The Purple Dragon Blog

After blog-hopping several teacher blogs (reading one blog, checking out their blog links, and so on) after coming across the Reflective Teacher blog listed among the best blogs on wordpress, I found myself reminscing about my high-school days.

In year 8, for example, we had this kind but hopeless RE teacher. I remember, during one lesson we had one girl chasing another around the room attempting to hit her over the head with a broom (while this is going on I am happily playing my digimon and telling one of the class bitches that no, she cannot borrow it - I didn’t trust her with it  - for which she got revenge a few minutes later by telling the teacher that I had one when they weren’t allowed) and our teacher was so deep in conversation with another student that she didn’t notice until another student pointed it out.

Then there were the random acts of strangeness. I can remember seeing one girl who, not in the mood to tie her school tie, had simply looped it around her neck and stapled it together with about ten large shiny staples. Thigns like that happened all the time.

There were the hopelessly stupid ditzs, inevitable in an all-girl school, who did things like ask if Islam was a city in Iraq - during year 11 Study of Religion - or observe that they thought the polis was a disease during Ancient History. I’ll never forget in year nine, our bright-eyed, first-year-teaching science teacher started off by asking whether we thought whwther the moon was a) transparent b) translucent luminescent* c) opaque. Even after explaining what each word meant, we still ended up with slightly less than half the class convinced that the moon was transparent, the rest believing it to be translucent, while I was the onyl student who believed it to be opaque. The poor man looked as though he was goign to cry. By the end of the year he looked permanently depressed. These classes took place in the biology lab, which had a tank with a small turtle that spent all it’s life trying to dig its way through the glass, and a larger tank with two axolotls. I used to say hello to the axolotls every lesson, and the black one would swim to the surface of the water and stare at me. Once I patted it on the head, but it continued to stare at me. As for the turtle? i felt sorry for the poor thing and once picked it up and let it walk around on my desk, but was sternly order by my classmates to put it back in its tank.

When I was in year 8, students were banned from using the elevator. This was because up to twenty students would squeeze themselves in there at a time, and every lunch time there would be an elevator party, where people sat in the lift and ate junk food, pressing the buttons for other floors and pressing ‘STOP’ before it could move far so that the lift would constantly jerk up and down. I remember the elevator parties fondly.

In year 11 my English teacher was always late for class, leaving us waiting outside the locked classroom. On a couple of occasions I solved this problem by climbing in the window and unlocking the door from inside. My year 9 maths teacher was a British man with a habit of making jokes with a deadpan look so that none of the students but me worked out that he was joking, which tended to result in me laughing hysterically while my classmates tried to decide who was weirder, me or the teacher.

My year ten SOSE teacher was wonderful. I remember, when the students were let out for a drink break, fifteen minutes later when only six of us had returned she locked the door and taught those of us who were there, merely raising her voice above the noise when the other students returned and tried to burst the door in. Only twenty minutes later did she open the door, and then she gave them a vicious trimming beofre letting them in. Another time I had a toy lizard that I was throwing up in the air and catching, and she called me up so she could look at it. She then glanced at one of the girls who never stopped talking - Helen - who was in fact talkign at that moment, called “Helen!” and threw my lizard at her. Helen looked around in time to see a creepy-crawly-shaped thing flying towards her face, screamed, and leapt out of her chair, much to the amusement of the class. Our teacher recommended in a loud whisper that next time I should bring a toy spider. She had no tolerance for stupidity, and once told us that we had the “organisational skills of fleas.”

*Meant to say luminescent, don’t know why I typed anything else.