As a substitute teacher in 2012 I often am called on short notice, to pinch-hit as it were. There is an unpredictability to the  school day anyway, if there is an emergency staff meeting, a fire drill or lockdown practice.  Schedules are often disrupted by concerts, assemblies, guest speakers, field days.  You never know when a dust storm will whip up  on the playground or the ice will necessitate indoor recess.  We subs have to be flexible.

But there are the other interruptions, the ones kids create or the ones the situation creates. The washroom is out of toilet paper, the soap dispenser out of soap. Someone threw up on the carpet. Some little kid wet the floor. Someone put too short a pencil in the electric sharpener and it got stuck there. The window blind cord got stuck, the upper window won’t close, there is  a hissing sound from the radiator. All these things need attention, sometimes of the caretaker and fast.

The PA system calls kids to the office for photo retakes, someone is at the door wanting kids from the special reading group.  Some child has to go to the dentist early, or to the sports practice or to catch a flight.   

Kids being kids, have their own crises. Someone lost her necklace, someone has a tummy ache, someone can’t get her boots tied untied.  It all takes time to resolve these things.

But beyond all those interruptions are the ones kids planned, the ones from the fertile mind of the bored or playful.  In 2012 the antics are creative sometimes.  Someone took the ball out of the computer mouse. Some hacker got into the school computer system and is now to be banned from access.  Most pranks are not malicious. They are just kids being kids.

 A few of course are worse- someone broke into the school over the weekend, destroying windows. Someone stole the teacher’s purse or got into it and ripped up all her credit cards. Very rarely a student will even try to pull a fire alarm or set a fire. One student, probably mentally disturbed, used to take fecal matter and spread it on the walls of the washroom.

This week we just had April Fool’s day. Teachers generally cringe if this day falls on a school day but happily it did not this year. I asked the grade 4s and 5s though what tricks they had done or others did to them. One had  put a note on her dad’s car apologizing for denting it as if a stranger had, and he was quite upset at first, believing it. One had put Tabasco sauce in coffee, another had switched the contents of two cereal boxes. Someone had put salt in the sugar bowl and one had put gummy bears in the bed of her little sister.  One had put whip cream quietly on the hand of her sleeping brother, then tickled his nose so he automatically rubbed it, covering his face with cream. 

When kids see a substitute teacher some become super helpful but a few will always figure today is a free day, and explode with pranks. They may pretend to be another student all day, sit in different seats from the assigned ones, misinform the teacher that that bell is a dismissal bell and of course claim that the regular teacher told them the test was cancelled.  One band class in the 1990s saw a sub and quickly got all students to switch to  a different instrument for the day. The teacher never knew.

But mostly, kids are good kids.  Even in 2012.  

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In pioneer Calgary in the 1880s times were pretty wild.  A fistfight was not serious but if you stole someone’s horse you got a $100 fine or 3 months in jail. In 1875 to keep their kids obedient Calgary mothers warned their children to behave or a vague evil named Bullhead would attack them at the fort. Whisky running was common and the drink was nicknamed rot gut, bug juice, red eye.

At one of the early schools which met on the second floor of a building, students in 1890 would lean out of the window and throw snowballs or shoes at younger kids. In 1900 kids would sneak ice from the ice wagon and suck on it, or would drop it down someone’s shirt as a joke.

Teachers knew the temptations of kids to misbehave but they still had to maintain control.  A common punishment in 1910 was to make a child clean up the manure pile from the school barn.  A child might be kept after school, or a note may be sent home to the parents. Sometimes physical punishment was used, a spanking, a slap on the knuckles with a pointer, or that feared of all punishments, the strap.

So what mayhem did pioneer kids cause?

In 1910 kids in the present day northeast played in sand pits in their leisure hours and ‘borrowed’  cornices for the new school. Some kids put a fence on the top of a school flagpole.

When the kids were downtown, where wooden sidewalks were in abundance, it was a game to hide under the sidewalk and put your fingers or willow branches up through the cracks. It was also a game just to hide there and not be found, or to play cops and robbers there.

In 1913 when King George school opened, it was so far out in the prairies that one boy thought it clever to ride his horse right up its front steps on opening day, right into the main hall.

