Weird things from your Schooling

[CaptainNuevo]

I was listening to Hearts on Fire earlier today and remembered this time in Middle School that my history teacher (or maybe just a substitute one) decided to show us the Rocky 4 training montage to help teach us about the US/USSR relations and competition during the Cold War era.



This montage if you've never seen it.



The kick is we weren't even covering the USSR, I think we were talking about the Civil War (which in Texas was also pretty questionable for other reasons).

 

[Shooter]

We had line dancing as part of our gym class every month

 

[Scarlet Spider]

My school taught us that Democrats are the super heroes and Republicans are the bad guys back in middle school. Blue was good, red was bad. Despite red being my favorite color, shit was weird thinking back.

 

[Deleted member 8752]

We watched the Mask of Zorro in Spanish class. I am not sure what we were supposed to learn from that. They spoke English in the movie.

 

[Deleted member 16516]

Been hit with a cane. It smarts.

 

[Griselbrand]

Our science teacher began one of our classes by reading a forwarded email about how abortion would have killed people who went on to become scientific geniuses had someone not stepped in to save them. It essentially presented a scenario where the mother might be in danger and the baby had a slim chance of survival and if you chose to abort the child to save the mother then BAM you just killed baby Isaac Newton.

Except for that she was a pretty good teacher.

This was freshman year of high school.

 

[HStallion]

Learn cursive they said. You'll use it everyday they said. Everyone uses it all the time they said. It's all but required they said. I only use script to sign my name and to make my Christmas cards look nicer.

 

[Curler]

We learned how to say the alphabet backwards in 5th grade. Somehow it's muscle memory that I've never forgotten and I can say it really, really fast too :/ Quite a useless talent :p

 

[El Bombastico]

We learned how to say the alphabet backwards in 5th grade. Somehow it's muscle memory that I've never forgotten and I can say it really, really fast too :/ Quite a useless talent :p

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I mean, if you're ever drunk and pulled over by cops it could be very useful.

 

[Deleted member 27938]

My english teachers taught me 2 spaces between typed sentences. In college I was part of a 5 person group project and 2 of us typed the report with 2 spaces where the other 3 did one. Was a shocker for all of us.
My English teachers again, we never covered who vs. whom. I still don't know when to use whom, thanks a lot assholes

 

[Goldenroad]

I could probably think of a million.

Little bit of a content warning up front (mild abuse, and language).

I was what, 10 years old, in 6th grade? I remember our teacher had a chalkboard up in the classroom on day one (this was around 1992) that said in big letters "THE I AM RETARDED CLUB", and if you didn't do your homework, or you were screwing around in class, or you got in trouble at recess or whatever, your name would go up on the "I AM RETARDED CLUB" board and you wouldn't be allowed to participate in Gym class, recess, field trips, etc. You got to do homework while everyone else was doing those more fun things. Well, #1, there was enough outcry from our class, that he had to change the name to the "I MADE IT CLUB", which didn't change anything else about it.

I remember one day sitting in the hallway doing homework while gym class was going on (I was in the I MADE IT CLUB), and my friends and I snuck into the gym and hid behind the big curtain that divides the gym, and my teacher spotted us and came up and with all his might started kicking at the curtain til we came running out. Anyway, that teacher was reprimanded and ended up getting laid off at the end of the school year after being at that school for almost 20 years. I think one of the kids parents took some legal action when he started kicking. My parents were more of mind of "you probably deserved it". Anyway, times change. He didn't. He would throw chalk brushes at students that weren't paying attention, and in general, didn't have a good disposition for teaching.


My other brief story was in Christian Ethics class in 12th grade (yeah, I went to Catholic school), the teacher made us watch the movie Beaches with Bette Midler, over the course of three classes. It had nothing to do with the class. Dude was just lazy and wanted a movie that he could fall asleep to, which he did, so none of the class paid any attention to the movie. On the second day of Beaches, the guy next to me started chopping up lines of speed on his desk, and we took rails of speed of his desk in Christian Ethics class while the movie Beaches played and the teacher slept. That's the only thing I remember about god damn Beaches.

 

[Indy in the Fridge]

American History X shown in a bullshit senior psychology class taught by our gym coach.

 

[Curler]

I mean, if you're ever drunk and pulled over by cops it could be very useful.

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I'm terrible with balancing even when sober :/

 

[Carn]

On the second day of Beaches, the guy next to me started chopping up lines of speed on his desk, and we took rails of speed of his desk in Christian Ethics class while the movie Beaches played and the teacher slept.

