I still sometimes think about the guy in my lower secondary school English class in probably 2016 reading the infobox on the Wikipedia article for Tanzania, and saying out loud, "Official languages: none de jure??", pronouncing it in a heavy singsongy Norwegian accent like "NOO-nuh duh YEW-ruh??", apparently believing "None De Jure" to be the name of some sort of obscure African language rather than just meaning "no official language"
And then I remember that this was around the same time that the teacher asked what New York was named after, and I raised my hand and answered "the Dork of York". And then my soul goes nichijou_pencil_stab.mp4 for a bit
Still remember a classmate who peed themselves in class because our horrible head master refused to let him go to the bathroom and he was very shy. This was decades ago now and we were small kids. But the main reason I still remember it is because it was such terrible abuse and shook me quite a bit. I mean our head teacher was a super toxic bully in all the possible ways and when I heard he had died I celebrated.
And of course the boy was bullied because of that by the unchecked bullies in our school do it definitely was not forgotten. Bullying was fully supported by teachers there which checks out considering what this country is like at its core.
I feel like people who say that have never experienced bullying or have forgotten how that works. It can be the smallest of things, it will never be forgotten.
To be honest, this is a very common occurrence in all UK schools up to ages ~13. I and at least 10 other students in my year group of ~150 were forced to wet ourselves in the middle of class because our requests to go to the bathroom were denied, not even by particularly 'toxic' or 'mean' teachers, it's just a fairly normal attitude. I remember asking to go for like the fifth time, the teacher said "You can wait.", and in response I showed her my piss-covered hand.
You'd think cleaning up all the piss would be enough to deter that policy, but apparently not.
It is child abuse though, and these really shitty attitudes to the needs of children are not spoken out against nearly as much as they should be.
You'd think cleaning up all the piss would be enough to deter that policy, but apparently not.
I am baffled by this
Freud / Reich would probably argue that fascism regarding bodily functions helps to turn people into fascists as they grow up. Think of the Koch brothers being caned by their literal Nazi nanny if they didn’t shit at exactly the same time every day. The Dulles brothers also had a similar upbringing. Denying people basic bodily needs makes us crazy.
lelel… for the record, I do suspect that abusive upbringings can make somebody readier to adopt fascism, but I understand what you mean. The extents to which some thinkers abuse psychology’s explanatory power are pretty ridiculous.
In my entire time at elementary school I think the most newsworthy story was this girl who peed her pants while we were walking around the hallways because she was too shy to ask to go earlier
Then in my entire time at highschool, the most newsworthy story was when this same girl ate out another on a living room table at a party
There was this older long term substitute I had in late elementary for a few weeks who was very anti bathroom and would deny permission. This was an awakening for me, when denied I simply got out of my chair and walked to the bathroom. They aren't going to physically prevent me from doing so and the only way the school could do anything in response was tell my parents who would say I was correct to do what I did. Detention? Just don't go. Suspension? Fucking day off. This lifted a weight off me that has stayed off me since. I'm a reasonable dude with a pretty exemplary moral bearing and if I see a rule as capricious or arbitrary I feel very confident in ignoring it if the consequences or more or less null. Measured assertiveness rules, people can ask me to do things but no one can tell me to do things.
Damn, my parents would take the side of the school and hit me. What the hell is up with parenting standards?
EDIT: I did not grow up to be a healthy person regarding assertiveness. I can barely ask people for things, I can mostly express needs and hope that other people address them. Asking feels too aggressive for me, which is unfortunate.
EDIT 2: changed only to mostly, I sometimes ask for things
My parents were and are pretty fucking awesome parents and just absolutely good people. They just didn't patronize me, I was allowed to 'talk back' and stuff and they'd yknow bother to explain stuff though on occasion of course there was a 'just do the fucking thing, doing shit that makes no sense is part of life and this is one' and retrospectively it was something my parents were socially on the hook for as well. And they weren't hippie although parenting guys or anything, I'm 2 generations removed from sharecrop farmers on both sides and I don't think anyone in my family has gone to college, my family is like if the Sobotka's in The Wire had their apolitical predilections set on soc dem, just good fucking union people. They returned hogwaets legacy which they wre gonna get my little cousin (once removed) who's mom is a Harry Potter adult when i told them about Rowling cause even though they'll only take the most convenient stands, they're not giving their 12 year old niece a game that gives jk Rowling money cause it's a bad example to set for children.
Edit: also my grandfather on my dad's side was fire chief for the region when women were finally allowed to be firefighters and he was merciless to those who opposed it or felt discomfort working with women. He also previously set up a system of mutual aide between rural fire departments so if there was a big fire several towns in the area could be dispatched. He also worked with cops but he was born in 39 and would consider it in the same line of community spirit. They're libs but like New Deal/Great Society type liva of yesteryear who now count as demsocs
Comparatively, my parents saw what British boarding schools in the 30s were doing and saw that as a model for how to raise quiet obedient children who did ok academically and didn't have visible bruises. But then complained about our mental health problems constantly and asked why we weren't ambitious confident go-getters climbing corporate ladders. A lifetime of therapy isn't enough.
