When not in lessons and if it was pissing down outside we were allowed to stay in school in the corridors after lunch. This was as boring as it sounds so sometimes kids made their own fun. A particular favourite was pulling down the door closers at the top of each door, moving a safe distance away and pretending to idly hang around while waiting for someone to open the door. As the door closer was now lower than the top of the door it would invariably force the door to swing back and into the face of another pupil or (more amusingly) an unsuspecting teacher. The challenge then was to stifle any laughs to avoid any suspicion that the door had been tampered with and wasn’t just broke and shit because the school was broke and shit.
Another game which can’t have been unique to my school was the Humming Game. The concept was simple. In any lesson where the teacher is talking for a while at the front of the class, you just start humming. It always starts small, perhaps two bored kids at the back of the class who make a humming pact and just gently start, well, humming. And the teacher is unlikely to notice anything at this point. But it always spreads. And as the humming reaches critical mass and the teacher finally realises what is happening it’s too late, there are too many of us to send outside the class (where let’s be honest, we’d just carry on humming anyway). The beauty of the Humming Game is that you can still look like you are listening intently to whatever the teacher is droning on about while at the same time humming your head off. For extra points you can even throw the occasional nod in when you catch the teacher’s eye. The only way the game usually ends is when the teacher storms off to get another teacher and brings them back into the classroom to deliver a bollocking, by which time of course we have all stopped humming and are sitting there innocently.
There was one slight variation of the Humming Game I remember. One of our female teachers unfortunately had a bit of a moustache. I don’t mean like a big Tom Selleck effort, more of a Gary Neville bumfluff style. But of course, teenage kids being evil this was picked up on. What you ended up with was a round of humming that, when the teacher’s back was turned, would morph from ‘mmmmmmmm’ to ‘mmmmmmuuzzzzy’. If you were ever caught, you could have argued humming is good for you.
There was another teacher who always had the class on edge because of this really weird speech habit she had. Basically every time she spoke, she always used to leave an awkward gap at the end of each sentence (a good three seconds) before completing………it. She was like a robot that had temporarily malfunctioned. And I’m not exaggerating when I say this was every sentence. What this meant was that we were always on edge wondering if she was asking us a question or whether we were just meant to wait for her to finish it herself. I remember one specific example (and bearing in mind she was a bit of an old-school teacher) she lost it with the class and flew into a rage at one kid and screamed at him ‘Steve, will you just fuck…..’ and then the gap! And just before the three seconds were up, Steve panicked. Apparently the correct answer was not ‘me’
As mentioned last time, I went to school at a time when there was a mix of new teachers and old-school teachers, the latter teaching at a time when you could still whack kids. What this meant was that there was a lot of restraint needed from these older teachers when kids were playing up but occasionally the mask slipped. I remember a couple of examples. The first was when there was some rubbish on the floor of the classroom, just some paper or something. The teacher asked a girl to put it in the bin. The girl replied that it was not her rubbish and she would not be putting it in the bin. The teacher replied along the lines of the girl having one more chance. The girl did not comply. The teacher got the bin from the front of the classroom and went up to the girl’s desk where he proceeded to empty the contents of the bin on her head. The teacher did not return to the school after that day.
The other example was in a design technology class, which was a fancy way of saying woodwork. I was on a table with a few other kids and at the other end was a lad who was talking while the teacher was talking. This went on for a few minutes until I heard the whoosh of a heavy wooden bastard board duster flying past this lad’s face. We all looked up at the teacher who sternly declared ‘next time I won’t miss.’ We all believed him. It turns out in his spare time this teacher was a champion archer who went archering every weekend. The lad who was talking didn’t say another word for the rest of the lesson and it looked like the board duster passed him so close it actually shaved off some of his bumfluff on the way past.
Daniel McChrystal 