I at last happened to look down at my shirt, soaked through by the morning rain, and of course a dark bra underneath.
At that point I definitely thought fuck it, I'll risk the parents evening. Never did another project.
( Amberl was stripey and dominated Europe, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 20:36, 2 replies)

I once spent years on a school project.
Then I wasn't allowed near the school any more. Well I said it was a project and they said it was grooming.
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 18:47, Reply)

when I was in Canadian grade 11
I was the most gargantuanly belligerent teacher's pet that wasn't in the the special classes. I was a socially awkward failure whose only approval came from the teachers whose asses I stuck my nose into the furthest. My "favourite" class was English, my teacher latched on to me as the child she never had, or at least one that hadn't rebelled against her smothering nature.
Of course, we disagreed on one important deal-breaker; come book report time she didn't regard comics as real literature. Fucking unacceptable. The most difficult part of my project was convincing her otherwise (the real reason I asked to do a comic was because I hadn't read a proper book in ages and didn't want to go through all that non-superman effort, so I chose some obscure graphic novel)
It still embarrasses me how long I worked on that essay, complete with powerpoint presentation and huge hand-drawn poster. I was surging with regular spurts of adrenaline come presentation day, and hardly even listened to the other students ahead of me. I arranged everything just so, and after loading the slides I dimmed the lights and a great big cover of a bare-chested hero beamed onto the wall.

Suddenly I understood. I realized all the ridicule, all the looks and shoving and swirlies and why nobody seemed to ever want to talk to the sad pizza faced geek. It took staring at that fucking ridiculous cover in near life size proportions to realize why I was never really taken seriously. In front of my class, I suffered a personal epiphany.
Every student was now staring at it with a half-interested half-incredulous smile of sarcastic disbelief, and I thought for a minute what a layman in this situation would think. No amount of nerd blathering could explain this away. It was a big oily bugling hero whose artist saw fit to draw every arm, leg, chest and facial hair in excruciating detail.
So I bullshat the whole thing. This cover was the hero's self-image as he progressed mentally and socially through the deep personal journey of self-discovery, in mid-century America, his struggles with masculine identity and self-worth, how the monster behind him was a visual allegory to his lurking and ever-present "battle" with alcoholism.
As soon as I was confident I had lost the classes' attention I wrapped it up without showing any other progressively greasy slide. I don't think I ever really mentioned it was a comic at all. I was sweating, though not as much as the hairy chest man, when I sat down.
I never read that comic again. My teacher kept the poster, I got a resounding A, made a few friends, and never mentioned it again.
(mys mys mys mys, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 18:26, Reply)

THE ANGRY FUZZY BLACK BEE
“It’s pretty straightforward,” I explained to the two lads who were part of my A-Level economics course just prior to stepping out on stage to run through our end of term project about the law of diminishing returns*. As the gobshite of the group I got to sit back and do fuck all while they came up with the presentation. All I had to do was present the fucker when they'd finished. The two lads sat silently pissing themselves at the thought of having to stand out onstage infront of a class of kids and a teacher they already knew, so I continued, attempting to put them at ease: “No, it’s really straightforward. What you do is lay on your back with your head touching the wall. Then you lift your legs up and sort of walk down the wall until you’re cock’s tickling your lips. You can start working on the tip and take it from there, and after you’ve been in that position for a few minutes you can manage to get a little bit lower and – hey presto! – you’ve got your dick in your mouth. I did it last night. The only problem is what to do when you shoot your load. I ended up with spunk all over my face. That was a bit weird. Didn’t taste too bad though, don’t know what Rachel’s complaining about. Anyway – shall we get on with this?” And I lifted up the paperwork, the empty beer cans for the demonstration, and walked out on stage.

The class looked wide eyed. My sixth form girlfriend, Rachel Andrews, sat hiding her face which was turning an interesting shade of purple. Rachel looked like she wanted to stick her hand down my throat and pull out my still beating heart. The teacher, Mr Grisley, a London lad who liked a bit of a laugh, was pissing himself laughing: “You’re miked up, Spanky,” he said. And I looked down at my shirt and there it was like an angry fuzzy black bee – the mike. Bugger! Mr Grisley continued: “Shall we get started, ehh? Oh, by the way – as much as I'd like to you won’t be getting any additional credits for the information you’ve given us so far...”


