Scott Pearson
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God bless the schools that try new things. Lining kids up in rows and making them listen to monotone math is a horrible way to teach, and if you want to really engage today's kids, you need to mix things up. Unfortunately, the line between "fun new learning experience" and "lifelong trauma" is razor thin. Especially when the staff is batshit insane.
How else can we explain ...
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In order to spice up their homecoming pep fest, Rosemont High School in Minnesota decided to corral the captains of their various sports teams and blindfold them in front of the entire school to be kissed by a "special someone." When you're a teenager, 90 percent of your daily brain activity is devoted to thinking about putting your mouth on other people in one way or another, so the students happily agreed. What's the worst that could happen from getting a mystery kiss while an assembled crowd of your peers cheers you on?
So, so many things, too numerous to list.
The "special someones" in question turned out to be the students' own parents, who weren't blindfolded, were in on the joke, and willingly made out with their own children. In front of the entire school. On purpose. Go back and read that again, we'll wait.
Back? OK good, because here's a video of the pep rally that will make each and every one of you horribly uncomfortable for the rest of the day. There is groping, tongue-sucking, and rolling around on the floor in amorous embraces, which is excusable for the clueless students, but terrifying for the adults when you consider that they're deliberately dry humping their own children. There's something deeply unsettling about a 40-year-old man striding across a basketball court in front of a ringing chorus of people to grab his blindfolded teenage daughter by the head and begin tenderly kissing her on the mouth.
To say nothing of the three or four times he tries to cop a feel.
One woman actually takes her son's hand, as they're making out, and puts it on her own ass, like they're filming a John Waters movie.
We need to invent a new type of prison for whatever the hell this woman just did.
After the video went viral, the principal of the school issued a formal apology, admitting that the event may have been poorly conceived. He was quick to mention that no complaints had been received from the students or the parents involved in the incest pep rally, which, considering how willingly the parents in question participated, probably just means that there isn't a phone in the windowless basement those students are chained up in.
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An eighth grade class at Walter Whyte Elementary School in Manitoba organized a camping trip at the beginning of the year to build trust and camaraderie between students (instead of the meth-building exercises we all immediately imagined after reading that name). Their chaperones -- a teacher, the principal, the school counselor, and a parent volunteer -- decided that the best way to establish this trust would be to trick the children into eating moose shit ("establish" here meaning "catastrophically betray in exchange for top-shelf madcap fuckery").
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Like having your wedding vows devolve into a Benny Hill skit.
As this is Canada, where you are never farther than 11 feet from a moose at any given time, it was only a matter of time before one of the responsible adults found a big pile of Bullwinkle doo, although it's possible that the chaperones simply brought the doo from home.
Either way, they placed it all in a plastic bag and offered it to the campers as chocolate-covered almonds, a description that we admit is not entirely false. One boy plopped (zing!) an "almond" into his mouth, only to be immediately told that it was the anal bullet of a forest creature. A female student messily chewed her moose nugget and got it stuck in her braces, causing her to throw up violently while the adults (remember, this includes the school principal and two teachers) had a ripping good laugh. One of them actually attempted to console her by saying that since moose eat grass, the poop was technically a healthy snack, which you may recognize as some of the most untrue words that have ever been spoken in the history of time.
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"OK, look, just drink rubbing alcohol until you forget everything."
The two prank victims were taken to the hospital to be treated for possible bacterial infection, and the three faculty members were suspended, which is a word that puzzlingly looks nothing like "fired."
Class elections help firmly establish the inherent betterness of the popular students while simultaneously preparing children for the soul-crushing reality of just how little difference politics will make in their adult lives. Sure, Alex and Becky made some amazing promises on the way to their landslide victory over Ugly Ben and that foreign kid who is really good at computers, but when it came time to actually replace all homework with pizza parties and math class with chocolate-snowman-eating contests, a whole lot of nothing got done.
And if you happen to be a student at Nettleton Middle School in Mississippi, you have the additional privilege of only being allowed to elect fellow students of a specific race to each office, because desegregation hasn't quite sunk in yet in some areas of the country.
That's right -- each position had a specific race assigned to it, and only students of that race would be considered viable candidates.
The Smoking Gun
"As with all quality diversity efforts, we've specifically excluded Asians."
Please note that each office is appointed by the student body, rather than just having those interested in running try to campaign for the support of their peers, which is totally how it's done in every other school that isn't completely insane. The result is a sort of racial draft that not only chooses to reduce the children's ethnic and cultural backgrounds down to two embarrassingly generic terms (either "black" or "white"), but also completely ignores any students who don't necessarily fit into either group.
