How well do you know your teacher? And other really strange facts about Education…

   Mrs Bartholemew with the glasses or Mr Wilcox who always wears a tie…Do you ever ask how their weekend was? Do you know how many children he has, and whether she prefers cats or dogs? Can he speak another language? Where is she going for her holidays? Some of the teachers at MAGS might really surprise you!  Many are very well travelled and a few even know how to burn the candle at both ends – when they’re not busy marking that is.  
 In the very dim distant past – the ‘olden days’ - back before television, there were some pretty weird rules that teachers had to obey. Here are just a few of these RULES FOR TEACHERS for your entertainment…
 * You must be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function. * You may not loiter downtown in any ice cream stores. * You may not travel beyond the city limits without permission of the chairmen of the board. * You may not smoke cigarettes. * You may not under any circumstances dye your hair. * You may not dress in bright colours. * Ladies may not ride in a carriage or automobile with a man unless he is your father or brother. * Gentlemen may take one evening a week for courting purposes, two if they go to church regularly. * After ten hours at school, you should spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books. * Ladies who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed. 


  
  Here are some other strange & disturbing facts you will not know:
 1.  As recently as 2009, China had elementary schools wholly sponsored by big tobacco. One in Sichuan had a message at the front gate that said “Tobacco can help you become an achiever.”
2.  In Armenia, all children aged 6 and up are taught chess at school, as it is a mandatory part of their curriculum.3.  Mussolini was expelled from school when he was 10 for stabbing a classmate. He did the same thing at his next school.4.  Most Japanese schools don’t have cleaners. Instead students do the cleaning every day as part of a practice rooted in Buddhist traditions that associate cleaning with morality.5.  There is a school in California named Millennium High School. Their mascot is a Falcon. The school football team is called the Millennium Falcons.6.    In 2010, a middle school board in Pennsylvania gave Macbooks to all their students, secretly spied on them, and then punished them later at school.7.  At age 15, the actor Jim Carrey quit school and became a commercial cleaner to support his family. They were living out of the back of a van at that time.8.  In 2013, a young boy was suspended from school for biting his sandwich into the shape of a gun. School officials apparently mistook it for a real gun and the boy was sent home.9.  The Beatles song “I am the Walrus” was written by John Lennon after he learned an English teacher in his old high school was making the class analyse Beatle’s lyrics. In response, he wrote the most confusing lyrics he could, saying, “Let the silly #@#s work that out.”10.   A Reform School for Boys in Florida was shut down in 2011. It had gained a reputation for all sorts of terrible things over the years - abuse, beatings, rapes, torture. Some even imagined there had been some murders of students by staff. When forensic police technology was used on the property, they discovered 50 unmarked graves located on the school grounds.