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this is the most entertaining sentence I've read in a while ;D

 

[Tortahegesztő]

1. "yOu wON't hAVe A caLcULaToR iN yoUr PocKEt aLl thE TImE!"
2. Mandatory folkdance. Oof. It didn't help that the teacher preferred blatantly sexual themed folksongs.
3. There's been a hungarian grammar rule, that 2nd grade (7-8 years old) kids thankfully don't have to learn anymore: "At the end of words the letters ú and ű are always in ther long form (as oppose to u and ü), except:... " And you had to list like 10-20 exception because this is a stupid, made up rule to rot your brain.
Bonus one: I learned piano in elementary school. If you were learning an instrument school choir was mandatory and it had classes during the long after lunch recess. On top of it every music and choir teacher liked to yell at you every chance they got. And they acted all suprised when I gave up on playing my instrument, lol.

 

[ronpontelle]

At my high school, one of the punishments for misbehaviour was being made to prise old chewing gum from under the tables with an old wooden ruler.

There was also 'Jar Club' which was a form of detention where you had to sit on a chair outside the year head's office doing nothing. 'Jar' is slang for boring where I'm from in the UK: "detention was a right jar, we just sat there in silence for half an hour"

 

[BennyWhatever]

We watched Amistad in 5th grade history class. Fantastic movie but uh, kinda gruesome for 5th graders. Some parent complained and we had to get slips signed by our parents after that to watch any movie in any class.
Still glad we watched it though. That was an impressionable movie. That teacher was very bold and I learned more from him than any other history teacher up until high school.

 

[Wraith]

In grade school, having to eat a tiny piece of fried squid, I think. Something I was dead set against doing at the time, but everyone in the class had to. As I remember it, the teacher had been on a trip somewhere and wanted everyone to try it.

 

[Protoman200X]

Back in University, I had taken a crash course on Jungian Psychology as an elective. The instructor was nice, and we learned a ton during that period about the subject in question.

But for two weeks, our regular instructor got in a car accident (he broke his leg), so we have a substitute in his place. Unfortunately, this sub wasn't much older than us and was only there to nab the credits needed so he can get his full license. He didn't bother teaching and mostly ignored the class if we had any questions or to prepare for upcoming tests/quize. So, for two weeks, we sat there and watched recordings of the lectures from the Mr. Edogawa's Classroom segment from Persona 4: Golden.

The plus side is the info provided in these lectures helped out in the end, but it was a really weird time to have a sub who didn't do his job and was a bit of an ass.

 

[SwampBastard]

I went to a small school district (a little over a thousand total kids in K-12) in rural Indiana in the 80s and 90s. When I was in 8th grade, every boy had to take a hunting safety course during a segment of our P.E. The reward for passing was going out to a field in the middle of nowhere on a Saturday morning and shooting a whole shitload of guns. I got second place in the skeet shooting contest even though I was so small and weak that I had trouble lifting the shotgun. I have not fired a gun since then.

 

[psynergyadept]

We watched the Mask of Zorro in Spanish class. I am not sure what we were supposed to learn from that. They spoke English in the movie.

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We watched Independence Day in Spanish class with Spanish subtitles because why not!?

 

[PlatypusDude]

Some fun ones:

Watched the Lion King in High School health class. Was ostensibly for interpersonal relationships, but think teacher just wanted to watch The Lion King.

Went on a field trip in 3rd or 4th grade to a corn maze themed fun center called Maize Quest.

Our High School chemistry teacher showed ua the Safety Dance music video as we were discussing lab safety.

 

[bobeth]

Religion classes, which were basically catholicism applied..

 

[____]

We somehow found out our Art teachers (at an art magnet school) would sell our "assignments" (read:artwork). You know....cuz we were kids and they weren't.

 

[VeryHighlander]

Muslim private school, I got smacked by a teacher for playing basketball with girls. Shame on me what was I thinking?

 

[Duane]

Been hit with a cane. It smarts.

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Yep, I got spanked with one in 2nd grade by the principal, except it was a big paddle with holes drilled in it to remove wind resistance. And, I kid you not, it literally had the pun "BOARD OF EDUCATION" written up the middle.

 

[Panther2103]

Had a couple of weird ones from high school,

teaching wise we had a really awesome law teacher who took us to a prison to talk to inmates as a field trip, but he also ignored a lot of rules as sometimes if our class was small enough (4 or 5 people) he would take us to starbucks as a "field trip" without permission so he could get coffee.

We had some weird bad things happen at my school though, like a group of kids who said they were in a gang essentially kidnapped some other kid and beat him with chains and stuff (at least this is what went around school, all I know is all the kids involved got expelled).

 

[Curler]

We watched Independence Day in Spanish class with Spanish subtitles because why not!?

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At least you guys got subs. We watched The Indian in the Cupboard French dub-only in 6th grade. I wasn't the best at French so I only understood like maybe 20% of it.

 

[Birdie]

My school taught us that Democrats are the super heroes and Republicans are the bad guys back in middle school. Blue was good, red was bad. Despite red being my favorite color, shit was weird thinking back.

