Weird Memories From Elementary School

My 3rd grade boyfriend said he wanted to finger fuck me.

Classrooms with really dated posters and decor. At my school in the early '90s, classrooms with late '70s cartoon posters and books (feathered hair, bell bottoms) were still common. Looking back, the teachers were probably given zilch for supplies and decorative items.

Sister Valerie shrieking at us all, and chasing Marc B. around the playground so he could kiss Kim M.

My 4th grade boyfriend said he was gonna rape me.

i knocked my front tooth out playing on the playground at recess. I remember a blood trail on my shirt and shorts. The teacher sent me to the nurse and she cleaned me up and sent me back to class

Realizing years later that all the “old maid” teachers were likely lesbians.

R2, I remember those, too. Some of them seemed like they'd been there for 40 years.

I'll always remember the smell of the school I went to. It was a lot like an old library book. Every hallway and classroom had this smell. Whenever I get a whiff of something that smells like that, it takes me right back to those years of my life and I smile.

[quote] My 4th grade boyfriend said he was gonna rape me.

So does mine.

There were 4 interconnected rooms in each grade level, in the middle of which was the "pod"/common area. On Wednesdays (?) or Fridays, each classroom would gather in the pod & sing songs. I can't remember a single one, except one sounded like a pirate shanty.

We'd be all sardined together, & a fun diversion would be to trace letters on the back of the person in front of you, using your finger to spell out the letters. I remember shivering whenever the kid doing it would use a light touch, & I could never guess what the letters would spell.

Eventually the teachers caught on, & touching was forbidden, I remember the penalties were really severe if you were caught.

When a kid would puke all over their desk in class and the teacher would lead everyone into the hall for a “shelter drill” until the custodian came to clean it up with that green sawdust.

A stupid blonde kid’s mom brought cupcakes for his birthday and before he gave me one he licked it. he is probably a deplorable now.

i did not get my pee pee out and pee peed on the front of my pants in 2nd grade. i stayed in the cloak room till they dried.

oddly, it was not embarrassing as it sounds.

it also happened coming back from a church choir trip. i remember the hot man (some pe teacher guy) showing me how to make sure it was drained and shaken. no, not pervy actually. he had like 3 sons.

I have the best memory of helping my first grade teacher decorate the classroom for Christmas. It was a Saturday, and I was such a hopeless teacher’s pet. I’m sure I didn’t help as much as I sat there chattering away making paper chains. I often wish life could be so simple and happy.

My first grade teacher was wearing royal blue low rise pumps the morning I threw up my breakfast on her feet. I remember the yellow scrambled eggs contrasting vividly against the blue.

X marks the spot With a dot dot dot Draw a line and a dash And a big question mark Travel uptown, downtown, all around town Travel uptown, downtown, all around town Crack an egg on her head and let the juice run down Rub it all around. Whhhhhhhh!

R14 was definitely an undesirable

I didn't steal my english teachers book of quotes. My friend did and said I did it. I still hate that bitch.

There was a little girl in kindergarten who was very contrary and nobody seemed to like, I particularly remembered that no one wanted to sit next to her on the carpet. She always missed a lot of school and there was one point where she never came back. It was only years later that I found out that she had died during the school year, but we were never told. I’ve always wondered if she was very ill all along and her unpleasantness was because she was in pain much of the time. Maybe she even gave off a smell, maybe even a medical smell that we picked up on and made us keep our distance. I think on some primal level we as children knew something was wrong or off with her and shunned her.

[quote]Looking back, the teachers were probably given zilch for supplies and decorative items.

R2 This is still true.

My 5th grade teacher was fluent in Arabic. This was the late 80s, and I was mesmerized. She was physically stunning, and we would often ask her to speak in Arabic because it was so beautiful. That was probably the only straight "crush" I ever had.

I still remember the tiny toilets we had in kindergarten. They were so much easier to use than the one at home.

On the last day of fourth grade our grade level teachers created a field day for us, but it wasn’t the primary track and field events, but fun and games with things like frisbees, nerf balls, jump ropes, four square, kickball and things like that. My teacher had brought a lot of these things from home and when we came in from the outside she packed them up in brown grocery store paper bags to take home for the summer. The bags were sitting near the door, and unknown to the teacher the custodians came and gathered them up with the garbage. At first the teacher thought we students were teasing her and hiding them. Before we figured out what had happened the custodians threw them into the incinerator to get rid of all the end of the year garbage in closing down the school. As we left the school that day the air smelled acrid and smokey, especially because of all the burning plastics from those items used for fun and games at field day.

Mid 1970s. 1st grade. The class was video taped during some learning exercise, and then we all watched afterwards. My teacher, Rosie T, pointed to my head on the TV screen and said "not paying attention!"

Second grade. Maryann flashed her scooter at me in the hallway so I told Mrs L Hardy who attacked me verbally by screeching "YOU PROBABLY TOLD HER TO DO IT!!" I found out years later that she and her husband were racists!

Sixth grade. I met the best friend I'd ever have in Cy T. I also met my favorite teacher of all time, Angeline Moskel, nee Colosimo. She taught Italian folk songs which I still remember partly. She also taught us the saying hated while making the sign of the cross which I never forgot: Jesu, Josepha, et Maria. Ta thun ya luna cordi et lani ma mia (phonetically).

In 2nd or 3rd grade my young, attractive, teacher brought in her fiance. She introduced him to the class and explained her name was going to change. One of my classmates ran off into the woods at recess heartbroken. Our volunteer Fire Dept. had to search for him. I remember being embarrassed for him and his drama queen behavior.

In second grade, my teacher scandalized the classroom by saying she loved to watch baseball because the players had "great buns." She was fired later that year for getting pregnant out of wedlock. This was at a public school in the '90s.

A fifth grade teacher asked us to raise our hands if we were Jewish. Mine was the only raised hand, so I was told "You're giving a lesson on Hanukkah tomorrow," with no additional instructions. Then she pointed to a black kid and said they could do the Kwanzaa lesson.

^ Now THAT'S some MARY! shit!

oh...the little retarded girl was pushed off the top of the big slide. sure i have put this on here before. the little bully pushed her off the top. and i think it was really tall. i saw it in like slow motion. they took it out and then big slides were things of the past.

i knew not to trust it or the kids. lol

Maypole. What the hell was that all about? Was it rare in USA? If so, why did we do that at my school?

Summer library hours. It wasn't weird in the least. It's weird now because it sounds so olde worlde.

The huge art supply room. Cave of Ali Baba - an enormous quantity and deep variety of art supplies. For little kids! And it was just a middle class suburban school. That weird NOW, wasn't then. Also the band room. Any kid could take up any instrument, and it was all practically free. Maybe a tiny rental fee. Meanwhile the school paid music teachers to teach any kid to read music and play instruments, and to love music. REAL music. Isn't that amazing? Nowadays it sound like something from a 18th century European royal court.

Battle Axe school nurses. The three elementary schools in my little system had Battle Axes but they were the beloved type.

[quote] Every hallway and classroom had this smell. Whenever I get a whiff of something that smells like that, it takes me right back to those years of my life and I smile.

R7, I know exactly that smell you're talking about, and it's not something I can easily describe -- like musty textbooks and ditto sheets?

and play dough

I remember hating every minute of it.

I think the smell was just kids and natural clothing materials stinking. And the wood they used to make all the furniture. And the perfumed and probably highly toxic cleaning and polishing supplies of the custodian. And mop water if the custodian didn't know how to do his job.

and the green vomit stuff!

I also remember Rosie T's twin sister, and other first grade teacher, Roxie C telling me "THAT'S VERY GOOD!" as I was given a drum to beat while the class sang songs - I demonstrated musical ability from the start.

45 years ago! My good God! The shit we remember...

Plus the cafeteria smelling of cheap ingredients. Though my school had that amazing art supply room, the cafeteria prepared quite shoddy meals. I think it was still in the culture that children didn't need to eat quality food. Any old gruel would do. Many kids brought their lunch, to avoid that food.

I remember making butter by putting whipping cream in an old glass jar with a lid on it. Every kid got to shake the jar for 1 minute, then pass it on to the next kid. Eventually it turned to butter and we got to have some on saltine crackers.

Mrs Gasmire and Mrs Wacker, the teachers aids, always waiting at the end of the chow line with a tub of lard to butter your buns haha

Every classroom was connected to the main office via intercom. The teacher would press a small black button and a few seconds later a garbled disembodied voice would blare out, “OFFICE!”

Watching some old Spanish cartoons videos, having to learn about Canada and it's provinces, singing some French song. Also having to sit on the unstable chair and the smell of the janitor having recently moped the hallway.

I was a major gossip in elementary school. I once spread a rumor that one of the substitutes was a big dyke, (she looked like one of the indigo girls) Little did I know , a tall skinny girl in one of my classes (with an an ugly pageboy haircut) was her niece and told her. The sub came and confronted me at lunch in front of everybody and told me to “stay out of her business!”.

My 6th grade teacher was old enough that the school we attended was named after her. She was wonderful. If we had a party in the classroom it lasted 3 days because she loved to see the kids dancing and having fun. she always got into trouble for it. Best and kindest teacher I ever had.

I remember a PE game where one person would sit on a little wooden dolly and the other person would pull them around the gym/cafeteria with a piece of rope. I also remember playing with a giant rainbow parachute. So much more fun than the stuff they had us do in high school.

My P.E. teacher was really hot. I'm sure that's when I knew I was gay. He was really funny, sexy, and wore tight t-shirts all the time. When he wasn't teaching a class, sometimes he would just show up in our classrooms and make jokes, or mess with the teacher. I was so in love with him.

We'd lay on the wooden dollies and race to the other side of the gym!

Miss Blitzer, my second grade teacher, was a contestant on Jeopardy. Mrs. Grib, my first grade teacher, shamed me in front of the class because I didn't know what a table of contents was. I know, every six year old needs to know what a table of content is by the time they're five.

She shamed me again when my mother pulled my sister and I out of class to watch Pope John Paul's arrival at JFK airport.

The walls in the hallway were painted turquoise and were overlaid with a Jackson Pollock-like web of shiny black shit. Uplifting. I haunts me to this day,

Yes! The wooden scooters and the parachute! My favorites!

I had a very kind second grade teacher. It’s a good thing she was kind because the students were all drama. My part in this was hiding under a table to surprise her and taking a chair leg to the head. My mother had to come take me for stitches.

I remember a lot of aquamarine paint in schools and cafeterias that smelled like burned peas.

My middle school showed woefully outdated filmstrips. Complete with porn movie music and afros. I got in trouble for making everyone laugh because one was called “Wind” and had very dramatic music and I said OH GOD NOT THIS AGAIN really loud.

2nd grade: Every birthday was celebrated by us standing in a line with our legs spread and the birthday kid crawling between our legs and getting a birthday spanking from each of us. What the fuck? 🤣 This was the early 90s but that seems so wrong it sounds like the 50s.

6th grade: My PE teacher talking about anorexia in health and going off on this long tangent about Karen Carpenter and her angel’s voice. It just went on and on. Had no clue who he was talking about and asked my mom when I got home.

My memory is really something. I even remember the custodian's name was Mr Headly...haha

At the very beginning of the school day, the teacher would take the hot lunch order. You could have pizza, grilled cheese, hot dogs or something called a “Dagwood sandwich”. I usually brought my lunch, but every once in a blue moon, I’d get to have hot lunch. The hot lunch items were packaged in crinkly cellophane and kept hot under a heat lamp. They were absolute garbage, but to someone who was used to whole wheat and sprouts and “dessert” being raisins or an apple, it was exotic and tasty. (And salty.)

There were also generic brand ice cream bars: ice cream sandwich, creamsicle and strawberry shortcake.

OP, are you sure you didn't dream that because it sounds completely insane.

We had a game in fifth grade called “Poink”. When someone passed your desk, you poked them in the buttocks with a very sharp pencil. Boys could poink boys. Girls could poink boys or girls. Boys could NOT poink girls.

Eventually it was forbidden.

The little sink the the classroom in grade primary.

Our school didn't have a cafeteria, but on a regular basis we had 'hot dog day' where you could buy one or two hot dogs. This was in the 80s, I don't think you could give kids unhealthy, choke-hazard food today.

The lunchroom monitors were moms who had free time to volunteer. Fortunately my mother had to work. There was one mom who was fat and the kids called her “Porky” behind her back. Her son was in my sister’s class and he was “husky”. Nowadays she’d be considered average-sized in flyover country. But in the 1970s Fairfield County, she was fat.

She was a really nice lady, though.

In 1989 when our fourth grade teacher had a baby, and went on maternity leave we had a really weird substitute teacher. The first day she was there she assigned us homework, to write a report on where our families were from. The following day we all had to stand up, and tell what we were. Then she asked us to pull back the front of our hair to see if we had a widows peak. I have one, and so did a few other kids. We were asked to stand in front of the class, and asked again what our background was. Im Czech, and Kurdish. The other kids were from Central or Eastern Europe lineage, and one Asian. She took notes on all this. A few days later she started teaching us the Cyrillic alphabet, and Russian words. Learning Russian went on for a few hours a day, until our teacher came back.

We never got an explanation as to what she was doing, or why she started teaching us Russian. I grew up in Washington State, and most of the kids in my class were mostly Scandinavians, Asians, or Native Americans. A few days after she left, she contacted my parents to see if I wanted to learn Russian. Turns out she also asked the other kids parents who had widows peaks if they wanted to be taught, but not the Asian. I still to this day don't understand why she was obsessed with our genetic traits, or trying to teach us Russian.

It's cool to read these. Many memories have been triggered in me.

First grade: Johnny Fisk and I were best friends. During recess, I was making my way across the monkey bars and he grabbed my legs and tried to pull me down. He succeeded but I landed on his leg in such a way that broke his femur. He was out of school for the rest of the year and had to repeat first grade. We stopped being friends.

Also in first grade, when it was raining, we had recess in our classroom. Miss Smith left us alone for 5-10 minutes (probably to have a smoke) and during that time, I was sitting at my desk talking to my cousin who was a classmate. Elizabeth Tice stood in the aisle a few desks in front of us and my cousin and I noticed that she seemed to be scratching her butt. Nope. She reached under her skirt, pulled her underwear out a bit, and a hard 2-inch dry turd plinked on the floor. My cousin and I were stunned and didn't know what to do. After recess, Miss Smith was walking up and down the aisles reading to us from a book. She stopped at the nugget on the floor, knitted her brow, bent down, and picked it up. She inspected it like a jeweler might look at a gemstone, then she raised it to her nose and sniffed it. I glanced over at my cousin, wide-eyed, wondering what was going to happen. Miss Smith casually walked to the trashcan and dropped the turn in.

In second grade, Mrs. Martini wheeled in a TV, attached it to the coax cable, and we watched the Electric Company live on TV three mornings a week. My other cousin/age mate was a puker. He threw up on Mrs. Martini's foot while we were lined up to use the boys restroom. A few of us laughed and were sent to the principal's office. Why did so many kids puke in elementary school???

I loved my third grade teacher. She was the Methodist minister's wife, and I fondly remember her reading a chapter of Charlotte's Web to us until we finished the book. Midway through November, the evil old hag Mrs. Gray appeared in our classroom. She told us that Mrs. Fox was ill and she would be our teacher for the rest of the year. Mrs. Gray was friends with my great grandmother; she taught my dad for two years when he was in elementary school. I got so sick with depression and anxiety that my parents took me to the pediatrician. He prescribed Lithium, which I took for several months thereafter. They were tiny pink pills and I did not like taking them, but I guess they helped. After New Year, I walked over to Mrs. Fox's house to visit. She had been hospitalized for several weeks, but was home recovering. Mom called to make sure it was okay for me to visit. I remember sitting with her in their living room and it was hot and kind of dark. It was reassuring that she was alive, and after a while she told me that she had contracted trichinosis (from a pork sandwich served in the school's cafeteria, I later learned) and she raised her sleeve to show me an angry scar on her lower arm. She promised me that she would be okay, then asked me if I would like to see the worm that caused her to be sick. Fuck yeah! She has the trichina worm in what I guess was formaldehyde in an old jelly jar. I excused myself shortly thereafter and, when I got outside, I vomited.

I have a lot of other stories about elementary school, but these are among the weirdest ones.

Taco boats and other delights from the Sysco truck.

Printed lunch menus for the month, where at least on one day something called 'the manager's special' was being served.

My first grade teacher scared the shit out of me, even though i liked her. This was 1980, so corporal punishment was still allowed. She had a wooden yard stick she would slap on our desk if we weren't paying attention. She also had a punishment where you had to stand in front of the class and bend over and touch your toes. She'd whack you with the ruler if you bent your knees. This one kid was always in trouble, Billy. He was always in the front of the class, bending over and touching his toes, crying. I still think of poor Billy. She seemed to pick on him.

The most popular girl in 4th grade started crying every day in class and it was unclear why. She would just put her head down on the desk and weep. No one teased her because she was so beautiful and popular - everyone just pretended it wasn’t happening. Overheard my mother talking to a friend about how she heard they had to “tranq her” to even get her to school every morning. Now looking back - god knows what was actually going on with that poor 10 year old girl.

I was obsessed with a married straight male teacher in 3rd grade. Just wanted to be near him. Would daydream about him constantly. Couldn’t understand why. Convinced myself I must just want to be “teacher’s pet.” SURE JAN. THAT’S ALL IT IS.

I grew up in the northeast (urban school). For some reason, the district hired a menacing, old woman to float from school to school to teach us square dancing. It was a swing your partner, dosey-do apocalypse: she was violent and abusive when we missed our cues and thought nothing of hitting, shoving, and knocking us to the ground. By the time we entered the fifth grade, we escaped her wrath but were bussed to the local YMCA where we were forced to swim naked by a sadistic old perv who was probably married to the square dancing teacher.

Back in the 70s, we played Mad Libs in class and when it was a plural noun, someone said "balls". Of course, we all laughed, but the teacher allowed it. Then it turned out it was about a rock band and the sentence came out as, "They wore their hair beneath their balls". We never laughed so loud. I'm amazed old Mrs. Boyd said it out loud. She'd probably get in trouble today.

My best friend gave me a “sissy burn” on the back of my hand. I was too stubborn to give in and that damn eraser took off so much skin that I still have a scar.

My 5th grade teacher was kind of molestery. He favored the jock boys and picked on the faggy boy- probably because he was a gay boy himself.

The teachers had their own bathroom, but his teacher would piss in the student bathrooms. He would stand at the urinal with his pants and underwear dropped all the way down to the floor and expose his gross old man cock. It was so creepy.

Also his best friend was an Inuit who would visit him for a few weeks during the year and carve statues in a corner during class. Like Inuit art that he would sell to the parents of his students.

I was in the gifted child program in my elementary school (which meant that three of us out of the whole school would go to a trailer in the back yard three afternoons a week and be taught by our own instructor). I also acted professionally, so I was out of class a lot. That made me not terribly popular with my fellow 5th graders. My teacher would let me help him and I would grade test papers for him. If anyone gave me shit, I would erase their answers and write in the wrong ones so they would fail. I never got caught.

They'd taken a bunch of old tires, and made them into various things to climb in and around in the school yard. They made there was one where they made like a dragon- and they painted a tire orange and cut it up, and it was coming out of it's mouth like it was fire.

There was a black girl named Fern. I saw the orange tire, and commented "That's a strange color..." and I was going to finish "for that tire" but Fern interrupted me and said "It's MY color, and I like it!" I was 7 years old and couldn't find the words to explain what I'd actually meant. I always felt badly about that.

You're not too bright, are you Fern?

We cut up potatoes to make woodprints. You'd carve something in a potato and then dip it in some kind of thick latex paint and then press it on a piece of paper for the imprint.

My teacher had to keep begging and warning my fellow pupils not to either lick or eat the paint nor the potato. Continually.

R66 I don't blame Fern. She had probably faced people making fun of her color (we were a mostly white school) and I would guess her parents told her that was how to react. She was just sensitive to it, and didn't quite hear exactly what I was saying.

My 3rd grade teacher started reading Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't to us. I remember her stumbling over a few words, like "puking." She slowly realized it was a book for boys 13+ (there was wet dream stuff in it.) The next day, she switched to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.

Square dancing in PE class: WHY? We didn’t even live in a white trash area.

Mr. Lindstrom taught sixth grade. Every June at the close of the school year he and his wife would throw a pool party at their house with grilled hot dogs, hamburgers, lemonade, etc. It was legendary.

Finally the year I was in sixth grade — around April — he kept the boys in during recess to announce that we had all been so collectively bad that year that the party was for the girls only. He wouldn't give any more explanation. I was crushed, and I wasn't the only one. Jocks, nerds, brains all met on the playground to discuss: What did we do?

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that Mr. Lindstrom's parties were held solely so he could look at a bunch of preteen girls in wet bathing suits.

Wow this is bringing up a lot of memories. Late 70s - early 80s.

We had really weird art and music teachers. Do they even teach art and music anymore? Looking back, I’m surprised my small town private school had those classes.

I still remember that dumb Ja Da song.

Ja Da

Ja Da

Ja Da Ja Da jing jing jing

[quote]In kindergarten we did finger paintings with chocolate pudding. I suppose the idea was that we wouldn't lick paint off our fingers. Sometimes for lunch a cafeteria lady would wheel in a tub of mac 'n' cheese. Kids would gather round with spoons and eat from this trough.

Did you go to David Lynch Elementary School?

One time a kid crapped in his pants and one of the teachers found his underpants in the boys room with crap in them. So to find out who did it, the principal had all the boys line up in the basment by the lavatoriy and we had to lift up our shirts and then she stuck her hand in our pants waistband to see if we were wearing underwear or not. I don't remember how it played out, but I remember feeling humiliated and like my privacy was violated. It was like being inspected by the prsion warden, and everyone seemed frightened. I think it was second grade. I told my mom and she was shocked and said it was wrong. But I don't think any of the parents did anything about it.

Fourth grade. The door to our classroom had a glass transom. David Bonerigo, the last to come in, slammed the door so hard the glass broke.

WELL. The teacher told us to line up single file to go outside. I was sure the glass would fall and impale one of us and begged Miss Nolan to let us climb out the windows. That suggestion was shot down.

Once we all were outside (and miraculously still alive), I insisted that I be allowed to go to "the office" and phone this in to the local TV news station. Clearly this was a major event and they'd send a crew down immediately to film the shattered transom, get our shocked reactions, etc., and broadcast it at the top of the news.

Once again I was denied.

I'd forgotten about the wooden dollies and the parachute. We also had an activity with 2 long wooden poles on wood blocks, with a kid on each end banging the poles on the block and against each other in some set rhythm. The other kids would do rhythmic moves in an out of the poles. KInd of like double Dutch, but not with ropes.

There were 2 weird girls in my grade school. They stuck together, didn't talk to anyone else, dressed strangely, had poor hygiene, looked unhealthy, indulged in some asocial behavior. I realized much later that they were probably products of incest or some other horrible family background.

I loved grade school and all my teachers. My school had been built by the WPA and was of excellent craftsmanship (unlike all the newish schools in my lower-middle class PNW area). They built a new school nearby with the pods R9 mentioned, and I was so relieved when I didn't get sent to it. There were some additions behind it with a breezeway, which is the only place I've ever heard that word used.

I had a teacher in the 5th grade who resembled Morgan Freeman. He would wear tinted glasses and say things like "On tomorrow..." (as in- On tomorrow we're going to have a test.) He would yell at all the black girls in the back rows who would lean their heads against the chalkboards and leave grease spots.

When I was in 5th grade, a 10th grader stuck his finger in my ass while we were alone in the science lab.

That was pretty weird.

