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Strange things your teacher did? (MOD NOTE in op)

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    #32
    landofthetree
    Registered Users Posts: 2,303 ✭✭✭landofthetree


    A couple of incidents in a midlands secondary school in the 1980s. I was in primary school at the time but remember hearing about them.

    First one was a whole class failed ordinary Irish on purpose as a protest against the teacher.

    The second was a class covered the wrong history syllabus for Leaving Cert. They didnt discover it till March and the mocks.


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    #33
    banie01
    Registered Users Posts: 16,529 ✭✭✭✭banie01


    A technical drawing teacher who was of a very nervous disposition, and often threatened to hand over our names to the Russians.
    Even though the cold war was over a few years at this stage, was often convinced that planes flying over were actually Russian Paratroopers on their way to take over Shannon Airport.
    Cue years of the "Russians are coming" chants from students with associated meltdowns on his part.

    An English teacher who was fond of flowing language and very erudite. He was also a quite large framed man and a bully ;)
    He pulled me once for talking in class (For once it actually wasn't me) and flew into a rage.
    I repeatedly told him I wasn't, he hauled me into the corridor and asked was I calling him a liar?
    Me being a smart arsed 1st year with a Grandad who was fond of word play and excuses....
    Said, "No, not a liar but you are guilty of a terminalogical inexactitude!"
    Caught a fair clip on the ear for that before being marched to the office.

    Also had an English and History teacher who reffed for the FAI.
    I was playing at a tournament in Galway (Not school related) and said teacher was there as a ref.
    Over the course of that weekend he was arrested for quite a violent sexual assault of a woman up there.
    When I returned to school, I told my class what happened.
    Had English shortly afterwards and he erupted at me in class, pulled me out of my desk and assaulted me.
    Well tried to, because I lamped him, left him on the floor and walked myself down to the office to tell the Principal what I'd one and why!

    Still though, had a great time in school and would definitely recommend the said school to others and have even sent my own son there :D


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    #34
    Hangdogroad
    Registered Users Posts: 4,935 ✭✭✭Hangdogroad


    Deleted User wrote: »
    Ah yes, a long list of posts where the things didn’t happen.

    You clearly wernt around in the 80s.


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    #35
    thecretinhop
    Registered Users Posts: 6,502 ✭✭✭thecretinhop


    Ah christ where to start.

    The greatest psychopath i will ever meet my geography teacher. This lad was not off the wall type he was genuinely scary, there was an air or presence which was not to be messed with.

    He had a small room at the back of his class, if you were misbehaving he locked you in there for the day. One poor lad was terrified of mice. Every ten minutes or so he would get the class 40 plus to make mouse noises all at once the lad was begging to get out.

    One kid stole a box of chalk, he opened the window 5 stories up and held him out until he gave it back. I think the kid needed therapy after it.

    The day the inspector came he said "Yere the big boys now ye teach" walked out went to pub came back the week after.

    Bizarrely I got a mini mars bar for naming all the moons of the planets in the solar system. Rlol he was saying how much class Mr cretin had not like Johnny over there who be on drugs by his 21st birthday (he was right)

    I have truckloads more stories fk me thinking back my school was insane...


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    #36
    Mullaghteelin
    Registered Users Posts: 624 ✭✭✭Mullaghteelin


    mloc123 wrote: »

    The last two were the best fun. We had a maths teacher, real old school strict guy. But we realised after a few months that he had a couple of topics of conversation that he loved... so all you had to do was get him going on one of them and he'd spend the whole class telling us some random story. Somehow I scraped through honors maths..


    "Tell us the story about the Yorkie Bar Sir!"
    ...By Junior Cert we were well aware how much our business studies teacher enjoyed telling us a long winded story about the origin of Yorkie Bars. No homework would be corrected or given on such days.


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    #37
    NeuralNetwork
    Closed Accounts Posts: 727 ✭✭✭NeuralNetwork


    Eggs For Dinner wrote: »
    There's a definite pre and post 2000 difference in school experiences here and rightly so. For many, myself included, school was an horrific time, with little of the light relief described here. I'm genuinely happy for those who had a good time at school.

