What have your teachers done (apart from noncing)

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Noncing is literally the only point of note I have about any of my teacher's doings.

[Gurke and Hare]

An old English teacher of mine had a terrible column in the Scotsman newspaper for a while about education.

Our headmaster used to write mad right-wing letters to the local paper, including one dismissing half the current (tory) cabinet as pinko lefties.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My primary headteacher moonlighted as a Tom Selleck lookalike (uncanny, actually) and was once on the Crystal maze.

Ooh we had one that was nicknamed 'Knight Rider' because he had a massive perm and drove a MK2 VW Scirocco, in 2002.

[Joe Qunt]

My favourite teacher weighed a frightening amount, so much so that after I left school someone told me he was having health problems and I kind of resigned myself to believing he'd passed.

Lo and behold a few years later, I saw him outside a Sainsbury's looking like a completely different person. If I had to guess he was under 75kg (down from his roughly 130kg frame). He'd taken up long distance running and was fitter than ever.

I was massively relieved. He inspired me to become a photographer and was massively important in my teenage years. If you're reading this Mr Foster – which he might well be – I can't thank you enough for all you did for me.

[Fr.Bigley]

If you're reading this Mr Foster – which he might well be – I can't thank you enough for all you did for me.

You always were a snivelling little suck up, I never liked you in my class and your photos were shit. Next time you corner me in a supermarket car park I'll fucking drop you.

[Thomas]

Science teacher - usually flat, stoic, and dry - once opened up to me about his passion for racing chickens. He later appeared on Paddy McGuiness and Rory McGrath's Great British Adventure (Channel 5) with his speedy hens.

[Joe Qunt]

You always were a snivelling little suck up, I never liked you in my class and your photos were shit. Next time you corner me in a supermarket car park I'll fucking drop you.

I'm laughing on the outside, but my soul weeps.

[Sebastian Cobb]

We had a grumpy physics teacher who clocked some of his pupils drinking in his local and didn't grass but just sidled up to one of them in a lesson and said 'stay out of my pub. I don't care about you drinking under age but pick another one, I go there to forget about you lot'. Fair.

[Bad Ambassador]

Head of English, generally very popular though not with the senior staff as she took the piss out of the headmaster behind his back, smoked like a chimney to the extent she would nip to her office during lessons for a tab. I went in their once and it was like walking into an enclosed yellow fog bank. After we got back from summer holiday we were solomnly informed that in the intervening two months she had been diagnosed with and died from lung cancer.

[Twit 2]

Bit unlucky, that.

[JarrowMonkey]

Lots of piss artist and violent teachers at the Comp i went to between 81-86, fucking horrible bastards, there was a few nice ones, our music and English teacher is currently the leader of the Hartlepool Labour Party, one of our PE teachers reckoned he played for Darlington, but i cant find any record of that, we still had two nuns teaching at the time, they were like Bishop Brennan from Father Ted, rather than Dougal or Ted himself

[buttgammon]

It's amazing how many teachers' football careers have gone mysteriously unrecorded - my headteacher's appearances for Shrewsbury Town have somehow escaped the annals too.

[Jockice]

This is very hazy but a few years after I'd left there was an article in one of the tabloids about a teacher at my old school. He was a maths man but he never taught me so I didn't really know him. The piece was about him belonging to some strange society and contributing something controversial to a magazine or book. It may have even been about sexuality, but he wasn't known as a nonce* at our place and he was no longer teaching there at the time so I haven't a clue what happened to him. But I do remember is that the only time I ever saw him after I left was when I was driving through the red light district (look, I had a friend who lived at the edge of it. Honestly!) and saw him walking through there. I didn't stop to say hello though. We'd never spoken to each other before and he might have thought I was going to ask him for business.

(*the king nonce at my school was a geography teacher who regularly used to ask well-endowed girls to lie on tables to create mountain landscapes, and once referred to a lass in my class - in front of the whole class - as a 'tasty bit.'

His reputation was so well-known that when the year above me did an end of year show one of the pieces was a pisstake of his proclivities with him actually appearing sitting at a desk on stage while some girls - aged about 14 - did provocative dancing around him and he leered at them.

Absolutely remarkable that this sort of thing happened., even in the late 70s/early 80s. Even more remarkable was that his wife also taught at the school and let him get away with it. He also referred to me as a buffoon on parents' night, but that wasn't really remarkable at all. Luckily my mum and dad were amused.)

[pigamus]

It's amazing how many teachers' football careers have gone mysteriously unrecorded - my headteacher's appearances for Shrewsbury Town have somehow escaped the annals too.

Didn't expect the internet, did they? Like all them old-school murderers who didn't expect DNA to come in.

[Fr.Bigley]

All Games teachers seem to have been ex Welsh Rugby players. 3 high-school moves as a teen due to my dad's job, and every games teacher was Welsh and played rugby professionally. Beats mining I guess.