R70 - Square dancing was a feature of my JR high school PE classes in 76-77 and the school was (and still is) in a very nice neighborhood in California. Think of the film Ladybird. Kit Carson JR high bordered the wealthy neighborhood with mansions (Fab '40s) and the rest of us who lived east of the demarcation point of wealth vs. middle or working class (my family) 48th St. Back then, the wealthy folks sent their kids to public schools at least until high school. Now, none of the Richy Riches would deign to send their kids anywhere but private. Times have changed.

A few people mentioned the giant parachute thing during PE. I thought our school was the only one that did that! Midwest in the 1970s.

During those days PE was fun because it was just about doing active things, not organized sports where you had to have a particular skill or be popular.

Oh yes R52, the little sink in the classroom. When I was in 2nd grade, some kid said a bad word and the teacher made him go over to the sink and wash his mouth out with soap. It was that nasty powdered kind that was actually more like the texture of clumping kitty litter. Do they still make that? I can still remember the smell.

In 2nd grade I was the only white kid in the whole class. I didn't even realize it at the time because it wasn't relevant to me. I realized it many years later when I was looking through an old box of stuff and found my class picture (the kind where every kid's school pic was arranged on the page with the teacher in the middle - do they still do that?).

Grade 4 or 5 we had our first swimming lessons in PE. It was all boys and at the time the policy was that boys swam nude. Most of the boys were circumcised of course, but there were several who were intact. We had a PE teacher and a swimming instructor. I can't remember exactly how many lessons we'd had, only a few, the PE teacher ended one lesson early and after we were dressed, he gave us a hygiene talk about our "private parts", as he called them. He said he noticed that some of the boys were not circumcised and explained to us the difference stating he didn't understand why their mothers and fathers left them "like that" and the skins should have been removed when they were born. He went on to explain that the boys with foreskins required extra cleaning because they were always going to be smelly and dirty.

When I got home later that day, my mother of course asked how swim lessons were today. Being circumcised, I was intrigued with this new knowledge I had acquired which I related to her, probably in great detail. After I finished telling her, she sent me outside to play and as I was going out the door, I heard her on the telephone asking to speak to the principal. I didn't hang around, so I never heard my mother's side of the conversation, but I could tell she wasn't happy about my "news". HAHA

We had the square dance teacher. We also had "Pockets". Shudder! Pockets was a creepy grungy ex or still hippy who was some kind Shields and Yarnell street performance art/clown somehow appropriate for kids. She was a racket. At least for the love of god I hope that was a woman. Now it occurs to me it might have been a tranny.

My first lunchbox. Couldn't be a first-grader without one.

We had to learn to ballroom dance in PE class. The class had more boys than girls and we got paired up by height. I was lucky enough to get paired up with the cutest boy in the entire class. He was a new boy in school that year who looked like a mix of Jonathan Brandis and a younger Prince William. We danced the waltz and jive and he didn’t seem to mind grabbing my waist and shoulders. It was my favorite week of PE.

A man was hit by a car while crossing a corner of our playground during recess, and supposedly his head hit the curb, spraying his brains out. I don't know the truth of that, but for certain, the school janitor did go out and scatter sawdust around the scene while waiting for the police to arrive. Many kids swore they saw the brains with the sawdust mixed in, and for several years after, kids would go out and look at the stains on the curb that were claimed to be a result of the accident.

We were watching the Challenger launch live when it exploded, and the whole school was sent out on an extended recess after, I assume so the teachers could decide how to react.

More than a few recesses ended with someone getting a bloody nose from the rubber balls we used for dodge ball in the circle on the school ground pavement.

R65 made me sad. R75 made me LOL.

This is the best thread in this godforsaken site right now. There have been other great threads, but this is the current champion.

R79, I know two legit billionaires who send their kids to public schools for elementary. Of course they’re excellent, safe well-funded schools in the wealthiest zip codes.

[quote] 2nd grade: Every birthday was celebrated by us standing in a line with our legs spread and the birthday kid crawling between our legs and getting a birthday spanking from each of us. What the fuck?

Wow, r47. We had the Birthday Spanking Machine in 2nd Grade in the 1970s. I wonder if there was some teaching guide that told teachers to do this? How was this idea passed from school to school.

In second grade during morning Mass a Nun slapped me and I in turn projectile vomited Lucky Charms all over her.

In retrospect this seems weird, elaborate or both, but in elementary school there was a flag system throughout the halls for recesses. Green meant that there was outdoor recesses, red meant indoor recesses and yellow I guess meant conditions rapidly changing so stand by for updates? We did have a PA system, I’m not sure why they didn’t use that, but I guess that didn’t want constant interruptions during the day since each grade level had recess at a different time. And who changed those flags, the poor rundown secretary to the principal?

Anyways, during the winter or rainy springs when there were constant indoor recesses and the teachers were burning out on it, or maybe they had regularly scheduled meetings we would be herded into the Cafegymatorium to watch movies. At that time, early 1970s, for the most part schools would rent movies usually dealing with curriculum cycles or big school events and not really own many films, so inevitably we saw the same few films over and over again.

One was a Disney production live action nature film about a family of otters throughout the year. You get very attached to them, but about two thirds of the way through the film there’s a horrible landslide on the side of the lake that kills about half of them. It was so traumatizing and there were kids who would always openly weep. I’ve never found that movie before and I wonder considering what came out about what they did with the lemmings if they blew up that hillside to cause the avalanche to add death and drama to the narrative.

The other movie in heavy rotation was the stalwart film Paddle-to-the-Sea, which I loved!

When i read these memories, i feel a great love for you all. Like for the boy who ran off into the woods because the teacher was getting married.... And then i remind myself what vile bitches you all grew up to be.

Oh we had movies in the lunchroom when we couldn’t go outside. They projected “Our Gang” and Laurel and Hardy movies onto the cinder block walls. Usually it was too loud with rowdy kids to hear the audio.

It must have been second or third grade when we had a music teacher come into our classroom a couple of times a week. I remember she would ask Who wants to put the lines on the board? (She may have said it differently but, you know, like the lines on sheet music where the notes are written. I loved getting picked to make the lines with that weird wire contraption that had five little holders for five pieces of chalk.

Does anyone else know what I’m talking about?

I'm the peed himself fella.

It was a learning lesson. I can't just unzipp and whip it out. I must unbutton too. High waist.

No more dribbles!

[quote] Does anyone else know what I’m talking about?

Yes, I remember those chalk contraptions that drew the music staff.

During a break I asked my 3rd grade teacher how much she got paid. She told me, "You don't ask people how much they get paid." I felt embarrassed and the other kids around were just grinning at me.

This poster from the 1970s which was popular among teachers who were also girls' P.E. teachers.

[quote] My first lunchbox. Couldn't be a first-grader without one.

Oh man, I was such a lunchbox queen. Nothing I loved more at the beginning of the school year than to go to the store and spend an hour poring over the selection of lunchboxes to decide which was the perfect one to represent me. And it had to be metal, NOT plastic. My mother made the mistake one year of telling me I could use the same lunchbox two years in a row. The first week of school that year I "lost" it by throwing it into an open field on my walk home. She tried to force me into using brown paper bags but I was not having it.

I remember every lunchbox I had. Sigmund & The Sea Monsters, Peanuts, The Hardy Boys Mysteries, Star Wars, Superman The Movie, and my final one, Mork & Mindy. The Aladdin lunchboxes were better (IMO) than the Thermos brand ones because the Aladdins had bumpy, raised pictures on the front and back, where the Thermos brand were all smooth.

I remember getting ready to start the 7th grade and mentioning to a friend that I was going to pick out my lunchbox and he told me that lunchboxes were for babies and if I didn't want to get made fun of, I should start brown bagging it. I was so disappointed, but I abandoned my ritual.

I have a couple of lunchboxes on display in the bar area of my home- Welcome Back, Kotter and The Partridge Family. Both gifts from friends who know how much love and nostalgia I hold for them.

R101, I showed up on the first day of 6th grade with a lunchbox, and was humiliated to have not gotten the memo that lunch boxes were OUT. I was pretty much the only boy in my class carrying one that day. It was so dumb to shove everything in a brown bag, but by then my school had a cafeteria so I just bought lunch most days.

I remember my lunchboxes, too! My first was a big yellow plastic thing that was supposed to be shaped like Snoopy’s dog house. Then Scooby Doo, Super Friends/DC, Hanna Barbera characters, Marvel superheroes, and this one I took for ONE DAY in sixth grade. It was a more “mature” one I had selected, a red and gold plaid box.

Of course, this was the lunch box I WANTED.

In sixth grade, we had a older man math teacher whose initials were H.P. A lot of the guys would just call him “HP” behind his back. One day I was in a small study group with a couple of the more “worldly” guys, and one of them asked me if I knew why they REALLY called him HP. Clueless me had no idea, and then he told me it stood for “Horse Peter!!” I *still* didn’t get it until he nodded his head toward the teacher and cast his eyes downward…it had never occurred to me to look at this man’s junk area! Lo and behold, this man had a veritable third leg snaking down the leg of his polyester pants. It was long and thick. I don’t know how I’d never noticed it—there was no hiding that thing!!

I was so innocent and naive then. But by the end of 6th grade, I’d learned A LOT.

This is not a weird memory, but a nice one.

In fourth grade, our teacher—an older woman named Mrs. Walsh—walked our whole class to the local savings bank branch and gave everyone $1 to open a passbook savings account. Such a generous and smart thing to do. I used that account for years to save money. I loved her and used to go to school early in the morning to help her with the filmstrip library from where teachers would request filmstrips for use in class.

Have you ever talked or sang into a fan to hear how weird your voice sounds?

One day in gym class, a boy was yelling into a large rotating fan, then a teacher forcibly yanked the kid away from the fan. It happened around third grade, and I remember witnessing it and thinking, "What the hell?"

I also remember three boys named Matthew in my kindergarten class. I still remember their last names 30 (!) years later.

5th grade a kid in my class asked the teacher if she was pregnant. She wasn't, I don't think he ever asked anyone that question again.

[quote] My first was a big yellow plastic thing that was supposed to be shaped like Snoopy’s dog house.

Yes! My mom tried to talk me into that one because she hated how the metal boxes would clang, get chipped and then rust, but I was not having any of it.

And funny, I was going to post the same thing about the Charlie's Angels lunchbox!

In 4th grade, Sr. Collette would not under any circumstances allow kids to use the bathroom until recess. Shelley Donovan, the hippy kid in class (the only kid in my class who got lice) really had to go, but Sr. Collette wouldn't budge. Soon a waterfall of pee began to cascade down from her seat onto Fernando P's shoes. I had a birdseye seat right next to them.

Sex education day! We were all excited but had no idea what to expect.

The girls were taken by a woman teacher to another classroom while we boys stayed behind with Mr. Howard, who had set up a filmstrip.

In cartoon form, we learned about Joey, who was starting to sprout hair on his chest, under his arms, and down there. One day in the shower his penis became erect! This was normal and natural and a part of growing up. Sometimes he would have nocturnal emissions or "wet dreams," and this did not mean he was wetting the bed. On and on it went.

We compared notes with the girls at recess. They got an actual film that was mostly concerned with how to apply a "sanitary pad." In retrospect, it was probably financed and sent to schools by Kotex or Modess.

Whats wrong with that? Would you prefer they all stay home in the back yard menses hut?

[quote] We compared notes with the girls at recess. They got an actual film that was mostly concerned with how to apply a "sanitary pad." In retrospect, it was probably financed and sent to schools by Kotex or Modess.

How dare they! Not all women have periods!

[quote]I know two legit billionaires who send their kids to public schools for elementary. Of course they’re excellent, safe well-funded schools in the wealthiest zip codes.

Get her!

I think during lunch break if you needed to use the restroom, you had to ask the school secretary first and she could be a real bitch about it. I don't think there was a single time I asked where she didn't question whether I had some sort of bladder problem.

Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bang bang Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bang bang Doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh

How big and so mature those sixth-graders seemed.

Every once in awhile we would have school assemblies in the auditorium, consisting of physical and dance exercises to keep us fit. One year, our dance instructor taught us how to do The Hustle, which was all the rage that year.

Our music teacher Mrs Blacka was an impeccably dressed woman who always wore high heels. One day, while we were singing and she was in front of the class doing her Curwen/Solfege hand signals, she took a step back, lost her footing, and fell on her back. She screamed in pain as her kneecap ended up behind her leg. Most of us were were horrified, but some of the jerk kids laughed at her mishap. The teachers next door came to her aid and we were sent back to our regular classrooms.

I was in second grade. This girl Tammy, maybe a grade ahead of me, went with some of the boys in the woods behind the school and exposed herself, and I think I remember something else happening, with the boys touching her, but I dont exactly remember.

It was the talk of the playground for a while. One day, there was a class trip that my mother went on. One of the other mothers mentioned "that terrible incident" to my mother. I was mortified because I didn't want my mom to know about it, even though I wasn't involved.

I had terrible organization problems as a little kid. It was bad. My desk was always messy. My fourth grade teacher, Miss Sacks, would see how messy my desk was and dump it on the floor. Once she FREAKED, she dumped my desk, and took my chair that had books and papers under it, and threw it across the room. I remember her eyes being wild for a few seconds there.

I didn't really care that much. But they REALLY should have gotten me professional help, because that problem haunted me fir years and years.

R119 I’m guessing Miss Sacks wasn’t voted “Teacher of the Year.”

My fourth grade teacher was well-known as the meanest teacher in the school. She didn’t speak—she yelled. She used a reading comprehension system in which each day each student read a different article, answer questions about it, check how many questions they got correct, add today’s score to their daily chart, and then go up to the teacher to show her the results. The teacher was constantly yelling at me because my daily scores went up and down so much. When I’d had enough, I simply gave myself a perfect score each day, and that shut the teacher up. By the way, I’m now a politician.

When all students congregated in the gym for Santa and the Easter Bunny to give each student a big piece of candy it was a good day. Also, the Bazaar which was held in the gym each year. In retrospect, this was consumer training. Spend! Buy! Consume!

One day one of my teacher's told the class that he was not going to be there the next day and that we would have a substitute teacher. Turns out the the substitute teacher just so happens to someone that my grandmother knew and was friends with.

wow...

R123! It was a CONSPIRACY, bruh!

My 7th grade teacher wore these enormous bell bottoms in bright yellow. She would sit on a desk with her feet on the chair and wrap the bottoms around her calves. One day while doing this, she told our class that black people could not afford to buy a house, so they bought a Cadillac instead. Even as a youngster, I must have known this was a wildly inappropriate thing to say because she and her yellow bell bottoms are burned into my brain.

We had a teacher in our grade school named Mrs. Peña, who was also a senior officer or administrator and wielded a lot of power. She had long, salt & pepper Farrah Fawcett hairdo, and had a good figure that she showed off in tight blouses, a-line skirts, and high heels that made her walk with a wiggle. Despite her older age, I thought she was the prettiest teacher and reminded me of Connie Stevens. But she was also a cunt Supreme, had a terrible temper, and everybody was afraid of her.

One day, while stationed at the staff and faculty line (I worked in the cafeteria), I was serving Mrs. Peña her lunch, when our male substitute teacher came up behind her and started flirting with her. She giggled like a school girl and flirted back. After she left for the faculty lunch room, Mr. Smooth asked one of the lunch ladies, "Who was that pretty lady?" It was a side of Mrs. Peña I had never seen. Before then, I had never really given much tought to our teachers having a romantic life.

[quote]a-line skirts

I meant pencil skirts.

The pee, poop, and puke stories made me remember a few of my own.

• In first grade, we used to go to the restroom at an assigned time each day. (I never pooped at school because I lived a couple of blocks away and I either went first thing in the morning or held it until I got home.) Usually I was able to snag a toilet to myself, but one time I had to share one with a boy named Steven, who missed the bowl and peed all over the front of my nice new tan corduroy bell bottoms. (It was 1973.) Years later, Steven ended up at my college. I recognized him at a party after he introduced himself and told me we had gone to elementary school together. Outwardly I was friendly, but inwardly I was thinking, "You pissed on me in first grade, you nasty fuck!"

• Also in first grade, my main academic rival, a girl named Linda, projectile-vomited all over herself and they had to bring the sawdust. I Googled her not long ago, and she's a US circuit judge.

• When my sister was in first grade, a girl in her class had shit herself and it fell out one of her pants legs while they were doing the Hokey Pokey. Another kid saw it and threw up.

The biggest story and most memorable thing from the field trip was always which kid threw up and where. One of the big elementary field trips was to go to Gettysburg to see the miniature horses! Everything that’s there in Gettysburg and we go to see miniature horses.

We did go back to Gettysburg in 4th grade when we studied it and that’s when I learned that depending on which legs the horse statue had up or was standing on would tell you if the person on him was wounded, died or unscathed during the battle. We also got to see the dinosaur rock foot imprints at Devil’s Den.

[quote]The pee, poop, and puke stories made me remember a few of my own.

Yes, it reminded me of when I was in kindergarten, this girl threw up her lunch, and the smell triggered a chain reaction and several other kids, including myself, threw up one after the other.

Good Lord, I never realized all the shit and vomit teachers have to deal with. You’ll are saints!

Fuckin R40, man! Cunting since 1987...

We would have cake walks as fundraisers at our elementary school in rural Nova Scotia, this was in the mid-late 80s-early 90s. All the kids' mothers would bake cakes then the kids would go to the gym and pay to play a game sort of like musical chairs to win a cake. I won a few good cakes.

In fourth grade, we switched classrooms for the first time. Most of our day with with one teacher, but we had math and social studies across the hall with the other fourth grade teacher. The desks in the other room were the ones with a tilted desk that you lifted up to store stuff inside, and the chair was attached to a steel base to the desk. And the chair swiveled. I was an inveterate swiveler.

One afternoon, I was swiveling back and forth and in an instant my sharp pencil rolled down the desk and I ended up jamming it into my thigh about three inches, through my pants. The girl next to me let out a scream before I knew what had happened. The teacher came back and started yelling at me for swiveling around all the time. Eventually the school secretary showed up (she was a neighbor), and I leaned on her and hobbled to the office with her. Both my parents were at work, so she called the hospital and asked them what she should do.

She pulled the pencil out, wrapped it in tissues, and I took it home with me. I walked home and waited for my mom to get home. She poured hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which, curiously, did not bleed very much, then she heavily dabbed Merthiolate on it. I do not recall ever seeing a doctor or nurse about it, but I still (47 years on) have a small, round scar with a distinct black spot in the center, on my left thigh.

R135 Luckily all those lead poisoning stories from pencils were myths and it was graphite anyways.

R136 Indeed, it was graphite. I was a pencil snob -- only #2 Dixon Ticonderogas for me!

I was in a 1st/2nd grade combination class. One of my classmates was a curly-haired girl named Monique Paradise.

Not long after the school year started, Monique stopped showing up to class. Every day the teacher would take role and call her name, and she was never there.

There was this song that we used to sing in class, and somebody was always chosen to "act out" the song. It was a faux-Asian ditty that would be cancelled today as cultural appropriation, and I can still remember the melody and the words:

[quote] School is out as the sun goes down

[quote] Books in my bag, I go through the town

[quote] Here are my parents who smile at me

[quote] I make a nice low bow like this, you see.

I don't remember exactly what the person chosen actually had to do, other than bow at the end of the song, but I seem to remember it was a big deal if you got picked to do it.

So one day, about halfway through the morning, all of a sudden who comes into the class but little Monique Paradise. Her mother brought her in for a brief visit.

The teacher decided to sing the "school is out" song, and chose Monique to be the one to act it out. She seemed really happy and had a big smile on her face as she went through the "choreography", such as it was. And then, just as suddenly as she came, she was gone.

Not long after, the teacher announced that she had some bad news. She called on one of the girls in the class who was Monique's friend, to tell us.

I still remember the exact words she said: "Monique died last Saturday".

Nowadays, they would probably offer counseling and therapy for all the kids in the class, but back then, it was just "she's dead" and everybody was expected to move on. And we did. I don't remember anybody ever talking about her again, all throughout the rest of our school years. At some point, as an adult, the memory of her popped into my brain, and it's never left since.

I'm surprised at how often throughout the years I think of Monique Paradise. I don't remember if I ever even spoke to her, but her death impacted me in a way I can't really explain. It's like she lived such a short life, and I feel some sort of weird responsibility to keep her memory alive, as one of the few people who (kind of) knew her.

I'm the guy upthread who was in the gifted child classroom. Reading about 4th grade teachers reminded me of this. I started the GC program in 4th grade and was in it for two years in my elementary school. The first year, my 4th grade teacher was Mrs. Baker, a heavyset black woman, and my gifted child teacher was Miss Brown, a young white woman with a very tight Barbra Streisand perm. My mother, who could never keep names straight her entire life, would constantly refer to Mrs Baker as Mrs. Brown and vice versa, and I was mortified because I was certain Mrs. Baker would think we were horrible racists who saw a black woman and naturally assumed she must be named Mrs. Brown. I would drill my mother endlessly in the car on the two days that year they held parent-teacher conferences- Miss Brown: White, Mrs. Baker: Black. My mother came home that night from the conferences and I asked- How'd you do?

She'd called Mrs. Baker Mrs. Black and Miss Brown Miss White.

[quote] One day one of my teacher's told the class that he was not going to be there the next day and that we would have a substitute teacher. Turns out the the substitute teacher just so happens to someone that my grandmother knew and was friends with.

Did she finger bang you?

I remember one of our religion books defined marriage as a "union between two people". My teacher, Mr. Hayes(a culchie), made us cross it out using a pen and amend it to read "between a man and woman".

This would have been in the mid-nineties, only two or three years after Ireland decriminalised homosexuality.

My first grade teacher was a mean old bitch. She would routinely grab children, sink her long red nails in their arm and violently shave them.

I was terrified of her.

She was obsessed with the movie ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and talked about it all the time

Until the explanation, I thought you meant "cultie," and typoed, r141. Similar with overlap. In Spanish, the word is "paleto."

What percentage of your teachers knew you were gay?

Lol r125

My 5th grade science teacher was gay but it was something that was left unsaid. I thought one of my second grade teacher's was a lesbian until she later on start mentioning a husband and then got the school to giver her permission to allow her to take her class to the farm she and her husband owned.

I’ve already contributed a few, but I’m enjoying these so I’m going to add another, and take it to another level. I don’t think anyone as of yet mention the all important school photo day where you would have your individual photo, but there was also the class photo. You would be lined up in size order with the shortest kids in the front row who were seated in chairs, and then a group behind them standing, and then maybe one or two other rows perhaps on low risers behind them and the teacher standing off to one side.

Down front was sign with the press in letters and numbers that announced the teacher’s name and the grade. I know it was always scandalous if one of the short kids sitting in the front row was wearing sneakers (or poorly dressed) because it would mess up the whole picture, at least to the fussy standards of Gay boys or pretentious mothers. Well one year there was a girl in my class who had the brightest firecracker red hair and though not Jewish (not sure my town even had a synagogue), but what best can be described in 1970s terms as a Jewfro. To say it was quite noticeable was an understatement. Everyone of my family would look at the picture and immediately exclaim “Who is that red headed girl with the big hair???” And I would answer “Oh, that’s Teri Furr!” Talk of Teri Furr became ubiquitous in my house that year as she was the one everyone remembered and few even hinted at had “ruined the class picture!”

Decades later I’m living in New York, going to shows, and reading my Playbill throughly, as one does, and who shows up in the cast of (at that time Linda Lavin helmed production of) Gypsy, but good ole Teri Furr! She sang, she danced, she stripped, thought I don’t think she was one of the “gimmick girls.” All in all quite outstanding, especially up against the lack luster Linda Lavin, who was no Tyne Daly. No, I didn’t go see her at the stage door, I always shunned that behavior. Nor did I even look her up, I remembered her, but there was a reason, I had no expectations she remembered me. But one day, decades later and how I don’t remember I stumbled upon this Playbill obituary of her and found what a remarkable life she lived and that we had even at one point lived in the same New Jersey town for awhile too.