*As we’d just turned eighteen it involved beer. Loads of cans of beer (they were empty, the college I went to was modern but not that modern). It went like this: if you have one pint you feel great, two you still feel good and have an almost equal return for your hard earned dosh. But by the time you’re onto your tenth drink the beer still costs the same but it doesn’t taste too great and you’re more likely to attempted to chat up the barmaid with the immortal line: “My face would look great with facial hair, fancy coming back to mine and we'll experiment – you bring the curly black beard,” while wiggling your eyebrows suggestively. Though, strangely, our presentation didn’t feature this line...
( SpankyHanky, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 16:04, 3 replies)

Bogroll
In junior school at the age of about 8 we were all told that on the next day we'd be making puppets and that we ought to bring in some materials (paper, cardboard, glue, etc) to use. I immediately went home and forgot all about it.

The next day everyone is turning up with bags of stuff. Some appeared to have brought the contents of their Dad's shed with them. I of course had nothing at all. Afraid of what the teacher might do to me I considered running away. On the way out of the classroom I spotted Fred, the class' pet gerbil. Fred had a nice big tank full of interesting stuff. Hmmm, I thought. Checking that nobody was looking I reached in and stole a toilet roll tube.

I went back to my seat, stole some marker pens and a few bits of tatty cloth from a girl opposite who wasn't looking and set about my task. I painted a face on the tube and used the cloth to make some hair and a big cloak. A page torn from an excercise book rolled into a cone made a wizard's hat. A pencil sellotaped to the back made a stick to hold him up with, and some work with scissors and a bit of wire I pulled from out of a bookcase gave him a mouth I could open and close. And there I had him - Gandalf, king of the Wizards.

I got a gold star for my inventiveness. Crime does pay.
(yesyesyes, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 15:43, 1 reply)

Dirt Poster
For my foundation degree in natural science we had to dig up some soil samples in our Forensic Geology class. We had to go outside the class with some bags, a trowel and a camera. I was with two great guys and we had a right laugh larking about with the pictures which we had to take of the location of the sample and also putting it in the bags. Imagine a load of model posing styles with sandwich bag full of dirt and product placement of my mates watch, phone, drink etc etc.

We did finally get all the samples we needed and went back to the lab to note it all down (and having to convince my mate that the phrase "stinks like shit" was not an official term for the smell of the sample) we left them to dry for a week and come back in and sieve them and note what we found, any changes etc etc.

This information then had to be put in chart and note form with the pictures on to an A0 piece of paper, which is mahoosive and costs around £7 to do. Ok so the end result we did have to copy and paste our information over but waiting half an hour for it to print was not fun.

However, the day of the judging everyone sticks their posters up and the teacher takes a look. We all had a look at each others and noticed that a lot of them had spelling mistakes including someone had spelt their name wrong. You think that by the time they hit 18, people would know how to spell their own name. A lot of people lost marks because they didn't use spell check.

Anyway long story short (and it is as I could have gone in to all the soil testing that we did, very boring but lovely and messy, much to most of the girls disgust) My group got 21 out of 25 for it which was the highest in the class and the only reason we didn't get higher was because we didn't use the same font throughout? (WTF is that all about?) The tutor did try to fob me off with the whole "font" thing but I said to him "go on admit it, you don't have anything bad to say about our poster because there is nothing wrong with it, hence why you are picking on the fonts." To which he replied, "yes you are right,"

haha, score!

We didn't win the class vote simply because most of the people didn't like me as I like to be able to listen to the tutor so I would take great delight in telling them to shut up as I was allowed to do so as I was student rep for the year. lol
(Soaps Roller derbying your way since, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 15:21, Reply)

Textiles Pig
For our GCSE textiles exam we had six weeks to fill in a book, then the exam was ten hours, sitting in silence, making our final piece.

For mine I decided to make a pig. In the exam my best friend was sitting opposite to me but two benches apart. Two hours in she caught my eye and proudly held up a pair of cardboard glasses I gave her the thumbs up and then held up the leg of my pig, which was a light pink tube with a dark pink patch on the end with bits of stuffing still poking out of the end. It took ages to make, I expected her to look impressed and give me the thumbs up back, but instead she looked horrified mouth wide open and just looked back down at her desk.

When break came she came straight over, grabbed my pig's leg and said
"dude, why are you makin' a penis?!"

