Classroom mischief?

[Dayvo]

Happy days !

Good list, Alan!


Conkers, and deliberately hitting your mates hand.

Detention and lines.

Getting the 'whack': slipper and cane.

Getting 'lost' in London on school trips.

Buying beer in les supermarches on the class day trip to Calais

Winning the school dinner eating championship.

Winning the school dry cream cracker eating contest.

Successfully failing my A-levels in spectacular style.

Happy days, indeed!

 

[Graham O]

"Pass the Chair" in fifth year history with Mr Lawton. He liked writing on the board, so when his back was turned, we would hold a chair above our heads and pass it from one boy to the next. Whoever was holding the chair when Mr Lawton turned around, was out! Great fun!

 

[Fnaar]

And what was that "game" where you stood opposite your opponent, fingertip to fingertip, and tried to smack the living daylights out of their hand ?

Used to go home with hands which were almost red raw !

Slapsies, we called it.

 

[darkstar]

And what was that "game" where you stood opposite your opponent, fingertip to fingertip, and tried to smack the living daylights out of their hand ?

Used to go home with hands which were almost red raw !

Yeh slaps! Could NEVER give in though, no matter what state your hands are in
Same with knuckles, and the similar game where you put your knuckles fist down on a table, your opponent slides a coin into your knuckles as hard as they possibly can, used to come out with cuts all over the place!

 

[661-Pete]

We had that too - equally hazardous but good fun too! I used to practice at home, using the leaves of a Swiss Cheese plant as 'targets' . Not sure if my Mum ever got to the bottom of the mysterious 'holes'....

Until the 'nitrogen tri-iodide' craze caught on. Now that really was fun! And as far as I recall, no-one got hurt, though it would, once again, have been a different story if anyone had got some in the eye. The teachers however went spare over it: eventually we had a blanket ban on all chemistry lessons involving crystalline iodine. Shame really.

 

[dellzeqq]

[quote name='swee'pea99']Just read Alan Frame on another thread asking if anyone remembers blow football, and it took me right back to junior school and the battles we boys used to have behind the teachers' backs, using little wads of chewed up paper spat peashooter-stylie thru' bic biro tubes with the refills removed.

This was when we weren't folding up bits of paper into tight little slugs, bent into a V and fired using rubber bands. Man, they could sting! You could get in real trouble if caught - quite rightly, on the grounds that 'you could take someone's eye out'. And you probably could, tho' no-one ever did. But the satisfaction of getting someone with such a cracker on the bum that they actually yelped!...

In the winter, we liked putting wax crayons on the radiators and watching them melt....

With hindsight I'm amazed any of our teachers remained even semi-sane.[/QUOTE]I cannot tell you what pleasure your post has given me.

The ceilings of some of our classrooms looked as if they'd been Artexed. Happy days!

 

[661-Pete]

The most hilarious stunt ever at my school - though I wasnt involved in it: some boys broke in at night, rifled every classroom, library, bookshelf, locker in the school, collected up all the books and dumped them into one of the classrooms. Filled the entire room waist deep in books. I don't remember how many days' lessons were lost whilst the books were re-sorted.

I don't know if the culprits were ever apprehended, but the Headmaster was ranting 'expulsions' over this...

 

[Aperitif]

Terrible thread this!
Not so much mischief but, as milk monitor in primary / junior school I used to sort out the milk bottles in the crate and 'memorise' the positions of 'Gold Seal' bottles - moulded in italics rather than suffer the blunt capital letters of 'Express Dairy' - first signs of madness at an early age...
Grammar School arrived with caps and their subsequent removal by Weaver of 5D, who possibly took them back to Leonard Lyle in Harrow and got coins for his trouble. Silver paper darts on the ceiling involved the use of fine quality silver paper from cigarette packets, with the thin paper accompaniment chewed - it tasted disgusting. Sekiden guns and their golden balls made a swift exit after their introduction to the UK - real 'stingers' they were.
Two of the boys - clever sorts - got chucked out for making explosives from the school chemmy lab chemicals...they concocted this stuff underneath the school magazine, crammed full of .303 ammo and .22. Another couple had the keys to every room in the school and were able to alter their exam results amongst other things. One spat in the Headmaster's sherry. There was a mini on the roof, compo biscuit fights, brag in the quartermaster's stores - all-day every day - for quite large amounts of money, outright thieving and academe all mixed together. The teachers were a fine selection too - let's not forget that. In fact, a lot of it is well documented on the School website. I just 'popped in' there and picked off the first snippet, written by someone I used to play cricket with:

Date: 27 Oct 2009
Time: 16:04:56
Comments

Re-the Ted or Toad Simmons debate. I remember this likeable and amusing character. It is true that he thumped an unfortunate prefect called Tony Turmer (also a pleasant guy.) No doubt, Turmer was attempting to enforce some nonsensical Simpsonian rule. Poor Toad was made to walk the walk through the Assembly, to exclusion. I felt rotten for him. I heard later that Major Skillen ordered horse manure for his roses, from a local farm. Toad was the truck driver or driver's mate and apparently dumped the whole load on his old enemy's doorstep. The Turmer incident is not be confused with the later Lockyer issue (see Pete Fowler's recent comment.) Lockyer did indeed dig a small hole in the cricket outfield. For this he, too, suffered public Assembly humiliation but may only have been suspended. Simpson's vindictiveness was extraordinary. He never seemed to cotton on that it was his odd views and behaviour that inspired adolescent rebellion. Square's second highest insult was to tell a miscreant (in his eyes) that he was a 'hobbledehoy.' (Possibly a Burns reference to the Scottish McYobbo of yesteryear?) The foremost insult was to rant from the stage about 'Hungarian renegades from Soho smelling of spagetti!' The man was wonderfully mad or sad, depending on one's point of view. Personally, I always found his Simpsonisms mightily amusing and he was a joy to imitate in the playground. The trick was to pull the mouth tightly wide in the shape of the slit in a GPO letter box and attempt an educated Edinburgh accent imposed upon a humbler Lowland origin. This was very difficult to do without corpsing and general collapse of an appreciative audience. Those ex-HCS or Harrow High School pupils not present during the Simpson era do not know what they missed. There was enough ludicrous behaviour around to make a popular TV School-com. Instead, in the 50s, we had to make do with 'Whacko!' starring comedian Jimmy Edwards.

You have got a lot to answer for swee'pea - making me waste time...I can do that very well unaided!

 

[vernon]

Until the 'nitrogen tri-iodide' craze caught on. Now that really was fun! And as far as I recall, no-one got hurt, though it would, once again, have been a different story if anyone had got some in the eye. The teachers however went spare over it: eventually we had a blanket ban on all chemistry lessons involving crystalline iodine. Shame really.

That wasn't confined to pupils.

As a teacher I made a quantity of the stuff that was perhaps too big to be totally safe. I left a marble sized lump of the stuff on a paper towel on a trip to drain and partially dry over lunchtime with a view of cutting smaller lumps off and having some fun with pupils after lunch.

Unbeknown to me, the path of the sun's rays passed over and dwelled on the draining triodide and when I brought my pet science geeks in to see my accomplishment, the whole shooting match exploded when I lifted the paper towel off the tripod with such volume that I was partially stunned looking at shreds of paper through a purple cloud of iodine vapour in my hand and kids lying on the floor shaking with hysterical laughter.

Concerned colleagues came rushing into the lab fearing the worst and were relieved to find everyone intact. The incident never reached the head's office and my incendiary/explosice career continued unabated but on a generally smaller scale until the stoichometric mix of hydrogen and oxygen incident but that's another story.....

Making ammonium triodide is now a dismissable offence in many local education authorities....

Is it any surprise that kids are switched off by science now that the bangs flashes and smells have been outlawed?

 

[dan_bo]

An aquaintance of mine stole a JCB that was left on the rugger field and drove it into the (prefab) CDT block.......BIG hole.

 

[Zanelad]

Putting an entire packet of Polos in your mouth and seeing who could eat them first.

Seeing who could hold their hand on the radiator (in winter, or course) for the longest.

 

[dan_bo]

Sitting behind the deaf kid in english whistling.

 

[JiMBR]

The old classic was always good for a laugh....

Pulling someones chair from beneath them as they went to sit down.

 

[meenaghman]

On the subject of "blow pipes".. found that rice was an altogether better ammo then having to chew paper.. couple of grains at a time and really stung.. it also made one hell of a rattle off the venetian blinds.
I remember some of the crazy things lads used to do in metalwork.. leaving chuck keys in the lathe, starting it and seeing who could get it stuck in the ceiling ? lads bouncing hammers along the floor and having to dodge them. The smell of burning because hot forged metal had been dropped into someones school bag.

 

[Dayvo]

Taking the bell out of the blind kid's football!

We were only 7 at the time!

Throwing our crayons on the floor and looking up miss' dress

We were only 16, then!.