EDIT: To be clear, my parents were the ones complaining about the mental health of their kids. We were not complaining about this, we were just trying to survive with the tools given to us.
Of course, look at how the British adults ofnthe 40s and 50s turned out. Clearly ideal.
Still remember a classmate who peed themselves in class because our horrible head master refused to let him go to the bathroom
This drives me nuts as both someone with a small bladder and as a teacher. I can't fathom why anyone would ever be that cruel. I always tell my students not to even ask: just get up quietly and go. It's less disruptive, and I don't need to police bodily functions.
Yup. When I did substitute teaching I always told the kids that if anyone needs the bathroom mid class they can just go and come back as needed. Nobody "abused" this, funny how that works when you trust people.
One high-level director interrupting another at work in the middle of a call DO YOU WANT A BISCUIT? DO YOU WANT A BISCUIT? in this sing-song voice. I thought it was some advanced office-level politics thing that was over my head until she apologized and said she was talking to her dog.
Honestly that's just cool though, we love a good dog don't we folks
the funniest part of this tale is that you though she was just saying that to somebody
CW: abuse
when i was younger, in like 2nd or 3rd grade, all the other kids knew what sex was before i did and would trick me into both saying and doing sexual things that i didn't understand. now i have PTSD and tons of sexual hangups, which is super fun. we need to teach young kids about this shit or they absolutely will be taken advantage of by adults or other kids, 'innocence' is just a liberal bullshit way of saying 'ignorance' and it only makes kids easier to manipulate and abuse, you aren't protecting them by making them unable to identify threats and abuse.
I know a guy getting a phd in history and writing a book. Sorry dude, but I remember when you came up to me in the hallway, put your arm around me, and went, "bro, please take me to the bathroom. I smoked too much and I can't walk and I really need to shit, I'm about to shit myself." You could become the next Karl Marx that's always what I'll remember you for.
Im sure most people who personally knew Karl at the time remembered him for things like that
"Karl? You mean the guy who always smells like brandy and has piles?"
He was known to shit outside bars he got kicked out of iirc
Soviet anthem plays as Karl Marx shits outside a bar he was thrown out of for ranting and raving too much about the valorization process
I'd be happy to help. That's a cool story not an embarrassing one.
Mid ones: Classmate who shat themselves, classmate who publicly declared their love for a girl in the most cringe way and immediately rejected, classmate who tried to be funny in front of the whole school and it flopped miserably.
Hard ones:
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A classmate was arrested for intentionally destroying the food that was gonna be served in a beneficial event for thousands of people
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Another one was arrested for turning obsessive/violent with his girlfriend.
How do you crawl out of that?
Oh wait wait, a uni classmate admited offhandedly fucking a sheep with his friends
"What? You grew in a farm and didn't do it?"
I grew up with a guy that got on his hands and knees and pleaded with a girl to not break up with him. Same guy asked out every single girl in our grade and by the time he had gotten halfway through the list the rest had gotten wind of it and were rejecting him out of principle.
Hey, I also had a classmate who shat themselves in high school!
I also had a classmate in elementary who, during a field trip hike, accidentally tripped, rolled down a hill action movie style, and fell face first in a river that we were just warned was full of animal shit and was referred to as the "scat river"while a whole class of elementary school kids watched and laughed. He switched schools.
In the scale of embarassment accidents are accidents, they shouldn't count, that should include most cases of shitting themselves (unless it's a tactical self-shit and somehow someone reveals it).
Nothing I'm comfortable with sharing, so I give up.
Although there was a schoolmate who puked in the hallway once, and left everyone in the classroom scrambling to open the windows. Was the shit story a bit like that?
There’s always that one class clown who tells hundreds of jokes a day and maybe two of them are funny.
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The German word for "team" is "Mannschaft" and one kid in my class had to translate "I like to be on the team" from German to English out loud but he didn't translate the whole thing so he said "I like to be on the Mannschaft"
'Mannschaft' corresponds to 'mannskap' in Norwegian.
My dad had the complete set of Stewart Clark's Broken English books, and there's a ton of fun anecdotes like yours in those books, many of them based on Scandinavians' English mistakes. I should probably share a few of my favorites in a different thread.