I think ultimately she the most almost famous person from my grade and my elementary school. Brett Michaels, the guy who wrote the Se7en screenplay and a Major League Baseball player that murdered his dog were a few years older or younger then me, so they are much more famous, but Teri Furr was a standout even back in my elementary school days.

Interesting R146 we didn't do the class photo that way. Every student had an individual "school picture" taken every year (and you would order various packages of prints to give to friends, family, grandparents, etc.). The class pic was just a montage of all those individual pics with a pic of the teacher in the middle of the page.

I posted earlier about looking at my 2nd grade class picture decades later and realizing that I was the only white kid in the entire class. I didn't even realize it when I was a kid because it was irrelevant to me. I never thought of people as being classified by race.

I see the link didn’t work at R146, I’ll try again.

Maybe this link will work, R146

R149 Thanks, don’t know why it didn’t work for me (twice)?

We had both class and individual pictures. I would end having to wear whatever my mother or grandmother wanted me to wear that day.

One day I always hated was the annual Newspaper Day.

Anyone else have this?

Basically that morning you were given the Sunday paper (complete with sale papers) and each class you studied a different section of the paper and did various activities with/in it. By the end of the day the paper was a total mess, my fingers were stained with ink, etc... Ugh I loathed newspaper day.

In 2nd grade our class received "Friends From Germany" in the forms of two twin sisters named Heike & Silke. This was around the era of Time-Life Books airing that book set commercial about WW2 that always started out as, "Hitler. Himmler. Goering and Goebbels." So I asked them if their parents were friends with those 4 Nazis.

Did anyone else have a giant traffic light in their cafeteria that measured sound? Green meant talk freely, yellow would keep that you were a little too loud and rowdy and better quiet down so it went back to green. When red let out a loud screech, you had to be dead silent til green returned.

I remember The Witch Doctor, R115.

Did anyone else have one of these as your school portrait? Mine turned out like shit because I blinked when the "looking off to the side" shot was taken. As a result, my eyes were closed and I looked dead. My mom was so mad.

In sixth grade, they would herd the whole damn school into the cafeteria/auditorium on Friday afternoons to sing songs. It was a mix of folk songs and popular songs of the day (mid 1970s)... crap like Hang down your head Tom Dooley and the Carpenters (Sing, sing a song...). Lyrics were displayed from an overhead projector onto a big screen. Same teacher on the piano, same playlist every freaking week.

I don't recall how long this went on for, but it seemed like hours.

Only later did I realize this was all a scheme to give teachers a break from teaching.

Probably let them check off some mandated musical education requirement, too. Bastards!

We had an actual singing class in 7th grade. Daily.

I remember this old, retired teacher coming in to teach us one day. Troublesome kids always try to take advantage of these situations because they're hoping that their reputation doesn't precede them with the substitute teacher. Anyway, this girl claimed to be sick and wanted to be excused from the classwork or something. A few minutes later, the old woman gives me a note, saying, "Take this to Mrs. Hennessy", another teacher at the school. I walked to Mrs. Hennessy's room but, en route, hid in a corner and read the note, which she'd folded up a few times. It said, "Jane McCarthy says she is sick. Should I trust her?"

It's always stayed with me because it was a reminder that teachers and other adults did see me as a Goody Two-Shoes but that I had an inchoate desire to push back against that.

R4 = Dawn Weiner

.

6th grade I had a substitute teacher who basically told the class that she didn't give a fuck about your feelings, the principal, vice principals, school board or your parents and that you were going to do whatever the fuck she tells you to do.

I remember a weird memory. Our elderly teacher Mrs Sakamoto had to retire early because she fell at home and couldn’t get up. In her place we got a fresh out of college substitute for the last few months of the year named Mr Bennett. He wore gym type shorts with office type shirts and nike shoes, which I knew was tacky even as a child. He wasn’t attractive to me back then but he wasn’t ugly either, he was just a regular looking stocky white guy. He had a habit of standing behind the student’s chairs and watching while we did classwork ,especially during art. One day I grabbed my drawing and turned to show it off and I hadn’t noticed Mr. Bennett was already behind me (admiring my art ) and I hit his junk with my elbow really hard which made him kneel down and do a Tim Tebow pose. I could tell from his face and the noises he was making that I got him good. He had to go sit at his desk and it looked like he wanted to cry.

R75 = a budding Miss Rhonda Young, live on the scene in this bitch

We moved to an area of high growth in the mid 70s, and the public schools were overcrowded. For Kindergarten, I was sent to a local Catholic orphanage which the school district arranged as an annex. I didn’t get to ride the regular bus, they sent the short bus for us annex kids. At the orphanage, the classroom was completely segregated. There was no interaction with the orphanage kids who we could clearly see. Even the playground areas were segregated, and we were told we weren’t allowed to play with the orphanage kids, and we had our own designated time to go outside. I remember being so perplexed about the entire situation. The next year, I went to the local elementary school on the typical bus, but the following year for second grade, my parents banished me to Catholic school where I stayed with the nasty nuns. It was a lot of change over three years.

Later on in life, I had to question my time in Kindergarten at the orphanage a few times as it seemed too bizarre to be real. My parents validated it really happened. I often wonder how the kids at the orphanage felt.

[quote] I remember the yellow scrambled eggs contrasting vividly against the blue.

Ukrainian?

The art teacher in my grade school was young with black hair and alabaster skin and beautiful hands with very black hair on the knuckles. I was so in love with him, it almost made me physically ill.

the district was absolute shit but most of the teachers were cool.

k & 1st grade teacher and aide were incredible women that exemplified the reasons someone might want to go into teaching. no weird memories about them, other than perhaps finding out later that many of my classmates (and I) had stayed in contact with them for years.

2nd grade teacher regularly taught us to cook...

3rd grade teacher was a cousin to Mihaly Meszaros. but I spent most of the school year on home study

4th was a former dinner theatre actress and lounge singer. she frequently Julie Andrew'd the class lessons.

5th was an asshole that singled out the outcasts for abuse. A few of us rebelled.. mostly just getting up and walking out whenever started going off about whatever crawled up his ass that morning. And then one day, he placed another kid and myself in an enclosed room and locked us in ... where we climbed into the rafters and hid out all day. police were called, and, myself and the other kid were sent to new schools shortly thereafter..

6th - I was a townie going to a boarding school for the music and arts. the girls at that school were obsessed with trying to put their hands in my pockets and for obvious reasons, I wasn't into it... while the boys invited me to play football - I just didn't realize it was tag football and apparently that was a big faux pas or maybe it was just being a townie.

Our music teacher, on very rare and wonderful occasions would play the theme from “Jaws” on his cello, if we were really well-behaved and if we begged enough. Man, we looooved that.

I keep thinking that r142 and his classmates must have had lots of nicks and cuts from all that violent shaving.

@R161 - 🤣😂🤣😂

About once a month in grade school we would have a movie Friday. Somehow the nuns got a hold of movies, herded the entire school into a basement auditorium under the church and ran movies. Of course there was always a break when the reel finished and the next reel was loaded, as there was only one projector. Most of the films were religious themed; Quo Vadis, King of Kings, etc. The most memorable for me was MGM’s Boys Town. I know this turned me gay. I wanted to go live in Boys Town with Mickey Rooney, Bobs Watson, and all those other hunky MGM boys from the 1930s.

I was so in love with my 2nd grade teacher. She was young and pretty, and so good to me. She left after that year to go to a bigger school. When I was in 3rd grade, I received a wedding invitation, addressed just to me, for her upcoming wedding. I felt so grown up. My parents took me, and I was the only student she had invited. I remember feeling really proud and special to be there. It was my first wedding.

After she got married, they moved several states away, but she kept in touch with me all the way up to high school. She would send me cards and letters of encouragement, and even helped me get my college scholarship. We lost touch for decades, but about 10 years ago, after her husband died, she moved to my city to be with her daughter. We connected on Facebook. We didn’t become talk-every-day friends, but it was nice reconnecting. My partner and I ran into her and her daughter one day, and she started crying when I hugged her after introducing her to him as the best teacher I ever had, which made me cry. I know, MARY!

We never saw each other again, but would sort of “talk” on Facebook occasionally. About 4 years ago, I got a Facebook message from her, but it was really her daughter, wanting to let me know that her mom had gotten really sick suddenly, and had passed away. She wanted me to know how fond her mother was of me, and that I really was her favorite student.

I think in 2nd grade she pegged me as a little gayling and wanted to give me that extra support and attention since she knew there was potential there for my life to be pretty shitty growing up gay in a little hick town. She was just a very special lady, and I consider myself very lucky that she cared about me.

I know, not very “weird” but it all came back to me this morning after reading through this thread.

It sounds like Teri Furr was a really great person.

R170, I teared up reading your post. I'm so glad that you had someone like her in your life.

There was one year - maybe 1982? during which our area had an infestation of gypsy moth caterpillars. They would drop out of the trees where they had built impenetrable nests of gauzy silk. Kids would spend entire recesses stomping them, making piles of them, devising cruel ways to kill them. Even the girls.

2nd grade a field trip to the zoo. There was a cage of chimps and kids were all around it. Our class was probably 3 or 4 classes away from the cage. 50 ft? Hard to judge but we were not close.

The chimps were crazy. I was thinking how horrible it must be for them caged up and all the gawkers

Then one stops acting crazy and becomes still. It stared at me, way in the back. We made eye contact and it spit.

The spit hit me in the eye.

No shit.

R173 Political Correctness has caught up with the racially slanderous name of Gypsy Moth, they are now known as the Spongy Moth. I guess they didn’t consider the Roma Moth or Traveller Moth.

My elementary school was also made up of pods with four classes in one big room. The fifth grade room had a claw foot bathtub in the center, which was filled with blankets and pillows. We had special reading hours when we chose our own books to read (I remember Watership Down in particular), and someone always got to lie in the bathtub and read for an hour.

In addition to the pod setup, the walls in the hallways were carpeted from the floor to about three feet up the wall. Of course we constantly ran our fingers along the walls no matter how many times we were told not to. I can only imagine how filthy that carpet got.

We had our own Scut Farkus, a mean kid who constantly bullied everybody. By the third grade, his teacher had had enough. She yanked him from his chair, made him face the chalkboard, and beat him with a paddle so many times you could hear his belt buckle hit the chalk tray over and over again. The whole pod went quiet as we watched in awe.

At the end of each year, we had what was called Play Day. We’d walk as classes up the hill to the park and participate in races like egg and spoon, sack race, three-legged race, etc., and winners went home with blue, red or white ribbons. The weird part was, under one of the shelters were tables set up with boxes and boxes of every kind of candy you can imagine. I remember Pixy Stix were a big thing. We all got wired on sugar just before they sent us home on busses. I’m sure the bus drivers hated Play Day.

My third grade teacher hated me for some reason. I was a very shy child and well behaved so I have no idea why she fixated on me to bully. We once were given a homework assignment to draw pictures of our pets.

The next day after my teacher had looked through all the drawings she forced me to stand in front of the whole class and “admit” that my parents or older sibling had actually done my drawings. After denying it a few times in tears she still wouldn’t let me sit down so I lied and said my dad had done the drawings for me.

I did later tell my parents but nothing ever happened. Can’t imagine an incident like that occurring in a school today.

A girl in my fifth grade class demanded I give her my only popsicle coupon for a french kiss I didn't even want. I was so upset and cried to the teacher.

Wow, a lot of you were Guinea pigs in the Open School Education movement, which was basically abandoned within one generation.

Yes r154 - we took those pictures in the 4th grade (mid-90s). My brother mocked my pic for years…YEARS! I have sleepy eyes and the side-view picture looked like I was about to pass out and he thought that was hilarious. 🙄

Also, r170 - that made me a little emotional. I’m glad you had her in your life.

Denise showed me her twat during nap time in 1st grade. And wanted me to finger her.

I didn't but she was persistent.

Now, you have to wonder.

A teacher took me out into the hall to tell me I was always an instigator. I told her I didn’t know what that meant. When she told me, I was very flattered but I don’t think that was the reaction she was looking for.

R170 Thank you for sharing that lovely memory.

To everyone else: I'm enjoying your memories too. I've looked forward to reading this thread all weekend.

Kindergarten Mid 60s

A little boy in my class told me his mother was a stripper called Hope Diamond. It was true.

Imagine of Terri had married a man by the name of Berger...

Her obit would have read TERRI FURR-BERGER!

My mother was a teacher and eventually ended up teaching in the same elementary school I had gone to, luckily years after I was student. She taught with many of my former teachers, one of whom was Mrs. Creavy my first grade teacher. It was then that she learned that she was an inexorable snob and how in particular she would kiss up to the children of the more wealthy families and brag about holiday and end of year gifts she would get from them. She also had a thing for very attractive children and they got extra attention and praise. When I was an adult she shared this with me reminding me I was not one of her favorites and we were poor, letting the other unsaid factor factor hanging in the air.

[italic]Matilda[/italic] was released the summer before fourth grade, and our P.E. teacher looked like a younger Miss Trunchbull. Fortunately, our teacher was a lot nicer than Trunchbull.

In second grade, I had a classmate named Ben who I assumed didn't like me because I'm a girl, and I was socially awkward. On the last day of school, Ben and I were sitting with another boy, and the two of them argued if boys and girls could be friends. Ben pointed at me and said, "she's a girl, and we're friends!" I was surprised and asked him, "we are!?" And Ben said, "yeah!" Go figure!

R170, I wish there were more teachers like yours. She seemed like a kind soul.

R185 I'm ashamed to admit that I laughed. Terri was a pretty woman.

[quote]A little boy in my class told me his mother was a stripper called Hope Diamond. It was true.

Please welcome to the stage ...

[quote] Oh man, I was such a lunchbox queen.

R101, we would have been great friends. I loved lunchboxes. And I even told some kids that their lunchbox didn’t fit their personality. I lived for lunchboxes.

[quote] A teacher took me out into the hall to tell me I was always an instigator. I told her I didn’t know what that meant. When she told me, I was very flattered but I don’t think that was the reaction she was looking for.

This is a little later on- middle school- but I remember in 7th grade we had a somewhat impaired student in our class. I can't remember his name, or what his particular affliction was, but he had motor skill issues, walked very funny, and had a super high voice (like High Pitch Eric from the Stern show). He used to get made fun of a ton, and I felt bad for him, but it was easy to make him scream, so being kids, we couldn't help ourselves.

I remember one time I found a long, jagged piece of wood peeling off the back of a chair in class. It looked like a dagger. I broke it off, dropped to the floor, crawled on my belly like a sniper until I got behind his desk, then I popped up and held the wood to his throat like I was going to kidnap him. He screamed like a woman. My teacher turned around and shouted at me- "Ooh, you brazen thing!" and it struck me so oddly (both the phrase and the way she said it), that I burst out laughing. For some reason, she actually really liked me (I was a good student and behaved most of the time, and I would actually have intelligent - for my age- conversations with her) so I didn't get in any trouble, which is kind of shocking considering I pretty much performed the equivalent of pulling a knife on a student and threatening him with it.

[quote] Mrs. Creavy my first grade teacher. It was then that she learned that she was an inexorable snob and how in particular she would kiss up to the children of the more wealthy families

My third grade teacher was like that. One day, my mother was talking to another mother at the public library and the other mother said she needed to get going because she had invited the third grade teacher over for afternoon tea (we’re all Americans by the way). I felt sorry for my mother because I realized that she not only didn’t know how to play the game, she didn’t even know there was a game being played. She began asking other mothers and found out they would come in and help the teacher (one came in and made tacos when we were studying Spanish words) another bought a set of books for the class that the teacher recommended.

I remember photo day because they would give us a comb. Unfortunately they wouldn't let us go to the restroom to look into a mirror. My 4th and 5th grade pictures (individual not class type) make me look as if I had stuck my finger in a electric socket........

R119 That happened to a kid in my class, too. The other thing was, his mother sent a bib for him to wear when he was eating, a big bib that was sewn to look like a pig and had "Oink oink!" written on it. He had to wear it while eating lunch at his desk (which is how we used to eat lunch. All we got was free milk, we had to bring our lunches. The point was, I guess the teacher had told the mom he was a sloppy eater.

...close parentheses.)

Damn. I would have kicked my mom in the cuntbone if she'd given me a bib like that.

The teacher - who was a nice lady - should never have agreed to do it.

I remember seeing a guy who later became my best friend (and still is a friend) swishing up to the pencil sharpener all the time. In first grade. Swinging his little butt. I didn't know what gay was, but I knew that was very feminine, and, to be honest, I was a little repulsed by it. he ended up being a straight-acting gay no one really suspected was gay (in high school, for ex).

Great thread OP and everyone who's contributed. It's funny how a teacher can have so great an influence on you that you remember details and facts that few others around you at the time can recall with such clarity, and even more so that here I am recalling things that happened in my third grade class 50 years ago as though they happened this morning...

Her name was Sylvia Anderson, and she was a cunt. (I only use that word here on DL, with the only exception, out loud, was upon bumping into Mrs. Anderson in the grocery store in my late teens, and unfortunately, I was with my mother.) That cunt tried to ruin my life. It's the only way to describe how she treated me. It was the worst year of my life, and in retrospect, that's saying something.

My mother pulled strings and insisted that I be in Mrs. Anderson's class after my brother, who she adored and he adored her. It started the first day of class when she made us all stand up and introduce ourselves... to the children we'd been going to school with, at that point, for 3 years. We were supposed to say our name, our age, and what we hoped to get out of the third grade. Most of the students said exactly what you'd expect them to say on the last question, like "learn" or "have fun" or "go to recess". When it came to me, she made a big deal about how she loved my brother and he was such a good student that she had high expectations for me, and then said, and I remember as clearly as anything anyone ever said to me: "but you'll probably let me down." I was so flummoxed from her saying that that all I could do was stand there. She finally said "what's your name?" which made the class giggle. Then she said "and how old are you" and I replied "nine." And then she followed up with "what do you hope to get out of the third grade" and all I could think of was "to not be compared to my brother" which caused the class to explode in laughter and really upset Mrs. Anderson, so much so that she felt compelled to call my mother that evening and tell her if I didn't "straighten up" she'd be forced to transfer me to another class. Oh, how I wish. The boom came down, and it came down hard.

She was a horrible teacher. She was obsessed with penmanship and American history. She intertwined the two and came up with the idea that, for extra credit, we would put together "Americanism books" which mostly consisted of patriotic coloring book pages which we had to mount to construction paper and hand write a title and short description of the drawing after coloring it. I could never do it right. Either I chose the wrong colors for the picture, or my handwriting was so bad she couldn't read it, or I'd glued the picture off center or tilted, and so she never, and I mean not once, gave me an extra credit point.

She made a show of it; she kept a scoreboard of your extra credit points on an easel next to her desk, and I was always last on the list with a big zero next to my name. Near the end of the school year, when things had gotten so bad that I was having emotional problems and the school had brought in a counselor that I had to see twice a week, Mrs. Anderson decided to post previous year's results to "motivate" us, and of course... yes, the year she pulled from was from 4 years prior, with my brother's name at the top of the list with a perfect score: a point for every of the 180 school days in the year. It was devastating. Mrs. Anderson proceeded to announce to the class that I must have been adopted because she "just couldn't imagine how," and I quote, "with greatness like [my brother] in the family, could [I] have turned out such a rotten egg."

I begged the counselor to transfer me to another class. I begged my mother. I begged anyone who would listen to me; the school nurse, the principal who lived down the street from us, the school janitor. To no avail. I was stuck in her class for the duration and told to try harder.

She had a bizarre rule that if you showed up in the morning or after recess with wet pant legs — which devolved into just having snow stuck to your cuffs — she forced you to go into the little bathroom between the classrooms (which she refused to let anyone use for their intended purpose) and, if you were female, put on boy's pajamas, and if you were male, you had to put on girl's pajamas — which in the mid 70s were still pretty much miniature night gowns — and wear them for the rest of the day. It happened to me once, and from then on I was careful to not get wet and if I did, I would hide until either my pants dried or someone found me and took me to the principal's office, which at least kept me out of Mrs. Anderson's class. A couple of times he drove me home to change and bring me back to school dry enough to pass her "test". The odd thing was that he, and no one in the school, at least no one in a position of authority, thought this was wrong.

I could go on for pages about this cunt and the horrible things she did to me. To this day, I do not understand what made this cunt be such a cunt. Until then, I'd received good grades and was doing well in school. From the 4th grade on, I did well, got good grades, and several teachers, one of whom I credit with saving me from being held back a year, really went out of their way to help me recover from Mrs. Anderson's abuse. And it was clearly abuse. That teacher who saved me had me stay after class one day and pulled out my "permanent record" to show me what Mrs. Anderson had written about me (pretty much summed up as I would end up either dead or in prison), telling me she didn't believe it and (I'll be honest here, I've got tears in my eyes thinking about it) I was a good kid, a smart kid, and could do anything my peers could. [italic]She[/italic] could have lost her job over showing me the comments the cunt had written. [italic]She[/italic] was everything a teacher should be. She was a hero.

So there I was, just graduated from high school as the Salutatorian, with my mother in the grocery store. Mrs. Anderson walked by with the exact same hairdo, old lady clothes, odor and all, when my mother spoke up and said "Well hello Mrs. Anderson!" as though I was in for a pleasant surprise. I tried to hold my mouth as I stood there in fury at this cunt who had done everything in her power to wreck my life. She looked at me, smirked and actually said "How is your brother?" and it was all I could take. I leaned in to her and in a low, menacing voice said "You are a cunt. You have always been a cunt, You will always be a cunt. And beware, if you're ever crossing the street in front of my car, I will run you over, and I will back up and run you over again to make sure you're dead, and for that, I will be happy to go to prison, just as you wrote in my record." She tried to say something, I yelled "you are a cunt" as I turned to my visibly shaken mother and said "Make your choice, Mom. Either you stand here, defend Mrs. Anderson and lose me forever, or come with me now and don't say a word."

We left the cart full of groceries and went home.

Damn you, R170. Damn you straight to hell.

I am R129, and I was a puker too. Once again, it was first grade.

I loved school and was tied for best grades with Linda the Vomit Girl (the one who became a circuit judge). One morning I knew something wasn't right, but I didn't feel [italic]that[/italic] bad. My mother and grandmother told me I needed to stay home, but little Mary that I was, I begged them to let me go to school because I'd gotten it in my head that I would flunk out if I didn't.

Out of the blue, a wave of nausea hit me in class. I told my teacher, Miss. Lawson, that I needed to go to the boys' room so I could throw up. I ran as fast as I could, but before I could make it, I unleashed a waterfall of puke where I stood in the hall. Then I puked some more in the restroom.

My mother picked me up and took me to my pediatrician, whose office was just around the corner from the school. At first they thought it was the flu, but it turned out to be viral pneumonia. Luckily, I didn't need to be hospitalized, but I was out of school for two weeks.

For the first two or three days, I was the sickest I'd ever been in my life up to that point. On the upside, I got to watch Merv Griffin, [italic]Brady Bunch[/italic] reruns, and soaps every morning and afternoon.

[quote]6th grade: My PE teacher talking about anorexia in health and going off on this long tangent about Karen Carpenter and her angel’s voice.

Fag!

A lady told me about her experience being poor growing up and her cruel/thoughtless school teachers. For most of the Midwest winter they made all of the kids go outside for recess. She would huddle up in a corner of the school building and pull her legs in under her skirt for warmth. Her parents didn’t dress her warm enough and during the era (1950’s rural Illinois) girls mostly wore skirts or dresses to school everyday. The teachers refused to let her come inside the building until the bell rang signaling the end of recess.

