secondary:

stabbing people with pins
throwing a tub of white paint over the stage
cutting another boys hair in the middle of class

I sent you a pm, Mitch. :blush:

Nothing much really. I was well behaved most of the time. But i remember i broke my finger once after we were messing around in class. :joker:

...hmm, I'm a bit confused Zee..4th/5th year, for me that’s 8/9yr olds..are your years in Scotland different because grades don’t come until later and it sounds as though you’re talking about when you were older, at secondary or upper school..?...but anyway, it is quite interesting seeing things from both sides as it were, which you must have found as well...it’s kind of hard to get that balance with pupils who really just want to learn and not distract and those who do distract, especially when it’s regularly...you can’t just ignore the ones who find learning easy and think oh, you don’t need my help, you’ll do very well on your own because you motivate yourself..well not quite like that but you know what I mean...and you can’t exactly ‘reward’ bad behaviour but you also can’t and shouldn’t ignore these disruptions and the reasons for them...hmm, this is difficult because I actually think that your teacher was wrong in just concentrating on the ones who ‘wanted to learn’ and it’s sad those others failed but I don’t know exactly how it was and circumstances are different and have to be adapted so I’m not really judging her as such, I guess I’m just looking at your perspective of it, which was full of frustrations and understandably so...anyway, for me, I would feel that if pupils were constantly disruptive then I would be looking at why I wasn’t engaging their attention and if I was failing them..and maybe it would be nothing to do with me, there are different reasons for everything and you can’t always ‘fix’ them...but as frustrating as it is for others, I would actually be giving them a lot of attention but not in a way that I would give them the impression that I condoned their behaviour or that it was acceptable..but obviously that has to be balanced out with attention to the less disruptive pupils as well, so it’s hard...and I don’t work with older children so don’t encounter a wider range of problems ..but on the whole, as odd as it sounds, I would rather if a pupil found it hard to engage, that they were disruptive, rather than quiet as it would draw my attention to any potential learning difficulties much earlier so I kind of don’t always see it as a negative thing...but that’s from the ‘other side’ so I understand how frustrating it is for their fellow pupils and as I say, I don’t work with older children....

..it’s sad that your experience put you off though, I think maybe you would have made a good teacher and mentor...my friend’s son now teaches at the upper school he himself went to, which is quite unusual and we often have chats about it because it’s not only ‘from the other side’, it’s also the exact same people who taught him who are now his colleagues...I think even calling them by their first names is strange for him..but yeah, it is interesting reading your views because your experiences are from both sides....

I thought this said "stole a bunch of staff". :laugh2:

Saint in Primary..
In Secondary School
I put pictures of Phil Mitchell all around my German Teachers classroom :joker:
Threw a condom on the floor halfway through a lesson :joker:
Oh and put this awful picture of my History teacher all around her room too

That's about it

not much of note

Primary
- stole a bunch of pencils/pens from classmates and teacher
-made up a rumor that some kid ate a cheese stick off the floor, and then everyone called him 'cheese boy' for a year

High School (Secondary)
- was caught doing people's tests for them in Accounting for money

the rest was just vanilla hijinks most kids get up to

What the hell is 'vanilla' supposed to mean, people keep saying it
Never heard that word used in that way ever before :s

..were you like The Breakfast Club..?..

boring, normal, usual, not exciting

Primary: Nothing

Secondary: Got drunk a few times, with one resulting in calling my fat teacher a sexy bitch. Set fire to my hair accidentally (I had a long fringe at the time and was messing about with a lighter) and the whole building was evacuated because they thought it was a computer that was going to explode.

Primary - Nothing.

High School - I had just started smoking (I was just trying it out really) and was standing out at the back of the school where the smokers hung out, the head of my house walked out the door and I panicked because I really didn't want my parents to know I was smoking so I threw the cigarette I had into the bin and the bin went on fire :bored:

Other than that I truanted every day for about a year.

Most other things we got up to was in a goup so can't be bothered listing them all but I ended up being expelled and having to go to another school.

Probably exiting secondary school each day, when I didn't have the rights to do so.

I used to hate my French teacher and vice versa. She was horrible, rude and would give us these horrible spelling tests and if you got less than 16/20 correct she would keep people behind and do another test until you got it right. The French lessons were always before lunch so you could end up missing most of your lunch break.

One day after drama I had a baby doll that would cry which I had used for a performance. I kept setting it off during lesson and she was getting so angry. She then tried to take the doll from me and I refused and kept setting it off. She then shouted at me and I told her to **** off and that she was a **** teacher. She burst into tears and I got called to the headmasters office and my mother came in.

Looking back, I feel like a right **** for doing that.

Aww :(

I know. I wasn't usually that troublesome at school but me and my French teacher hated each other. I'm not proud of that moment though. :(

I was liked but a nightmare ( which was my nickname for a short time)
never ate dinner and was regularly sent home for it
hid everywhere
ran away all the time
refused to stop running/fasten my coat/ anything
never stopped talking/giggling
told a teacher my older brother was a stranger when he came to collect me, she almost called the police
I brought mud/worms and ladybirds into school to upset a teacher with an issue
Wrote alison had a wee on a desk... I didn't like alison

High school

bunked off constantly
threw away a map on a school trip and got our group lost on a moor in durham for 4hrs
burped the word parsnips everyday in registration
Sent a scruffy kid a tin of MR DOG wrapped as a present on valentines day... he cried.
laughed my head off when my best friend fainted in assembly thinking she was joking.. she wasn't
hiding in her house from our English teacher and spiting on his head from her bedroom window.
Staying up all night on another trip and almost being sent home for being 'giddy'

Funnily enough we had a neurotic French teacher who cried a lot :joker:

One of our french/spanish teachers was a bit of a nervous wreck too, her name was Miss Friar or something like that.

