The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

The latest Ofsted report for Bishop Vesey's Grammar School says that

students’ behaviour around school and in lessons is outstanding

and

[students] respect the school’s learning environment

It makes me wonder who wrote this report, and whether they really visited the school.

I went to Bishop Vesey's Grammar School and I can say that good behaviour was not typical. Here are some of the things I witnessed firsthand.

The flamethrower

Yes, your read that right: the flamethrower.

I once walked into a classroom to get my bag and I saw that some of the lockers had been moved and there was a group of boys behind them. I looked behind the lockers and my classmates were using an aerosol can and a lighter as a makeshift flamethrower. Let me repeat: a flamethrower. In a school. Obviously, this was not the safest idea, especially given that our school was made largely of flammable materials like wood and people. I backed away and didn't look back. I think I stayed in the playground for the rest of the lunch hour, near the school gate, just in case the school caught fire and I had to run away to safety. Unfortunately, the school did not catch fire.

The egg

The school held a competition where you had to get an egg from one side of the school stage to the other without breaking the egg and without the egg touching the floor. Points were awarded for inventiveness and originality.

Save for inventing a teleporter, I don't know how you're supposed to move an egg in an inventive and original way. It was a crap idea for a competition if you ask me.

One kid put the egg on his remote control car and drove it across the stage. Another kid used a piece of string to get the egg across. By lifting up one end of the string, he turned the string into a zipline and egg went across without harm.

One kid who entered was a kid in my class. He had the unlikely name of Alexander Papachristophorou. His method for getting the egg across the stage was to use a makeshift see-saw device, which I think was just a plank of wood on a brick.

He put the egg on the plank and took a few steps back. Then, in front of the whole school, he ran up and jumped on the other end of the plank as hard as he could. The egg, of course, went straight up into the air. It went so high that it hit actually hit the ceiling of the hall, where it exploded on impact. The egg white and the albumen left a stain on the ceiling which I think is still there to this day. Certainly, it was still there all the rest of my days at school. I would sometimes look up at it during assembly and have to suppress a laugh. The ceiling was at least ten metres high and I don't think the caretaker had a ladder tall enough to reach the stain, so no one ever cleaned it.

Alexander Papachristophorou didn't win the competition of course. His egg had broken, for one thing.

The kid next to go up was called Matthew Seymour. He went up with a hockey stick. Presumably, he wanted to hit the egg with his hockey stick as hard as he could, causing it to smash to pieces too, but we never did find out because the deputy head told him to immediately return to his seat. You could call it was an automatic disqualification I suppose.

A few months later, Matthew Seymour was expelled for a different reason. His crime was to have weed in his locker. The school had a "zero-tolerance policy" on drugs which I think is fair given that many drugs are dangerously addictive.

Matthew was the only kid I ever knew who was expelled. Some kids got in enough trouble to be excluded for a few days (myself included) but he wa the only one who ever got kicked out permanently from the school. I wonder though if things might be different if the same thing happened today. Given that weed is now legal in Canada, at least, would a kid still be expelled for possessing it? I don't know.

The slave auction

Every year my school held a "slave auction" which already sounds like a terrible idea now that I think about it. The idea was that some of the older students volunteered to be "slaves" and the younger students would bid in an auction for the right to "own" the slaves. "Slave auction" makes it sound like we brought a load of black people in from Africa to sell, so maybe Bishop Vesey should have changed the name of that one.

One time, an entire class (year 7, blue house) pooled their money together to buy two sixth forms girls. The winning bid was around 200 pounds, an incredible sum. The reason these two sixth forms girls were worth so much is that they were the hottest girls in the school.

You were supposed to make your slaves do things like carry your books for you or go get your lunch, but the Blue house kids had different ideas. They wanted to get their money's worth.

What they did was drop pens down the girls' tops. They also got the girls to undo the (gasp) top three buttons of their shirts. I believe, though I did not see this first hand, that the girls' bras were showing.

There was a huge group of boys around the two girls at this point. There was shouting and excitement on a level normally only seen on the floor of the London stock exchange. Boys were pushing and jostling each other to get a view.

I think at that point a teacher came over and put a stop to it. When the deputy head found out about it (it was basically the deputy head running the school, the actual head did nothing), he banned slave auction indefinitely. It wasn't until six years later that it finally returned.

Other stuff

On the last day ever of school, kids in my year (we were technically adults at that point, all of us 18 years old) brought in flour and eggs to throw around the school. The head of sixth form, Dominic Robson, managed to stop it though by threatening to expel people. "Even though it's your last day, I can still expel you!" he said. It worked, and the fear of expulsion made everyone put their eggs and flour away. They could always make a cake, I suppose.

And there was a kid who put his friend's crutches under a teacher's car. He was excluded for that.

There was a kid in my year who was had weed in his locker. The school had a zero drugs policy and expelled him.

There was probably other stuff too. I'll try to remember them. In the meantime, I think I'll make a cake.