    I think you actually get several eras.

    1. Pre early 1980s when corporal punishment was still permitted - grim times. More like prison camps in many cases.

    2. 1980s when it was gone but still had rogue teachers who were violent and plenty of psychological nastiness.

    3. 1990s progress but still very disciplinarian approaches - lots of shouting, roaring and humiliation of people and still a not a progressive system - tail end of the heavy religious influence was ending, but still there.

    4. Post 2000s modern era - somewhat more likely to have seen the last of the old guard retired, but still fairly backwards by most comparable systems in EU, with things like floor length skirts being required by some schools and on going heavy religious ethos in many that isn’t reflected outside school anymore.

    We’ve a fairly weird school system. We just tend not to realise it, as we’ve all been though it and think it’s normal.

    I mean just as a few examples: in the 1990s I had a teacher who thought it was totally acceptable to behave like a rough 1970s stand up and make jokes about people’s mothers, implying they’re were hookers!

    I had a lot of hearing issues (now resolved) and they used to just spend their time mocking me about not speaking loudly enough, or throwing things at me when I didn’t hear them.

    I’d a guy who used to blow a referees whistle in my face if I didn’t hear him. To the point I just refused to go to his classes at one stage.

    We’d an Irish teacher in the late 1990s who used to slap people across the back of the head and a maths teacher who threw a book though a glass window pane in a fit of rage over someone not having homework done.

    Hated school and I’d agree it did me a lot of psychological damage for years. You’d think it was designed to knock any self confidence out of you.


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    #38
    Gregor Samsa
    Registered Users Posts: 8,935 ✭✭✭Gregor Samsa


    One teacher in primary school in the class beside me had a heart attack in front of the class. He was in the middle of giving out to them (he was known for his temper and roaring), grabbed onto one of the desks in the front row with both hands, then suddenly keeled over, still gripping the desk. The two lads in the desk were thrown to the ground. One of the kids came running into our class for help. Luckily, he survived.

    Another teacher in the same school taught us for months with chronic laryngitis - basically he didn't speak for most of the year. He'd write everything on the blackboard - lessons, questions, comments, punishments and had a referee's whistle that he'd blow and then point at you to get your attention. It was bizarre when you think about it, but at the time we just adjusted to it.

    Yet another teacher (English) in Secondary school refused to teach us 3 months before the Inter Cert. Every day, we'd have to sit in his class with our hands flat on the desk, feet flat on the floor, looking straight forward. He thought someone had thrown something at him one day in the class, and refused to teach us until someone owned up to it. Thing is, no-one threw anything at him. After a few days of this, the parents got involved, and there was a meeting with him, the Principal and some parents. At it, he flat out refused to teach us until the person owned up. Parents made threats of legal action, but he kept his protest up for a month, until he was suddenly replace with a sub and nothing more was said about him or it. My mother bumped into him years later, and he apologised, saying he'd had a mental breakdown and got out of teaching.


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    #39
    landofthetree
    Registered Users Posts: 2,303 ✭✭✭landofthetree


    Corporal punishment wasn't illegal in the 80s.

    In the law of the Republic of Ireland, corporal punishment was prohibited in 1982 by an administrative decision of John Boland, the Minister for Education, which applied to national schools (most primary schools) and to secondary schools receiving public funding (practically all of them).[113] Teachers were not liable to criminal prosecution until 1997, when the rule of law allowing "physical chastisement" was explicitly abolished.[114]


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    #40
    seamus
    Registered Users Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭seamus


    Gregor Samsa wrote: »
    Getting away from the abuse to just simple bad teaching for a minute: We’d a Physics/Chemistry teacher for the Leaving who wouldn’t let us do any experiments. But he made us copy them from the text book into a lab book as if we had done them, in case an inspector ever checked. He was very blatant about this being entirely for his benefit, at the expense of ours.
    Funny, that brings me back. Our leaving cert physics teacher did the same. Very, very rarely, we would do an experiment. Almost every time he would say that there wasn't enough time for everyone to do it, or that we didn't have enough equipment for everyone to do it, so he'd just do it at the top of the room while everyone watched.
    Except we had a double class every week specifically to give enough time for practicals, and we could see the storeroom, there was a tonne of stuff in there. I think he was just lazy and would rather do it himself than have to watch the whole class doing it.