My French teacher was amazing, she let us virtually cheat in our coursework and I would have failed overall if I hadn't (got two A*s on speaking and writing courseworks and two Ds on the reading and listening papers)

There was a boy and a girl in my French class who hated each other and argued every lesson and she egged them on :laugh:

:laugh2:

Ahh yeah, I don't know exactly the equivalent in England but 4th year would be when English kids sit their GCSEs (year 10? year 11?) and 5th year would be when they sit AS levels; except in Scotland, 5th year is the important year for exams, so when English kids sit A Levels, Scottish kids would either be doing Advanced Highers or more Highers (Highers being the exams we do in 5th year) - Highers are what Scottish kids need to get into Scottish universities, so if you do well in 5th year you can pretty much relax in 6th year, and if you don't do well then you can retake things in 6th year and still go to uni at the same time as people who did well in 5th year, assuming you did well in 6th year. Does that make sense in terms of comparisons? :laugh:

3rd year (14 years old-ish) you do the groundwork in preparation for 4th year (15 years old-ish) where you sit your Standard Grades; but at my school they started changing some courses to Intermediates instead of Standard Grades, so in 3rd year you would sit Intermediate 1 exams and 4th year you would sit Intermediate 2 exams. 5th year (16 years old-ish) you sit Highers, if you do well then you'll probably get unconditional offers for places at universities, if you don't do so well then you can rely on 6th year (17 years old-ish) to retake subjects, or sit Advanced Highers, which you would do either because you'd done well in 5th year and perhaps you wanted a challenge, or if you were applying to a really good uni (Oxford, Cambridge etc) because you would need to gain equivalent qualifications to A-Levels.

I used to dread working with the disruptive kids because it could be quite intimidating, I'd be sent outside with a group of kids, or sometimes half the class, and just be given work to teach to them, so I wouldn't even have time to prepare it or think about it, I'd just have to work on the spot. There were a lot of times where my lessons failed and there were a lot of times where it worked really well. I found that the best way to get a rowdy kid to engage was to joke along with them, if they like you then that's half the battle; kids don't want to listen to people they don't respect, but if they find you interesting or think you give fun lessons (though not to the point of pandering, obviously) then I found that they'd be willing to give you the time of day. Those hit/miss lessons were with kids aged 15 or thereabouts, that awkward stage where they're either really loud and hyperactive or painfully shy and awkward, I'd see a lot of mild bullying and at one point I even lectured some 13 year old kids about not picking on this one boy who was very, very quiet and used to be the butt of their jokes... and I had a similar situation with 9 year old kids where I had to shout at them in German and I couldn't tell if they were shocked that I was being serious or that I was speaking to them in German :laugh: because I was there to teach English... Felt quite proud of myself for doing that though, they never once made fun of those kids again in both cases, at least not when I was there...

Why are the Scottish and Irish systems so complicated? The English and Welsh system makes the most sense

I don't think it's complicated at all; I think the English one is complicated :laugh: guess it just depends on what you were brought up with.

Scottish year groups run according to the year you were born in... so in my case, the people in my year were all born in the same year as me, and maybe in December the year before or January the year after, but generally everyone is the same age. In England I believe it runs according to the school year... so you could be a month older than someone (e.g. you were born in August and they were born in September) but you would be the year above them at school, which seems mad to me...

..Ah thanks for explaining how the Scottish school years work, I was a bit confused..it sounds quite a flexible system in general..?..


...hmm, sometimes you do have to ‘wing’ your lessons because I guess the point is that you’re not working with pupils who cope well with structure, which is often why it’s better for them to be in a smaller group and so long as the curriculum is covered in what you are doing, your ‘working on the spot’ was probably much better for them and you said a lot of the time it worked well..?..it probably worked well for them a lot more than you thought but I understand that you might not have thought so..if you have a lesson plan and you get through it without disruption and the pupils produce good work then you’re bound to get a feeling of satisfaction...it’s a bit like a tick list, that same feeling...it’s not as instant feel good thing when you’re working with disruptive pupils or ones with learning difficulties, it’s a bit more of a slow burner but the fact that you did feel as though it went well a lot of times means you were actually very good at engaging those pupils that the teacher couldn’t in a more structured lesson...you know, sometimes people can find things difficult to understand/do for whatever reason and their self-consciousness about that can be masked in messing around and drawing attention in other ways....that’s why sometimes bad behaviour can be a sign that you’re looking for that someone needs extra help and isn't always a negative thing....

..but you know Zee, everything you’ve said that I’ve bolded says that you would make an excellent teacher, whether it be a year/class teacher or working with children with learning difficulties who would benefit with someone like you to guide them..I know that you don’t want to do it but I think that’s a loss to the Scottish education system because if you’ve got a child’s attention and respect then you’ll find they don’t want to mess around so much and start to learn..and that’s what you did...