Her story always stuck with me. I’m 48 yrs old and suffer with chronic anemia. I’m cold a lot as it’s a symptom of the disease. My heart broke for that little girl huddled in the corner of the school building. ♥️

R198/R199, good for you. It reminds me of that bit in Jane Eyre when she rips her cunt aunt, Mrs. Reed, a new asshole.

Our third grade teacher was a bimbo - Chrissy Snow type with bad skin and lots of makeup.

And she hated me.

I’d gotten detention with this tall, dumb mouth-breather named Scott. You know when those drunk idiots remove their shirts, cover their heads with oversized top hats that rest on their shoulders, and then draw a face on their torsos and their nipples look like eyes and their navels look like a whistling mouth?

Well, that’s what Scott’s face looked like all the time.

Anyway, we’re in detention and out of the blue, mouth-breather, saliva-sucker Scott says to her, “It looks like you’re not wearing a bra - are you not wearing a bra?”

She stopped dead in her tracks and looked somewhat mortified, though that Ho-bag’s high beams were definitely coming through that burgundy turtleneck sweater.

I blurted out, “Scott! You can’t just ask things like that!”

Then, without missing a beat, I stage-whispered to her, “Are you wearing a bra?”

I think I had gotten detention for addressing some boy as “tall, dark and boring.”

Good job, R198/9

I had a cunt, not even teacher - a substitute teacher who had taken over full time classes halfway through the year for some reason and a bunch of kids were transferred from some of their regular classes to her classes, I guess because of overflow?

Anyway, she was nasty, and condescending and got off on humiliating kids.

I wasn’t having it so I demanded to be put back into my regular science teacher’s class.

He was funny, like a quasi-scary Sean Connery type and 7 or 8 feet tall with a bushy beard. I later learned he was a huge pothead.

Anyway, apparently the counselors were surprised I wanted to transfer INTO his class, as most kids wanted to transfer out.

I liked him and I learned from him.

I didn’t realize what a big deal this was - to me, you just type in the change on a slip and your done - but it took a few days.

Before it was finalized, I saw the science teacher whose class I wanted to transfer back into, and asked what was taking so long.

I remember him ever so slightly smiling and saying, “Sometimes it’s good for you to stew and fret.”

I gave him the side eye and he chuckled and kept going.

The next day I was back in his class and when he posed the first question, he immediately called on me.

Luckily I knew the answer.

He narrowed his eyes and nodded in the affirmative.

First off I forgot to thank the OP for this thread, it’s so interesting to hear these stories.

In grade 5 I witnessed my teacher’s possible nervous breakdown. It was a particularly annoying mix of children, our class was actually known as the “bad kid” class because due to about 4 kids who had zero respect for authority (which is always sort of contagious in an environment like that) it always took forever for the teacher to obtain silence. Etc.

This teacher had always kept a heavy glass bowl on his desk containing sweets which he sometimes gave out to students who got top marks or whatever.

On the day in question the class was particularly noisy, ignoring the teacher’s requests to pipe down. He had always been an amazingly calm man with decent strategies to keep us in line, so we were all utterly shocked when on that day he suddenly grabbed the glass bowl, yelled “shut the FUCK UP!!” And threw the glass bowl with all his might into the opposite wall of the class. It shattered in a cinematic fashion. No one was seriously hurt but a few kids ended up in the nurses room with minor small pieces of glass in the back of their neck and heads.

We never saw that teacher again but as far as I know there was no legal action taken. Again, a different era. I later heard rumours that he ended up in a mental hospital but who knows!

The early 1990s FYI!

R167 Violent shaving would have been less bloody snd painful than being grabbed snd shaken with those prehistoric talons.

In kindergarten I was at the very front of the recess line. I was never, ever first because I was a slow eater. I was looking down the line and a kid named Chad had a giant string of snot hanging down his face. It made me so sick I puked up my spaghettios right there (my parents fed us garbage). It looked just like spilled spaghettios from a can. I didn’t tell the teacher her what it really was because I didn’t want to lose my place in line.

Like another posted up thread, we watched the Challenger launch live on a tv our teacher wheeled into class. I didn’t know what the liftoff was supposed to look like, so I didn’t notice anything was wrong until I saw my teacher crying. We had been studying the teacher in space lesson plans for months. I don’t know if this was nationwide, but one night kids were supposed to leave their porch lights on in honor of the teacher who died in space. My mother refused to let me because it was a waste of electricity. I was upset for days.

[quote]I leaned in to her and in a low, menacing voice said "You are a cunt. You have always been a cunt, You will always be a cunt. And beware, if you're ever crossing the street in front of my car, I will run you over, and I will back up and run you over again to make sure you're dead, and for that, I will be happy to go to prison, just as you wrote in my record." She tried to say something, I yelled "you are a cunt"

A born Datalounger!

In the mid-1970s, my elementary school was in the middle of a residential area. There was a house next door to the school, in which I was told, lived a nice man. Some kids would go visit over recess and he would give them candy. I never heard that anything bad happened there, but looking back on it now, it’s just so weird. Everyone treated it as totally normal and not something completely inappropriate.

R169 that sounds cosy and sweet. Didn't the nuns ever show the sexy peplum adjacent bible movies?

R198 did you ever murder someone?

The one custodian my elementary school had was 20-something and just happened to be a pervert. One day I saw him making out with a classmate behind a building. The classmate was 11 or 12.

a boy or a girl?

My first grade teacher pushed over my messy desk onto the floor, smacked a hat off my head, told racist jokes and choked a classmate against the wall. It’s no wonder I hated school with an introduction like that.

A girl, r215.

It wasn't until fifth grade that I had a male teacher – two of them, fact. Our primary teacher seated us alphabetically. Until fifth grade, I was always first. Then a blond boy with dirty hair moved into our town and sat in front of me. Directly behind me, a girl from a poor family, as usual. But in fifth grade, she started to smell bad. Some days, she reeked of putrid urine. I complained to my mom, who called another mom whose son sat next to her. She confirmed what I was saying. So they got together and made a gift basket for the girl. They took it to the office and, after explaining to the principal what was going on, asked them to give it to the girl. They did, and her odor improved, but only temporarily.

The other teacher carried a folded white handkerchief in his pocket. He made a guttural throat clearing noise and spit into the handkerchief. About every other minute or two. It was so gross and we all made fun of him for it. This was the era of mainstreaming kids who theretofore were in special education, so we had an age mate new to our class. We all knew Billy; his father was one of the richest people in town. But he had been schooled separately during K-4th grade. He had behavioral problems, probably what today would be diagnosed and treated with drugs. One of his "problems" was that he had no impulse control. He rubbed his crotch a lot and sprung from his chair and just walked around the classroom frequently. It was bizarre for the rest of us, but our teachers told us to be compassionate. A few weeks into the year, Mr. Graham's hacking/throat clearing, Billy bluntly demanded to know what the hell he was doing. Mr. Graham turned bright red and excused himself. The principal showed up and invited Billy to accompany him to the office. Billy returned the next day, as did Mr. Graham. And the revolting throat noises continued.

about 20 years ago a woman moved into my building and she was always washing cloth diapers. She had two sons, late teens. Over the year we became friendly. She told me one of her sons was born with out an anus and after many surgeries, made do with a cork, which wasn't very effective. He didn't want a permanent colostomy bag. It finally dawned on me this was the situation of a boy I went to school with for 12 years, who very often smelled like pure shit, even though he was attractive and clean and from an good middle-class family. We put that boy through HELL all through elementary school. the teachers never really policed us effectively and of course there was no sense of "handicap" then so it was all a big shameful secret.

I would complete the assignment quickly in the first grade - so I would get up and walk around to see if any of my classmates needed help.

Finally my teacher told me to sit down and be quiet. At the end of the year she wrote in the comments section of my report card: "Jack is entirely too social."

I didn't even know such a thing was possible.

I remember on hot days, probably when the kids were on the teacher's last nerve and not paying attention, the teacher would close the blinds, make us put our heads down on our desks while facing the movie screen up front, point a couple of fans at us, and play a movie of volcanoes erupting. There was no narration, it was just volcanoes erupting and lava flowing.

I recall doing this with more than one teacher, it must have been a calming tool some teacher passed around.

R198, your story was satisfying to read. I wish I could have done this to a few of my teachers, especially my fifth-grade teacher. He was a piece of shit who did next to nothing when I got bullied by my classmates and was a bully himself. I wanted to tell him off or slap him in his smug face.

Before anyone asks, I did tell my parents about the bullying, but they didn't do anything.

Mrs Burroughs 5th grade teacher. Punishment would be to write one hundred times "I will not..." Then you would present the pages of handwritten text to her and she would rip up the pages in front of your face and just smirk. What a cunt. I hope she had a miserable life.

When I was in fourth grade, the janitor made fun of me for jumping rope at recess. I told my mom, who told me he had once been a teacher but lost his job after being found in a car with a high school girl. After I learned that, I was quite smug around him. I only regret that I wasn’t smug enough to tell him what I knew. Anyway, not long ago I thought about this and I googled him and the story was true. The real question is why they allowed him to continue working in a school at all.

I'm someone's weird memory from elementary school. In about 4th grade, I went through a phase where I wore a little sort-of tutu my mom had (just at home). My best friend Bobby came over one evening and I went out to greet him wearing it, so his parents must have seen me. He said he was going to hang out with my older brother. I sat on the floor arranging the tutu around me and wondering why he didn't want to hang out with me. I don't think he ever told anyone, but he stopped being my friend. Maybe I would have become a drag queen - but my dad and my brothers teased me out of it and I never was into women's clothing again.

Not my weird memory but my mother's. She had a teacher named Mrs. Threllkill. That really was her name, the Threllkills were very prominent in town. Anyway, as punishment she would place kids in what she called "The Cave" which was the space under her desk. The kid would have to sit there and massage Mrs. Threllkill's feet.🤮

[quote] I would complete the assignment quickly in the first grade - so I would get up and walk around to see if any of my classmates needed help.

This was sort of me, too, except in 2nd grade, and the teacher had a policy where if you finished your assignment early, you could go into the "reading corner" (which was a couple of shelves of books and a beanbag chair) and read a book. Of course, I sped through all of my assignments because reading was one of my very favorite things and I loved being by myself, but it was hell for the teacher (Mrs. Rose, whom I adored) to get me out of that beanbag to start the next lesson. She finally had a conference with my mom and suggested I be skipped a grade because she worried I was not being engaged properly. I would not hear of it, as I couldn't imagine not being with Mrs. Rose, so that was the end of that. We wound up moving after that school year, and when I began 3rd grade that Fall, the same thing happened. This time my mom was adamant, and off to 4th grade I went.

I was the only child in my elementary classes who was in the special academically gifted class and I don’t think my teachers really knew what to do with me.

When I was in third grade our school office secretary had to be out for several weeks for surgery and for some reason they pulled me out of my class and for three weeks I answered the phones, tallied attendance, got the principal coffee, and did all of the other things she would have done, sitting alone at her deck in the anteroom of the principal’s office. That would never fly today, I expect.

In the sixth grade, our classroom windows looked out on to a driveway on the back of the school where the handicapped boarded their bus earlier than everyone else. I was a voracious reader and used to mindlessly rock back and forth as I read, which drove my teacher insane. She was constantly telling me to stop. One late afternoon, as we were all quietly reading she called me over to the windows and pointed to a handicapped boy on the short bus rocking back and forth in his seat and said to me, “Do you understand now why I don’t want you to rock back and forth?” I just nodded and went back to my seat and thought, “Does this bitch think I’m retarded?”

I wasn't in any fancy gifted program because my school didn't have one. But I fell in love with 60s French pop that our senegalese au pair would play, so she taught me to speak and sing in French and I taught myself to read it and by 4th grade I was reading Jules Verne and Victor Hugo. In 5th grade I audited French literature classes at Vassar and in fact matriculated part time in 7th grade. I found it boring so moved to my grandmother's in Cambridge to transfer to MIT. I would have graduated at 15 but I interrupted my studies to write symphonies. Plus I got sidetracked training for and competing in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

No, R213, I am not a murderer. Fortunately, Mrs. Anderson never walked in front of my car.

I guess it was training, R210. It's the only time I've used the 'c' word IRL. I apologized to my mother in the car for using it in her presence; it was the only thing I said to her on the way home. I only use it here (well, not if I could engrave it on Mrs. Anderson's grave stone).

Indeed, R170; it all comes flooding back to you. I've been in a bad mood all day.

I was in the gifted child program in elementary and middle school in the 80s and what I most remember was playing chess, being the only kids to use the brand spanking new Commodore 64 computers in the library and taking field trips. Other than learning BASIC programming I don’t believe that being in the program taught us much.

The scoliosis checks were the best part, seeing the boys all lined up without shirts and bending over. It was fantasyland for this gayling.

By sixth grade I had a volunteer weather position at a local television station. This station had a community outreach program involving its news chopper. They would fly it out and land on the playground. The kids would get to go out and ooh and ahh at the helicopter and there would be some kind of presentation by the pilot about flying. I used my connection to get them to fly out to my school and for one brief day I was the most popular boy in school. If you grew up in metro Atlanta in the 80s, you’ll know I’m referring to 11Alive and the late Bruce Erion who was local hero with kids until there was that scandal involving a dead girlfriend, a houseboat and Lake Lanier.

In 5th grade we had this new language curriculum called Morphographs. It mostly involved learning the roots of words, & the teachers had to do hand signals for each word. To this day I remember dis=away from, & a closed fist or some such to accompany it.

You weren’t allowed to erase anything you wrote down in the workbook, there were major penalties for erasing something.

Apparently it was so controversial, there were parent-teacher meetings & the school eventually scrapped the program. Looking back, it feels like it was part of some government secret experiment!

I love you r231

[quote]She finally said "what's your name?" which made the class giggle. Then she said "and how old are you" and I replied "nine."

R198 You were nine at the beginnning of third grade? Did you enter first grade at seven? Why?

My elementary school was split. K-3 in one school. 4-6 in one down the road.

So third graders were the "seniors" in a way. At the end of the year, the entire school would have a King Arthur festival (or something similar) A huge pot luck. Fake jousting. The whole nine. Well, we voted for who in the third grade would be King Arthur, Gwen, Sir Lancelot, Merlin. It was like our strange version of prom. Younger grades were relegated to serfs, farmers, clergy, etc.

Believe it or not, I was King Arthur. I was a very gregarious kid. Sue me.

The weird thing was, for that entire day, I had total rule of the school. Other members of the "Court" had to do as I say. And still lower members of our little society had to due what the Court said. On and on that went.

I remember quite clearly that everyone took this "roles" very seriously. I was actually obeyed.

Maybe I'm over thinking it, but it was kind of fucked up. Like that Stanford Prison Experiment played on the played grades of a suburban Los Angeles schoolyard.

At any rate, I was a benevolent king. I was good to my people. Mostly.

[quote][R198] You were nine at the beginning of third grade? Did you enter first grade at seven? Why?

Probably because of a late birthday. I've never really understood the reasoning for this, but in most states kids who were born in September–December have to wait a year to start first grade (or at least they used to). My sister is a year younger than I am, and she was two grades behind me because she was born in October.

I used to go home for lunch even though nobody was there and break in the house through a window. Homes really weren’t that secure in the ‘70s.

R101 The big deal was moving from the kid's cartoonish lunchbox to a real black lunch pail, just like Dad took to work. Could pretend you were a grown-up then.

They're now considered antiques.

When I was in 5th grade, one of the clearly gay kindergarten teachers ran off with one of my mum's best friend's husbands. (They moved away from town to live together.) His classroom had been right down the hall from our 5th grade classrooms, and my 5th grade math teacher was pretty much his fag hag.

All that to say, the math teacher was a complete bitch. Even though I won the award for the highest math average, she never liked me. Then she died of cancer the next year. She was one of the first people I remember dying of breast cancer, and she couldn't have even been 40.

[quote]there was that scandal involving a dead girlfriend, a houseboat and Lake Lanier.

Did they all walk into a bar?

R146 when I was in 2nd grade a girl in my class showed up to school on picture day wearing sneakers, jeans or corduroys and a baggy sweatshirt. ON PICTURE DAY!! I was horrified and was trying to art direct the whole thing, insisting she was moved to the back because she was dressed so poorly. My teacher, a no-nonsense veteran who generally seemed to like me, grabbed me by the collar and yanked me aside. She yelled at me that if I didn’t shut up, I would be out of the picture.

End of the year comes and I’m cleaning out my desk. The class picture is still there and I left it behind. On some level I think I was ashamed of my behavior especially if it made my classmate feel bad. She was 7 years old and probably had no control over what she wore that day, and/or no one who cared that it was picture day. But I also thought she ruined the picture with her sloppy outfit that day.

[quote]You weren’t allowed to erase anything you wrote down in the workbook, there were major penalties for erasing something.

Firing squad?

[quote]Well, we voted for who in the third grade would be King Arthur, Gwen, Sir Lancelot, Merlin.

[quote]Believe it or not, I was King Arthur. I was a very gregarious kid. Sue me.

I would have demanded to be Morgan le Fay and plotted against you.

R236 is correct, R234. My birthday is in September and my parents were given the choice. I didn't know why my mother held me back a year until later in life, after I'd come out to her in my 20s and was discussing life decisions and such, and she admitted that she'd held me back because she knew she was going back to work full time once I was in school and wanted another year when the opportunity presented itself. She thought it would help me to be among the oldest in my class, which was why when my kindergarten teacher wanted to put me in the first grade she told the school no, she didn't hold me back a year only to jump a grade and making me among the youngest kids in the class.

My mother agonized for holding me back a year, for pulling strings to get me in the cunt's class, and like most parents, for a lot of the decisions that didn't work out as planned. There were a lot of extenuating circumstances that went into her thinking.

[R240] it had similarities to Natalie Wood and it did ruin his career in media. From what I knew of him behind the scenes into the 90s Bruce was a bit of a playboy. After his girlfriend drowned (ruled or accidental or suicide don’t remember)he became a helo pilot for hospitals. The girlfriend death is mentioned in the obit linked.

[quote][R236] is correct, [R234]. My birthday is in September and my parents were given the choice. I didn't know why my mother held me back a year until later in life, after I'd come out to her in my 20s and was discussing life decisions and such, and she admitted that she'd held me back because she knew she was going back to work full time once I was in school and wanted another year when the opportunity presented itself. She thought it would help me to be among the oldest in my class, which was why when my kindergarten teacher wanted to put me in the first grade she told the school no, she didn't hold me back a year only to jump a grade and making me among the youngest kids in the class.

Okay, I do remember something about parents having a choice. I don't think R236 is correct that everyone born in Sept-Dec. was your age in 1st grade. Your mom made the choice to start you later. All the kids in my 1st grade class were 5 or 6. I also don't recall anyone starting senior year at 19. That would mean starting college at 20. Every freshman I knew in college was 17 or 18 at the start. Anyhow, sorry you went through that. There should have been some kind of intervention.

The first week of Oct was our cut-off.

The term for holding a child back for a year before entering kindergarten is called redshirting.

My third grade teacher who used to have us come back in the coat closet with him and pretend that there was a magic fountain, where we had to make up a flavor.

I think his intentions were pure and he wanted to spur our imaginations - but that was the 70s. If my (nonexistent) kid told me a teacher was doing that today, it would totally hit every panic button that he was doing something fucked up.

R248 Thanks. By the way, I never went to kindergarten. I started with 1st grade. Kindergarten was not mandatory then (1964) and not part of public school classes. There were private kindergartens, but not everyone went. Did I miss anything?

R250 I never went to kindergarten either.

I was smart enough at 5 to go to school, but they gave some kind of weird psychological test that I apparently failed because I didn't draw a body on a piece of paper, just a head. (Drawing arts have never been my forte.)

My folks gave me the choice of going to public or parochial school, and I chose public.

The talk about the teacher treating someone badly reminded me of something. I went to public school but still had to go to CCD (Catholic instruction) on Saturdays - as well as special classes after school for First Communion and later, Confirmation.

In public school, though I sometimes stayed after school - mostly for talking, passing notes, etc. - I was a good kid and got high marks. In CCD, a couple of the nuns treated me as if I was stupid, and a really bad kid. They were verbally abusive if you showed any curiosity outside the strict curriculum, or asked them questions. I remember one called me "Dummy" all the time. They also hit kids.

Not all the nuns were bad, some were nice. But I remember being really glad I didn't choose to go there full time.

In 3rd grade I was sent to the principal's office for yanking on girls ponytail. The principal was Italian, probably 40-ish. I sat down in front of his desk and when he started to reprimand me, I noticed he was getting hard. I stared at his crotch and he started to get flustered. I asked him to show it to me. He said no, it was inappropriate. I went over behind his desk and unzipped his pants and then he throat fucked me and blew his load in my mouth. I got up, collected myself, licked his cum off my lips and said... my mother better not hear anything about this hair pulling shit. Then I ran off and played hopscotch with my gal pals.

All I remember from Kindergarten is giant circles of colors on the wall, making shitty crafts like a Thanksgiving turkey on construction paper using my hand as an outline, my beautiful teacher (Mrs. Kenny) who looked like a cross between Lynda Carter (looks, hair) and Julie Newmar (height, long legs). This was 1981 so the fashions still screamed 70s and she used to dress like on of Charlie's Angels. I idolized her.

Then in first grade I had a beautiful but slightly frumpy lady who, while still kind and encouraging, just didn't have Mrs. Kenny's joi de vivre. Even her name was pedestrian. Mrs. Patricia "Pat" Patten.

Second grade was even worse. Mrs. Beuter was a fat pig with granny glasses and those god awful purple church dresses adorned with white flowers. She reeked of cheap parfums like Emmeraud or Forever Krystle and used to force us kids to massage her back.

Third grade was exhilarating cause Mrs. Heilborn had bleached permed hair and dressed like a hooker. She also wore way too much makeup and I loved her. She, too, claimed I was far too social for my own good then shrugged her shoulders and added, "but they said the same about me at your age and I think I turned out okay." Wow, so philosophical.

R253 Why do people have to post stuff like this? I always get drawn in by the first few lines, then it's like a nightmare...

I didn’t find out until I was 20 but in 4th grade (like ‘74 - ‘75?) my teacher phoned home and informed my parents that they thought I might be gay.

The fucking nerve.

R256 What did they want your parents to do about it?

[quote] I didn’t find out until I was 20 but in 4th grade (like ‘74 - ‘75?) my teacher phoned home and informed my parents that they thought I might be gay.

What was your parents' reaction to this?

My parents went to marriage counseling and individual therapy with the same therapist, a woman named Annette, and they decided that I would benefit, at age 10, from therapy, so they put he in sessions with Annette, and also with her mother who was a hypnotist. I was never able to be hypnotized, but I do remember falling asleep once.

I overheard a partial conversation between my parents one day where they were arguing (when *weren't* they arguing?) and mentioned something about Annette telling them I was was very likely gay. I didn't even really know what that meant at the time, and it would be another year and a half before I even began to discover this about myself. At the time it was a completely alien concept to me.

After I came out to my mom in my early 20s, she told me that Annette had told her I was gay and that it was her fault. And that she had carried that guilt with her all those years. I told her Annette was a fucking quack and that she (my mother) had zero to do with it. I was born gay, and since I was adopted, my mother really didn't have anything to do with it. I think it took her a little while to grasp that concept, but I wanted to find that cunt therapist and scream at her for saying something like that my mother and making her feel guilty about it by posing it as something bad. (This would have been around 1980ish.)

Reading through this thread again is causing memories to flood back through the mists of time, so here is another -embarrassing- story from elementary school.

