What is a 'technology college' anyway?
My secondary school was unique as far as I can tell, in that it's the only one I know of that has its own farm. I don't mean a seperate site somewhere - half the school grounds were set aside for this. "Agricultural Science" was one of the GCSE options, and every year some kids would come around selling various pork products made from the school pigs. One lad from the year above mine spray-painted one of the sheep when he left...

Anyway, teachers. We had our fair share of both great and crap teachers (I still feel sorry about the RE teacher that left before her first week was up after we got her to break down and swear at the whole class) but by far the oddest was my physics teacher, Doctor Carson.

Doctor Carson was (and, I suspect, still is) a loveably eccentric teacher. He used to stick pencils up his nose, in an attempt to dissuade kids from chewing the ends of them when they had to borrow a pencil. He also spent many a lesson wandering around the classroom with his foot stuck in the metal dustbin (step, clank, step, clank). One particular lesson half the class was missing (damn skiving History students) and Doctor Carson, as head of science, had just recieved a new load of educational gadgets that he'd ordered. We spent the lesson electrocuting the poor lass we attached to the new Van de Graaf generator by touching her with our feet, and scaring some first years with a gooseneck-mounted camera.

Another particularly memorable lesson, we were told to split the classroom in half using tables, and pile the chairs up round the edges. Then we were given a hundred or so pieces of paper, told to screw them all up into balls, and put all the balls on the floor on one side of the room. Then - without explaining why - Doctor Carson split us into two groups (one on either side) and had us throw paper balls at each other for ten minutes. Once we'd set the classroom back to rights, he explained how this was a demonstration of diffusion. (The pictures he took of that lesson got published in a magazine somewhere, apparently.)

One day, Doctor Carson told us told us that our next lesson would be watched, as he was being assessed for 'super teacher' status (I have no idea what this was, but I'd guess another government initiative). The rest of the lesson was spent regaling us with stories that we could never tell the assessor - "particularly that one about the boy that ate a stick of chalk instead of taking a detention". Sure enough, the next lesson, there was a twenty-something official-looking woman sat at the back, so we spent a cheerful hour telling her everything we could think of.

Inevitably, Doctor Carson was given this 'super teacher' award. We knew this when he arrived for our lesson wearing red underpants outside his trousers. Same lesson, he took the effort to sneak out of the storeroom and round the classroom in a (successful) effort to surprise the head of year - who had just popped into the class to ask him about something - by jumping on her from behind.

Needless to say, we all got good grades for physics.
( Legionary - My god, Brian, there's a message in my alphabets, Thu 10 Nov 2005, 12:54, Reply)