    How I didn't fail that subject I don't know, I don't remember anything I learned.


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    #41
    NeuralNetwork
    Closed Accounts Posts: 727 ✭✭✭NeuralNetwork


    landofthetree wrote: »
    Corporal punishment wasn't illegal in the 80s.

    In the law of the Republic of Ireland, corporal punishment was prohibited in 1982 by an administrative decision of John Boland, the Minister for Education, which applied to national schools (most primary schools) and to secondary schools receiving public funding (practically all of them).[113] Teachers were not liable to criminal prosecution until 1997, when the rule of law allowing "physical chastisement" was explicitly abolished.[114]

    The issues that stand out to me from that era were all about grown adults trying to be “cool” by engaging with and encouraging the bullying behaviour of teenagers. We had a few teachers who seemed to want to be “one of the lads” and would often do that by participating in mocking / bullying someone for the entertainment of the group.

    So typically it encouraged a bullying atmosphere and they led by being the bully-in-chief and thinking they were stand up comedians.

    In my experience of it, it was usually the inadequate and least professional teachers who behaved like that. They were often very poor at actually teaching anything but spent all their time engaging totally counterproductively with a bunch of teenagers.


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    #42
    Gregor Samsa
    Registered Users Posts: 8,935 ✭✭✭Gregor Samsa


    In my school anyway, they stopped "officially" using corporal punishment in 82, in that the teachers stopped carrying and using the leather to beat kids with as a punishment. I remember in second class, our teacher lamenting the fact that he wasn't supposed to hit us any more, and asking how was he supposed to teach kids if he couldn't belt them every now and then.

    Teachers would still hit kids with their hands, and being belted across the knuckles or the head with the edge of a ruler was common. One had a special move where he's grab you by the jumper and repeatedly punch you in the chest while he held your jumper, pulling and pushing you into his fist, so you couldn't get away or fall down. This is 9 year old kids we're talking about.

    To those reading this thinking "more made up stories that didn't happen", school then was an unimaginably different place to what it is now. I mean, the schools I went to were actually considered good ones, yet I can list at least 6 teachers who should have been jailed for assault on primary school children.

    I've three kids in primary school now. It's unimaginable that they'd go though even a fraction of the stuff that went on - without an eyebrow being raised - in the 70, 80s and even somewhat in the 90s (although my secondary school was nowhere near as violent as primary school). Completely different world.


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    #43
    banie01
    Registered Users Posts: 16,529 ✭✭✭✭banie01


    A collection of tales from my secondary school ;)
    https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056121774


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    #44
    B.A._Baracus
    Registered Users Posts: 11,179 ✭✭✭✭B.A._Baracus


    This one is more arrogant (then a little strange)

    When I was 13 in secondary school my P.E. teacher was just so arrogant. He was only 23 and looking back now he hadn't matured. Always chewing gum and all bravado out of him. You know the sort.
    Brought me in to an empty class and locked the door one day. Put it up to me over me calling him by his first name. In my face full on putting it up to me. I was an extremely shy kid so he was picking his battle. Silly thing to do as if it were someone else they could have said he touched them up even if a fight did break out. I was shy so I took it and he knew it.

    Later on he was subbing for one of the other teachers so he grabs the TV trolley and shows his "recorded video" of his trip to the states. His brother was a paramedic and allowed him to ride along recording things (don't ask me how he got away with that) but then goes on to say how later in the video a guy had a motorcycle accident and lost his leg. There was enjoyment in his voice like "I got it all on camera!" - he was gonna show a bunch of 13 year olds it but the class ended.