[Bad Ambassador]

We had a two-man Economics and Business Studies Department, with Mr M - who looked and sounded exactly like Mike Myers' dad in So I Married an Axe Murderer_{a film the title of which he took at face value and wouldn't let us watch, but fair enough} - ripping the piss out of Mr P at every opportunity. His discovery that Mr P was nicknamed "Pants" by the pupils, as he once turned up for sports practice in short shorts, provided a new source of amusement for him. Once, while addressing the entire sixth form, Mr M apologised for his colleague's absence, as he was "in his office, trying on different styles of underwear".

Mr M also once told some bully types that if he heard them victimising others again, he'd threaten the head with his own resignation if they weren't expelled. On another occasion, after hearing that I'd had a magazine confiscated for reading during a study period (which was technically allowed), he handed it back without comment. Largely, I think, because he hated the teacher responsible, a Australian CDT teacher over here on exchange and a miserable bastard. We also had an Armenian exchange teacher who looked like Screech from Saved by the Bell and the head of IT was nicknamed Tefal for his bookish manner and giant forehead.

[Jockice]

It's amazing how many teachers' football careers have gone mysteriously unrecorded - my headteacher's appearances for Shrewsbury Town have somehow escaped the annals too.

On the subject of Shrewsbury, this wasn't actually a teacher but when I was in my late teens/early 20s there was a bloke in my local pub whose claim to fame was that had played for Leeds United just before their glory days. But his career was cut short when he got badly injured and had to retire, therefore missing out on league wins and European Cup finals with Bremner, Reaney, Cherry, Madeley, Lorimer, Harvey etc.

It was practically impossible to check these things in the 80s but you can now. And it turns out his story was partially true. He was on the books at Leeds in the late 60s, made a couple of appearances in friendlies but instead of getting injured he was farmed out to Shrewsbury, played a few times for them and then played non-league football and then in America for a couple of seasons.

I mean, I'd have found that impressive anyway (he'd been an actual professional footballer) but the way he used to talk it was as if he was the linchpin of the team and Don Revie had to reorganise the whole set-up to replace him.

In checking this out I've also discovered there was a professional snooker player at the same time from the same city with the same (not particularly common) name. What are the chances of that happening eh? Wonder if they ever got mistaken for each other.

[Gurke and Hare]

My own personal bullshitting story was that I was a promising player in West Brom's youth team but I had to give up playing after blowing my knee out. I specifically picked West Brom because nobody who was making this up would ever pick West Brom.

[Captain Z]

He said they were both in some sort of punk rock band, with both my teacher and Neil Buchanan being good at art. They were approached by telly folk to make a show, but Buchanan contrived the situation to exclude my teacher. It could all be bollocks, but I like the idea of this bitter old art teacher, who lost his chance at fame, reduced to smoking weed in the ginnel opposite school between classes.

I'm going to suggest that your art teacher was a fucking nightmare that Buchanan knew would ruin any chance of the show being successful.

[Sebastian Cobb]

All Games teachers seem to have been ex Welsh Rugby players. 3 high-school moves as a teen due to my dad's job, and every games teacher was Welsh and played rugby professionally. Beats mining I guess.

Ours was a lanky Barry Chuckle lookalike and a blithering idiot to boot.

He regularly regaled us with tall tales about the 'boy before lunch' who seemingly could run the shitty track at speeds olympians would be proud of, but had also seemingly lost several eyes to javelins.

For some reason the school gave him an adult milk-monitor additional title of head of exams, which according to my physics teacher, meant he basically turned up after the teachers on invigilator duty had sorted everything out and shuffled all the papers around so everything was in a state of chaos.

He caught me doing the wanker sign behind the back of his head and sent a letter home, apparently it's on my permanent record. Probably why the head passed me over for head of department.

[Fr.Bigley]

He caught me doing the wanker sign behind the back of his head and sent a letter home, apparently it's on my permanent record. Probably why the head passed me over for head of department.

Genuine lol

[Voltan (Man of Steel)]

... once opened up to me about his passion for racing chickens.

Did he say if he'd ever beaten them?

[Inspector Norse]

It's amazing how many teachers' football careers have gone mysteriously unrecorded - my headteacher's appearances for Shrewsbury Town have somehow escaped the annals too.

Having worked in the world of SCHOOL for several years I can confirm that I had several colleagues with insignificant footballing careers behind them. One guy had played a solitary game for Dagenham in League Two, another's claim to fame was that while with his Swedish Fourth Division side, he'd played against IFK Gothenburg in the cup. A third was an assistant referee in the Swedish premier league.

As for my own old teachers, I can't remember any of them being particularly interesting, or at least not that any of us kids knew about. My high school form teacher did once in an absent-mindedly candid moment label one of the Physics teachers "a revolting little man" but realised her mistake and didn't let on about any of the details.
The only reason I know about any of their real-world lives is that they're actually still acquainted with my parents, or that tragic news has been passed on - one of my old primary school teachers' sons died in an accident, which I found particularly sad because I remembered her being pregnant with him when I was in her class aged 7.

