At my (state) secondary school, every year on the last week before the summer holidays there was an activities week where you had to pick an activity. There were a lot of different things to do and the cost varied, such as kayaking, skiing, trip to Italy etc… there were also various activities at the school.

Over the years there were fewer options until the whole thing was cancelled, mainly due to health and safety.

Anyway when I was in year 7 I made the choice of spending the week playing with solid fuel model rockets, it helped that it was also a cheaper option.

So with the teachers supervising or rather taking part, the week was spent stuffing rocket engines into cardboard and plastic pipes and launching them, some of which exploded showering shards of plastic over the football pitch.

Someone also wondered whether we could make a rocket powered car, which turned out as a rocket with wheels on it that was launched somewhat unsuccessfully down one of the school paths. I think that one almost got me.

On the last day one of the teachers decided to show us what a dust explosion looked like, so they took all the sawdust from the workshop and put it into a container with a party popper in the side. The rest of the kids and I were stood a good distance away shouting at other kids who were wandering around nearby to keep back. The resulting fireball was awesome.

Our music teacher (whose name was Tom Jones. If only that Tom Jones) would deal with disruptive pupils in a class by hurling the wooden blackboard eraser at a pulls head where it would hit them directly on the forehead. He was a supreme marksman. Saw a kid lose consciousness from the impact one. Wham! And suddenly there’s was just a cloud of chalk where a kid once sat. This man was also in the Salvation army (clearly attack division)

Funny thing is I was in secondary school in the 80s and had 3 Teachers (Technical Drawing, Art and PE) who had also taught my Dad, so he had stories, for the same teachers, that blew mine out of the water.

The worst thing I ever saw were two 15 year old boys being dragged by their collars across gravel by my geography teacher when getting off the coach from a school trip aboard. They had trashed their hotel room, tearing the paper off the walls, burning their bedsheets and throwing food and drink all over the room. This would have been bad enough but the trip was to the CCCP (as was) and the hotel had contacted the local governor who had contacted the embassy in the UK who had talked to the Foreign Office, putting the whole educational trip program in jeopardy. By the time the bollocking had made it to the school (before we arrived back at the school the teachers and students had no idea, there were no mobile phones back then) it was apocalyptic, so my Geography teacher just totally lost his shit, mixture of fear and rage I think.

My Dad’s stories involved Teachers dangling kids out of the windows by their ankles and having their head shoved in a desk and the desk lid slammed down. Proper “how was nobody killed” kind of stuff.

I remember British bulldog being barely tolerated. Cannot imagine it’s allowed now.