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

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.

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.