    What a di*khead looking back.


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    #45
    mloc123
    Registered Users Posts: 9,454 ✭✭✭mloc123


    landofthetree wrote: »
    The second was a class covered the wrong history syllabus for Leaving Cert. They didnt discover it till March and the mocks.

    Mullingar?


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    #46
    hots
    Registered Users Posts: 5,200 ✭✭✭hots


    cj maxx wrote: »
    Had a science teacher who used to make his own poitin in the lab. He'd be completely bucked ar 4 o'clock !

    Had the same here, junior cert year when he let a few of the hardy bucks of the class try it and one threw up out the window. Good times.


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    #47
    fryup
    Registered Users Posts: 18,069 ✭✭✭✭fryup


    B.A._Baracus wrote: »
    What a di*khead looking back.

    weirdo more like....did he try it on with other pupils?


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    #48
    landofthetree
    Registered Users Posts: 2,303 ✭✭✭landofthetree


    mloc123 wrote: »
    Mullingar?

    Yes. :D

    It actually happened again couple of years back in a south Dublin school.



    https://www.thejournal.ie/leaving-cert-english-error-4232595-Sep2018/


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    #49
    Seve OB
    Registered Users Posts: 15,846 ✭✭✭✭Seve OB


    we had a teacher back in the 80's who would kick a GAA ball off the back wall of the classroom.

    He then shook it up a notch when he started to puck a sliotar over our heads against the wall :eek:


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    #50
    SeaFields
    Registered Users Posts: 6,551 ✭✭✭SeaFields


    Had a French teacher who I am convinced to this day did not have a word of French. He lived by the school and for nearly every french class he would have to go home as "I forgot my specs". He also wanted the class to start at the basic level french and work our way up. This was in fifth year after coming from honours french in the junior cycle. When he did decide to teach us, he had his head in a french dictionary looking up words..... Just bizarre how he kept that uo for years.


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    #51
    GirlatdRockShow
    Registered Users Posts: 218 ✭✭GirlatdRockShow


    landofthetree wrote: »
    A couple of incidents in a midlands secondary school in the 1980s. I was in primary school at the time but remember hearing about them.

    First one was a whole class failed ordinary Irish on purpose as a protest against the teacher.

    The second was a class covered the wrong history syllabus for Leaving Cert. They didnt discover it till March and the mocks.


    The history thing happened in our school too in the 00s. Must be a Midlands thing!


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    #52
    L1011
    Moderators, Business & Finance Moderators, Motoring & Transport Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 67,850 Mod ✭✭✭✭L1011


    Irish teacher (with very famous relations) hit a pupil in a rage - this being the early 2000s, not the 70s - and did everything he could to try prevent it getting up to the principal that he'd done so. It did, but the lad he hit didn't want to make anything of it. Teacher left after that year.

    Two of the older teachers - woodwork and metalwork - used to use the rare times they both had double classes at the same time to leave the class at it, and go to the metalwork store and smoke for the bulk of the class. Some suspicion it wasn't just tobacco.


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    #53
    B.A._Baracus
    Registered Users Posts: 11,179 ✭✭✭✭B.A._Baracus


    fryup wrote: »
    weirdo more like....did he try it on with other pupils?

    I never heard anything but I did leave that school about a year later. But my gut tells me he did.
    I actually googled his name there for a laugh and it appears he is now a trainer for some Wexford Camogie team.


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    #54
    mloc123
    Registered Users Posts: 9,454 ✭✭✭mloc123


    landofthetree wrote: »
    Yes. :D

    I think it was the same teacher (Paddy) that thought me history for junior cert.... funny man, terrible teacher :pac:


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    #55
    The Mighty Quinn
    Registered Users Posts: 1,228 ✭✭✭The Mighty Quinn


    freshpopcorn wrote: »
    Another teacher used talk about how important it was for lads to shower down after sport and not just use deodorant. He used talk about how important it was to use a bar of soap and really lather it up.

    I don't view this as weird behaviour. Honestly. Okay, it's not curricular stuff but it's important all the same!

