Thread: Shit we did as kids

Given the calibre of TD's fine members we probably all have tales to tell of stupid things we did when we were in school. Share them here!

Here are some I recall, this was in the early 80s in Northern UK

English
My English Lit. teacher had total alopecia and wore a terrible toupee, I think it was made of nylon or something. Anyway, everybody referred to him as "Wiggy" but nobody ever said it to his face. You can see where this is going. We had to write an essay on MacBeth after studying it and I handed mine in after copying almost all of it from the Everyman's Encyclopedia my father had recently bought. When he was returning the essays with the marks I saw I had received a good one and blurted out "Thanks Wiggy!" That got me excluded for a week and 10 days of detention where I had to read Dickens. I hate Dickens to this day.


German
I am crap at this language, while being berated one day by our German teacher (who was a PhD) I said "At least you aren't seeing a psychiatrist!" She immediately shut up and I thought I had got away with it until she kept me back after class and asked why I was seeing one. I had to think quick so I told her my parents thought I was abnormal, she said she didn't think I was abnormal but I should concentrate more. After that she would pull me aside now and then and ask how it was going and I would say something like "It's great, now I only have to go once a month" or some other BS.

End of the year we have the PTA meeting. My father can't go so my mum's going alone. As she's leaving I tell her about this facade and she giggles and says "Oh my God" or something. When she gets in front of the German teacher she tells her I've been lying and the German teacher bursts into tears. After the PTA my old mum decides she needs a drink so she goes to the pub nearest to the school and the German teacher is there being consoled by half a dozen other teachers who all give mum the evil eye. My mum still nags me about that one.

At the same PTA my maths teacher told my mother that I would probably have a lucrative career selling combine harvesters to fishermen ???


Physics
One day we have some machine hooked up to an oscilloscope and we are supposed to be watching the wavy lines or something, I forget. Anyway, we are given stern instructions not to fiddle with the buttons on the machine, just watch the lines. Yeah right! I fiddle with all the buttons and then hook the crocodile clips up to the ends of a pencil which then catches fire. I am excluded for a week from physics. The next class I am allowed to attend is all about Amps and Ohms and all that good stuff which gets me thinking, so that evening I take a plug and screw pieces of my Meccano between the neg and pos terminals.

Bear in mind this was a school that opened in like 1903 or something and the only upgrades since then had been a lick of paint here and there so the result when I sneaked into the physics classroom and plugged it in were stupendous; it not only blew out the whole main building but it also tripped the little green box holding the transformer at the end of the street thereby cutting power to all the other buildings on the road. At this point I was crapping my pants, I got hauled into the Head Mistress' office and she had the charred remains of my plug sitting on her desk. Of course I adamantly denied knowing anything about it, and they had to let me off because they couldn't prove anything. Thank god there was no CCTV in those days.

Art
I am crap at art. We were all given a lump of clay one day and the project was to build a tower. Most of the class set about building Lord of the Rings type things as that was what we were reading at the time in Eng Lit but I couldn't think of anything so I made a clay dick as I had recently discovered pornography. The art teacher was pretty indifferent to what happened in class, he'd assign a project and then put his feet up and read his book so he didn't notice. I got away with it and even managed to get it into the kiln with everybody else's stuff, but when they cooled down and were removed I got busted. My parents were summoned to the school for that one, I probably would have been expelled but having a father who was a popular local doctor saved my skin although he was seriously unamused.

Physics Class
I was sitting in the back of class with some brand new florescent orange plasticine that I'd nabbed from a shop next door.

Because I was the only one in the back row everyone would knwo who threw is if they got hit in the back of the head. So I devised a cunning plan. I spent the lesson rolling the plasticine into little balls and attempting to flcik it up into the ceiling fan at which point it would bounce off at odd angles and hit other kids around the room. (mostly it missed everyone as it was wildly inaccurate.

Problem was this was a brand new Science wing, with brand new bright blue carpets. During the course of the day the bright orange balls of warm plasticine melted into the bright blue carpet and was slowly smeared and walked into it by the foot traffic.

I spent eight hours will a bottle of caustic chemicals cleaning it that next day.

Outside of class
Stood on the roof of a car travelling at 65 mph in an attempt to car surf.

Made paper helicopters with sodium as weights and threw them out the third floor window at the kids in the quad after a heavy rain. ( detention )
Made a sheet metal model car powered by a homemade rocket fuel which ran along a guidewire we had strung along the quad. It broke the guide, slammed into a classroom at near lighspeed and exploded, breaking several windows. ( detention and lost access to the science lab for the semester )
Dry ice bombs set off during principals end of year address in the auditorium. ( not caught)

school.

when attached to the desktop gastaps in the school lab, a length of rubber tubing and a bunsen burner with the air vent blocked make a fairly powerful flame thrower.

classroom gang warfare between two opposing factions of the lower sixth was always going to be more fun than adding water to anhydrous copper sulphate, especially when the chemistry teacher was unable to control the class.

.... until the day when one kid was set alight.

i still remember the shock on his face as his shirt caught fire, luckily for him, and for those of us involved in the firefight, the teacher reacted extremely quickly and extinguished the flames with water or a fire blanket before they really took hold, the lad was rushed down to the sickroom, the nurse applied witch hazel and nivea, and that was that, and apart from a small blister on his skin, no lasting damage was done.

in those days, the late sixties, health and safety concerns were non existent, and the idea that parents could sue schools, teachers or individuals and claim compensation was a long way off.
these days the police would have been involved, the daily mail would have been frothing at the mouth and the school closed down for a month whilst an investigation took place.

next morning at assembly the two gangs, about ten of us in all, were severely beaten by the headmaster in front of the whole school.

assembly beatings were like public executions, conducted with gravitas and a slavering delight by the headmaster. you stood there on the podium, in front of a thousand pupils and teachers, with your head held low and your bowels churning whilst your crimes and the punishment were eloquently announced to one and all, and although there was some notoriety and celebrity to be gained from all this, the main purpose of the exercise was one of public humiliation and degradation, you listened to the headmasters long speech about irresponsibility, stupidity and idiocy, before being made to touch your toes and hit hard six times on the buttocks with a long wooden batten, full swing, five seconds between strokes, counted off by the deputy head. tears or any facial twitch signifying suffering would mark you down with your peers as a coward, but it certainly hurt a lot, with bruising and swelling.

pink floyds "the wall" has always had a special place in my heart.

the chemistry master was accorded a lot of respect by the class for his prompt action, and our class eventually did him proud by gaining excellent results in "a" level chemistry. the lad who caught fire eventually went to oxford.

aaaah, the good old days.

When I was sixteen, my mother gave me the keys to her new Buick, her store credit card and sent me off by myself to buy a new dress for an upcoming dance. Until that time, I had been driving my father's Volkswagen beetle so I was very excited to go alone in the new car. Off I go downtown with the radio on full blast, thinking this is the greatest thing that ever happened. I park in the multi-level parking garage, go inside and buy a new dress.

Coming out of the car park, I'm driving a little too fast going down the ramp and scrape the passenger side of that big Buick on a concrete pillar. Knowing my parents will have a fit, I park the car very close to the garage wall when I get home so no one can see the damage.

The car goes unused for a couple of days until my mother goes shopping. She has an accident while she's out. A woman made an illegal turn and ran into the passenger side of the car. She and my mother get into an argument in the street about the damage. They can't figure out how the car got damaged in the front AND the back panels......

I just kept my mouth shut. Insurance paid and my parents, to this day, don't know I ran that car into a concrete pillar.

don't remember anything from back then was stoned pretty much everyday from about 15 to 29, fucking sad.
fucked up my childhood memories.