I had a six year-older sister who was both my protector and tormentor. One Easter Sunday, when I was six, she told me on the way to church in the backseat of my mother’s Chevrolet Chevelle convertible that I was adopted. Apparently, she and my mother had found me in a grocery buggy in front of the Winn Dixie and brought me home because they felt sorry for me. She informed me that she was also adopted, but from a rich family from California, and that she’d be picked up and taken back to Hollywood any day now. This was just at the beginning of the Cabbage Patch craze and I ate it up, believing everything she said.

For the next six years, I was on edge. I tried to well in school, keep my room clean, Boy Scouts, piano and trumpet lessons, everything I could do to be a model child for fear I would be abandoned again. My sister came to hate me because I was always a little, perfect goody two-shoes.

One day in the sixth grade, my sister would have been a Senior in high school by then, we read a story in our Language book about a young girl who was adopted and after the story the teacher asked us a list of engagement questions including, “Does anyone in the class know anyone, or is anyone, adopted?”

A feeling started in my stomach and rose through my chest and I shot my hand in the air and practically yelled, “I’M ADOPTED!” The next half hour was taken up with me being asked questions. I shared the story of my being found in a grocery buggy and everyone was starstruck. Snack time came later that afternoon and some bought me an ice cream sandwich. I was given first choice of the best of the seats at the swings at recess. I rode home on the bus feeling like I was floating. Why hadn’t I shared my secret years before? Being adopted was great!

I got home and did my homework and chores and at 5:30 my mother pulled into the garage. I jumped when she slammed the door and started stomping straight to my room.

Barging in the door, she said through gritted teeth, “How dare you go to school and tell everyone you’re adopted! You think you’re so much better than all of the rest of your family?” I pled my innocence and told her the story my sister had told me that Easter years earlier and she looked at me, paused, and said, “And you were stupid enough to believe her!” slamming the door to my room as she stormed out.

I had forgotten that a distant cousin was in my sixth grade class and she had run home and told her mother telling about me being adopted and it had gotten to my mother with the speed of a bullet. Upon reflection, I realize that my teacher, who would have been my sister’s teacher at the time of the story’s telling had a funny look on her face as I told the grocery buggy story but it didn’t seem important at the time.

Man, parents are the worst. What was the big deal that you said you were adopted if you really thought you were? I mean, I agree that by 6th grade you should have been suspicious, but okay, maybe you weren't. I was adopted, and I swear it was my saving grace growing up. I was so relieved to know I was not biologically related to my family and it made so much sense. I think it might have driven me crazy if I hadn't been told.

I remember when I was 8, we were temporarily living with my grandparents, as we had just moved out of state to be near them and were looking for a house of our own. My father was an alcoholic and totally unreliable. I'm certain one of the reasons for our move was because he couldn't find a job due to his reputation, though no one said it at the time.

One afternoon, my mother and grandmother and I were driving home from church and I asked my mother- What would happen to me if you died? My thinking was that my father would never be able to raise a child on his own, and I wondered where I would wind up, if there was a plan.

Well, my mother burst into tears and my grandmother lit into me. Somehow they interpreted this as my wishing my mother dead, when nothing could have been further from the truth. I tried to explain but they were not having it. They wanted me to apologize, and I refused because I'd done nothing wrong and I thought it was a completely fair question.

I tell you, nothing is more chilling than realizing at such a young age that you're the smartest and most mature person in your family.

R260, my family was perfectly capable but I always need I was just as smart, and far more empathetic, than the rest of them. I think it comes from being gay.

We have a special sense.

need = knew

R234 is soooo ignorant!

Great anecdotes.

One thing that really stands out (several people mentioned it) boys had to swim in the NUDE??? WTF?

R264 We didn’t have to swim nude, but we had to wear the provided navy blue style speedo they supplied, which I was very squeamish about wearing what others wore, so I’m not sure what was worse.

R257, I appreciate your question but the better question is WTF did this teacher offer to do about it? Nothing! I mean, what a fucking asshole. It’s like he phoned my parents - who were conservative Catholics and very homophobic anyway - outed me and rubbed their faces in it and then that was it! What an asshole. I kind of felt bad for my mother when she told me, when I came out to her at 20. He basically created even more distance between me and my parents, the fucking asshole. It’s not like I’d set up a blow job stand on the playground or something. What a jerk.

I love you r260, we were similar children I think.

I sense similarities about a few of us on here, R267. I find it both fascinating and supportive. Gay men of our generation (X'ers) will talk about a bunch of superficial stuff that we we had in common or that we can bond over (and there's nothing wrong with that, it's actually quite enjoyable) but these other kinds of things are rarely discussed. At least among our peers, I think. And while I know I am far from the only kid who went through these sorts of things back then, it helps even today to know I wasn't alone, as much as I wouldn't wish that trauma on anyone else.

When I was growing up, in the '70s and '80s, it was considered shameful to have anyone know your business, and you did everything you could to keep any embarrassments hidden. Starting in the mid-'90s, it became the fashion to air one's dirty laundry in public, and then to even revel in it, thanks to trash television. And then of course the internet made trash TV seem quaint by comparison.

I also didn’t go to kindergarten. I don’t know why my parents didn’t send me, but I suspect it was because I was “the baby” of the family and my mother wasn’t ready to be in the house alone.

Thanks to my dad, I entered first grade already knowing how to read, despite skipping kindergarten. My teacher was pretty and sweet, but I know I frustrated her because she wasn’t sure what to do with me. I was super bored, especially during the reading lessons. Eventually, she just started having me read to the class to give herself a break.

I was also very artistic, and the only time she and I argued was over a stupid coloring sheet. It had a big tree in the foreground, and while the other kids colored the bark brown, I colored mine black, as the trees in my yard seemed black to me. She handed it back to me, with a fresh sheet and said I needed to do it again and make the tree brown. I refused. I think she was shocked that I was defying her since I was usually so good natured. It was a real standoff, and resulted in my mother being called in. Mom pretty much let us both have it—the teacher for giving a shit what color a tree is, and me for being a little asshole, I guess.

Fourth grade was the absolute worst - two sections where the teachers were both nasty old witches.

I guess now with so many different allergies and health codes, outside food is no longer permitted at most schools? It seems like at least once a month in elementary school moms were bringing cupcakes and snacks for different occasions. Weird that they would give us that much sugar! I’m sure we are all out of control the rest of the day. My mom didn’t work then, and even though she acted like it was a pain in the ass, I know she loved visiting my classes and having the kids compliment her on how good her snacks were.

Every year there would be “fiesta day” and everyone would pig out on “Mexican” food, and there were sombreros and maracas and music..I am cringing now at how racist it probably all was.

I’ll steal a story from my best friend to introduce this topic that was most likely quite universal for us Gay elementary school boys. When he was in third or fourth grade he had a teacher who at the start of recesses once brazenly and loudly announced to the whole class “Bobby is going to play with the BOYS at recess today, isn’t he!” It completely humiliated him and scarred him for life and remains an open wound to this day.

I was one of those Gay boys who primarily had best friends who were girls both at home and at school. In first and second grade you can kind of get away with it, but the older you go the more suspect it seems to become. I assume it’s the main identifier for the straight boys to peg you as gay and start that harassment so early, sometimes even before you’ve identified that in yourself. But the truth was straight boys in elementary school just never seemed to have the social emotional makeup to be good friends, and they seemed so physically oriented and didn’t want to play the complex fantasy games and do arts and crafts like I wanted to do.

And then when it was physically oriented we still wanted to do more cooperative games or sports like jumping rope. I was known as “the boy who jumps rope” and I was damn well good at it. I was one of the Double Dutch champs of fifth grade. When I did do things like kickball, there was the option to have another person on your team kick for you. I always positioned myself on the team of Patrick Bender, who was the lanky, good-looking, tall (for fourth grade) son of the town’s fire chief. He was basically the Jacob Elordi of my elementary school. I always let him kick my balls, which he did stupendously. We became friends because of this and even had a sleep over at my house once. He was just so good looking, athletic and fit, I had such a huge crush on him. Really nice guy too. We changed schools for fifth grade and I lost track of him.

In fifth grade I did have another (and probably my last) real straight guy friend with Randy Siegman. He and I were best friends and a couple with two girls who were best friends, so the popular kids of fifth grade. That was the last flourishing of my heterosexuality and popularity, it was all downhill from there socialwise and becoming a true gay boy outcast with each following year beyond that.

no, r272, we are not all losers who peaked in 5th grade.

I wish I had thought of setting up a blow job booth on the playground......talk about enterprising!

[quote]We have a special sense.

Not to derail the thread, and I'll include my own story about elementary school. But I think being gay, (not knowing exactly what that is as a kid, only knowing that you are different than what you sense around you) opens up your powers of perception to the world much earlier than other children. When the world looks and acts like you, you have no reason to question it. But when you sense you are different, you begin to look at everything around you in a different light. If at four years old you begin to feel different, that power of perception only continues to grow, get stronger making us I think more intelligent, compassionate, more mature than our peers. That's why I think gay men are better at artistic endeavours, interpreting things, that call more on one's powers of perception. The world I grew up in looked nothing like me race or sexuality wise. So I was constantly interpreting everything - first investigating the differences, and then how to survive being different.

I went to a private school for 5th and 6th grade in Cleveland Ohio. I went to a ton of different schools all around the country. But this school in particular had a lunch period like no other. Your home room was assigned to a long wooden table. All of the food was placed in the center of the table and served family style. No one brought their own food to school. There were proper plates and cutlery and glasses. And each month there was a rotating duo who was responsible for cleaning up, bussing the table, wiping it down, after every lunch period. I didn't know how unique this was at the time. And this was the system from kindergarten all the way through 8th grade. I am not sure if they continued the practice at the upper campus, hight shcool, since I never ended up going.

I remember free milk in miniature bottles in schools, until Margret Thatcher as Education Secretary stopped it. Apparently she was against it and was forced into it by the Treasury. Coward. She was forever after known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher. I know that adults thought she was a monster. I formed that opinion myself as I grew older.

R276 I’ve not heard that story before, but it’s a nice companion piece to President Reagan getting ketchup declared a vegetable for school lunches.

I went to a private school where lunch was provided as part of the fees. There was always white bread, peanut butter and jelly available if you disliked that day's offering. The one meal I truly destested? Chicken chow mein with all that nasty celery.

R275 You maybe interested in the memoir by Brian Broome about growing up Black, Gay and very sensitive in rural Ohio called Punch Me Up to the Gods. It’s won multiple awards and is a stunning book for a first time published author.

We had desks with a little compartment underneath it, to keep your books. There was a little groove for pencils, and we used to make little puddles of Elmer’s white glue. It dried clear after a day or so. We’d put little crayon shavings in it, like stained glass. Sometimes we’d trade them.

I’d totally forgotten until this thread.

I had a Flintstone's lunch box in 1st grade. I wasn't a huge fan, and don't remember picking it out but it was fine. My mom used to make me chocolate milk in my thermos, or my favorite lunch ever, Campbell's chicken & stars soup to have with a half sandwich. The thermos was an integral part of my lunch. One day I accidentally knocked it off the cafeteria table and it fell to the ground. There was a mirrored glass lining that completely shattered. The custodian had to come and mop up my chocolate milk and shards of glass. Now, if this had happened today, my mom could have gone on Amazon and ordered a replacement thermos and had it the next day. Back then, lunchboxes were only stocked in stores for the back to school sales. There was no getting a replacement thermos in February. I had to buy regular plain milk at school every day for my lunch for the rest of the year. The next year I had a Snoopy lunchbox and a 100% plastic thermos.

In high school, I played fall and spring sports, so usually bought my lunch in the cafeteria and brought a 2nd lunch to have before practice. The cafeteria ladies in high school were all immigrant Italian grandmothers of my classmates and they made the most of what they had. I am convinced a lot of it "fell off a truck" and we ate good. At the end of the last lunch period my teammates and I would show up for any leftovers and they would give us whatever they had. And on game days they'd always give us extra. People always joke about school cafeteria food but it was really good, none of that Sysco garbage back then.

hair bear bunch box

I am still friends with a lot of people from elementary school, and we still occasionally how the lunch ladies made the cheeseburgers. The burgers would be under the heat lamp, and if you wanted cheese on it, they’d swish a Kraft single (well, probably not even Kraft) around a few times in hot water in this little crock pot thing. They’d then slap it on the burger and hand it to you. It was really weird.

Sorry, that first line should have included “laugh about”.

1968, in the 6th grade we were assigned a show and tell task to demonstrate a skill to the class. I thought I was being very daring and edgy when I showed how to ferment grape juice to make wine. Then I was followed by the only boy in class who's parents let him grow his hair long, who pulled out a pack of rolling papers and a bag of oregano and showed the class how to roll a joint.

We didn't have any more show and tells.

I had an ABBA lunch box. I wish I still did.

I've been told they never existed, but mine did. It must have been a knockoff of some type.

Are you from Australia, R286?

In the late '60s in the last grade of elementary school in Binghamton, NY, I had a middle-aged teacher who I realize now was somewhat eccentric. She would just sit in front of the class and free-associate and talk about anything she wanted to talk about to a captive audience. She talked about nuclear war a lot, in detail. I remember her telling us the symptoms of radiation poisoning. She said the Russians had a list of primary targets and Binghamton, NY was on that list because of a confluence of railway lines, or something. I remember the odd look on her face as she told our class none of us would make it through a nuclear attack, cynically amused, as though she was secretly looking forward to us getting nuked. Weird lady.

I remember milk money from early elementary school in Florida. Each kid had to bring in 2 pennies to get a little 1-cup waxy carton of milk. The poor teacher had to keep track of all those pennies.

If it was two pennies you must be....of a considerable age. Mine was a quarter, I think, in the late 70s.

R228 lol, teachers telling students that their town would be a Cold War target must have been a big educational pastime in schools during that period. Although we lived in Central Pennsylvania the Navy Ships Parts Control Center was in our town, which they told us would be an early place the Russians would bomb so that when they took out Navy ships there wouldn’t be any parts to repair them. And the War College in the next town over would probably be a target as well. I had more then one teacher who mentioned this. I might have been more afraid if we did Duck and Cover drills and talked about them, but surprisingly they must have realized at that point there were futile.

R85 that's great! LOL

We had a lunchroom monitor who was an older lady with a bum leg. When I would take my tray to be placed in the window where the dishwashers could collect them, she'd throw a fit if I didn't eat everything on my tray. Just to confuse me more, whenever I finished everything on my tray she would always comment, "Son, one day you're going to simply burst." Yes, I was a porker; but, talk about mixed messages. Sheesh!

Watching kid's shows like The Electric Company, and Stepping Into Rythm on the local PBS station, during class time. . I guess the teacher's needed a break from us little assholes .

Did anyone else have a "lock-in" in elementary school, where all the students were invited to a school-wide sleepover?

I remember desperately wanting to see what the teachers’ lounge looked like. I don’t know what in the world I must have thought was in there.

For some ungodly reason, this was our high school PE uniform. 5 days a week, we had to dress out in this abomination for PE.

Elementary and middle school were also awful because I attended a Seventh Day Adventist school; their mission was, biblically preparing eternal souls for the kingdom of God. I basically stopped listening and simply opened my textbook, did the assignment; then opened novels and read. I got all C’s, hoping my parents would move me to public school. We wore a white shirt with a green tie and green skirt with tiny pleats; I had to iron that shitty thing. I was mentally abused I feel.

Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches for a nickel.

1960s. 5th grade. Mrs. Brandenburg.

She put the boys in the front desks. All the girls in the back and she hated the girls.

When we would take a test she would sit on the front of her desk on top.

She wore garter belt and hose with the line in the back. Red pumps. Tight dress. Red hair. Black thick glasses. She would cross her legs and take out a lipstick from her pocket. Red lipstick. And she would slowly apply it to her lips while staring at the boys.

Just beyond gross!!!!! She was around 50 years old. Believe it or not some of the boys reported her. Nothing ever happened.

Behind her back we called her “The Nazi”. Because she hit the girls and actually picked up there desks and threw them against the wall. With the girls still sitting at the desks. Nobody ever stopped her.

The 6th grade teacher was a mean, old hag. Once, after a math quiz, my cousin asked me what I had gotten on the surprise quiz. Of course I lied as math was my least favorite subject. That nasty little cunt went up to the hag teacher and told her what I had said I had gotten on the quiz. That old bitch screamed in front of the class that 1) I did not make that on the math quiz 2) what grade I had actually gotten. The little cunt cousin looked so smug, thst I wanted to push her through a plate glass window. Fiucking bitch.

Interesting. I always had the impression my female teachers in grade school really favored the girls.

A lot of women could give some Dataloungers a run for their money with their near psychopathic hatred of other women-- usually it's the really nice ones who bear the brunt of it-- tough bitches don't tolerate it and dumb bitches clamor around female misogynists because they think they're cool.

My mother and father fought about sending me to board at The Rosey. Mother won, so it was grades 3-6 there. Furthermore she insisted I select French as preferred language. Well, I was in love with Prince Seesio Berengu of Naruba whose mother Queen Masenatu Mamasito, insisted Seesaw (that's what we called him) choose English preferred courses. Well we almost went on a hunger strike to be together. But Seesaw had a lot of pull, being royal, so they secretly let me attend the English. The weird part was when King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV's illegitimate son invited us to Tonga for holiday, causing a minor diplomatic scandal as Seesaw was the future king who shouldn't be with a bastard royal, and I was a girl. I forgot to tell you that. So they had to board me in the harem quarters. Fortunately, I met their a very cosmopolitan courtesan who thought I was a very pretty girl, and we began a correspondence. She in fact has been a model and governess in 1930's Paris. And she was my connection when eventually I grew bored of boarding school life and went to Rome to model for Capucci, then for Valentino in Florence.

I was in 6th grade in 1984. We had to sing the theme from MASH in chorus, whose chorus is "suicide is painless/it brings on many changes/and I can take or leave it if I please". The next year, I had to sing John Denver's Annie's Song "You fill up my senses/cum fill me again". Really odd song choices.

[quote] I remember desperately wanting to see what the teachers’ lounge looked like. I don’t know what in the world I must have thought was in there.

At my school they smoked cigarettes and drank soda. They had their own soda machine, a refrigerator, a few tables and chairs, and a couch. I wonder how many of them fucked on that couch.

Yep. I did a lock-in once. We watched a lot of movies, but the only one I remember was Vice Versa, with Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage.

R304 That was our teachers' lounge, too. A Pepsi-Cola vendin machine with tiny glass bottles. In addition to a sofa, there were a couple upholstered chairs with standing ashtrays next to them.

Every year from roughly first through fifth grade, all the children in those grades were herded to the windowless cafeteria in the basement. Then we had to watch a horrifying "educational" movie called The Child Molester. For years, whenever I saw 1959 Ford Skyliner I panicked and started crying.

[As an adult, I learned that the movie was based on a real abduction and murder of two schoolgirls in a city near my hometown. It includes actual footage of the murdered girls at the end. The message was allegedly 'Don't Take Candy From Strangers,' but the shocking images really stuck in my head for a long time after each (forced) viewing.]

We never saw The Child Molestor, but we did see a film about drugs, and I remember there was a scene of someone shooting up, and my friend fainted, fell out of his seat onto the floor. I later learned at least one kid regularly fainted when this scene was shown at the other elementary schools in town. Kids were pretty sheltered in those days (late 60s). We didn't see the kinds of movies or TV shows kids see now. I remember that movie haunted me and I was often worried about what would happen if some guy offered me drugs, and what if I ended up hooked on drugs?

I also remember that a couple of my friends kept a stash of torn out pages from Playboy and other nudie magazines in a crack in a big rock, in the playground. We would look at them after school. Some of the women weren't even totally nude - some of them had pasties, or g strings. But it seemed very forbidden and scandaloous. Another time (not school related) my parents took my friend (who also turned out to be gay) and me to the drive in, and the second movie was The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, which had a topless girl in it. My parents felt weird about it and my mom felt she had to call my friend's mom the next day and apologize. Though my folks were soon laughing about the incident.

The Art Lady, who visited a few times each year with prints of famous paintings that she would explain to us sixth graders. She was a lovely woman and did her best but unfortunately was missing half an arm, which made it kind of hard to focus on the paintings.

There was this girl who was in a higher grade than I was who was kind of a bully. One winter I guess she was running across some ice and she fell and landed on her back and couldn't move afterward--totally paralyzed. An ambulance showed up and they took her away.

I remember just staring at her while overhearing some teacher say she's really brave. All I was thinking was "she deserved that".

In third grade, 1978, for recess one day, we were told to go outside to a special ‘carnival’, and that we were supposed to bring money for this carnival, so we could buy brownies and books and play games.

My mom gave me a quarter to use (man we were poor). I got to school and I somehow lost the quarter. I told the teacher that I had lost the quarter, and she told me that was too bad, but that I would have to stay inside the classroom while all the other kids got to go outside to the carnival. I was really upset and stressed by this, and walked around the room looking for the quarter for quite a while, and looking out the window at the kids playing games and eating goodies. I ended up sitting and reading Charlotte’s Web for awhile, and got pretty engrossed in the book. When the kids came back, gloating about how much fun they all had, and that I missed it all, I reached in my pocket, and somehow the quarter was there all along!

That day taught me two things: I'm pretty good in a crisis, and my teacher was a cunt.

In 6th grade, the music teacher Mr. Hudson, who came in every Wednesday at 1:30pm, was they most stereotypically 1981 gay I've ever seen. Badly receding hairline, with a mustache. Why was that such a huge gay look in those days? Anyway, he had a stereotypically gay voice, and he would flit around the halls gossiping with the teachers, who thought he was hysterical. "That Mr. Hudson cracks me up!" Mrs. Hoffman used to say all the time. I didn't realize I was really gay at the time, so I would join in with the other children making fun of him. He never heard us, of course. It was always behind his back.

One day, he passed out a children's music magazine called Pipeline. Someone dared Suzy Devlin to yell out "You're gay and so is your Pipeline magazine." She did, and I was MORTIFIED. That was just awful. Poor Mr. Hudson just pretended he hadn't heard her, even though he for sure did, and he continued his lesson.

I've always felt badly about that, even though it wasn't me who dared her. But I did contribute to the atmosphere that caused her to do it. God, f'give me. Seriously, it makes me sad to remember it.

You're also kind of a dummy, aren't you, R311?

[quote] Someone dared Suzy Devlin-

Cunt.

I went from a very hippyish school in Cambridge to a Mormon school in Utah—by choice, no less—so most of my memories are weird.

A restaurant delivered pizza every Friday and we'd eat in the auditorium while watching a church movie. Most of them were like ABC Afterschool Specials but even older and more dated, more depressing, and starring Gordon Jump. For example:

Cipher in the Snow—a kid asks the bus driver to stop the bus; he has to get off. He takes one step and drops dead on the side of the road. The rest of the movie flashes back to the shittiness of his short life and his teachers finally realize how badly they failed him after they find a glowing essay he wrote about one of them, and the guy doesn't even remember him. The "oh my heck!" moment comes when one teacher says something like: "He didn't just die. We did this. We all erased him, bit by bit."

There was also an open obsession with appearance, weight, and fitness. Orthodontists (including my stepmom) would come in and examine the kids' teeth on stage, while we stood in line watching and commenting, and dictate notes to an assistant who would then give the kid an index card with everything that was wrong with them. Also on stage, we had our fat measured with calipers and one time a bunch of women came in and held scarves up to our faces to determine which colors we should avoid.

Finally, Hawaiian Haystacks. You'd get in the cafeteria line and they'd slop some shredded chicken and pineapple chunks in gravy on top of white rice. The rest of it was set up like a salad bar, but there was no rhyme or reason to any of it—shredded cheese, raisins, Goldfish crackers, corn, almonds, grapes, coconut, bacon, croutons, etc. were all supposed to be piled on the bed of glop.

