Somethings my history teacher in high school did. This is an Australian high school as well. Might provide some context. Might not.
- brought a dance instructor in because we were learning about the US in the twentieth century and decided learning the Charleston was an important part of our education.
- afterwards we made hot dogs for lunch because they are also a vital part of American history and culture.
- Made us watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail while we learning about Russia because “It’s an excellent display of the disparity between social classes experienced in feudal societies.”
- showed us 1920 German army training videos because they didn’t have tanks and were thus running around with cardboard cut outs.
- had a running joke that one of the other students was going to become a fascist dictator because of reasons I’m not too sure of. The kid - Bailey - rolled with it.
- Would make a game of Spicks and Specks up each semester as a way of studying for the exams. Spicks and Specks, for those who don’t know, is a quiz show. It’s very fun. Would recommend
- Never sat at his desk. He’d always sit on top of an empty desk and make jokes about how dictatorships could be avoided if said dictators were given the Sims.
- Wrote with a fountain pen. His handwriting was illegible. He couldn’t read it himself. I asked once what my mark was (I couldn’t read it) and he said “Yeah that looks like a sixty. Or an eighty. You know what, just say it’s an eighty. I don’t know.”
- Another quote: “If I marked you wrong, don’t tell me. Keep the extra marks. Unless I marked you down, in which case do tell me.”
- Would do weekly Kahoots and give the winner an icy pole.
- Tricked the class in the year below me into thinking the poster of Lenin he had in the back corner of his classroom was about John Lennon. Don’t know why or how.
- Every week he’d move said poster about two centimetres to the left to see if anyone noticed it was moving.
- Would make us all try to decode Russian in said Spicks and Specks or Kahoot sessions and laugh while we struggled. When we asked what it actually meant, he’d shrug and say something like “I don’t know. I just put it through Google Translate. Why would I know?”
- Tried to convince us that the reason the Equator exists is to prevent penguins and polar bears from going to war again, because apparently they did at some point.
- Would put funny little ditties, rejected sources and jokes on that back of each source analysis sheet and under the titles of homework and stuff. Except that it was in like font size 0.5.
- Gave us crosswords for homework and wouldn’t mark it because sometimes he couldn’t figure it out.
- Told us - in detail - how Rasputin’s dick went missing after the Revolution. None of us asked why he knew. It was weird.
- Called himself an older, glasses-wearing Ben Affleck. Scary thing was that he does actually look like that. I kid you not.
- Made parody board games based around history
- Brought in a game called Secret Dictator for one of the final classes of the semester and played it with us - he claimed that because it was based around Hitler’s rise to power, it had relevancy to the unit.
- Did not question when he came late to class and found one of the other students teaching us. He sat up the back and let her continue.
- Would use pictionary as a way to get us to practice our source analysis. It was fun.
I’ll add more when I think of them. But yeah, I had this guy for my final two years of high school and he was pretty wild.
