My middle school was a stupid place that looked like a prison on the outside, but on the inside, the classrooms had no back walls and were separated by accordion dividers. Occasionally, they would open up the dividers and show the whole three-classroom block a video on three of those carts all chained to one VCR.
The one I remember was on a fun day where we all got to watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which had just come out on video. They fast-forwarded through Napoleon's, "Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde!" being translated as, "Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" in the subtitles, but we could all see it and we were all like 13, so it was pretty funny.
Here is the school. It still exists. Batchelor Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. I hear the inside has been renovated and there are now actual walls.
And I'm not exaggerating when I said it looks like a prison. It's not the most comforting sight the first time you go.
My school’s bus, which was used only for sporting events and trips, was an actual prison bus. It still had restraint attachment points and the bars on the windows.
It was brilliant for psyching out the other football teams.
My elementary school was an old Timex watch factory. It was a "temporary" building that ended up lasting 13 years. The only windows in the building were in the office and kindergarten wing. Last I checked, which was over a decade ago, the building had been turned into a firefighter training course.
So, school being a prison? All I have to do is remember my elementary school days.
This is obviously not that bad, but there was a continuous rumor going around the school that it was going to be a women's prison but they decided to make it a school instead.
I went to a similar looking middle school, but each grade was in one giant room probably the size of a gym. No class had an actual wall unless it was on the edge. Probably 10-11 classes in each big room for the grade. The only dividers between classes were like rolling bulletin boards and maybe a metal cabinet or two. I couldn't imagine having to teach in those conditions because it always was pretty noisy.
I also remember the school's gym had a full locker room with showers but students weren't allowed to use the showers and none of the bathrooms in the school had stall doors. And the stalls were those short ones were your head was higher than the top of the wall. It was super weird.
Windows are terrible at efficiency. Yes, even modern ones with three panes and filled with argon. A building with minimal windows is generally going to have better thermal efficiency than one with lots of them, and that started to be really important during the 1970s oil crisis. The result was a bunch of schools like this that look like prisons.
If you get some local mural artists to paint the concrete in bright, whimsical images, it fixes a lot.
I had a Shakespeare class in high school and we convinced the teacher to let us watch 10 Things I Hate About You because it's very loosely based on The Taming of the Shrew. She turned it off with the dick drawn on the kid's face.
I did a comparative study on 10 things I hate about you and taming of the shrew for a term in school. In fact, a lot of our Shakespeare was dressed up as comparative studies which did make it interesting.
i thought Scarface's name was Carface when I was little and obsessed with this. had a stuffed animal named Mr Carface (I obviously couldn't 'steal' the name Carface, I had to be original) that would watch the movie with me all the time. 16 years later and I still have them lol
It's the 6th grade. The girls are taken to the gym for a presentation about menstruation. Us boys are put in a room with this cart to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
First grade, they piled all the classes together, because it's 1993 and we only have one laserdisc player, and we need to watch a video on pollution. Main topics were acid rain and smog and that shit has been with me for 30 years, I will never forget it.
You got to see real movies? All we ever got was, like, PBS Nova episodes or A&E documentaries. No worksheets; but I got to learn about Ray fuckin' Kroc years before they made a movie about him.
Oh yeah we had those too. I totally forgot about A&E, those tapes were around for sure. And a lot of stuff from the National Film Board, I think the schools in Canada got that stuff for free or something.
The first thing that came to mind (assuming this is being wheeled into my classroom) was that 90s birthing video they used to show in sex ed. It culminated in them showing the baby's birth; though the poor thing probably got rug burn coming out.
Fun fact about me, the first time I watched the original Star Wars trilogy was in high school. My teacher didn't really want to teach us anything, so he put on episodes 4, 5, and 6 over the course of a few days.
Well....maybe, but my original teacher stopped teaching in the middle of the school year. There were rumors of him getting a BJ from a student and being fired. He might have just retired. You know rumors. They moved in a couple different temp teachers to fill in for the last half of the year. One of them was bored one week and just started playing the trilogy. Good old 'principles of technology' class.
Late 90s Chicago, I don't recall this happening much, but I did have a social studies teacher in 7th grade that let kids take their lunch period in her classroom and the AV cart would usually be tuned in to the Maury Provich show.
Oh man, a friend and I were the AV crew for a while in high school in the late 90s. Basically we’d deliver these TV & VCR wheeled stands to the teachers needing them in the morning. If there wasn’t any need, we got to hang out in the equipment room instead of home room.
We got to use the elevators and even wield “the key ring” from time to time.
With what happened in the US .... they wheel in the big ol' CRT to the front of the class where I'm sitting, the strap breaks and the 150 lb 36" behemoth lands on top of me.
I'm pretty sure I was in first grade, but for sure no older than third grade, when our sub put on The Blob (1988 version). That sure left a mark on me and I was pretty freaked out showering for at least months afterward.
Awesome. I like the 2000ish version. In elementary school a very cool spelling teacher let us watch one of the Pumpkinhead movies for Halloween. So hilarious and great. I'm honestly surprised some little bitch kid didn't get their parents to start shit.
Once when we were studying in biology class, when I was maybe 14 or 15, the teacher leaves the room and comes back with this sort of telly on the wheelie stand thing; he was trying to surprise us with an educational distraction from textbooks and, it was good on paper.
He must have forgotten to rewind the VHS or something, of a nature documentary, and the entire class got an immediate scene of two wildebeast trying to repopulate the Savannah by themselves.
I mean it did work, since it was a great distraction whilst he frantically Goku punched the Stop button as fast as he could, before pressing rewind.
Does anyone remember Channel 1? They made contracts with schools to play the propaganda every day and they put a shitty TV on an arm in every room. I don't know who paid Channel 1. This would be late 90s.
I sure do. In exchange for those free TVs we had to watch 30 seconds of awkward middle schoolers doing a news report followed by 6 teen spirit perfume commercials in a row every homeroom period.
Pat Paulson had this bit on his show where he was the science guy and he would torture the young guy guest and try to make out with the young girl guest.