Late in 6th grade, there was a class trip to go see the junior high we'd be starting at in the fall. I had a special session I would go to every Friday for extra help with math with Mrs. Leibowitz. I'd spend about 30-40 minutes with her going over the week's math lessons.

On this Friday, I got back to class, and everyone was GONE. The lights to the room were off. Mrs. Hoffman and my entire class left, and forgot about me. Mrs. Hoffman had marked me present earlier in the day- in a class of 25 children, I guess she just didn't think of it. I put a record on the record player. For some reason, a copy of The Beatles Abby Road was in the class. And, I think, a Bill Cosby Fat Albert comedy album. I cleaned up the listening station, untangled all the headphones, all that stuff. I generally straightened up in the books area, cleaned out my desk, and for a while just sat there daydreaming and waiting for them to return.

They did. The whole fucking time, Mrs. Hoffman didn't realize I wasn't there until they got back. She looked almost panicked when she saw me. I was there, alone for a good two hours. It sucked, because then I had to go into 7th grade junior high completely blind having never seen Thompson Junior High. Now Thompson Middle School.

The aftermath was pretty crazy. I think there was a whole investigation of Mrs. Hoffman. The Principal, George Ahlers (pictured below) had a closed door meeting with me, and demanded to know why I didn't go to his office to tell him I was left alone. There was a lot of incredulous head shaking and AHHHH!s. It was like "How could you DO that to us??" He HAD to have been a hardcore Republican. Mrs. Leibowitz told me I should've come back to her room, and she would've driven me to Thompson on her free period. And Mrs. Hoffman didn't speak to or look at me for weeks.

What the FUCK? How is an 11 year old supposed to know what the protocol is when they're left alone in a classroom? That anger at me was certainly misdirected. Mrs. Hoffman was basically cleared when I told my parents what the situation was, and when the school contacted them they said it was an honest mistake by my teacher, and the matter should be put to rest as far as they were concerned. I was never in any danger, of course. That meeting with Mr. Ahlers really pisses me off, in retrospect. Oh yeah, why didn't I spring into action when one his HIS teachers fucked up? Fuck off.

I just remembered x2 more:

-My 3rd grade teacher was very, very old. (My parents have admitted she was probably in her early 70s when I had her as a teacher...she still reminds me of Sophia from 'Golden Girls', purse and all!) She had a terrible temper and was always yelling at us to, "SHUT UP!" All that to say, the last day before Christmas, she pulled me out in the hall and I thought for sure I was in deep trouble. She gave me a hug and told me I was the only student in the class to pass the "gifted test." (Which we took in the teachers' lounge, btw...the only time I was ever in there.) When I was in 5th grade, both my parents volunteered at Field Day, and my father went to throw a kickball to another parent volunteer. He hit my 3rd grade teacher smack-dab on the head (from about x30 feet away). It hit her so hard that she dropped her purse off her lower arm! She retired that year.

-Not elementary school, but my last class of the day in 6th grade was Agriculture. Our teacher was young, but a terrible diabetic and also had other health issues. The final bell rang, but she wouldn't let us go. We all even pointed out that other students were passing by the classroom windows to go home, and she accused us all of lying. I'm not sure why we didn't just leave (except that we were new to middle school and scared of her). We all ended up having to call our parents from the school office since we all missed our buses. No doubt the bitch got a write-up for that, and from then on out she actually let us out early!

Let's all sing a song today,

a song today,

a song today.

Let's all sing a song today

with Tony Saletan!

[quote] Late in 6th grade, there was a class trip to go see the junior high we'd be starting at in the fall.

Oh man, we did this when I was in the 5th grade. I went to Bethune Elementary and we went across the field to visit the Middle School, named after Crispus Attucks. It was considered the most dangerous school in South Florida at the time, even more dangerous than some high schools. I was younger than the rest of my classmates because I skipped a grade. I don't remember much about the details of the school itself, other than we sat in on some school assembly and a student sang The Greatest Love of All. However, either something scared me, or the reputation of the place freaked me out so badly that I came home and told my mother that night that if I went to that school I would be knifed to death by the end of the first day. Plans were quickly made to figure out how my parents were going to afford to send me to Catholic School after that, and for the next five years, that's exactly what I did, until we moved to a much nicer school district and I spent my final two years in public high school (ironically, in a school that just a couple of years prior had a horrible reputation, but had somehow turned itself around and was really nice).

Kill the Man with the Ball

Third Grade

I was actually enjoying sports for a minute. Keith, who was held back and a foot taller than everyone, came up behind me (I actually had the ball) and I like backed into his teeth.

They asked if I was alright, of course. Went to the bathroom and blood was pouring from my head. Headed to the teachers; lounge. A billow of smoke and coffee aroma poured out and there were all these women with heels and bouffants (ok, a couple straight haired ladies) towering and ogling my wound. My sister was 10 years older and there. We went to the doctor. He stuffed cotton from the bottom of the instrument jar in it. No stiches.

It is where I have my only bald spot.

Damn you, Keith.

Does anyone else remember learning how to properly brush your teeth in school? They would first ask you to brush them and then give you a red tablet to chew to show you all the places you missed. I don't know how accurate this was scientifically, but it definitely did have me scrubbing my teeth and gums completely from then on out.

^yes, and I remember the bitter awful taste of that tablet. Then you’d bare your teeth to all your friends to compare whose teeth were the dirtiest.

I remember those tablets!

Yes, it looked like Keith's teeth.

I don't remember the tablets tasting bitter. I remember them tasting sort of candy-ish (not tasty or anything, but not bitter).

I remember my second grade teacher, Mrs. Sheeba, casually grilling me about where I lived exactly in front of half of the class. My parents had separated and my mother, brother and I were staying with my grandparents previously in Shaker Heights Ohio. We eventually found our own place in another school district but my mother wanted me to finish out the year at the same school in Shaker. Well living in another school zone and going to a Shaker Heights public school is akin to murder. So my second grade teacher took it upon herself to question a 7 year old in front of everyone else about how I got to school this morning, where I slept and who brought me to school each morning. I distinctly remember being savvy enough to know what she was doing and innocently answering the questions correctly. I remember being proud of myself that I evaded their cross examination. The truth was eventually found out, not through me, and they sued my poor mom for 12k, in 1982, for half a year's tuition to a public school. That put the rest of our lives in a bankruptcy tailspin for the quite some time.

Another weird memory was from middle school (not elementary, I know) in Florida, Palm Harbor Middle School. During gym class, for some reason, they were weighing each student and figuring out their body fat percentage on top of that. This would have been around 1988. I seriously doubt they would be able to do this now. But I was a chubby kid - not fat fat but not rail thin like the other kids seemed. I remember being mortified in line terrified of what I would see. I got my results and kept them close to me. I remember finding the only other kid fatter than me in our friend group and trying to pry his info out of him just to make me feel better. Mine was 37% at the time, according to their monitor. And I remember almost dying when one of my friends found out and said, "Wow, you're like half fat."

You should have said, "Actually, it's closer to a third, you pea-brained cunt. Guess what they say about fat being an important part of the brain is true".

I hated art class as I can't draw a simple stick figure. However, pottery was better.

I went to a K - 8 school which was divided into Lower and Upper School, latter being more like Jr High. Starting in 5th grade, we stayed until 4:30 M - Th because of the hour of gym class - ugh! That was also when girls wore uniforms and suits for boys.

A rotating class member would bring back milk and cookies mid-morning; there was also an assigned chore of setting up, serving and clearing lunch, which wasn't bad and got us out of class a few minutes early.

Much of December was devoted to practice for the Christmas Sing rather than class work, likewise May and the early June graduation ceremony.

Our report cards were handed out by the headmaster in front of the class including comments.

I went to a NY public school in Ridgewood, Queens. One day I went to the bathroom and was shocked to discover a pile of shit at the bottom of the standing urinal. I have a feeling one of the special ed kids did the dirty deed. I never said anything to anyone and just went about my business.

R310 reminded me of the cunty queen bee of my 6h grade. She got appendicitis and her appendix burst, which kept her out of school for the last part of the school year. We were all supposed to be sad that she was gone, but I was so happy. The final months of grade school were so pleasant without her.

Sounds like third grade for me, R331. The teacher I didn't like was gone when we returned from Christmas vacation; her replacement was great.

We moved in the middle of first grade, so after Christmas break, I started in a new school. My teacher had just gotten married so she had a new last name, Berberich. (I don't remember what her maiden name was as I didn't have her before that but I remember that the rest of the class had a hard time calling her by her new name.)

Anyway, I was dropped off on my first day while the class was out at recess, so it was just me and Berberich. Each student was paired with another student at two desks pushed together, and she showed me where I was to be seated. She was telling me about the class and said (and I'm paraphrasing, but there's no good way to say this), "We have another fat student in the class, a girl named Ruth." Like she thought we would bond over being fat slobs.

I sat at my desk feeling humiliated, and then the class came in. I was seated at the back by the door, and as all the kids came in, they passed me and said "Ki, Karen. Hi, Karen." And I got completely freaked out. I walked up to the teacher and said (quietly), "What did you say the name of that fat girl was?" I thought they were mistaking me for her and I was about to start crying.

It turned out that the desk I was sitting at had been vacated by a student who had moved away over Christmas break, and his name was Kieran, which was a name I'd never heard before, so I thought they were saying Karen. They saw someone sitting at his desk and just assumed that I was him.

To borrow a phrase from a poster above, I learned two things that day- My classmates were idiots and my teacher was a cunt.

Most elementary school teachers are cunts.

The profession attracts bullies.

They are like cops that way. Very similar intelligence, too.

We had mandatory hot lunch. You were not permitted to bring your own lunch. You either consumed their undercooked fish sticks, or whatever, or you went without. Did anyone else experience this?

I had ADHD before anyone knew it was a thing, and in second grade was assigned to a teacher who was supposedly good with boys with "behavioral issues." She would probably be jailed today. She duct taped one kid by the legs to his chair. One time, I was out of my seat talking to someone and she hauled me back to my seat and slammed me down so hard I saw stars and bit my tongue, drawing blood. When it was freezing cold, and the other classes got to stay in for recess and play games or color in the classroom, she made us go outside and run around to stay warm and burn off some energy. She left halfway through the year to have a baby and her replacement was the nicest, kindest young teacher. She reminded me of my oldest sister and I felt safe and understood with her. I'm seriously getting teary eyed remembering how much better school was for me when she took over.

[quote]We had mandatory hot lunch. You were not permitted to bring your own lunch.

In Canada there was no free or provided lunch at any time. There were certain days of the week where students had to bring in money to get a hotdog and a 125ml container of milk. Whenever I hear about about students getting a free lunch I get really pissed off about teachers who strike because of salary issues here. This was in the 80s / 90s

Unfortunately, R337, free lunch has become more of a necessity over time in America to help families make ends meet. When lockdown started, there was a fair bit of news coverage locally about how losing access to free lunches was hurting many families. I live in Portland, OR, and there are parks here that serve free lunches through the summer (I live just down the street from one) to families who need the help year round.

Although I'm sure there were families who relied on free lunches when I was a kid, I don't remember it being nearly the necessity it is now.

Ours wasn’t free. It was just mandatory that you buy it and eat it or throw it out.

R313, I was 7 years old, and was put into school one year early, younger than the other 3rd graders. I wouldn't classify myself as a dummy, I was just a kid... if I were a dummy, I would have probably trashed the classroom or stole something. Instead I read quietly once I gave up on that quarter.

I recall looking through my pockets over and over too, which I had failed to mention. It was so weird that the damn thing was in the pocket all along!

Ever lose something and then find it again? Even as an adult? If so, you're just as much a dummy as I was.

School lunches have gone the way of student loans.

At one time, both were done fairly, enough to cover costs and make perhaps a small profit or sum.

Now both are big business. And both are much poorer for it.

At my elementary school there was NO lunch served. Everyone had to bring their own lunch. There was no cafeteria just a room with tables to sit and eat the lunch you brought from home. They did have a table set up and offered for sale ice cream on a stick and a small container of milk- hardly a meal- I don't know why they bothered.

R319 Same here. After sixth grade, before transferring to the big, bad junior high, we were given a tour. At some point, we were told what to do if we found a GUN lying around the school or if we came across some other potentially deadly weapon. I was so terrified that I begged my parents to send me to the small private school instead. Bless them, they actually listened to me and scraped together the tuition.

In my middle school and junior high there was a cafeteria (late 70s) with a hot lunch prepared by a group of women. In addition to the daily hot entree, there was a roll (they baked these off there) dusted with flour and topped with a pat of butter, a small salad, a carton of milk, and large pieces of frosted sheet cake. Lunch was .40 and cake was an additional .10. It was a good deal for .50.

We had a cafeteria all throughout school. It was honestly the only decent part of school - seemed affordable and usually had some decent choice.

My rural school didn't have a cafeteria, so we ordered in lunch from the town's greasy spoon every day! The teacher took our orders in the morning - you could get a burrito or a hamburger and the only dessert was a box of Hot Tamales (for 10 cents). Mrs. May would only allow one dessert per day, but the other teachers didn't care. I still miss those greasy fried burritos!

Listening to "Patch the Pirate" cassette tapes during lunch before recess. All two of them.

R277, that's not exactly true. I was surprised when I learned it.

Wow, that's pretty amazing, R346. I've never heard of such a thing.

When we moved down south and lived with my grandmother for a while, I started at the elementary school there and we were on food stamps until my parents found jobs, so I began that school year in the free lunch program. This was during busing so, while I was not living in anything that could be considered even middle class, the school I was bused to was firmly in a lower class neighborhood. I remember being so ashamed to be on the free lunch program, and the ONLY people who got the hot lunches in our school were those on some form of public assistance. Everyone else brought their lunch to school. So we were made to line up in front of all the other students who were sitting at the tables, already eating, and then we got our lunches. Everyone knew who the poorest of the poor were. I don't recall anyone making fun of me, but I felt like Veda Pierce, vowing I would get revenge on my mother for putting me in this position. By mid-year both my parents were working, and the next school year I was carrying a shiny new lunchbox.

I stopped eating lunch at school after 8th grade. I went to an all-boys Catholic school for 9th and 10th and we had such a short school day (8am-1:30pm) that I just waited until I got home to eat and I went to the library during lunch to read People Magazine and eye fuck the two cute gay upperclassmen who had new wave haircuts and were best friends. Then when I moved to a public school for 11th & 12th, the day was longer, but I still skipped lunch. Instead I would go into the rafters of our auditorium and take a nap. Back then I was routinely up til 3am most nights, so by lunch, I was ready to crash. More than once our drama teacher had to send someone up to wake me because my snoring or talking in my sleep was disrupting her class.

Two big memories of elementary school lunches — pizza cooked on sheet pans (with government commodity cheese), topped with dried oregano flakes and cut into big rectangles. Occasionally there would be sausage crumbles on top.

Then there was "hamburg gravy" — commodity ground beef in a weird whitish-gray gravy. The lunch lady, wearing a clear glove, would scoop up a handful, plop it on a bun, and hand it to you.

R346- Why didn't you just bring some lunch from home? Much cheaper even then a GREASY spoon.

Amazing but it doesn’t seem like there are any memories of kids having massive allergy attacks from the cafeteria food in the olden days. Hmmm…

If a box of Hot Tamales was only 10 cents, then I'm sure the lunch was also cheap.

R350, I remember those. Another common serving from my elementary school days were the turkey chunks in a tan, translucent gravy poured over a scoop of mashed potatoes.

R344- You must have lived in a poor town. I was in Junior High School in the late 1970's too. For just under $1 I could buy a hot dog, French fries and a small container of low fat milk- about 85 cents altogether. More than double the price of your school lunch.

My parents rarely gave me money for lunch. My mother always made me lunch for school which I toted in a brown paper bag. I LOVED Lunch boxes and wanted one so badly but she wouldn't budge. She felt they were a waste of money.

R354, diced turkey was a special lunch treat served just before the Thanksgiving break.

[quote]sink her long red nails in their arm and violently shave them.

Kids should be gently shaved!

I wrote a horror story called “The Janitor” in the 5th grade and used all the kids in my class about a killer janitor. We all got killed in the story. I wrote it after I had seen “I Know What You Did Last Summer”. It was pretty gory!

The substitute teacher turned off all the lights and read it to the whole class. Everyone loved it.

This was pre-Columbine.

I would have been deemed a psycho kid or troubled had it been after. I think Columbine was the next year.

But I loved horror movies and writing short stories. I ended up running for a Halloween themed photo studio and got into Vogue. So it’s not like my crazy killer stories as a kid didn’t translate to successful creativity lol.

My favorite cafeteria meal was chicken croquettes. They were so good, though I'm almost positive they were 85 percent salt with a little congealed chicken matter stuck to the edges.

R358, you just reminded me of something my husband said he used to do in middle school. I guess he started writing a serial called "The Adventures of Desiree" that all the boys passed around and took turns reading. It was completely x-rated and full of all of the things a little gay boy would want in an x-rated story describing straight sex, but as long as there were tits involved I am sure the other boys didn't pick up on it. I guess the handwritten stories were widely popular and I am sure titillating for my husband at the time, turning on all of his classmates.

We actually wrote together for a bit at one point and turned The Adventures of Desiree into a screenplay with all of these over the top sex scenes as told through the imagination of a middle school kid. If anyone remembers, think of the old Emmanuelle movies from the late 70s/80s with all of the soft focus, stilted acting, improbable storylines and karate - but as a comedy.

Yes, those freshly baked rolls with the pat of butter. Yum. And the "grilled" cheese sandwiches drenched in butter. Can't eat like that today.

During elementary school, we raised money by selling magazine subscriptions. I hated that annual shitfest. We got a new principal before third grade. He was a real dandy – very tall, long blond wavy hair that was always just so. When you sold x number of subscriptions, you got y prize. Well, I had my heart set on a little stuffed animal, a tiger. I managed to sell just enough to earn the stuffed animal, so when it was my turn to go to the principal's office to pick out my prize, I reached for the tiger. The principal snatched it from my hands, and shoved an elephant at me. I said that I did not want an elephant; I wanted a tiger. Then he said something like, this is the last tiger, so maybe you should let somebody else have it.

I was dumbfounded and walked out holding the elephant. I walked home, and my mom asked me what was wrong. I broke down in tears and told her the story. In a flash, she was dragging me by the arm and speed walking toward the school. She told me to wait outside in the hall, and went in. I could hear her asking the principal what happened, and his voice, then Mom again, and before I knew it, they were screaming at each other. I heard a loud thud and couldn't control myself any more, so I opened the door and ran in. The principal was sprawled next to the bookcase rubbing his nose. Mom grabbed the tiger and handed it to me, then she threw the elephant at the principal. We marched out of there and went home.

The principal was not there the next day, but his two daughters were. By lunch, it seemed that everybody knew that my name's mom punched the principal in the face. I was secretly so proud of her for sticking up for me, but I got a lot of guff from other students. The principal was back the next day, with a black eye. Mom had hit him in the nose with the heel of her hand, and she must've hit him hard. By the next year, Mom was a legend and the principal moved to another school.

What was his reason for not giving you the tiger?

The guidance counselor smoked Eve cigarettes in her office. She used a scallop shell as an ashtray.

R362

MMMMMAAAARRRRRRRYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

Go r362’s mom!

I would have chosen the elephant - the true King of the jungle. Some folks who went into education were just as immature as the kids they taught.

We had a substitute in 4th grade. I was recently excited because I discovered the joys of lip reading. I told her that I could read lips, and to mouth something to me. That bitch mouthed "go away!" 😝

We had hot lunch all through school. Most of the meals tasted pretty good. Lots of variety. It included an entree, vegie, desert and bread and butter. When I started school it was 35 cents and it rose to 55 cents in high school. Extra milk was a penny rising to 2 cents. You could bring your own lunch from home if you wanted.

[quote]The guidance counselor smoked Eve cigarettes in her office. She used a scallop shell as an ashtray.

This could be the beginning of a short story.

A short story written at the Datalounge Academie of Writing.

I remember my 4th grade teacher telling us about how there was a population explosion and that in places like the Far East, they were trying to get people not to have so many children, and I asked her how they were going to do that. She evaded the question but I kept asking her. She couldn't explain sex, or birth control methods, in a 4th grade class, so she got madder and madder and finally gave me detention.

It was a dark and stormy night when I first went to the guidance counsellor's office.

In 3rd grade, we had a weird bake off fundraiser that focused around playing duck duck goose and having to take a homemade cake as you were eliminated. The teachers had ranked the cakes ahead of time so that the worst were taken first and the best were saved for last.

The parents were all there, not knowing that their cakes were going to be judged in that manner, and I remember most of us kids were uncomfortable playing the game while many of the parents looked on in sourness as the cakes they had made for the night were deemed varying degrees of unworthy. I was eliminated somewhere in the middle and brought home some swampy green thing, though, so there may have been something to our teachers' madness.

R372, I remember something similar from 1st or 2nd grade. There was a cakewalk or something and when I won, I couldn’t find my ticket or something and I was denied the cake I had won. When I got home I found the ticket in my pocket and I was enraged. I can still see that ticket.

We always enjoyed being punished for an imaginary crime and missing recess. The time was spent gossiping about the other students and our teacher.

Rolando's eyelashes.

When I was in kindergarten in the early 60s, we had half-day sessions, which I suppose were about 3 hours in length. In the middle of the session, we were given a snack — either a small bag of potato chips or a small paper cup of ice cream (with a wooden spoon). You had to put in your order at the start of the session. Sometimes they’d have chocolate covered ice cream bars on a stick. What a mess that poor teacher had to deal with twice a day.

In first grade at Catholic school, just before recess an older girl, I think an eighth grader, would come into the room with one of those cigarette girl type boxes around her neck, filled with candy and chips. She'd walk up and down the aisles, and kids would make their selection and hand her their nickels and dimes. The money raised supposedly went to the poor, although half the kids in the class probably fell into that category.

[quote] [R372], I remember something similar from 1st or 2nd grade. There was a cakewalk or something and when I won, I couldn’t find my ticket or something and I was denied the cake I had won. When I got home I found the ticket in my pocket and I was enraged. I can still see that ticket.

You and the chick who couldn't find her quarter ought to get together and do a magic act.

Thank you, R368, for that very interesting and informative contribution. Keep 'em coming!

R362 I love your mom. What a lady!

Has Marilu Henner ever shared her weird elementary school memories with anyone?

My elementary school had a "store" in the front office which sold pencils and notebooks and erasers in the shape of different animals. (Does anyone remember those triangular rubber tubes they used to make that you could stick a pencil in to help with your grip, but we would always use them to put our broken pencils back together after a pencil fight?)

I got to take my class' orders once a week and go to the store and buy everything. The secretaries couldn't be bothered so they just let me go to the stash and grab what I needed and then dump the money on their desks. I used to shoplift animal erasers and then take them home and act out slasher film scenarios with them.

[quote] My mother came home that night from the conferences and I asked- How'd you do? She'd called Mrs. Baker Mrs. Black and Miss Brown Miss White.

R139, I probably laughed for a full ten minutes at your story😂🤣. Please give your mom a hug for me!

Wow r198/r199. Thanks for sharing. Even I thought the teacher was a cunt!

[quote] You must have lived in a poor town. I was in Junior High School in the late 1970's too.

Ah, you mean it was the late "1970s" — no apostrophe needed.

^I’m not the person who wrote that, but The New York Times always used to use an apostrophe with decades, as in “the 1960’s,” but they may have changed in just the last few years.

R384 is correct.

When I was in the 4th grade, my family moved and I spent the last 12 weeks of the school year in another school.

Of course all of the friendships and cliques were well established so I spent most of my time alone. My teacher was the type of bitch talked about above. Her name was Mrs. Naile. She was horrible to me. She never called on me even if my hand was the only one up to answer. She gave me terrible grades on papers even when my answers were right.