Out in the country when kids were paid to snare gophers, the skill spread to the city fields too.  Kids over recess and lunch would go outside and lay in wait for gophers, filling one hole with water then waiting with a snare by the other hole.  Indoors they would sometimes play at putting their fingers through the ink well hole of the desk and trying to snare the finger.

In 1922 where a school had been built beside a tennis court, many tennis balls landed in the school yard. One student took one and put grape shot in it to blow up hollow tree  trunks.

In 1925 kids would sometimes smuggle fat textbooks outdoors to use them as sleds down hills behind the school and in rural areas kids jammed the handbell full of plasticene, put a rabbit in the teacher’s desk and locked her out of the school when she went outdoors at recess.

In the 1920s a few of the older kids at one rural school went to the school barn to smoke and by accident set it on fire. 

Kids always have seen humor in things that do not amuse teachers. In 1925 the teacher was writing on the board about algebra but the kids giggled when she said’ Here you  get the rise and here you get the runs”. 

Kids had to go to school but they might not stay. A few would wander off at recess or refuse to come down from the tree after lunch.   Rurally some might wander off to the creek for the afternoon but the teacher realized she had an ace up her sleeve -they had to come back at the end of the day to get their horses for the ride home and she’d get them then.

Once they figured out how to make paper airplanes, the next trick was to do it when the teacher was not looking so as to not be discovered. One senior recalled an airplane misfiring though and getting stuck in the teacher’s hair.  Paper could be folded cleverly too, to hold paper and some kids used it to make water bombs to throw at each other. Some papers could be folded to hold a bubble of air and then popped, loudly.

In 1929 many kids took quite a while to get to school, either rurally by horse or wagon, or in the city by bike and on foot.  It was  a game to hitch a ride on a passing train as it slowed to go up a  hill and then to jump off when it reached the top. Another game was to hitch a ride on a passing car running board or holding on to its fender.

Kids in caterpillar season dropped caterpillars down shirts, stole bird’s eggs from nests in the school yard, dared each other to climb up the fire escape and walk around the roof on the eavestrough.

At Hallowe’en it was a common prank to knock over the school outhouse. Though the rules said that when you build it, you should put bowls under each hole and clean them regularly, it was common to just wait till the whole thing filled up, then move the outhouse to a new trench, filling up the old one with dirt from the new one. Upending the outhouse temporarily messed up those plans.

The outhouse provided other opportunities for pranks too. It was common for kids to go behind the teacher’s outhouse and giggle while she was in there or to trap someone inside it for a while.

Bringing wild animals to school was a common prank to cause confusion.  Mice might run along the top of the blackboard, a garter snake might make girls scream.  At one school in 1921 a gopher was seen running away with the bathroom tissue. One time kids caught a muskrat and hoping for a prize brought it to school but it escaped and set up house in the woodshed. 

 Rural teachers set out traps for mice but were still surprised when they opened the school book register in the morning to find one. A teacher knew that when she opened any desk drawer she took a chance of finding something, maybe as one did, a dead gopher. Little kids at one school chased a kitten playfully in the yard and discovered, when it sprayed them, that it was a skunk.

In 1935 a child brought a porcupine to a rural school, shocking everyone as he carried it in as a pet. Kids already had horses with them and a lunch time game at some schools was to stand on the back of the horse in the barn, try to make it buck and then grabbing the rafters.  Two boys did a special trick on the teacher’s buggy rearranging the wheels so the big rear wheels were put in front and the small front wheels were put in the back. The teacher did not notice and set off, driving the full trip home as if headed uphill.

In the thirties one kid made a clothespin gun. He shot a match from it into the hole of a gnarled tree, started a fire and then threw water and snow into the opening to put the fire out. Eventually since the fire did not go out, he had to get help to axe down the tree.

Inside the building the school equipment itself had potential. In the 1930s some kids used the nibs of pens as darts to throw at the ceiling to see if they ‘d stick.  Whoever thought of giving children a glass container and indelible ink must have known that things might happen.   Kids when not closely watched sometimes dipped their fingers in the inkwell, spilled onto their papers, the desk, their clothes, the floor.  One angry child threw her inkwell at the teacher, spraying a lot of classmates at the same time.