There was the RPSE teacher at my high school who disappeared one summer, and the rumour was that he'd done what we now know as "a Damian Green" on school computers.* Then the rumour developed, perhaps inevitably, into noncing, which was kind of true because we all found out he was dating a kid in my year's sister, except not really true because said sister was in her mid-twenties. In all probability he'd just got a new job.

I did wonder about my A level History teacher who was a cocky young hotshot earmarked for bigger things (and, to be fair, a really good teacher); I thought he might have had a book or two out, or a little-watched show about Mussolini's rise to power on a minor BBC digital channel, but Google shows me he's not done anything that exciting and has instead settled for solid success in education, now being principal of a large sixth-form college.



*school computers do remind me of my favourite anecdote about high school, when some wee scrote in the first year hid in the bathrooms after school and then in the evening let his criminal parents in. They proceeded to nick loads of laptops and leave a turd on the English teacher's desk. They were caught because they tried to then sell the computers on to another local high school without trying to scratch off the Tippexed school name on the underside.

[Inspector Norse]

All Games teachers seem to have been ex Welsh Rugby players. 3 high-school moves as a teen due to my dad's job, and every games teacher was Welsh and played rugby professionally. Beats mining I guess.

Yeah all the PE teachers at my school were rugby blokes as well. Their grading system seemed to be that if you were on the school team for rugby or football then they remembered your name and you got an A, if you were obviously a computer game nerd then you got made to stand in nets and got an E, and the rest of us got a C.

[Sebastian Cobb]

There was the RPSE teacher at my high school who disappeared one summer, and the rumour was that he'd done what we now know as "a Damian Green" on school computers.*

*school computers do remind me of my favourite anecdote about high school, when some wee scrote in the first year hid in the bathrooms after school and then in the evening let his criminal parents in. They proceeded to nick loads of laptops and leave a turd on the English teacher's desk. They were caught because they tried to then sell the computers on to another local high school without trying to scratch off the Tippexed school name on the underside.

This has reminded me that the school's web filter (no need for https interception in those days) was a look-ahead filter that would block stuff if it found rude/sexual words. One enterprising young lad realised that this was probably only configured to look for such things in English, so with the help of a pilfered English-French dictionary he could view as many "belles nuelles" as he wanted.

[shiftwork2]

Not a single achievement between them apart from Claypole (can't remember his name but you'll either get that early 80s reference or you won't) who won a competition to win a car off a packet of crisps.

Plenty of non-achievement notable stuff though.

Otherwise forgettable PE teacher who threw an 11 year old against the wall and broke his arm.  To the school's slight credit he 'disappeared' for a term.

Dolly, who pushed a kid down the stairs in a fit of rage breaking his collarbone.  Dolly was also famous for reacting poorly to pupils who taunted his baldness from the playing fields by getting into his Vauxhall Vectra and razzing off across the grass to catch them.

Mr G**** was the headmaster and he appeared on Granada Reports in 1995 for a bit of the old extra-curricular child sexual abuse.

With a tiny handful of exceptions teachers at my school should have been imprisoned, or sacked.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Our first IT teacher was so scared of someone damaging the Nimbus 186s that the class was forbidden from touching the machines unless specifically doing what he instructed, every interaction with the machine was scripted and he'd dictate it down to "type WORD press ENTER now you may place your hand on the mouse" He made a rule that your hands couldn't physically be over the desk unless you were typing otherwise they had to be on your knees. To inforce this he went and got a yardstick from the maths department and he used to randomly swing it really hard between the desks and pupils, so it would smack the hands of anyone typing. He really went at it zweihander style sometimes when the kids were distracted so god knows how he didn't seriously injure someone. Allegedly he'd already been in trouble for picking up a tiny kid with a growth problem and suspending him on a hook in the IT department closet and closing the door behind him. He also had some sort of illness that made him sweat like a proverbial IT teacher, he'd be a like a ginger merman on summer afternoons with nipples like Barney Frank and dripping everywhere like the guy from Airplane. Sacked for reasons unrelated to his conduct I believe, heard he immediately got a job in another school where he got a rep over his temper.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I remember one angry young pupil had a falling out with one kid and rather than punching him to assert his dominance decided to rip the computer mouse from it's cable. A teacher didn't see him do this but saw the aftermath and went into crime-scene mode and announced nobody was to leave or touch the evidence because the POLICE might want to take FINGER PRINTS.

Obviously it was a blag to get someone to grass or turn themselves in but they really hammed it up, you'd think someone had been stabbed.

[Kankurette]

Has anyone here been taught by Welsh international turned science teacher Barry Horne?

[badaids]

The most famous thing what one of my teachers did was get exploded over Lockerbie.