A load of balls
One of the very unfair things at my primary school is that, while kids were always being called to the front in assembly and given trophies for having long legs or being good at catch, there were never any awards given out just for being clever. One of these humiliation-of-the-unfit rituals was a certificate system where everyone was made to perform various pointless tasks such as running, jumping over things and throwing things, after which we would be graded purely on performance, with none of the nice awards that you're supposed to make for kids like "best effort" or "sportspersonship", nor even a reassuringly patronising segregation between boys and girls. If everyone who got below a certain grade had been been herded into the sports hall and gassed, it would have been entirely in keeping with the tone of the whole thing.

Very few of the events were actually proper sports. One of them was simply "throwing a cricket ball (as far as you can)". I probably made the great achievement of managing to throw the ball further than the end of my feet, but this story isn't about me.

A couple of kids who'd had the foresight to forget their PE kits had been given the task of measuring the distance of each throw, using a trundle wheel. For those for whom trundle wheels were not an essential part of school equipment, this is basically a wheel on a stick that you roll along the ground in front of you. The circumference of the wheel is one metre, and every time it turns it goes "click", so as you walk along you can count out the number of metres. One young lad who was particularly good at throwing things lobbed the ball a fair distance, maybe forty metres or so. At that distance, and with the grass on the school field not having been cut for a while, the ball was now completely invisible from the oche, or whatever it's called in cricket-ball-throwing. The trundle-wheel team set off, but at the wrong angle. Cue a dozen kids yelling "No, not there, over there!" and the trundlers zigzagging all over the shop, all the while dutifully counting the number of clicks, before they eventually found the ball's resting place after four or five changes of course.

Presumably there were no teachers around at the time to realise that this would have given a rather skewed result. Neither can they have really been interested enough in the results to realise that a nine-year-old child had apparently beaten a world record.
( Photoshop Bitch 2014 edition, Thu 19 Apr 2012, 15:20, 2 replies)

Trundle wheels!
I remember trundle wheels being used at primary school. Six of us were divided up into two groups to "Measure the playing field". One group got the trundle wheel, and our group got a 12" ruler.

So the trundle wheel group were done in two minutes flat, while we were laboriously laying out the ruler, and in true small child manner we were placing a fingertip at the end of the ruler to "mark the place", moving the ruler and then moving the fingertip, and so on and so on.

40 minutes later the teacher came out and started shouting at us; I've still no idea why she was so cross. We were just doing what we were told.
(richardm, Thu 19 Apr 2012, 17:28, closed)

Primary school teachers could be absolute fuckers for no fathomable reason
you just accept it when you're that age
( Photoshop Bitch 2014 edition, Fri 20 Apr 2012, 20:38, closed)

Trundle wheels..
I remember those bloody things.

A maths class I was in at school (run by a chap who also did PE funnily enough) had our class split into groups and measure various things with the trundle wheel.

Examples:

- The school car park
- The distance from the staff room to the front gate
- The distance from the front gate to the bus stop

On the plus side, ample opportunity for skiving presented itself, the exercise swiftly ended however, when one of the 'special' kids decided to spang another lad in the face with the group trundle wheel for quote: "Looking at [him]funny".

Great days..
(wuckfit Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori., Fri 20 Apr 2012, 2:45, closed)