Kids’ fascination with fire and explosions was often more innocent in intent that the result turned out to be.  In 1948 a child at one school put ammo from a 22 calibre rifle into the school stove, causing an explosion.  Another time someone threw a dead crow into the stove to make a bad smell and force evacuation of the building.

At Hallowe’en some kids threw firecrackers into one school stove but not all antics were so serious.  Kids discovered that having a heat source in the middle of the room had drama potential.  In 1930 they noticed that frozen ink in a bottle on the stove might not just reheat but might explode if the lid was left on.

Kids might just set themselves little challenges like balancing a crocus behind their ear all day or winding fine wire between two desks to see if anyone would notice, or trip.  They might climb above the rafters in the school barn at recess, put burrs under the saddle of someone’s horse before he headed for home.

In 1935 at a rural school one older student brought a gun to school and the teacher treated this as a misdemeanour only. She sent him home after reprimanding him.

As the antics of kids got known, teachers set rules of course. By 1939 in most schools peashooters, slingshots and rubber band guns were banned.  That does not mean the kids did not have them though, just outside school.  Inner tubes of car tires were often fashioned into rubber bands or slingshots. One discipline book in 1939 records strapping a boy for ‘”being in possession of stolen wire cut up into shots for sling shots”.

Often the victims of the prank were the ones who created it.  Most kids discovered, some by experience or on a dare, that if you touch your tongue to a cold metal pole in the school yard at recess, it will stick there. One  Calgary student in 1940 put black powder under the wooden steps behind his school and set the powder on fire but the explosion went terribly wrong and did not just make the big bang he thought would be fun, but destroyed the steps.

In the 1940s kids played many pranks on each other of course, including camouflaging a gopher hole in the playground so someone’s foot would fall through,  putting a bird’s nest in someone’s desk, or dangling the pigtails of the girl in front of you in your inkwell.

In the 1940s kids at the bigger schools in Calgary just updated the antics.  Some discovered that most people left their lockers just a few clicks from being opened so during a break might try out a lot of locks, happily open a few and then simply redistribute them all to new locations.

Teachers were  not immune from causing a few problems inadvertently themselves. They may pull down too hard on the cord that holds the roller map breaking it or in trying to stoke the fire, find they’d used wood that was too green and created a lot of smoke.

At one school in 1937 the teacher was in the basement putting paper in the firepit and found the paper came sailing out of the chimney as the fire had just gone out. One new teacher arriving at a school new to him in 1938 found a lot of unlabelled jars in the science cupboard and felt uncomfortable even having them around not knowing what they were. One evening he and a friend decided to just dispose of them all in a big pit behind the school, only to find that as the bottles broke and the chemicals  mixed, they cause explosions and flares into the sky.

I toured Alcatraz prison once and remember the guard saying that given enough time there is no limit to the creativity of some people. He was noticing how some inmates had fashioned a key out of spoons. Kids in school are not in prison of course, but they have time on their hands and are creative. I always feel it my job to get them to use this creativity for good- to help us make a rug sized maze to study x and y coordinates, to build a model native village out of toothpicks and plasticene and crepe paper. But kids often use the creativity other ways.

In 1950 some kids cut the strap into pieces.  A few sneaked up to the school attic.  As a rural prank some kids tore down the school gate and put it on the school roof.  The kids know where the teacher parks and at one school the kids subtly put a wood block behind her tire so leaving for the day would be difficult.  A few broke into a teachers’ car and blew up dozens of balloons there. More recently I read of a US school where grads  at night put forks all over the lawn, tongs facing up, with a sign saying’ Turn us over. We’re done” Some of those perpetrators were however suspended.

Kids have not changed so much after all. In 2012 I regularly find that kids, in idle moments, have pencilled or inked designs on their desktops and someone has to clean them  In the 1930s those marks were often carved in wood.  The old techniques are tried still, like copying answers. If the wisdom of life is that the answer is right in front of you, it may only be true if she’d move her head a bit.

Students have created more clever ways to cheat on exams, high tech ones with earphones and smart phones and cameras.  The schools try to be one step ahead.

What such antics usually got, was punishment and that has not changed.   How the punishment is delivered  has changed though, somewhat.