I Went to a Catholic School
And you could tell. The school was on two sites, and one of the sites was own by monks. Anyway, onto my story. This is how one day a couple of parents decided to show our school how to handle bullies the right way. Needless to say, things really got out of control.
One day when I was probably in the lower end of the school, so maybe 12ish, I was on the school bus going down the lane towards the school when I saw out of the window what looked to be a BBC News van complete with cameraman. Next I saw this giant banner which proclaimed ' Beat Back at Bullies!'. And there was practically most of the school that had arrived standing around on the pavement blowing into their hands. I got off the bus and ran to a huddle of friends wondering what on earth was happening. They looked around at me and showed me briefly a blue whistle in each of their hands before they blew them really hard in my face. They then gave me one, telling me that some parents were having some protest about bullies and that they were instructing everyone to blow the whistles at bullies. We wandered into the quad and could see through one of the windows that policemen had actually turned up. Turns out the protest wasn't exactly 'legal'. So the parents moved from the school side of the road to the other side, which is a field. Things got pretty out of hand at that point. Most of the school by then had gone onto the field and had begun to do synchronised whistling. They even did ' God save the Queen'. Me and my friends peered into the teacher car park to see 2-3 police cars there, kind of made you think they thought they had a riot going on. Well, at 9:45pm, only 15 minute before school should start, the bell went and some teachers ran out onto the field to get everyone inside to their form rooms. Some of the lads weren't going to go easily and one faced the cameraman who was eagerly filming everything and yelled ' Save us!'. By this point I was sitting on a bench safetly in the quad out of the way and giggling with my friends. It truly was a sight to see. When we got to our form rooms and had sat down, our form tutor then began to tell us all that they needed to confiscate all our whistles, or else we'd be excluded for a couple of days, which I thought was pretty unreasonable. Thankfully my whistle at that point had made it into my sock, so even if they did a bag search, which they did do, my whistle wasn't found. All in all, it was one of the most eventful days of my school career. I shall remember it fondly. I also must find my whistle again. Maybe give it to my sister to take to school with her tomorrow to give the teachers a fright.
And my big tip here is, whistles make excellent school entertainment, even at supposidly strict 'posh' schools like mine :)
And don't forget to kit our your children, brothers, nieces, nephews, sisters, grandchildren and so forth out with them on their next school day :)
If your child is punished I shall deny any and all charges of being the one to give you all this idea :)