    There were lads in my class and I swear you'd smell them before they entered the room. They obviously hadn't the best home lives. Some people just aren't taught how to wash themselves and to keep themselves right.

    I see no harm in a teacher imparting this bit of advice. I'd an English teacher, former priest, and he was great at talking to the students in a fatherly sort of way, he was a great teacher, but also showed an interest and offered some good life advice without being over the top. He spoke to the students with respect and saw us as young men to converse with, not children to be barked at like many treated us.


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    #56
    NeuralNetwork
    Closed Accounts Posts: 727 ✭✭✭NeuralNetwork


    I’d just wonder what did management of those schools actually do to justify their salary?

    There seemed to be absolute mayhem going on in our school, between bullying teachers, underperformance, people being way off syllabus and all sorts of stuff and the principal was this aloof character who was bit like “Mr Grace” from Are You Being Served. He’d wander in, wave and say “You're all doing very well!” and go back to whatever it was he did - which mostly seemed to involve writing painfully long speeches to be delivered at various events and strutting around the place in a suit and tie looking principally.

    We had a vice principal and year heads and I don’t seem to remember them having any involvement in anything to do with anything useful. The year heads just spent their time issuing slips if you were late and those never really seemed to actually even be tracked. I amassed loads of them without any follow up from anyone.


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    #57
    EmmetSpiceland
    Registered Users Posts: 10,561 ✭✭✭✭EmmetSpiceland


    Gregor Samsa wrote: »
    To those reading this thinking "more made up stories that didn't happen", school then was an unimaginably different place to what it is now.

    I don’t think anyone is doubting your stories, G.

    It’s only the heroic fantasy tales of lads “chinning” the teacher or getting into some dramatic fisticuffs that end with the teacher on his back with some dweeby nerd standing over him, showing him who’s boss, before he’s cheered out of the school gates and getting the support of the staff that no one really swallows.

    “It is not blood that makes you Irish but a willingness to be part of the Irish nation” - Thomas Davis



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    #58
    fryup
    Registered Users Posts: 18,069 ✭✭✭✭fryup


    B.A._Baracus wrote: »
    I never heard anything but I did leave that school about a year later. But my gut tells me he did.
    I actually googled his name there for a laugh and it appears he is now a trainer for some Wexford Camogie team.

    wouldn't ya know it...probably tries on his BS bravado with them as well


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    #59
    zuutroy
    Registered Users Posts: 6,854 ✭✭✭zuutroy


    EmmetSpiceland wrote: »
    I don’t think anyone is doubting your stories, G.

    It’s only the heroic fantasy tales of lads “chinning” the teacher or getting into some dramatic fisticuffs that end with the teacher on his back with some dweeby nerd standing over him, showing him who’s boss, before he’s cheered out of the school gates and getting the support of the staff that no one really swallows.

    This actually happened in 6th class in my school, on a school tour! No cheering, but he caught this absolute nut job alcoholic ex Christian brother with a solid shot. Kid was freakishly big at the time and was a body builder in later life.


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    #60
    begbysback
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,910 ✭✭✭begbysback


    One teacher used to name his stick JonJoe, and we used to steal it and throw it on top of the roof, then he’d get another JonJoe II, by the time I left there was a lot of wood up on the roof and I believe we were on JonJoe XV


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    #61
    NeuralNetwork
    Closed Accounts Posts: 727 ✭✭✭NeuralNetwork


    The other one I remember was a teacher asked me to collect and drop up a bundle of copybooks to the staff room.

    I wandered up, all perfectly friendly and knocked on door. Some weird middle aged woman opened it & I said “Mrs X asked me to drop these up.” She yelled “get out!!!!!” and slammed the door in my face, literally in my face as I had stepped towards it.

    The paperwork went flying all over the floor. I knocked again - got similar abuse. So I just opened the door and dumped them on the floor and walked off.

    I was then given detention for 3 days for no particular reason.

    Bunch of utter ignoramuses!


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