While American schools are often viewed to be boring, British schools are trying a bit too hard to be interesting.
What a weekend it has been. Just Sunday night, I sealed my fate when I sent my college applications out, and boy, was I cutting it close to those deadlines! In honor of this momentous time in life and the halfway point of my final year in high school, I would like to present you with some of the wonkiest high schools ever.
Generally, teachers and administrative members of the staff have a duty in ensuring the safety and well-being of children in schools. That usually implies that teachers will do their utmost to make sure that children don’t wander off the school grounds, talk to strangers or get themselves into life-threatening situations.
Obviously, the teachers at the British Melksham Manor School were extraordinarily well-trained in such procedures. A 5-year-old child somehow escaped the eyes of the teachers and decided that he was going to worm his way up a tree. However, after getting 20 feet off the ground, he got simultaneously scared and stuck, which meant that there was absolutely no possibility of him getting down on his own. So what did the teachers do? Call the kid’s parents? Call the fire department? Call someone who can actually try to help the kid out?
No, the teachers did the most logical thing. They left the 5-year-old up in the tree and went about with their business. Apparently, the school’s policy deemed a rescue operation a health and safety hazard since it could distract the child and cause him to fall and dash his brains out on the pavement. The child was stuck on top of the tree for over an hour before a kindly stranger helped him down. The stranger was promptly sued for trespassing on school property because good deeds means criminal investigation.
Of course, the Melksham Manor School isn’t the school that is seriously whacked up. Take a closer look at Blackminster Middle School, also located in the British Isles. During a recess in 2010, all of the children were forced out of the building due to a fire drill. In the midst of the drill, a fake gunman arrived out of nowhere and fake-shot an extraordinarily popular science teacher to death. The teacher promptly fake-died and the rest of the teachers began to perform fake-CPR on him.
However, upon witnessing the “murder,” the majority of the children began freaking out in the loudest and worst possible ways, demonstrating extreme emotional distress. The teachers waited 10 minutes before revealing to the children that the “murder” was just a simulation for teaching children “to investigate, collect facts and analyze evidence.” Obviously, a 12-year-old will begin to “investigate” when his favorite teacher gets murdered.
And then there’s the Southway Junior School, located in (you guessed it) Britain, that simulated full-on alien abduction. By “full-on alien abduction,” I mean that the school even planned the whole event out with police involved to make the event more realistic, and by “realistic,” I mean traumatizing.
Essentially, a UFO crash-landed in the schoolyard. A bunch of aliens exited the vehicle, grabbed a teacher and began to fake-anal-probe him. As the 7-year-olds descended into hysterics, the event was revealed to be a joke that was meant to stimulate creativity and imagination in students’ writing.
I don’t know about you, but school in Britain sounds to me that we will never have the opportunity to experience, for better or for worse.
Richard Hwang is a student at Athens High School. What do you think of this schools? Email him at rhwang999@gmail.com.