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Democrats being "super heroes" is an exaggeration for sure but I'm struggling to say the second part of that isn't true.

But like you I also found myself as a kid thinking Republican was cooler because I liked red before understanding the policies.

 

[AGoodODST]

I remember my female MI (Moral Issues) teacher telling me once she had "penis envy" which was a bit weird.

I guess being forced to do highland country dancing in PE all the time. Though to be fair, I did actually like it and competed with the school and won a few times.

 

[Deleted member 13496]

There's a god and if you don't follow his rules you'll burn in hell forever.

Catholic School baby! Good times.

 

[EnlightenedMint]

My elementry school teachers were insistent that we would be using cursive for the rest of our lives so we weren't allowed to use print from grades like 4 - 6.

Also in High School I had an astoundingly lazy physics teacher who just had us watch Mythbusters and Junkyard Wars about everyday.

 

[Weltall Zero]

On the second day of Beaches, the guy next to me started chopping up lines of speed on his desk, and we took rails of speed of his desk in Christian Ethics class while the movie Beaches played and the teacher slept.

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wellthatescalatedquickly.gif

 

[Glasgow Mega-Snake]

Had an incredibly lazy teacher who was pretty much just coasting until retirement. We watched James Bond and Mission Impossible movies in English class with him. And his actual English teaching just consisted of telling us to read the sections on grammar in the textbook in silence. Nobody learned anything for those years. Parents tried to get him fired for years, but without success, it's pretty much impossible to fire civil servants here.

He also had the habit of asking us each time "Do you like Uncle ... (his name) ?", and if we answered yes we'd watch a movie. (This wasn't elementary school, we were teens.) Really weird guy.

 

[Hasseigaku]

I was in a small, private Christian school, so things were weird by default.

1. A school announcement about not going to the U2 concert.
2. We were shown Hell's Bells, a relic of the Satanic Panic 80's.

 

[Torpedo Vegas]

Ran out of normal Art classes to take so gave me an independent study class. It was great I did what ever I wanted.

 

[PeskyToaster]

We watched Amistad in 5th grade history class. Fantastic movie but uh, kinda gruesome for 5th graders. Some parent complained and we had to get slips signed by our parents after that to watch any movie in any class.
Still glad we watched it though. That was an impressionable movie. That teacher was very bold and I learned more from him than any other history teacher up until high school.

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I don't think we watched it that early but we did in maybe middle school and again in high school. And had to get parental permission. I think they did it for all rated R movies though. Same thing with Schindler's List.

 

[Chubnasty]

When I lived in North Carolina, near Charlotte, we had to take a boat safety course during Health Class.

We also watched a bunch of movies about eating disorders

Spoiler: TW: eating disorders, potentially graphic description?

Eating disorders like anorexia and binging/purging. I remember watching a video about binging/purging where it would show the teen vomiting into glass mason jars and keeping them in the closet.

 

[sfedai0]

Hearing over the PA every morning to stand up for the pledge of allegiance.

 

[Jakten]

It's funny to look back on now but in grade 7 we started learning Almena, which is just a method for teaching typing by giving little sayings for each set of keys. We'd all sit in the gym with a special keyboard that had a small screen attached, I think it was kind of like a calculator screen. They would over your hands with a sheet so you can't see them and then we'd listen to a shitty casette echoing across the gym "Quiet Aunt Zelda, Willie Skips eXams, Every Dollar Counts, Run From Vicky, To Get Betty, Young Harry Never, Uses Joes Money, I'm King Comma, Oh Lloyd Stop" over and over and over for an hour. I already knew how to use a computer at the time so it was mind numbly annoying.

Our French teacher would teach us french with this casette from a guy called Etienne who would rap the lessons, I'll never forget this one specifically:


Unfortunately Canadians don't take very kindly to french people and so the class literally drove her insane until she had a massive breakdown. She smashed her teaching cart into the wall repeatedly until it was broken and ran out crying and she wasn't able to return. It sucks because she was a pretty nice person. I went to school with some awful people though.

I was held after class every day for Grade 1 because I was left handed and was made to write lines for an hour using my right hand and my teacher would rap my knuckles with a ruler. The goal was to make me right handed, which worked. Supposedly this is what partially lead to me having dyslexia and adhd. Which on that note:

In grade 3 a doctor came in, I forget why exactly but they assessed our whole class. He determined that I had dyslexia and adhd. The teachers tried to downplay it and refused me any sort of help and due to how they told my parents, my parents also refused to see it as an issue which led to a lot of suffering throughout my school years. It was weird because they did not do this for other children. I didn't go to the doctor to formally get it checked until probably 20 years later because I was told I was lazy and stupid so much I believed that original doctor must have been mistaken.

