inhales
BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL!
BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY!
My middle school was a stupid place that looked like a prison on the outside, but on the inside, the classrooms had no back walls and were separated by accordion dividers. Occasionally, they would open up the dividers and show the whole three-classroom block a video on three of those carts all chained to one VCR.
The one I remember was on a fun day where we all got to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which had just come out on video. They fast-forwarded through Napoleon’s, “Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde!” being translated as, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” in the subtitles, but we could all see it and we were all like 13, so it was pretty funny.
Here is the school. It still exists. Batchelor Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. I hear the inside has been renovated and there are now actual walls.
And I’m not exaggerating when I said it looks like a prison. It’s not the most comforting sight the first time you go.
Honestly, as far as brutalist architecture goes, that one’s not too bad. I kinda like it, especially the cantilevers.
Yeah, that’s brutalism done right.
My elementary school was an old Timex watch factory. It was a “temporary” building that ended up lasting 13 years. The only windows in the building were in the office and kindergarten wing. Last I checked, which was over a decade ago, the building had been turned into a firefighter training course.
So, school being a prison? All I have to do is remember my elementary school days.
This is obviously not that bad, but there was a continuous rumor going around the school that it was going to be a women’s prison but they decided to make it a school instead.
Don’t need to see sunlight if you’re making watches right?
My school’s bus, which was used only for sporting events and trips, was an actual prison bus. It still had restraint attachment points and the bars on the windows.
It was brilliant for psyching out the other football teams.
I went to a similar looking middle school, but each grade was in one giant room probably the size of a gym. No class had an actual wall unless it was on the edge. Probably 10-11 classes in each big room for the grade. The only dividers between classes were like rolling bulletin boards and maybe a metal cabinet or two. I couldn’t imagine having to teach in those conditions because it always was pretty noisy.
I also remember the school’s gym had a full locker room with showers but students weren’t allowed to use the showers and none of the bathrooms in the school had stall doors. And the stalls were those short ones were your head was higher than the top of the wall. It was super weird.
I don’t get the idea. Prison on the outside, anarchy on the inside. Who came up with that concept?
1970s build?
Windows are terrible at efficiency. Yes, even modern ones with three panes and filled with argon. A building with minimal windows is generally going to have better thermal efficiency than one with lots of them, and that started to be really important during the 1970s oil crisis. The result was a bunch of schools like this that look like prisons.
If you get some local mural artists to paint the concrete in bright, whimsical images, it fixes a lot.
Only problem is that the paint fades eventually, and if no one cares to redo it it’ll end up looking like those sad old fading Soviet murals.
I had a Shakespeare class in high school and we convinced the teacher to let us watch 10 Things I Hate About You because it’s very loosely based on The Taming of the Shrew. She turned it off with the dick drawn on the kid’s face.
I did a comparative study on 10 things I hate about you and taming of the shrew for a term in school. In fact, a lot of our Shakespeare was dressed up as comparative studies which did make it interesting.
So this class was called Playing Shakespeare and I put it on my schedule because I’d never had a drama class and I had fulfilled all my high school shit early plus a few college credit classes. It wasn’t drama at all. It was based on a board game called Playing Shakespeare. We never played the board game at any time all semester. I did learn a few things. The class was mostly made up of jocks and rich girls because they knew it would be an easy A.
Looks like it might have been a county lockup at one point.
“You can never go back. YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK!”
oh my god yes
i thought Scarface’s name was Carface when I was little and obsessed with this. had a stuffed animal named Mr Carface (I obviously couldn’t ‘steal’ the name Carface, I had to be original) that would watch the movie with me all the time. 16 years later and I still have them lol
Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill Nye the science Guy!
It’s the 6th grade. The girls are taken to the gym for a presentation about menstruation. Us boys are put in a room with this cart to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Or some shit about shop class.
Probably DS9 on repeat. Nothing hits the spot like hopeful 90’s Star Trek.
Mhm yes I love a good occupation, terrorism, war, genocide and religious fanatics in the morning.
The fantasy is the competent opposition to all of those things.
Don’t forget Chester!
The Bell riots are on the menu, boys!
Hell yeah.
I watched a VHS dupe my father had made of this so many times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the proper cover art of it.
‘See you later, navigator!’
First grade, they piled all the classes together, because it’s 1993 and we only have one laserdisc player, and we need to watch a video on pollution. Main topics were acid rain and smog and that shit has been with me for 30 years, I will never forget it.
The first thing that came to mind (assuming this is being wheeled into my classroom) was that 90s birthing video they used to show in sex ed. It culminated in them showing the baby’s birth; though the poor thing probably got rug burn coming out.
Yeah I think that’s the one
Depending on the year/grade, could be Harriet’s Magic Hats, could be Brave Little Toaster, could be creationist propaganda.
In class it was always
- Shrek
- Shrek 2
- Remember the Titans
- Jurassic Park
- Any Rando Jim Carrey Movie
Although in grade 9 law class we got to watch Heat, Dirty Harry and My Cousin Vinny, that teacher was cool
You got to see real movies? All we ever got was, like, PBS Nova episodes or A&E documentaries. No worksheets; but I got to learn about Ray fuckin’ Kroc years before they made a movie about him.
Oh yeah we had those too. I totally forgot about A&E, those tapes were around for sure. And a lot of stuff from the National Film Board, I think the schools in Canada got that stuff for free or something.
Butting into your conversation to leave a wee link for any film lovers scrolling by. The NFB’s a public producer and distributor, and the catalogue’s free for everyone.
You need a license to use it in class or have a public showing, but you’re right - many schools have that already set up. Buying DVDs for the classroom will cost you, though.
Fun fact about me, the first time I watched the original Star Wars trilogy was in high school. My teacher didn’t really want to teach us anything, so he put on episodes 4, 5, and 6 over the course of a few days.
Your teacher may or may not have been on a bender.
Well…maybe, but my original teacher stopped teaching in the middle of the school year. There were rumors of him getting a BJ from a student and being fired. He might have just retired. You know rumors. They moved in a couple different temp teachers to fill in for the last half of the year. One of them was bored one week and just started playing the trilogy. Good old ‘principles of technology’ class.
Watching the teacher get irritated.
I still have one of those somewhere!
With what happened in the US … they wheel in the big ol’ CRT to the front of the class where I’m sitting, the strap breaks and the 150 lb 36" behemoth lands on top of me.
“Only 90s kids will get it”