When a mother of four interracial children complained after learning that one of her daughters was unable to run for any office (as she was neither "black" nor "white"), she was informed that the school had done elections this way for over 30 years, which you may notice is less a justification and more just restating the problem. The baffling policy had been implemented as a way to ensure diversity and participation in school politics -- the old "fight racism with racism" angle, with some "force kids to do things they have no interest in" tacked on for good measure.
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"Can we work some unwarranted condescension in here, too?"
The policy was quickly re-evaluated and then eliminated, which is good, because it was terrible and stupid. Although we're unsure if Nettleton school elections are still carried out via conscription, since expecting old-timey racist institutions to stop all the crazy bullshit they do is admittedly asking a bit much.
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We'll let you decide if the following is grossly irresponsible or impossibly awesome: To help kids develop critical-thinking skills, the faculty at the U.K.'s Blackminister School decided to surprise them by staging the murder of a teacher in front of the entire student body so that they could apply what they'd learned to gather evidence and solve the mystery. We don't mean they did it like a fun "Let's solve a mystery like on TV!" exercise -- we mean the unsuspecting children were brought out to the playground under the pretense that they would be taking part in a science lesson, and while waiting for the lesson to begin, an armed maniac came tumbling out of the woods like a meth-addled Sugar Bear and cut their teacher down with pistol fire.
Several other teachers ran to the downed man's aid and tried unsuccessfully to revive him while the horror-stricken children looked on. The assailant then ran into the school and proceeded to destroy the chemistry lab, because if there is one thing psychotic gunmen hate, it's science.
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"I'm gonna rape the microscopes next."
After almost ten full minutes of hysterically weeping children, everyone was finally led into the school gym and told that "the shooting" was actually a scripted mystery that was now in their hands to solve, sort of like those old "Who Stole Bart's Butterfinger?" ads, only with more gunshot blasts and less candy. The supposedly murdered teacher was fine, and the science lab was still intact. The only things that had actually been harmed were the hundreds of schoolchildren. Some were having vomiting panic attacks, others were acting as impromptu grief counselors for their classmates, and several took to the school's Facebook page (because a Facebook page is totally something that a grade school needs to have) to vent their feelings over the day's events, although judging by the following posted comment, parading a fake murder in front of 11- and 12-year-olds is perhaps not the biggest flaw in Blackminister's curriculum:
"Most of us were soo scared we was cryin!! it was horrible but its gd tht they sed sorry."
The principal responded with the most half-assed apology in the history of the universe, claiming that the students had simply overreacted to watching a man be suddenly shot to death. He pointed out that the only reason for all the fuss was that the "victim" was one of the most well-liked teachers in the school. He then uttered this showstopper verbatim:
"I don't think there would have been as much concern if it was one or two of the others."
That's right -- this man literally said that one or two other teachers could have been murdered in front of the students he is responsible for, and the kids probably wouldn't have given a shit. Because those teachers suck.
CATERS via The Telegraph
The sheer quantity of irony in this picture influences the tides.
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When Christopher Webb of the Albuquerque Police Department came to talk to the children of a local elementary school on Career Day about his awesome job as an ass-kicking traffic cop, his well of material about expired tags and mountains of paperwork quickly ran dry. So he asked the kids if they'd like to wash his cruiser instead.
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"And after that, you get to dig me a septic tank to ... build character ... or something."
While several boys agreed, probably lured by the possibility of finding a bloodstain or a condom full of drugs somewhere in the backseat, one emphatically declined Webb's generous offer. So Webb, demonstrating the wisdom and restraint of both a duly appointed peace officer and a rational adult, drew his Taser and said, "Let me show you what happens to people who do not listen to the police." He then shot the 10-year-old in the chest, leaving the barbs in for the full five-second shock of the expended cartridge.
The boy collapsed and lost consciousness, possibly due to the 50,000 volts of electricity pulsing through his still-too-small-for-most-roller-coasters frame. Realizing that Career Day had just taken a turn for the worse (and that he must have broken a law of some kind), Officer Webb heroically applied precisely none of his emergency responder training and instead carried the boy to the principal's office and left, presumably wearing a fake mustache and sunglasses for the rest of the day to avoid both detection and getting yelled at.
But not before covering his bases.
The officer got a whopping three-day suspension for the incident (he insists that the Taser went off by accident), and as you can imagine, the family has filed a lawsuit.
You can follow Scott on Twitter, or check out his other Cracked articles here.
For more lessons that got waaaay out of hand, check out The 6 Most Horrific Lessons Ever Taught in Elementary School. Or learn about The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School.
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