My grade 6 teacher hated the shit out of me. I have mild Deuteranopia (Red/Green colour deficiency) and one day during class she asked me to pass her a pink pencil crayon; I gave her a grey one. From that day on she lauded over me that I, the talented artist of the class, was too stupid to know the difference between grey and pink and would constantly bring it up and use it to goad kids into bullying me. There was a school wide contest to design a new mascot. I drew a cool robotic wolf and won with a significant amount of votes from the other students. It turned out that she had talked to the principal to get them to change who won so when they announced the winner they announced some one else. Since everyone knew I had won a ton of people basically just turned to me and laughed. It became just another thing that people would bully me over. This same teacher showed us some old Romeo and Juliet movie from the 70's and she had to pause the movie to make sure we all knew that Juliet had a nude scene coming up and how old she was.

We had line dancing as part of our gym class every month

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We did this too, some fiddle song and then the Boot Scootin' Boogie along with some other songs like the Macarena. I actually still remember how to dance to the Boot Scootin' Boogie.

 

[julia crawford]

My English teacher introduced us to Isaac Asimov by showing us the movie I, Robot.

Did i say introduce? I meant turn off.

 

[lunarworks]

My grade 3 teacher wrote-out and photocopied the lyrics of songs he liked and had us all sing along to them.

I still have "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel lodged in my brain.

 

[balohna]

My Social Studies teacher in Grade 11 (translation from Canadian: 11th grade history, basically) taught exclusively using movies. Everyone wanted to be in his class because of it, and it was basically an easy mark if you could manage an essay a couple times a week (applying the latest film we watched to some history lesson). This is the grade in which we were supposed to learn detailed 20th century history, but he chose to skip WW1 and begin with WW2. So I never really learned about WW1 in school.

Another weird thing is I had him in the first semester of the year, and then he retired before the second semester. And he wasn't the only SS teacher in that grade to begin with. So only like 25% of my graduating class took his class, everyone else taking a normal class that covered WW1.

 

[PeskyToaster]

My school taught us that Democrats are the super heroes and Republicans are the bad guys back in middle school. Blue was good, red was bad. Despite red being my favorite color, shit was weird thinking back.

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This reminds me that in middle school there was this kid who just hated george w. bush (probably because of his parents) and we live in a conservative area so lots of kids roasted him (also because of views from their parents) and the teachers probably rolled their eyes too because it came up in his presentations and stuff. There was one project where we had to make/draw islands with different features (I don't remember the full context) and he called his island "Bush is not Allowed" lol. Little did I know back then that the kid was right, Bush shouldn't have been allowed. I wonder what he's up to these days. I think he moved before high school. I need to tell him he was right all along.

 

[AlmostMilk]

Had to watch a History Channel documentary about the haunted house in Amityville in my Junior High History class. Not sure how it applied to anything we were supposed to be learning, considering there wasn't anything about it in the history books.

 

[Griselbrand]

I just remembered, in our US history class one of the other history teachers came into our classroom and showed us the typical theories for why the JFK shooting was suspicious but without a critical eye into said theories.

Also, my drafting teacher at some point decided to just start calling random students "catfish." I don't think it was meant as an insult.

I felt really bad for all the teachers who were new to the job right out of college. They were all young and rumors of inappropriate relationships would always spread.

 

[psynergyadept]

Another one:

We went to Ellis Island and the teacher told our mostly black class don't forget to look up to see if your ancestors came through here!

Me and the other black students: 😒😒😒

 

[Sesha]

Our German language teacher just spontaneously quit her job mid-class in March of our last year in high school.

She was quite a character. I have a dozen stories just about her.

 

[C J P]

For some reason our history teacher - attempting to cram a long, long film into a one and a half hour session - showed us Schindler's List on fast forward, only occasionally stopping, which sort of made it come off as Benny Hill's Holocaust. Not the ideal way to communicate the gravity of it.

Also, the ethics teacher slept with the (married) dad of one of her sixth form pupils. His parents broke up over it and while he obviously didn't go to her class anymore, he still had to see her around the place. Felt really bad for him.

 

[Swiggins]

We had a minor scandal at my highschool when a (possible) school shooting was thwarted in the dumbest way possible.

Douchebag gets sent to the counselors office for being a dickhead. Tells the counselor he's gonna "take care" of all the people in the school who wronged him, including the counselor.

Counselor isn't taking this shit so he calls the cops and they search the home that night (parents consented). Turns out the kid had several illegal guns and a small stockpile of ammunition. Kid gets arrested and expelled and he might've even done a little hard time.

Counselor got hailed as a hero.

Another weird thing that happened is there was a sort of under-age swingers club that got broken up. Several couples were apparently meeting up at various houses to have group sex/orgys. One of the girls parents found out about it and threw a fucking shitfit. All parties were under 18 though so I don't think anything happened to anybody.