My brother and I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian, and so we've had plenty of our own language mix-ups during the course of our lives: it took me embarrassingly long to realize that 'Kingdom of Norway' is 'Kongeriket Norge' and not 'Kongeriket av Norge' (age 13~14), that 'eventuelt' non est 'eventually' but rather 'possibly' (age 15~16) and that 'smal' non est 'small' but rather 'narrow' (age 20~21). My brother on the other hand pretty recently revealed that he still thought that 'sad' was an English-language synonym of 'semen' or 'sperm', by conflating it with Norwegian 'sæd' (which is actually cognate with 'seed'), and this is a mistake that I swear both of us made as kids, but which I evidently grew out of much faster.
My brother when he was a little kid also once said instead of "spider-like body", "eddercup-acty crap" (←edderkoppaktig kropp). What's interesting is that dialectal English does actually have the word 'attercop' for 'spider', and that Wiktionary asserts that 'crap' and 'kropp' actually are related. The semantic shift seems to be roughly like so: body → head of a plant → chaff → something discarded → poopydoodoo.
I've always thought Norwegian was basically German with English grammar - there are so many cognates with German. there was a time when I was learning German and Norwegian at the same time and I'd get mixed up so much. I will never remember which language uses 'kan' and which uses 'kann'.
I wouldn't say that Norwegian has English grammar, just that it has in some ways simpler grammar than German.
I sometimes think about the girl in one of my college classes (which was taught by Ralph Nader's incredibly insane and rad sister) referring to Evelyn Fox Keller's book A Feeling For the Organism as "the feeling of the orgasm."
An even better one: my PhD focused on the foundations of climate science, and when I was ABD I was teaching a class about it. We had Jim Hansen--extremely famous climatologist--in as a guest lecturer one week. He gave his spiel, and then opened it up to questions. One undergrad raised her hand and said "how did you go from making The Muppets to being a climate researcher?" She thought he was Jim Henson, and apparently had the whole time. It was the reddest I have ever seen a human being turn.
Not only do I still think about that one, I tell my students about it every year when I talk about Hansen's work.
He said he gets that all the time, actually. He's very nice.
Not gonna lie, if I was completely new to climate science and had never seen nor heard a photo nor video nor drawing nor audio recording nor impression nor Epic Rap Battles of History costume of Jim Henson in my life; and I didn't know that Jim Henson famously died in 1990 from toxic shock syndrome complete with that little drawing of Mickey Mouse consoling Kermit; and I wasn't the type of person who hears the difference between Henson and Hansen (met-mat merger is real and valid!); and I wasn't the type of person to stop and think about how incredibly unlikely it is for one to inexplicably go from puppeteering to climate research... Yeah, that undergrad is literally me though. I 100% read "[...] teaching a class about it. We had Jim Hansen--extremely famous [...]" and my brain just stopped for a moment thinking, "Wait, is that a typo of the name of the Muppets guy‽‽ That's one Hell of a twist right there..."
We love a bit of "say the first shit that pops into your head" energy sometimes, cheers to that undergrad wherever she is now, and I'm sure Jim Hansen gets things like that all the time.
I'm sure Jim Hansen gets things like that all the time.
Yeah that's actually what he said! He was super nice about it. Really decent dude.
The grand old Dork of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up the hill And then back down againOnce in a while, I remember a doozy when I was in high school where the dude read every instance of organism as orgasm. Also remember in HS a girl who shat herself because the sub was power tripping and wouldn't let her go.
people who shit/piss themselves to show fascist teachers they are serious actually rule. so does orgasm/organism thinking about it
In second grade I asked to go to the nurse's office because I didn't feel well. The darling teacher actually shriveled up her face and sneered at me - "You're fine"
Ten seconds later I puked directly on her
She seriously did it as an accident, I was in first class with her and she had diarrhea or something, this was second class and things hadn't improved.
Orgasm v organism the room was so quiet you could hear a mouse fart and people's faces were red from second hand embarrassment or holding in laughter, I don't think the dude even noticed until after when his friends told him. If I were the teacher during that I'd correct 3s in since there's no way I would have survived without being ded from oxygen deprivation from holding it in, bro went through multiple pages (of orgasms) like this, it was glorious like something out of a cringy 80s dude bro comedy.
i like to think that a teacher who gets the shitpants never denies a request again. there's a dignity in embarrassment improving the lives of others. what really should hapoen is those teachers get their knees broken tho
Yea no kidding, when I was a sub years later that classmate's experience was on my mind, so I always allowed requests since you can never know what someone's else's body is going through exactly.
I was in high school where the dude read every instance of organism as orgasm
I remember this kid at my school. He was doing it deliberately, sremoveding every time. Weird guy.
I'm going to pretend this thread doesn't exist and continue to suppress my embarrassing moments
When I was in primary school I saw one kid finger another kid's bumhole in class and the kid whose bum it was turned and chortled and said hurr hurr that feels good and then the kid who was doing the fingering continued digging for gold
I am so unsure of what to do with this information that my brain just played the PS1 startup sound
calling prince andrew the Dork of York is pretty funny tho
