An apology to the teachers we made cry

Throughout secondary school, rumours flew through the corridors of Mr Davies breaking down and crying because the year nine class locked him in a cupboard. Miss Patterson got locked out of French, and Gilbert lost his cool at the fifth formers in the corridor who were disrupting his IT class. It was a jungle, and it all got a bit much sometimes. We pushed it too far, and did some truly horrible things to the people whose job it was to nurture us and educate us.

To those noble teachers, we say this: we’re really really sorry.

“We convinced my maths teacher that I had an actual imaginary friend and she felt so confused and awkward that she would hand out an extra worksheet for ‘Graham’, and others would mess around and blame it on ‘Graham’ and she had no idea how to deal with it. When I moved back to the UK she wrote in my leaving card that she hoped Graham would behave at my new school, which kind of made me feel bad for how far we pushed the whole thing.” – Chloe, State School, New Zealand

“One of my friends once found out a regular substitute teacher had had once done modelling – like really shit modelling. Nonetheless he and a few others printed off the pictures and put them up around the school.” – Matt, State Comprehensive, Hertfordshire

“I threw my teacher’s pencil case out of the window, just for banter. He didn’t think it was banter.” – Ru, Private School, France

“On a ski trip I had to walk home one of my drunk teachers back to the other teachers in his room and then he threw up all over the bed. Think that kind of makes me a good person though.” – Leah, Comprehensive School, Merthyr Tydfil

“Our Latin teacher was known for writing fucking endlessly on the whiteboard without turning around, and was quite elderly with shit hearing. We used to move our desks around really slowly. So one minute we’d be sitting in a normal layout, and then 30 minutes later we’d all be squished into a corner, or there’d be 10 metres of space between him and the first row of desks.” – Robin, Private School, Dorset

“We locked our music teacher out of the classroom and she cried.” – Charley, State Comprehensive, Hampshire

“We found our IT teacher’s Facebook profile, so we catfished him with a fake profile using pictures of a pornstar.” – Kyle, State School, Hertfordshire

“My teacher nearly dropped me in a giant fish tank in an aquarium on a french trip so me and another teacher got my mum to ring her to pretend to have a go at her. my mum was having a go at her on the phone for a good while, telling her i was allergic to fish and she was going to write a letter of complaint to the governors. The teacher was a mad panic of apologies and when she eventually found out it was a joke she said she was scared she was going to end up losing her job. she did take it pretty well once she found out it was a joke.” – Kirstin, Catholic State School, Lancashire

“We used to play strip musical chairs and leave sanitary products on the floor when we knew a male teacher was on duty so that he’d get freaked out and let us stay up late.” – Annabel, Boarding School, Warwickshire

“We often forget that we lived through a technological revolution in teaching, from the acetate OHPs of Year 5, to the interactive whiteboards of Year 11. The main development came when they introduced the computer projectors to my Worthing all-boys’ school. From then on, every moment our Maths teacher spent without her watchful eye on the classroom was an opportunity to host a public screening the most depraved content possible to an eager audience of 12-year-old proto-masturbators. It was the Cannes of extreme scatology. What’ll it be today, fellas? Meatspin? Octopus Girl? Lemon Party? Eel Soup? Tub Girl?

“The teacher always returned red-faced, flustered, and without a clue who to blame. We had strength in numbers. The Palme d’Or has to go to Luke Elsmore, a baby-faced transfer student who Facebook tells me now works in a garage. Luke distracted us from our basic trigonometry with a site, now down, that I believe was called Snickers Bars. Our teacher had taken ill and didn’t return to the classroom – so instead it was our deputy head, a grey-suited, bearded man in his late fifties, who swept into the top Year 9 Maths set, to be greeted by a 12 foot projection of a winking brunette, grinning as she devours human shit. He calmly approached the computer, clicked the red-and-white “x” in the top-right, and took away our whole break-time. It was worth every second.” – Matt, State School, Sussex

“In nursery I handcuffed my teacher and lost the key and she had to go to the fire station to get them cut off, she took me with her so it didn’t look like she’d just got kinky and got it really wrong. She’s now my mum’s best friend and still reminds me of it.” – Isobel, Private School, Manchester

“We had a teacher who only took business classes for sixth form pupils. She’d always have to cover year seven classes on her corridor. A black kid walked into the class late, absolutely petrified and apologising loads because everyone was scared of her. She was known for kicking off at the slightest thing. He told her how he’d just been grabbing some books, so she paused, looked him up and down and said: “Well, I suppose you are Nigerian.” I never saw her again.” – Tom, Private School, Suffolk

“We made our French teacher cry because we were playing some game and class was split in two (all the lads on one team ofc),and the teacher was doing a tally chart to keep score. Every time he marked our score we’d all stand up and cheer as if Sterling’s ghost goal had gone in. Eventually he broke down and walked out as we wouldn’t stop.” Isaac, State School, Berkshire

“I tried to get my French teacher fired through a petition. Me and the boys threw snowballs at her house during half term and she accused us of nearly killing her mum.” Sam, State School, Berkshire

“My mate asked our maths teacher to come over for a BBQ and said he would get naked for her if she wanted – she cried. I also used to sit in French and fire spit balls at my teacher’s head when she was writing in the white board. As well as this, me and my mate used to through the little juplo toys that we had in our bottom set maths class at our teacher and he got so mad he stormed out and cried. We were horrible.” Conor, State School, Berkshire

“A girl two years above me was being driven back from a match by our hockey coach when she saw Anusol sticking out of her handbag. She took a picture of it and put it on Facebook with her name and everything. It went viral – harsh.” Penny, Private School, Hampshire

“To his staff and students, Tim Dingle was the respected headmaster behind one of the best-performing schools in the country. Yet while they were busy in class, the married principal was busy flirting with women using a webcam in his study. He even confiscated our weed and smoked it in his office. He posed as a surgeon called Dr James Bunyard to a lover he met on the internet in 2002. Mr Dingle kept up his double life for eight months before the lover, Nicky Barr, discovered the truth. In an interview she told how he took cocaine at a party while wearing a dress. He’s now a comedian who does his stand up int the dress.” – Joe, Grammar School, Buckinghamshire

“My geography was a fuck about lesson and we used to just terrorise her. She was pushing 60, bit nuts. Her classroom was on the third floor, and one day one of the lads in my class was sitting on the edge of the window and the teacher said “stop sitting on that window ledge Lukas it’s dangerous you’ll fall out” and when she turned around to write on the board Lukas threw his jumper out the window, hid under the table and another lad was like “Miss he’s fallen he’s fallen!” And she legged it over to the window, saw the jumper not really looking and legged it out of the classroom screaming cos she actually believed it” – Sarah, State School, Denbighshire