Apologies for crapness, but I made an effort to forget school.
(MissUnexpectedNuttering Mad to live, Mad to talk, and burn, burn, burn...., Wed 19 Aug 2009, 15:07, Reply)

DT Project year 11 - Make a candle holder
Imagine me a 15 year-old girl given the task of making a candle holder. Back in those days I was trying to be ‘alternative’ wearing hippyish clothes, claiming to have taken all kinds of mind altering drugs and reeking of incense and drinking fruit teas (which I still quite partial to, but I now drink them without milk). I was of the opinion candles were my thing, a world expert in fact on all things candle and candle related. Happily, I set about researching my project, contrary to the other subjects I thought this is my big chance the golden grade A* in sight, I was a world authority on candles, scented ones particularly.

Research done – all the best picture cut out of the Argos catalogue. Product specification done plus a risk assessment (I was a show off) Design development I even did a class survey of which design did they think was the best. A kind of elaborate hanging lantern was chosen, made prototype out of cardboard. Jobs a good one – into the workshop goes show off number one.

Spent ages measuring and cutting lengths of metal it was time to weld them together. There had been ‘the incident’ the year before and since if something had to be welded it could only be done under the cover of darkness, three months previously by a flame retardant teacher who was menstruating. The result being I had a small pile of lengths of metal and a grade D as the practical was incomplete.
(Free pens 100, 101, 102 is still counting on, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 14:10, Reply)

Yet another Tech Teacher misery scrawl
Back in the days of GCSE, where all you can think of is buggering off home and girls (2 years down the line, this still hasnt changed), i stupidly decided to take R.M. (basically woodwork for those out of the loop).

For anyone that know, the coursework you have to do takes a very long time indeed and involves many, MANY A3 pages of drawings (not my strong point) and bullshitting (a sort of strong point). Obviously doing it on a computer was the best way to do it.

I kept my lovely project on my USB stick (I had even set the stick's name as my own) and rarely backed it up.

17 pages about a wooden steamroller later and i accidentally leave my USB stick in one of the Tech department's computers. BIG mistake. I didnt know this at the time, but the head of tech Mr Sturman (a.k.a. the sturminator, Der Furher, cunt etc.) was a self centered, thoughtless twunt.

Instead of saying putting a note round saying "blue memory stick found in tech department", he just deleted everything off it (including my coursework) and used it for his own needs.

I only found out about it when i noticed it plugged into the Boxford(one of those computery cutty machines)'s computer. To which he feigned innocence. Bastard.

I managed to get it completed in the end and turned out quite nice i think (if find a picture i'll link it).

Apologies about lack of funnies etc, no apologies for length.
( unsey a frizzy haired fruit since, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 14:07, 1 reply)

PROTECT MY BUSH

Like most teenagers, I had quite a rebellious streak and because my parents were strict I had to save my naughty behaviour for school.

I was never seriously badly behaved; just the usual bit of skipping class, smoking week and some answering back.

A good example of this would be when our Science class was split into groups for a four week biology project in which we had to design and write a newspaper article on `Saving The Environment'. Our softie biology teacher let us choose our own groups to work in.

We had two lessons a week for four weeks so 8 hours in all. At my suggestion my group came up with the following:

A Page 3 girl with big titties (beautifully drawn by my goodself) and a big bushy tree covering her lady bits. We called this article `Protect My Bush!’ and thought that we were very witty and clever.

When we handed it in at the end of the 4 weeks and I swear I saw the science teacher smirk a little.

We were never properly reprimanded, I think he sighed and that was about it.

We got minor points for creativeness I think.
( DUMBLONDE is a rubber lover girl, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 12:55, Reply)

Saved by ACCIDENTAL BEE!
I've just remembered a story from my primary school days, when, as I mentioned in a previous post, I was at a C of E school. (Well, tambourine-banging evangelism masquerading as C of E...) I don't remember much of the work we did in the first few years...mostly just sheets full of sums to complete or handwriting exercises. But I recall one afternoon when the teachers got the paints out. I think we'd been studying Noah's Ark, because we were set up round a table with the watercolours and told to paint animals. I could only have been about 6 years old at the time, and the class was taught by Ms J, who was lovely.

The assistant teacher, Mrs S, however, I was slightly afraid of. She was alright really, but had a tendency to be a bit shouty if she didn't like you. When it came to my turn to paint, she was supervising the group. I wasn't too worried to start with and just started dawbing at this piece of paper, absent-mindedly.

