Telling Tales out of School

Despite the teachers' efforts, not all students conformed to their idea of disciplined behaviour. Some skipped school, others exchanged notes as they passed silently in the halls, while the most outspoken acted disruptively in the classroom. One of the most popular means of misbehaviour was to throw things (peanuts for instance) at the teacher when his or her back was turned. Writing rude things on the blackboards or other places in the classroom also proved popular. Students in many courses would try to get away with practical jokes, though the technical students usually had the most access to materials which could serve their pranks. Thus students in the auto mechanics course would take some carbide (used in early automobile lamps) and drop it into water to generate an awful, pervasive, odour (Cushman).

Students also rebelled at times against the general codes of behaviour, such as that which barred smoking on school grounds: the washrooms often "reeked of smoke" though students would deny their behaviour when challenged by a teacher.


he more relaxed atmosphere of p.t. class allowed for other forms of rowdy conduct. One student recalls a row of "travelling rings" hanging from the gymnasium ceiling. He (and his classmates) used to swing from the rings

...like a monkey, going from one end to the other. Our objective was to see if we could get up enough speed at the end rings to be able to get our feet up onto the balcony and grab the rail. Of course this was forbidden, but it was fun. We used to try it (Cushman).

At a basic level, all these forms of acting up served to challenge existing structures, encouraging teachers to abandon some of their role constraints and react as individuals. Such behaviour is part of the continuous bargaining between students and teachers which is crucial to the reproduction or transformation of lived classroom structures. At the same time, student misbehaviour also served to justify, and thus reproduce, the massive disciplinary structures of the school.

While students spent their school day in the company of the same group of classmates (usually of the same gender), extracurricular activities allowed students from different years, different classes and different courses to meet. Extracurricular sports included basketball, both for boys and girls, track and field, sometimes baseball, and boy's hockey. Some thirty to forty students made up the large school orchestra, while the glee club and the literary society provided similar forms of activity. The best-known cultural activities, though, were the annual school shows. These shows involved hundreds of students, including a large cast, the orchestra, and scores of workers. The facilities available through the technical side of the school - especially carpentry and painting - made the school shows much more impressive than those of other secondary schools in the city.

Dances were a regular fixture of the social calendar. As the school orchestra played waltzes, foxtrots or jitterbugs, the teachers - acting as chaperons - would lead by example and dance themselves. Even here, young men and women acknowledged the strict adolescent social rules which governed their behaviour:

There'd be a line of boys along one wall and a line of girls along the other wall.... They wouldn't think anything of going over and asking a girl to dance. The girls... didn't ever ask the boys. The girls were not aggressive.... You waited 'till a boy asked you. If you didn't get asked you were considered a 'wallflower' (Geddes).

As they sat between dances, students would talk of many things - including their views of the school. Frequently the discussion turned to P.J. Fallona, a fairly new teacher who already had a reputation as a stern disciplinarian. Apparently, a group of senior boys had recently taken exception to Fallona's approach. They had picked him up, pushed him out a third-storey window at the school, and held him dangling by his ankles for a minute or so, before hauling him back in (Fisher).