And she continually made remarks about me all throughout the day. We had small animals in the class, a hamster and a turtle. On the last day of school - since I fed the turtle for 12 weeks - and she was giving them away, I held up my hand when she asked who wanted him. And she gave it instead to the son of the high school basketball coach who hadn't even raised his hand.

I recently looked her up and was very happy to see that she died a slow painful death of cancer. CUNT!

she was sucking his dick.

In the middle of 5th grade, we got a new student who'd just moved into the area in our class. A couple of days before she started, Mrs. Wyckoff said to the class "You should all try to understand that when people move from different places, they might be used to different behaviors, or they might seem or look different. I expect you all to be nice and welcoming." Of COURE this put us all on alert that some kind of freak must be starting. Because kids had joined the class before, and we never got that lecture beforehand. I think it was a mistake- it turned out awful for her. Meredith Leffer.

Meredith was unfortunate looking. The classic homely look. Black hair, in a bowl, Moe-type haircut. Acne, and she had a deep, gravely Mackenzie Phillips type of voice. People picked on her right away. I really think they wouldn't have if the teacher hadn't given that warning.

Then, one day they checked us all for lice. We were all brought to the auditorium, and one by one taken behind a screen and checked with toothpicks by the school nurse. Then, we all went back to class, except for one notable exception. Meredith was not there when we got back. Once AGAIN, the school really messed up. They should've done the check at the end of the day, so that way, we wouldn't realize someone had been sent home. She was out for a day or so after that, and when she came back, it was really bad for her.

I remember three of the girls in class were aspiring cheerleaders, and they would bring out pom poms during recess outside. Meredith was sitting alone on a bench, and they came up to her. "Meredith, we know you were out sick and we made a cheer for you to get better yesterday! Wanna hear it?" Meredith goes "Well sure!" They did it, with pom poms shaking:

"Extra! Extra! Read all abouuut it! Meredith has LICE! No doubt abouuut it!"

She ran way crying because she didn't know that everyone knew. She was out again for a few days. And then she didn't return for 6th grade.

R389, wasn't it a bigger scandal when Mrs. Wyckoff was caught having sex with that black student?

My first grade teacher was crazy. Certifiable. In fact she was certified and eventually institutionalized. She would scream and yell all day except when the principal was in the room and then she’d get all syrupy and unnaturally sweet. As the year wore on he had to spend more and more time in the classroom. She lasted another year before they could get rid of her. The school was afraid she would hit a child. I knew some of this and learned more about just how disturbed she was from mutual friends and another teacher in the school. Fun part of growing up is having people who were adults when you were a child becoming personal friends, and they can tell you all the dirty details.

I never played Duck Duck Goose. Have no idea what it is. Am I the only one?

We’ve all played Duck, Duck, Goose, even if you’ve never realized it.

[quote] [R139], I probably laughed for a full ten minutes at your story😂🤣. Please give your mom a hug for me!

Awww, that's very sweet of you, thank you!

[quote] I never played Duck Duck Goose. Have no idea what it is. Am I the only one?

My favorite game was Seven Up. Does anyone remember that?

I went to catholic grammar school from 1962-1967. I left in middle of 5th grade. All teachers were nuns or lay women. No men. Men were priests & treated like demi-gods. There was a picture of the bishop on the wall & the president. After JFK was shot they put up a picture of LBJ and we didn’t like him.

Only boys could “dust” the erasers. That was taking the erasers outside and banging them together until no more chalk dust came out.

At lunchtime 2 “candy boys” came around. Each the end of a big cardboard box with candy in it for sale. Different boys were picked every day from the “upstairs” classes. There were 2 floors. First grade to fourth grade on first floor. 5th to 8th in second floor. It was a huge deal to us kids when we “graduated” to the second floor.

Altar boys were…boys.

So I learned that boys were superior to girls. Girls didn’t have any responsibilities. It made me mad.

From what I heard, it changed a lot in just a few years. They got male teachers.

In third grade, the two third grade classes were playing Red Rover against each other (to start). Our team called the somewhat intellectually disabled, obese boy. But we decided that we would release our arms instead of trying to stop him. He barreled ahead at full speed and ran straight into the brick wall of the school building. It knocked him out cold. The school secretary was summoned and our substitute teacher couldn't control her laughter while she was describing what happened.

The school officials would randomly toss wadded, colored construction paper around the playground. The papers would have various currency amounts{like scrip} stamped on them so that the child could exchange them for candy at the school office. It was to encourage kids to pick up litter, but it was a confusing message.

Dodge ball against the brick school building, lol.

Another strange memory is the smell from the hallways. Whatever the janitor used for cleaning had a distinct odor that I still can't place anywhere else.

[quote] She always missed a lot of school and there was one point where she never came back. It was only years later that I found out that she had died during the school year, but we were never told

Maybe she was neglected & abused and her parents killed her. I was very neglected. I was unpleasant because I couldn’t have things other kids had. When I asked my mother why I couldn’t have something she would say, “Wedint want that! It’s no good. Only stupid people have it. We’re not stupid. We’re smart and we don’t waste our money on such things.” So when kids made fun of my clothes or that I had a brown paper bag instead of a lunchbox I would say “I don’t want that. It’s stupid. You’re stupid for caring about it.”

Nobody ever figured out my home situation. Not once in my childhood was I ever happily surprised by something my parents gave me. In fact, I would ask for a Christmas present & they would get a knockoff if they even got something like the thing I wanted. I was very resentful and angry that I couldn’t keep up with other kids & that they treated me badly. I was so skinny people would grab my arm & put their thumb and forefinger around my wrist and sneer “Look at you! Look how skinny you are!” And throw my arm down. One boy felt sorry for me once, He realized I ate bread & butter sandwiches for lunch and asked me to switch half of my sandwich for half of his sandwich. I wouldn’t do it. But it was nice of him. His name was Peter.

I carried that resentment all my life. I wish I hadn’t. Now that I’m old I can look back and see my mistakes.

Sorry for all the pain you endured. Strange question about your sandwiches. Did you put sugar on them? My mom used to eat bread and sugared butter sandwiches. I always wondered if she was a child of want since she had a tough childhood and grew up while the Great Depression was still happening. Btw, my Mom turned out to be the best person I've ever met and adversity must of played it's part in forming her beautiful personality.

R399 What era did you grow up in? Just asking because I remember many kids who didn't have anything particularly nice or have nice clothes or lunch boxes. I was one of the lucky ones, my folks weren't rich but were really good to me. But many kids wore knockoffs, didn't get good Christmas presents, etc. Many of my friends, for ex. This was in the 60s.

[quote] adversity must of

Must have. There is no such thing as "must of."

[quote] played it's part

its part, not it's.

[quote]its part, not it's.

R401 You began a sentence with a lower-case letter, Professor.

Lecturer Von Sour Puss.

You're a ton of fun. All of your friends must have nothing, but nice things to say about you.

I thought I had a friend until she publicly corrected my grammar. "It's not mute, it's pronounce mooooooot! My whole view of her changed with one mean spirited sentence. That type of behavior is so elementary school. Cue the grease fire!

Spelling/grammar police on forums crack me up. It's people typing their thoughts quickly, not writing school essays. If you can understand what they're trying to say, that's what matters. Don't be an asshole and pick it apart. Oh, and by the way: NO ONE LIKES YOU.

I'll never understand why people go so apeshit over someone correcting them.

R408 Let's ask Miss Manners

Being corrected and other weird memories from elementary school.

R397 Are you a sociopath? There's nothing funny about what you kids did to that boy.

[quote] Amazing but it doesn’t seem like there are any memories of kids having massive allergy attacks from the cafeteria food in the olden days. Hmmm…

R352 I don’t want to derail this thread with an immunology lecture, so if you or anyone else is interested, Google the “Hygiene Hypothesis.”

I don’t know if anyone else did this as a kid. We would give each other “Indian burns”. It was when you grabbed someone’s forearm and used both hands to twist their skin in opposite directions. It really hurt!

R259, that story is AMAZING!

Did your sister ever apologize? Was there anymore fallout from your mother?

Fill in the gaps please...

Yes r413! I remember that, and another version where you went a step further by scratching your fingers down the arm of the person after you gave them the “burn,” making white streaks in the red down their arm. This was calling “plowing the field” or something like that.

I remember the cutest boy in the class, John S., giving me a really good one. It hurt, but I would have happily let him do the other arm if it meant being in close proximity and him touching me.

Sixth grade: A few of us were sitting at a library table, discussing the People magazine cover about Karen Carpenter dying. This dumb junior high girl walked by, heard us talking, glanced at the cover and exclaimed, “Linda Lavin is dead?!??” One of the guys that was at the table and I still laugh about that and repeat it if either Karen or Linda come up.

Around that time, that anorexia TV movie with Jennifer Jason Leigh, THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD, came out. We were in the library when the guidance counselor came over the PA system to remind everyone to watch this “important” movie about eating that night. Across the library, where the older students sat, this very thin girl stood up and shouted, “Why is everyone looking at me!!!!” and ran out of the library. She did in fact have an eating disorder and I think was out of school for a while.

I loved going to a K-12 school. The high school drama was always more interesting to observe.

[quote]Somehow the nuns got a hold of movies

Bunch of feckin thieves.

[quote] I pled my innocence and told her the story my sister had told me that Easter years earlier and she looked at me, paused, and said, “And you were stupid enough to believe her!”

So Tony, your mother knew years ago what the Datalounge has learned through painful experience.

R400. I recall seeing the Fabulous Miss Lucy’s photo. She had the most beautiful, soulful eyes.

I’m sorry to read about Cinder. One never gets use to losing a pet. It hurts like hell.

^Wrong thread

Kids from poor families were treated like garbage. The first grade teacher made the poorest little boy in the class wear a diaper to represent the New Year in one of her stupid plays.

He cried the whole time while the other students pointed and laughed

I transferred schools in the middle of the 2nd grade. When I started at the new school, the teacher would read the kids' names off of an alphabetical list, one by one. When your name was called, you replied either "hot lunch" or "brought my own"...so that the teacher could give an idea to the school how many kids would be having the hot lunch, I suppose. It also acted as an attendance exercise, and to make the kids talk in class.

But on my first several days I had no idea what these kids were saying, so I always just said hot lunch, since we were poor and I always always had the school lunch. My prior school had mandatory hot lunch, so once I figured out what they were saying, this whole idea of bringing your own a la carte to class seemed so strange, exotic and rebellious to me.

I also couldn't make out what the kids were saying out loud either, for weeks! "brought my own"??? I thought they were saying "Broccoli-oooo". I asked my mother what the heck broccoli-o is, and why is that an option for lunch? LOL. She had no idea either.

Third Grade, 1978.

I recall bringing my Grease Soundtrack LP to class to play during indoor recess (since it was raining outside), since we had a record player in class. Another kid also brought the same record. So, I wrote my name on the album cover to prevent confusion. I think we each took turns playing our record, and the kids loved it as we all danced around and sang along. The teacher must have been very entertained, as most every kid knew every song.

My mother wouldn't let me see the movie at all though, because it might show boobies.

Haha @ R423. I loved that album, too. I brought my Sesame Street Fever album to class around the same time and grade for show and tell. Ginger headed Tommy L yelled out that he'd gotten the same album for Christmas but just threw it somewhere and never even played it while I did my presentation - one in every crowd. I was sad to find that he'd died of heart failure as soon as he made it to college years later.

^ Haha

There was a mousy girl named Donna whose miserable fate was sealed the first day of school when it was revealed her last name was Titus, which immediately got her labeled TIT-us or Donna Tit for the rest of the year.

I wasn't going to post this fuckery because it took place outside of school, but a teacher organized it and only students were involved, so here goes:

Most LDS teens do a pioneer reenactment trek. It’s a safe, well-organized affair with sunscreen, parents, rest breaks, meals, and sufficient water.

Our gym teacher when I was in 6th grade—we were convinced he was in the witness relocation program, but that's another story—decided that the official trek was too easy and he was going to start his own pioneer handcart adventure.

I think he passed it off to our parents as a highly supervised pre-trek trek which would teach us teamwork and give us an advantage when it was time for the real one. It was actually Lord of the Flies with straw hats.

On the second day, the boys he didn't like and most of the girls were forced to stay behind and dig up rocks of a certain size while the rest of us kept going with the handcarts. They were told they had to catch up while lugging the rocks or they were on their own until it was over.

On the last night the non-digging kids formed groups and duct-taped the rocks along with all of our trash into baby-sized bundles. They represented the stillborn babies of the pioneer trail. We handed them over to the kids who had dug the rocks and they had to name their dead trashbabies, dig graves, and then bury them.

If the teacher hadn't enjoyed it so much, I would have thought it was just a creative way to break the "leave no trace" rule.

Our group was the first and last.

Eating male teachers asses

The alcohol-like smell of the purple-inked, still damp, mimeograph handouts in the mornings.

The older girls in the school (probably in the 4th and 5th grades) all sobbing hysterically right beside the outside water fountain during afternoon recess, one hot, late-November afternoon: JFK's assassination had just been announced....Thirty-five years later I checked it out: the school, that quadrangle, and the same porcelain water fountain were still right where they had been then.

Long afternoons underneath mr Hubert’s desk sucking his feet n cock.

One day, when I was in the 2nd grade or so, during recess, there was an older girl, probably in the 4th grade, whom I didn't know. She was sobbing hysterically, and claimed that she didn't know why she was crying. She seemed confused about it. It was pretty weird and it made all the other kids nervous. She had to go ride it out at the principal's office, of course, maybe even disappeared for the rest of the day.

I got ratted on by a mousey teacher's-pet bitch for eating a meatball sub right out in class.

^Were you passing notes?

Agreed that R397's story is majorly fucked up.

^I also agree about R397's story, but I DID laugh my ass off when I read it.

R436 I had the opposite reaction. I thought, why would the substitute teacher burst out laughing seeing a "somewhat intellectually challenged, obese" boy running straight into a brick wall? I didn't laugh. But to each his own I guess.

The smell of sawdust mixed with vomit throughout kindergarten and 1st grade. We always had milk and cookie (graham crackers) breaks and it didn't sit well with a few classmates.

I should have added that the fat boy was an inveterate bully. His father owned an oil drilling company and was (one of the) wealthiest people in town, so nobody punished him. He was mean. That's why it was funny.

In first grade, I didn't drink the milk in my thermos and left it in the schoolroom all weekend. I arrived Monday morning to find an angry teacher's helper who had had to clean out the disgusting sour milk that had stunk up the whole classroom.

OH! Well, R397, you might have added that defining factor from the beginning! Makes all the difference as we all know that mean people SUCK! 😝

It's so crazy you say that R440. I have a very similar memory. This would have been in the third grade. I was a new kid in school that year. During lunch, I had left my milk carton in my desk. And during the weekend it exploded inside my desk (remember the desks where the tops lifted up so you could store all of your books and supplies inside?). The milk had spilled all over my books and notebooks. There was a terrible smell. But I was too embarrassed or scared to admit the smell was coming from my desk. So for the rest of the year I worked with brown milk stains all over the edges of my books and notebooks. And every time someone would bring up the smell, I would join the group in trying to track it down while at the same time evading detection.

Wow, were you in special ed?

Fourth grade. Winter. I used my math book to sit on and slide down the little hill at the edge of our elementary school's playground before classes began one morning. I tore the cover up along with some of the pages. My teacher saw it and I got into trouble for it - just a "talking to!" I sported a pair of these. Anyone remember these from the early 80s? Space boots!

Why would milk explode?

My fourth grade boyfriend said he wanted an open relationship.

My 4th grade bf used to whisper “I’m gonna finger fuck your ass” into my ear while on the school bus.

Didn't you learn *anything* in 6th-grade chemistry class? The milk spoils, bacteria begins to grow in it, eating the sugars in the milk, and off-gassing. The gases build up as the milk becomes sour. In an enclosed container, the pressure builds, and finally the container fails, and the rotten milk explodes all over the place. (These were the days of cardboard containers, before they put stuff like this in plastic bottles). It's kind of similar to what makes the air bubbles in bread.

[quote]Didn't you learn *anything* in 6th-grade chemistry class? The milk spoils, bacteria begins to grow in it, eating the sugars in the milk, and off-gassing. The gases build up as the milk becomes sour. In an enclosed container, the pressure builds, and finally the container fails, and the rotten milk explodes all over the place. (These were the days of cardboard containers, before they put stuff like this in plastic bottles). It's kind of similar to what makes the air bubbles in bread.

Ok, thanks. I learned about what happens when you mix an acid and a base, not about why milk cartons explode. So how long would it take for all that to happen? I mean, I never saw it happen in any class I was ever in, so that milk must have been lying around in some slob's desk for weeks, right?

^I liked the implication in both the exploding milk stories that the milk MIGHT have already been sort of old by the time our heroes first got their little hands on it, if you see what I mean. -R448

R450 I'm not sure I do see what you mean.

The kids were given OLD milk...sheesh.

Pssst…Don’t drink the Milk!

Why?

It’s spoiled!

Not necessarily "spoiled" when it was handed out, just maybe 'getting there'. Government milk, you know. I was certainly served lots of shady stuff in public school cafeterias back in those days.

They were given old milk that all the other kids drank, and didn't notice was spoiled, but the ones who didn't taste it and left it in their desk had it explode. Ok, sure, that's really very logical.

God works in mysterious ways...you take milk that's on the verge of spoiling (it might taste just fine at that time) and leave it for several days in an un-airconditioned building, and...kaboom. Simple.

r294 Closest thing among those I attended were overnight fieldtrips and annual week to two weeks camps. It was more like sleep-away safety and survival drills with some environmental and anthropology education tossed in... as we lived in an area open to the ocean, mountains and not too far off from the desert. But that was back in the 'free ranging' decades.

r447 7th grade, I had a lad tell me he wanted to lick my face because it reminded him of pizza. Poor lad did and the accutane drove him mad.

For all of those interested, the milk containers for elementary school kids weren't huge. I was very forgetful as a kid and I probably left it in my desk on a Thursday. This would have been early in the school year, so September when it's still hot outside. I left it on a Thursday, didn't notice on Friday and it sat in my closed desk all weekend long until Monday. Not sure of the logistics of it all. But it certainly happened. And my desk smelled like old wet mops for the rest of the year. Just sour. I got used to it though, as you do with most smells. But when I smell the same smell now, it takes me right back.

Does anyone else remember the PURE JOY of covering your textbooks for the year? This is when your books were on loan to you from the school and you had to protect them or else pay for them if they got damaged. I did it with such precision using grocery store paper bags. It was a waste to buy the books covers sold in the store because they were so flimsy. Grocery Store paper bags were the best. Being from Cleveland, this meant Heinens bags. I would fold the edges perfectly, tape them up to prevent wear and tear. You measured the paper just-so so you could tuck the flaps inside - to short and they always came off / too long and you couldn't properly close it. Few things felt better than having book cover last the entire semester without falling apart. That was a job well done.

I was decent enough in school, A/B student. I wasn't the best at studying but I always got good grades. What I DID love was buying the supplies, the notebooks, the pens, pencil boxes, protractors. I lived for a new TrapperKeeper. I remember when they first came out around 1982/1983. The organization of it all with that velcro tight closure really turned me on. Of course a month into school, nothing was organized. But when it was brand new, it was life.

[quote] There was a mousy girl named Donna whose miserable fate was sealed the first day of school when it was revealed her last name was Titus, which immediately got her labeled TIT-us or Donna Tit for the rest of the year.

There was a family of four kids in different grades in our school. I felt so sorry for them because their last name was Kuntz.

When I was in grade school, the first day the teacher was passing out textbooks. For some reason, she gave me a teacher’s edition that had all the answers in the back. Maybe she thought I needed all the help I could get. I never told anyone and really had to keep it under cover because it was a bit thicker than student textbooks.

In my junior high school, the homemade grocery bag book covers were looked upon as trashy and low class. Store-bought book covers were where it was at.

.There were two elementary schools in my town back then, and both seventh grade classes combined for the annual Washington DC trip for a few days. I can remember plenty about that early 1980s excursion, but the one thing which sticks out above the rest is that me and a girl I knew from the north school snuck around to the back of the Lincoln memorial where we sloppily frenched and dry humped for about 20 seconds in the darkness.

R462, totally opposite when I was in school in the 70s and 80s. The store bought covers, or even worse, the ones with the school logo you bought at the school store, were cheap and flimsy, fell off, ripped and were made of slippery paper you couldn’t write on. The whole point of a brown paper bag book cover was to give you a blank canvas to express yourself - band logos, doodles, cartoons, phrases, etc. Store bought book covers were lame. I remember that some of the granola kids used to cover books in denim and even wall paper which was pretty cool.

In junior high, our homeroom teacher told us to bring four paper grocery bags one day. He had a stack of them for kids who came without. Then he taught us how to craft them into book covers. That's how our poor, rural school kept textbooks in decent condition for many, many years. He also taught us how to fold and tuck, so tape was not needed. Those paper bag book covers lasted all year!

The store bought book covers (and freebies that were, essentially, advertisements for local businesses) were thin paper, with one glossy, printed side ripped within days.

Yes, r465 a deep fold and tuck was key and the book covers lasted all year. Although today’s brown paper bags are so thin and flimsy I don’t think they would hold up as long. Do kids still have to cover textbooks? Do they even use textbooks anymore or is everything online?

I remember in 6th grade having a teacher who did random inspection of our loose leaf binders, folders and textbook covers. I was very disorganized and my folder of all the handouts was a disgrace. As she called me up to present my materials to her, we had a fire drill. Thank you Jesus for buying me some time to get my folder, binder and textbook cover in tip top shape worthy of Mrs. Gale’s inspection. She was a yeller.

I was on the safety patrol in fifth grade. We stepped out into crosswalks holding stop signs so students could go across them safely. Most of us walked to school.

One day it was pouring rain. I was getting wet, we all were. Our advisor, a well-built handsome fifth-grade teacher, went to each one of us to tell us to go back to school; there were severe storms coming. When he reached me, his clothes were soaked through. His tie was limp, his pants were glistening, and I could see his nipples through his waterlogged shirt. They were purple-brown, as I recall, and they stretched across his muscular pecs toward his underarms.

I was beginning to get erections, and I developed a strong one just looking at him. I had to put my stop sign in front of my groin to hide it. But I came spontaneously anyway. Luckily my pants were also wet, so there wasn't a stain on them.

I still enjoy looking at men in wet shirts, nipples clear as day.

you were shooting loads at age 10?

Yes, R468. It shocked the hell out of me. I was the first guy in my grade to get a really full bush as well.

I remember in 7th grade, Joey Gilbert lifted his arm and I saw up his sleeve into an armpit thick with red hair. I was absolutely mesmerized by it, and had never seen anyone our age with pit hair, let alone that much. I was completely turned on by it and beat off thinking about it for weeks.

I remember in first grade, one day after lunch we were working on a Thanksgiving art project. Carrie H. suddenly threw up all over her desk. I'm 57 years old now and I still distinctly remember that her desk was covered with the peas and carrots that we were served at lunch that day. She must have swallowed them whole without chewing.

We bought Pee-Chee folders just so we could scribble on them and alter the illustrations.

Did you guys have sixth grade camp? Ours was in October and our small school always has sixth grade camp with kids and teachers from two other schools. Dorms were separated by gender. I remember the gang showers and seeing fully grown bushes and hairy armpits on other boys my age for the first time there. We stole a bra from a girl and raised it on the flagpole that night. Then got in trouble the next morning.

I can't imagine having a school store. You mean there was a tore in the school and someone was paid to work there all day?

[quote]Does anyone else remember the PURE JOY of covering your textbooks for the year? This is when your books were on loan to you from the school and you had to protect them or else pay for them if they got damaged. I did it with such precision using grocery store paper bags.

