Matt’s Journal

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On Channel 4, every Friday night at about half past ten, there is a really humourous programme called “The Law of the Playground”. It racks up a good number of Z-List celebrities and then let them recall their days as a schoolkid. Topics range from Erections to Snogging, right on to Nicknames and Bad Teachers.

It took it’s inspiration from a site with the same name: http://www.playgroundlaw.com/

School was a good time for me, I was thinking of some things below:

• In Science, our class was the top set and we had a teacher who would range from being as nice as pie to a homicidal maniac within the blink of an eye. One day, we had been using lenses for an optics experiment and after packing them up we were three lenses short of what Mr Davies had expected. Annoyed and very angry, he made the whole class stay late after class, thirty minutes into our lunchtime trying to find these rogue three lenses. After nothing appeared he let us go, but with a sharp talking to.

  Next week we arrived to the class to find a very sullen-faced Mr Davies apologising profusely because he had broken three lenses with his previous class and completely forgotten about it. We didn’t do much that lesson.

• A girl who was in my class called Hannah was a really good athlete. However, she wasn’t very good with personal hygiene. The girls in the class referred to her as B.O Bob, a name that probably haunts her to this day.
• In Geography, we weren’t allowed to sit next to our friends and were assigned random places to sit when we came into the class. On one occasion, I was put next to the class weirdo, Rob Bronski (not of the Bronski Beat), a boy who was knee height to a grasshopper and with really protuding front teeth.

  Rob always like to show how red he could go when he held his breath. So when the teacher was facing the board or not looking, I would give him the all clear for him to hold his breath and show the class his party trick. Just imagine a goofy, skinny kid with any number of veins popping out of his head, trying to impress the class. I have to say, he did it rather well.

• From Sam at WhatDoIKnow: “We used to have an extremely Scottish Geography teacher with one eye, who wouldn’t take any talking in lessons. He devised a plan similar to that of your teacher, whereby you were assigned a seat each lesson, but the three naughtiest students were to sit at his desk and work infront of the class.

  His catchphrase when a kid was naughty was (and imagine this in a very broad Scottish accent) “Sit down, and get out!” Never really understood that to be honest, but he did say it to me a couple of times, and me being the wiseass used to sit down and shimmy my chair toward the door.”

I don’t want to list too many, just get the ball rolling with funny anecdotes, hopefully some of you lot will share and I will add them to the post in due course!