After a few minutes, I realised I was daydreaming. As I'm often wont to do, even to this day, the part of my brain in charge of regular, rational thought just departed this world and disappeared off into some fantasy world which probably involved dinosaurs and my cat, Morris. (I loved my cat. He was awesome.) Morris and I had likely just hitched a ride on the back of a triceratops when I heard a voice cutting through the fabric of my Cretaceous wonderland.

It was Mrs S.
"So, what animals are you all painting?"
Oh crap. Oh holy fucking crap. I've been daydreaming.
My heart did not so much skip a beat so much as a Gene Krupa drum fill. My hand had just kept daubing at the paper as my brain had imagined me climbing a tree with Morris to escape a hungry megalosaurus. I'd forgotten I was supposed to be painting an animal and I'd just wasted a load of time and paint and Mrs S would be angry and shout at me because I hadn't done as I was told...

Time ticked away. Johnathan was painting a lion. Kirsty was painting a horse. There were only a few more kids left between me and the wrath of Mrs S.

I had to think fast - and not about the possibility of being saved by a conveniently placed and benevolent ankylosaurus - could I turn this collection of daubs into an animal of some, any description?

Christopher was painting a pig.
Fay was painting a zebra.

I looked down at the piece of paper. What had my hand been doing all this time?

Robert was painting a bird.

I looked down and saw a series of yellow and black lines.
Oh god oh god what's yellow and black and striped and...well, it's just yellow and black stripes, like...a zebra covered in wee...or...
"A BEE!" I said.

Fuck knows how, but my brain had managed to save me by drawing Accidental Bee. At least, brain had painted something which I could turn into a (very long) bee. I could paint a bee and then Mrs S wouldn't shout at me.

I resolved to finish my bee and return to my Cretaceous paradise at a later date. That was too close. Thank goodness for Accidental Bee.
(LongJohnBaldry, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 12:23, 5 replies)

It is still a requirement
On the OFSTED check sheet that a school should provide a 'collective act of worship' once a week. Most schools don't bother with this but, keen to improve our standings, I was asked to join some other students and teachers to discuss how we could introduce elements of spirituality into each subject (I was chose for being good at Philosophy, not for being religious).

Have you ever sat down and tried to have a series conversation about how to introduce elements of spirituality into maths and PE?

I think the teachers realized I wasn't taking it seriously when I suggested that English classes could be conducted in the Lotus position.
( MatJ LOOK, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 11:48, 3 replies)

The Methane Mamba
I will always be greatful to Mr. S for teaching me this one.

To create the methane mamba, you take a large bowl of water. You add washing up liquid, then use a hose to bubble methane from the gas taps through it. Because methane is lighter than air, the bubble tower rises fast. When it has reached a sufficient height, you prod it with a lighted splint on the end of a metre rule. FOOOOM and a huge fireball is the normal result.

The normal height to build the bubble tower is not above 2'.

Enter AT, RU and DR, all of whom are friends of mine.

In an incredible lack of foresight, Mr. S had decided to trust them with the mamba equipment while he went out of the room for a minute or two. This equipment included the oxygen cylinder. When you add 98% oxygen to methane it ceases to go 'FOOOOM' and instead tries to blow your eardrums out.

They, somehow, managed to make a bubble tower 7' high using a combination of oxygen and methane. Just as RU was advancing with a splint, Mr. S returns to the room. "NO" he screams. But it was too late. RU pokes the tower with the splint.

The entire ceiling of the lab was enveloped by an expanding, exploding fireball. The poster on the ceiling above the epicentre was the first to give up and burst into flames, shortly followed by most of the others, along with RU's eyebrows and all the hair on his arm.

The beauty of the whole event was that because Mr. S should NEVER have left them alone, he couldn't punish them without landing himself hugely in the shit...
( MatJ LOOK, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 11:43, 2 replies)

FEED THE WORLD
The terrible thing about being at school during the mid eighties were the famines in Ethiopia.

Being a kid from Coventry who had his fill of fish fingers and McCains oven chips, I didn’t have much concept of famine, but the endless, relentless playing of that bloody awful song by Band Aid made me want to vomit – Bob Geldof deserved a hearty, swift kick in the bollocks for that audible, trite, load of stinky clam-clappers abortion of a song, not a fucking knighthood. So, in my way, I suffered.