I remember doing it, but not the pure joy. I just did it because we had to. I (and most kids) used to write all over the covers and draw things.

Why do children vomit so much? This happened a lot!

R474, we had a school store in junior high and high school. They usually employed older women and student volunteers in exchange for semester credits. I would buy school supplies, monthly bus stamps, and corn nuts and potato chips.

[quote]I felt so sorry for them because their last name was Kuntz.

I was in show choir with a girl having the same last name. My Mom was the president of the music association and would get so mad at another Mom who insisted on pronouncing the name with the "uh" sound rather than the "oo" sound.

in the 1960's a boy in my 6th grade class who had already hit puberty was showing his pubes to some other boys in the boys bathroom. Yes I looked as I hadn't started puberty yet. A teacher walked in to move people on and caught him. He brought him to the principals office. A while later he came back to class and sat down very gingerly. The principal gave him a paddling which was done in those days, but not often in elementary school. The only other that I heard of was two boys caught smoking and got paddled. Jr. High was different as all the gym and shop teachers had paddles and would use them.

R447 Was there another choir behind the scenes of the unattractive kids?

R478 I would love to know what fetish he developed after that incident?

Did anyone else attend a school where the gym teachers would routinely shower in the same locker room showers as the boys? Was this a pre-80s/80s thing? It's not like they jumped in the showers with us, but they'd be in there showering after a previous class just before we were heading in or something. Sometimes they were in there at the same time. I can't even imagine kids still shower at school these days, unless they are on a Varsity Team, let alone the teachers showering with them.

One of many stories from grade school, which in my town was Kindergarten through 4th grade. I had a 4th grade teacher, we'll call her Miss P., who was elderly (but in hindsight probably in her early 60s, though she seemed way older than that, even to me now). She was well known by students and parents to be "old school" and strict. Both of my older brothers had had her as a teacher, so I was scared of what she would be like based on their stories.

Well, the stories were true! She had zero tolerance for anything that deviated from her standards, which were not always reasonable for children of the age she was teaching. I escaped her wrath because I was basically the top student in the class, but many friends of mine were victims of her pointed remarks and tendency to humiliate targets in front of the entire class.

Anyway, the class was given an assignment to choose an activity (it could be anything) and write up how to go about doing it, in detail, step-by-step. This would have been considered an English writing assignment I guess. So some kids chose subjects like "how to get dressed" or "how to make lemonade." I don't recall what I chose as my subject, but I was given a pass. Each student had to bring their writing assignment to her desk and have her review it, in real-time, on the day it was due. As each student's assignment was reviewed, it became clear that Ms. P.'s mood was darkening, and the ever-present air of fear in her classroom increased. Apparently, the writing and/or chosen subject matter was disappointing her, and she started to show displeasure openly.

Finally she got to a girl (one of the better students in the class, really) and upon reviewing her work with burgeoning rage, shot the student a glance and barked: "How to Make Coffee!?"

The girl, visibly frightened, nodded, acknowledging that it was, indeed, the title of her assignment.

Ms. P. then demanded to know if it was "INSTANT COFFEE?!"

When the girl meekly replied yes, that it was about making instant coffee, Ms. P. violently crumpled her assignment up into a ball, without another word, and threw it into the trash can by her desk in a rage. The girl was basically in years and trembling.

I recall her then launching into an epic criticism of everyone's work, and her going full wicked witch mode in front of the class.

She really should not have been teaching younger kids, and had none of her own. By all accounts she was a bitter old spinster, and maybe was overdue for retirement.

So many stories could be told about her class and my experiences in that and other grades in the same school.

R482 here, "in tears" not "in years" was the girl in the story. Fucking hate phone autocorrect.

Damn, Ms. P was a bitch!

"Instant Coffee???" makes her sound like a Datalounger.

Miss P obviously needed to switch to decaf

I agree, R485.

I remember my grandmother asking “are there any Negroes at your school?”

R477 tell that to my classmate Jennifer Fuchs!

In 6th grade, I had a Social Studies teacher named Ms. Cupo. She was a large woman but very nice. One year, we were studying Mexico and we had a Fiesta. Parents made taco filling, refried beans, rice, and brought in taco shells. We even had Mexican hot chocolate, although I think it was just regular hot chocolate with cinnamon sprinkled on top. She was one of my favorite teachers and I missed her when I graduated and went to 7th grade.

I lived in a lower class neighborhood but went to the local school on the middle class side of town. I took my lunch to school in lunch box until I got older and that was considered a "kiddy" thing to carry. My mom would fill my glass-lined thermos with boiled water before she filled it with soup. She filled with ice water when she filled it with milk. My friends were amazed that my soup was still hot or milk still cold by the time we had lunch.

Unlike others here, my brown paper bag book covers were frowned upon as being something poor people used. We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up so Mom refused to waste money on those college book covers. However, some kids were jealous that I could write on my covers as theirs were covered in plastic.

I was the only black child in my classes until junior high school/8th grade. I was also one of very few who didn't have younger siblings to babysit. I am the youngest in my family. Some classmates' parents were still having kids! Mine were in their late 30s.

R310 - A similar incident happened in my elementary school when I was in 4th or 5th grade. A classmate's brother who was a grade behind us and known to be a bully and trouble-maker (unusual for our Catholic school) was hit by a car a block away from the school and wound up in a wheelchair. His brother who was a nice kid witnessed it. The family moved shortly afterwards so we never heard a prognosis, but my vague recollection is that it wasn't good.

I had and intense dislike for the victim. He didn't mess with me or other the older kids, but you could see his nasty disposition on display with his classmates and younger kids. It was such a strange feeling. A kiddie version of schadenfreude. Glad that something bad happened to remove the noxious little bugger, but then feeling awful and guilty that it was so bad. I'm sure the kids in his class felt a sense of relief and weirdness about it. This was in the mid-seventies, long before crisis counselors were available.

Mean Mrs. P. at R482 reminded me of a story Miss Trowbridge (RIP), my awesome 12th-grade AP English teacher, told us.

Right after she got her degree, Miss Trowbridge taught English at one of the shittier high schools in my hometown. The head of the English department was an embittered old hag named Miss Rakestraw who should have retired long before she eventually did. Her only criteria for grading were how neatly you wrote and whether your writing stayed in the margins. Miss T. got ahold of some essays Miss Rakestraw had graded, and she gave some well-written papers Cs, Ds, and even Fs because they weren't neat enough.

Miss T. also regaled us with this announcement she saw in the hall for color guard tryouts. She actually wrote it slowly on the blackboard so we could savor it:

COME ON GIRLS

DON'T BE ODD

TRY OUT FOR

THE COLOR GUARD

R490 reminds me that in my lower-middle class school district there were a group of kids that were really poor and were what we called hoods. They terrorized kids by threatening to get off with you at your bus stop and beat you up (which they sometimes did). One f them got hit by a car (Schadenfreude + relief!) while they were walking along the urban sprawl wasteland highway with no sidewalk. (This was junior high, not elementary school.)

R473, we had outdoor school in 6th grade. It was very exciting, especially for us poor kids for whom a vacation meant going to stay with grandparents. I still have my name tag thingy, which was a slice of a wood branch on a leather cord. We went down to the janitor's shop and he engraved our names on the wood.

I'm feeling bad for all of you who had such terrible teachers. All my grade school teachers were lovely, most of them older women who'd gone back to work after raising their family.

In third grade, we took a field trip to this small zoo place. They had all these different animals, some I think were rescues from bad situation. Lookin back, that place was shady AF.

Anyway, they had a camel. If you wanted, you could walk up to the fence and pet it. This one sort of unpopular girl went to pet the camel, and it leaned its head back, then thrust forward, hocking a huge camel loogie all in her face. Poor girl was humiliated. She was then dubbed “Camel Spit” for a couple of years.

Jeez, my elementary English teachers would have not been proud about how poorly written my post was. My apologies. It’s four in the morning!

Our violent, alcoholic (but that's another story) 4th grade teacher liked to play guitar and had us reenact "Mama's Little Baby Loves Shortnin' Bread" in front of the school. The class would sing the song whilst some of the students would perform the reenactment. I wanted to be the boy who steals the shortnin' bread from Mama's window sill, but Felix Garza got cast. I told him I wanted to do the part. For whatever reason, he didn't show up the day of the performance, so I replaced him. Except, I was too nervous and didn't know when to go on. What a disaster. Anyway, that was my acting debut.

Also, same teacher memory. I'm right-handed, but I write like a left-hander (so does my brother). The teacher made a scene one day in class and tried to force me to hold my pencil the "correct" way.

Also, same teacher memory. I was a chatty Cathy when I was 9/10. One day, he called me "diarrhoea of the mouth" in front of the entire class. Did wonders for my self-esteem. Some time after, I was a more depressed, less chatty version of myself. But, I blame that on junior high when I started gaying it up and then getting knocked back a few (so from then on, I flew under the radar). My grades did go up around that same time. Go figure.

3rd grade teacher got so mad at Sean McDonald being disruptive, that he literally kicked the leg off of the table Sean and fellow students were sitting at. Like, what? Who does that? Why was he teaching?

My 2nd/6th grade teacher (same guy) was nice, but definitely a closet case. He had gay voice/face. But, I think he was married (to a woman). He was talented though. A different student would stay after school once/week and they would sit for the teacher and he'd draw them. I have my drawing somewhere up in my parent's attic (it's not aging for my benefit, unfortunately). I'll have to find it the next trip I make.

My 5th grade teacher was groovy (and super handsome, and straight).

Why did I have so many male elementary school teachers? My school was probably 40/60 male/female teachers. I think that's weird. And I had every one of them (as a teacher).

R494 Was it what was known when I was younger as Tobias Animal Farm, but now looks to be called Lake Tobias Animal Wildlife Park in central Pennsylvania? Because that was sketchy as fuck. It looks like they’ve cleaned themselves up a bit, but I think they’ve had multiple zoo violations in the past and are as problematic as the Tiger King zoo.

[quote]I'm feeling bad for all of you who had such terrible teachers. All my grade school teachers were lovely, most of them older women who'd gone back to work after raising their family.

What kind of schhol was it, and what was your town like? Most people have good and bad teachers. Were you the teacher's pet?

R439 (see above)

R499, fair enough--I was a shy, good-in-school kid, so maybe I got treated better than other kids. But I didn't witness any yelling or irrational behavior.

One day in our 5th grade “pod,” one of the girls was leaning back in her chair with a pen cap in her mouth. The chair started to fall backwards, which caused her to gasp and inhale the pen cap. No one knew what was wrong at first, just that she was lying on the floor and not getting up. I didn’t see it, but some kids said later that she started to turn blue. One of the teachers ran over and did the Heimlich. I kind of remember that it worked, but an ambulance came and took her to the hospital anyway. She came back to school the following week, but her voice was always kind of raspy after that.

^and that girl was…Demi Moore!

My 5-year-old niece put a pen cap in her mouth, then she ran headfirst into the wall, which caused the cap to scrape off a layer from the roof of her mouth, grody!

R502 And that girl went on to invent the hole in the pen cap and is now a millionaire acting all Romy & Michelle at the class reunions!

I just remembered this. I went to elementary school in the 60s - beginning in 1964 (1st grade). Maybe in 2nd grade, fashions began to change to Mod styles. My mom bought me a pair of red pants that were "floods" (high on the leg - above the ankle) and a wide white belt, and wide-striped shirt and Beatle boots. We lived near the school and I always walked. I was scared to show up in these clothes - even though I liked them. They seemed so outrageous at the time - for a little kid. I thought everyone would laugh at me. Actually I got a lot of complements and the next day one of my friends showed up in bright lime green pants. He said his mom bought them for him but he was afraid to wear them until he saw me. Hair styles were similar. Wearing bangs instead of combing the hair back. Growing hair long at all. Then maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, bell bottoms. It's hard to explain how "forbidden" these styles seemed at first, since there was something so different about them from the conservative fashions up to that time. And some adults tended to give us weird looks.

I’m the hippie school —> Utah poster above, so naturally we didn’t have desks at my first school.

There was a girl in first grade who very protective of one beanbag chair and would grab it first thing in the morning and sit there all day while the rest of us swung on indoor swings and lounged in cardboard boxes. She also had really bad allergies and sneezed, coughed, and blew her nose constantly. A few times, she coughed so hard that she threw up.

The teachers obviously didn’t want to set her off, so she was allowed to stay on the beanbag all year. If we wanted to talk to her, we had to go to her. We also weren’t allowed to ask to use “her” beanbag.

Finally , the day came when she was absent and we descended on it like locusts. There was nothing special about it, but since it was forbidden fruit, we were all over it.

Oh, but there was something special about it. At some point, someone noticed that the zipper wasn’t completely closed. Upon further inspection, we discovered that the beanbag was full of her dirty tissues—months of them. I remember one of the teachers coming over and filling a trash bag with them.

We weren’t allowed to mention it when she came back, but they did put a small wastebasket next to her beanbag and the whole class got a lecture on hygiene.

We had a 4th grade teacher that suffered from PTSD even though it wasn’t a thing back in the 1970s. He’d have World War 2 flashbacks and start screaming that the Nazis were coming. They only lasted a few seconds. He was a short fat man (think Fred Mertz), who had a dual personality. He could be charming and would always sing old songs. And he led a square dance club at school. But when he got mad, his face would turn red and one time he threw a chair against the chalkboard.

About the commentary concerning kids held back a year due to the Oct. - Dec. window, or "red-shirting," my neighbors chose to do this because their son was of a much smaller physical stature than his peers. They were concerned about big physical differences with classmates, even though their son was and still is very athletic, playing varsity football as a tight end (no puns, please). He would have been considered a "runt" and been open to bullying by peers in elementary school. It's just a sad truth.

R501, I also went to an elementary school that didn't really have bad teachers. One of the 3rd grade teachers, Mrs. Taminga, had a reputation for being mean that we all heard leading up to that grade, but I was in her class, and she never lived up to that reputation with us. She had a more serious demeanor than the other teachers and was a little fat with a short, bull dyke haircut, so I wonder if that had something to do with the reputation.

The one exception was our gym teacher, Mr. Wilson. He would pick favorites and also disfavored in every class, and unfortunately, he was the only gym teacher for the school, so we had him all seven years. Even the other teachers were aware of it and commented on it openly, usually to give support to his least favorites.

He never liked me because, I always suspected, he sensed my incipient gayness and found fault with everything I did for years. He heavily favored two blond girls in my class and even had them over to his house to give them extra training for those presidential fitness tests that happened in our last year of elementary. A lot of us thought that was shady, even as relatively naive kids.

I don't remember much about my teachers from K-2. My third and fifth grade teachers were excellent. My 6th grade teacher was very good and the only male teacher I had in elementary school. The only bad teacher I had was 4th grade. It was her first and last year at the school. She just was bad at teaching.

OMG, R509, that is so tragic!

Go on and contribute to the conversation, r512.

Some of the more athletic boys were playing tackle football during recess. I was idily watching when I head a sound like someone had broken a branch. Then came the piercing scream

One of the boys had broken his leg.

R492, we called them "hoods", too!

We didn't have gym teacher in elementary school. The teacher would take us to the basement or outside and we'd do calisthenics, or play kickball. Also, we didn't have mixed gym classes when I got to junior high school. The boys had a male teacher and the girls had a woman. And after our class the boys did take showers. Not sure why that ended, or why younger guys seem horrified by it, but it seemed totally normal at the time - and later, in high school and college. It also made me more comfortable being nude around people, in those situations (and dressing rooms in theatre) and not be self-conscious.

"I was idily watching when I head a sound"

Oh, dear x2!

I remember when I was in grade school how happy I'd be when it would rain because that meant we wouldn't have to go outside for gym. I HATED gym. For some strange reason, few of my schools had gymnasiums. I think one of my elementary schools did and maybe one of my junior highs. My first high school did, and we used it as much as we did the outside field, but once I hit my 2nd semester sophomore year, I was no longer required to take gym.

Several of us did not shower after gym in high school. I don't know how we got away with it, and I don't know personally why I didn't reek afterwards, but it was probably because I put in the minimum effort. I remember when I first saw The Broken Hearts Club and there was that scene where the two guys were in the outfield gossiping and not paying attention to the baseball game. That was me and my best friend. We were always on the fringes of whatever game was being played and we would stand in the field and talk about what happened the night before on Dynasty or Knots Landing (or on Mondays, Falcon Crest and Dallas from the Friday before). If the ball came to us, we'd ignore it and let it sit where it landed and everyone would yell at us, but we did not give a shit.

R518 = stunning and brave!

Yes, but nowhere near as hilarious as your running commentary on people's posts, R519.

I've posted this before in a '70s thread. End of the year picnics at the local active nuclear power plant. It had a nice park with picnic tables and a little beach on the pond used to cool the reactors. We waded around in it.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with Nuclear Power Plant cooling towers having a prominent part in my childhood.

R518 I would have been out there gossiping with you. Gym was lost on me and I didn’t become athletic until well after college.

There was a pep rally my senior year for homecoming and I was over that crap too. Some friends and I hid under the bleachers and made fun of everyone.

I after the 1st pep rally that I got unwittingly herded into the school gym for, 9th grade, I always made it a point to go somewhere outside and smoke pot, putting the free time to good use.

[quote]The teacher was constantly yelling at me because my daily scores went up and down so much. When I’d had enough, I simply gave myself a perfect score each day, and that shut the teacher up. By the way, I’m now a politician.

Donald Trump's origin story at R121?

I used to bribe the boys to be my playground companion in elementary school with candy. This started when I was in kindergarten and worked well.

^^^ But when did it stop?

If we've moved on to high school gym stories ... every time we had to work on field sports we had to go downhill on a trail to the football stadium in the forested gulch behind the school gym. During my senior year, I never once made it down to the stadium for whatever we were supposed to be doing at the time. Instead a friend and I would duck off the trail into the woods and just gossip and joke around until it was time for us to slip back into the rest of the class heading back up the trail to the mandatory mid-seventies dick-comparing shower.

I wasn't sure why I was fascinated with my fellow gym-dodger at the time, but a short time after graduation I figured it out when I managed to make him splatter his cum onto the ceiling of my parent's travel-trailer parked conveniently in our back yard.

I miss that railer. It saw many delights.

^^^ I’m assuming “railer” was a Freudian Slip for what you continued to do their?

^^^ there, lol.

We had to run laps around the big playground in 6th grade. I was running with this little runt of a guy, Ty, and when we got to the farthest part of the field, he pulled out a cigarette, lit it and started puffing away while we were running. I was so shocked!

I skipped over this thread when I first saw it in March, but it's been a surprisingly interesting read. And it seems like there are a number of posters from south-central PA here--WW if you managed to survive one of those random little school districts like Cumberland Valley, Mechanicsburg, West Shore, Camp Hill, Central Dauphin, CD East....

I was in 7th grade, and we were waiting for Mr Joyce to join us, when Herschel Bunch took an attitude with me and called me a f**. He was already 16 years old, and had been passed over multiple times, but our school had decided to take on some hard cases from public school and try to turn them around, Anyway, Herschel got me pissed off enough that I managed to hoist one of those little desks and throw it at him. I scared enough people that I was left alone for the rest of the year. I remembered it because I voted this Tuesday, and my voting place was my old grade school. I was only 11 years old (I think) back then. Herschel is dead (according to some back window memorial I saw on a car a couple of years ago). I sort of had a crush on him.

SUBMIT FAGGOT!

I recall giving a presentation to 6th grade when I was in 5th grade. I was seen as a talented story teller and a writer at the time and was asked to read one of my stories to the older class.

I looked up from my reading at one point and saw a big intimidating 6th grade boy named Mark Bernier staring at me, gritting good teeth, and mouthing the words "you're gay". I stared back at him and smiled, winked, and shrugged my shoulders... And just continued the story... He left me alone after that.

That was pretty brave of me, in retrospect.

A teacher from my elementary school worked as the manager of our swimming club every summer. He had black hair and was so good looking in his dark sunglasses. He walked around without a shirt the whole time, dense hairy chest and thick light brown nipples. I saw him naked at least once a year in the locker room. Long cock, heavy balls and a large dense black bush.

I entered a third grade school room on the first day of classes and saw he was my homeroom teacher. He always dressed in a white shirt, a tie and pants that didn't do a very good job of masking what I knew was below his belt, or maybe I just continued seeing him naked in my head.

If I could have generated a hard-on while so young, I would have been hard the entire school day. I didn't miss a single day of school that year. In the following summer, he would talk to me at the pool, shirtless. I saw him naked several times that summer.

It was in second grade during a little girl's show-and-tell that I recognized my first lie. She was telling the class that over the weekend she and I, and a couple of our friends went swimming and surfing at the beach. She made it sound all so fun and exciting but I was confused why she was making the story up. I had never been to the beach in life at that point.

My first grade teacher came to my house to tell my mom that I had tested genius.

The time in third grade when we had to do book reports and individually read them in front of class. A kid named Tom, who was from a large impoverished family and was always dirty and terribly shy, got such stage fright at being in front of the class that he froze, started sobbing, and couldn't read his report. The teacher reacted by snatching his paper out of his hand and balling her other hand into a fist and pounding it into his back over and over before snarling "Just sit down then, you big baby."

Up to that point, I'd heard teachers yell or scold, but had never seen one twist her face into such an ugly snarl and physically assault a kid in such a petty, shitty way.

R532 Mechanicsburg here representing, I’ve posted about five times already.

R79, in '76-'77 I was at Sam Brannan Junior High in South Land Park, about seven or eight miles from Kit Carson. By then I'd gone through square dancing classes in Texas with snooty girls who stuck their little fingers out instead of doing full arm links. Almost went to Sacred Heart for elementary school but my parents opted for long-gone Our Lady of Fatima instead.

The nuns there seemed to take special delight in terrorizing us. I was mostly a good boy so got off lightly with a heavy book to the head, pinched ears, hands slapped with rulers, and hair pulled for smartass answers in class. I remember one kid got his head slammed into a chest of drawers with the drawer knobs gouging into his skull. Among the oddest memories:

We had annual variety shows with prizes given to the best performances. One girl roller skated around the stage to Melanie's "Brand New Key" at breakneck speed, got carried away, lost control, and fell hard off the stage into the front seats below.

In second grade we were taught by a new nun who was so kind that I had a crush on her. On the last day of school she let me kiss her goodbye on the cheek. When I came back for third grade I heard that she'd left the convent and had moved away. I wondered if it was because she'd let me kiss her.

Our third grade teacher was an Irish nun with bright red hair and an obsession with The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. For music class she'd play the entire soundtrack to one or the other and make us sing along. If we didn't, she'd make us get up in front of the class solo and sing every word.

In fourth grade we had a mock election. I voted for McGovern. The teacher (a confirmed bachelorette and not a nun) gave extra credit to the class tomboy who voted for Shirley Chisholm. Sadly Nixon won the class election too.

We had church every morning. Some mornings I got to ring the church bell by climbing on the bell rope with and swinging it with my entire body. One morning my best friend farted loudly during the monsignor's sermon, and about four or five of us couldn't stop laughing. The monsignor stopped his sermon and yelled at us to leave, which we did, followed by detention.

In fourth grade I had a crush on the cutest boy in class. We used to spend recess together and would take walks in back of school. On one walk he asked if he could kiss me. I couldn't think of any reason why not. That was my first gay kiss.

R531, Ty was badass all the way as would be anyone who can smoke a cigarette while running!

R539, I am heartbroken after reading that. God only knows what that kid had endured to make him so shy and withdrawn. An adult he should have been able to trust takes advantage of his vulnerable state and scars him for life in seconds. Strong, brave little soldier.

What became of him?

Hiding behind the furnace during air raid drills