For humanities (a subject where you get all touchy-feely and talk about how to make the world a better place through the awsome power of talking shit and doing pie charts), we were divided up into groups for our end of year project. The swats joined forces, the kids from the same estates grouped together, and what was left over formed my group – my mate Terry, a lad named Darren who had head lice, and a girl named Sarah who had infamously had a peperami shoved up her clout behind the bikesheds by her boyfriend, who then sold the sticky fanny battered pork product to Greggy Smith for a cool five pounds.

We were absolutely shit at humanities. And the teacher, the lovely Miss Gainey, was away shooting out a sprog so we had a series of supply teachers who monitored the lessons for a whole half term while we were supposed to be putting together our presentation. The other groups were going great guns, developing irrigation systems for use in third world countries, inventing fuels out of used bits of goat shit – but we just sat round and drew pictures and tried to look busy.

Then, a week before the end of term, we discovered the presentations were going to be made infront of the school at assembly. There was even going to be some geezer from Coventry City Council there, something to do with Education. Apparently he was a bigwig and had to be impressed. My group instantly and similtaniously shat itself.

We had to come up with something – fast.

And, in the space of about thirty minutes, we came up with our project that we should’ve been working on for the whole term. It was Terry’s idea. I blame him. It was a shit idea. But we had fuck all else to fall back on (a load of exercise books filled with games of naughts and crosses and elaborate drawings of willies are only going to get you so far). So we decided to do a presentation from the point of view of those suffering from the famine. Step forward, do a little bit of: “Ohh, I’m so hungry and it hasn’t rained for bleedin’ ages!” Job done. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. When Miss Gainey returned from preggers leave she didn’t even rest her boobs on my shoulder while she corrected my work, like she’d always done previously (it was our special little thing), she was that fucking pissed off. It was as if we'd just received instant membership to the Klu-Klux-fucking-Clan, though we wern't racist, just incredibly fucking stupid.

Fast forward to the day of the presentation. The fella from the council, a black guy in his fifties in a nice pressed suit, is being shown round the school by the headmaster. Things are going well, no doubt the headmaster is banging on about inclusion and race relations – the usual inner-city twattery made all the more apparent now that he’s showing a black man round who earns more money than he does. (Remember, this was the eighties and things were still a bit shit re. race equality in the Midlands).

The assembly’s a few minutes away. The hall is filling up with bored kids trying their hardest to look even more bored. The humanities class are, in their individual groups, adding the last minute touches to their various presentations. And just at that moment, as the headmaster is showing this council official round the lobby, my group who’ve been getting ready walks past. We each say: “Hello, Sir,” meekly, and continue on our way. The head and his guest just stare. Then the head starts trying to explain something to the visitor. He eventually gives up.

I don’t think even our head, king of making bullshit appear like gold, could come up with a plausible reason why four white kids, still dressed in their school uniforms, had filed past with their faces blacked out to resemble members of the black and white minstrel show...

The black guy from the council fumed and didn’t look too pleased.

And we didn’t get to do the presentation. Instead we were sent out onto the playing fields with empty bin liners on litter duty, but only after we’d scrubbed our faces raw getting the boot polish off.
( SpankyHanky, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 11:33, Reply)

Glue
In primary school we were tasked with drawing fish, for a big pond display on the wall. Once we had finished and cut out our loving creations, the teacher told us to thinly spread glue over each one. She told us not to worry that the glue was white, as by the morning it would have dried clear, providing a lovely shiny surface to our carefully drawn scales.
In the morning, we rushed into the classroom to find a host of solid, white fish shapes. It seems she had provided us with a different glue to the stuff she had tested the concept with.
( Peregr1n @peregr1n, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 9:14, 1 reply)

Thanks MissKitty..
you reminded me of woodwork. You see, as a sprog, I was never really given a project. As a young boy of 13-14, I was obsessed with two projects of my own - (1) Smashing Mill windows (2) Shagging virgins. Luckily, there was an abundance of Mills in Manchester around that time.

Anyhoo.. one of those radical teachers of the day, probably been watching too much Grange Hill, thought it would be a great idea to give us young aspiring thieves, rapists and drug dealers a "project". He was a woodwork teacher, and he thought it great if we could all have free reign over the workshop and use whatever materials we wanted to make an animal of our choice.

That was easy for me. I got a piece of 2x2, sharpened each end to a point, stuck four bits of dowling on it. Et voila - a crap crocodile.

My mate however, went OTT. He got different woods, with differing colours and grains, glued them together to make a large "liquorice allsort" sort of woody block. He then carved the most wonderful upright cat out of the block.

Every week, he chisled it, he sanded it, and when fully shaped, he spent weeks putting thin layers of varnish on it, building up into a wonderful gloss.

The light woods and dark woods reacted, and this looked like a very professional piece of art.

He was probably only 2 coats of varnish away from completion, when we put the cat's head in a vice and dismembered it with a good twatting from a bloody great mallet.

It didn't pay to have talent.
( Piper Alpha is being a grumpy northerm bastard on:, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 9:14, 4 replies)

Lynchian Nightmare
My best ever project was an English Oral (oo-er)in which we had to give a 10 minute presentation on anything we wanted.

At the time, my inquisitive 12 year old mind had led me to raid my brothers horror movie video collection, and having made my way through all the F13, Freddy and Halloween movies, I was moving into the darker corners of the genre.

With two days to go until my presentation, I still had nothing. I don't know what possessed me to pick up Eraserhead that wet saturday afternoon, but it's bizarre visuals, and aural assualt, inspired me in a way that I can't express in words. It was so utterly bizarre, in the space of 10 minutes my mum, pretending not to be watching, went from 'what's the rubbish you're watching' to mouth-agape disbelief.

I had my subject. It gave me the advantage to talk about one of the most insane movies ever made, but also the ability to completely bullshit through the presentation. I could be certain none of my classmates would have seen it, and the film is so open to interpretation that I probnably explain it was a metaphor for the Disneyfication of the USA, and everyone would buy it. I could also fill half the time with random clips of randomness.

My one potential stumbling block was teaher. A slightly bohemian type, who had the hots for (particularly after she told my folks I would end up writing for the NME... this was when it was still good). There was the possibility that she knew the film, and would see through my ruse.

As it was, she hadn't (but knew of it) and I got top marks for choosing a 'difficult' subject, and dealing with it in a 'mature fashion'. And I made a few quid making copies of it for half the class.
RESULT!
( Joe Scaramanga with a G-double-O-D vibration, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 8:23, 1 reply)

Not so much a school project as the results of one
In yr8 (14 years old) woodwork we were making something inane- moneyboxes? Something like that. In any case my teacher had forgotten how extremely accident prone I was and let me loose on a band saw.

At first I was cutting straight lines and I was fine. Confidence building I go for my first curve. Hang on, thinks I, the saw isn't going as fast- I know, I'll push harder. There, that works.

I think anyone who has ever used a band saw can figure out what happens next.

You finish the corner and the saw goes zipping through the rest of the wood in 2 seconds flat and takes off the end of my finger. It was my ring finger on the left hand, right through the nail and you could see the end of the bone.

I'm pretty sure I was in quite severe shock at this point as instead of screaming loud enough to get the required attention I meekly put my finger in my mouth and went over to my teacher. The exchange went somehting like this-

"Mr Whetton?"

"Excuse me Misskitty, you can see I'm with another student. You know how to wait your turn, now do it."

So I stand there going slowly paler and paler with my finger stuck in my mouth waiting for him to finish explaining some technical peice of crap or other to another student. Then he turns to me.

"Ok Misskitty, what can I help you with?"

At this point I merely took my finger out of my mouth to show him. I really didn't understand the reaction I got until much later when he described to me what he saw before him.

A 14 year old female student with whiter than white skin pulls her finger out of her mouth, blood starts running out of her mouth, as her finger sprays blood at his face. Blood is also running down her hand so fast that within a few seconds it's covered her hand and hit the floor where it is making a quite significant puddle.

Though he said the worst bit was when I tried to start talking, blood was still filling my mouth so when I tried to explain I'd hurt myself it came bubbling up through my lips over my chin and soaking my shirt.

I got the rest of the day off to lay in the sickbay.

Not very well told, but true story. My finger grew back fine but the teacher never looked at me the same. Never ignored me when I walked up to him again either.
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 4:36, 10 replies)

I loved art
weren't that good, but weren't that bad neither.
Spent a term making diaramas of alien abductions and cityscapes out of clay, that kept dissapearing.
Teacher didn't believe me that they had just vanished, so she failed me.
Found out a couple of years later that my friends would gather together in the kiln room and take turns smashing them.

Bastards.
( Captain Tripps is your taxloss lover from Liverpool, Wed 19 Aug 2009, 2:21, Reply)