For those not familiar with the institution, Junior High is the transitional stage in most American schools between the lower grade schools and high school, and generally consists of grades 7 and 8 (ages about 12-15). This is a time of life when many kids are clever enough to be destructive monsters but not mature enough to restrain themselves. It's a special delight, I'm sure, to teach. On that note, here's some pranks and shens from my Junior High days.
Duck and Cover
Some of you may have seen the fake foam rocks that many novelty stores sell. These appear to be hefty, fist-sized jagged grey and white granite rocks, but are actually speckle-painted foam pieces that squish down to thumb-size. They're remarkably real looking. In the morning before the doors were opened, most of us would congregate on the front steps of the school and stand around talking. The principal's office was just to left of the steps, and one day he was in the room having a meeting with the assistant principal. One of the kids had brought a foam rock, and he walked up to the window with a menacing scowl. As the two looked up, the kid raised his arm with the rock visible, clearly winding up for a pitch, and they dived under the principal's desk. After hearing not the expected shatter of glass but just a light "piff" on the window, they peeked up over the edge and saw the kid squeezing and unsqueezing the rock with a big snotty grin. Fortunately for him, the principal found it funny.
Sprechen Sie Jackass?
In the eighth grade, our social studies club took a field trip to Chicago to visit the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. We had a raucous ride up on the Amtrak from Indy, and set off to the Planetarium in loose groups. That semester we had just begun learning German, and I and a group of friends decided to try out our new vocabulary. We went into the planetarium hooting and announcing "WIR GEHEN INS KINO!!!", and sat down to a mixture of astronomy and fractured German. We'd greet each new lighting effect in the presentation with a chorus of "DAS IST SCHOEN NICHT WAR!?!" Finally, we heard someone mutter, "wish those damn Germans would shut up." My friend John, sitting on the end, turned around and in the gruffest voice possible said "NO! WE DON'T HAVE TO!" They were rather taken aback, and moved quickly to the other side of the room.
The Mess
A whole room full full of Junior High kids attempting to consume food can be a putrid spectacle, and Miss Manners would likely have hung herself in despair at the sight of our cafeteria. The kids at one table liked to play Drink the Pot. They would all chip in some amount of leftover lunch money, and then pass around a container which would be filled with every liquid substance available. Ketchup, mustard, gravy, salt packets, butter, and a half dozen hawked-up wads of multi-colored mucoid gastric juices would all be added to the concoction, and whoever was willing to drink the abomination won the money in the pot. It was usually about five dollars, and seldom worth it.
My own forte was stuffing straws end to end to form a long plastic chain through which I'd drink my chocolate milk. My record was a dozen 8 inch straws connected and successfully employed. The straws could be joined by pinching their ends and stuffing them together, but this didn't form a fully airtight joint, and a dozen straws was the limiting number at which there was barely enough suction to drink. As it was, it produced a dripping, bubbling, squirting mess, with nearly the entire contents of the milk carton contained in transit in the straw.
We also enjoyed bringing along leftovers from our biology dissections, and there were some highly amusing (at the time) puppet shows performed with pickled locust parts on utensils. There was also a pasttime of rolling pennies across the room and under the food line into the kitchen, with points scored for hitting workers and bonuses for technique.
PsuedoScience Class
Our eighth grade science teacher had an unmatched talent for losing control of his classes without fail every year. His inability to maintain discipline was rivalled only by his ignorance of the subject, and bedlam frequently ensued. In any given class, there would usually be one kid hiding behind him re- enacting his facial expressions, another flipping matches, and others tossing his plastic fossil blocks out the window (there was usually a substantial collection of natural history artifacts littering the lawn outside his room.) Still more who'd been sent to the back would be rearranging and inscribing editorials on his slides. He had an uncanny knack for bringing out the worst in kids; even the most silent, timid wallflowers would become surly and begin disassembling the plumbing fixtures. Nor did it help matters that he stuttered when angry, which would result in the class singing a chorus of "B-b-b-b-b-b-ad! Bad to the bone!" One day he inexplicably forgot he had to teach class, and arrived forty minutes late, by which time the projector was running, his gerbils had been freed to do whatever it is free gerbils do, and a rather festive party had developed.
Power to the People
One day some friends and I were seized with the notion of starting political parties in the school, for no readily apparent reason other than its irritation value. We organized the whole class of the aforementioned science teacher in the hall outside his room, and goosestepped two-abreast into class. Our emblem was the Mr. Yuck poison-control sticker, and our plentiful supply soon adorned most surfaces. The assistant-principal put a stop to the festivities by the end of the day, however, after seeing the propaganda posters we'd posted in the bathroom stalls regarding the desirability of much less education.
Little Shop Class of Horrors
We also had an entertaining shop class. The shop teacher was a fine man who was actually quite patient with us, but he had some unfortunate figures of speech he'd continually repeat, the most notable being "X number". He was always discussing "X number" of nails and "X number" of feet, and the phrase became highly amusing. One warm afternoon during our lecture, we could hear through an open window the gym class passing by below, returning to the locker room. One of the kids stopped under the window long enough to scream "I HAVE X NUMBER OF BALLS" at maximum volume, and we spent the rest of lecture trying to keep from exploding in giggles.
The class also involved a great deal of free-lance investigation, to put it mildly. We spent several weeks doing arc welding, and would bring in Hot Wheels cars to weld into the aftermath of terrorist bombings and "action figures" who were turned into plastic marshmallows. My own favorite activity was disassembling plastic figures with a soldering iron and melting them together in interesting new configurations. We used the buffer to smooth the suture points, and produced horrific army soldier/cowboy/dinosaur/goat people hybrids that looked like demons from Medieval paintings of Judgement Day. There was also an industrial strength blow drier in the shop hot enough to melt plastic, and when directed at hapless figures would turn them into dripping creations that looked like comic-book illustrations for The Origin of Atomic Blast Man.
Magic Bus
Our town school system had no buses of its own, part of its effort to avoid being integrated (ahem) into the Indianapolis school system. I lived too far from the school to walk on a regular basis, and thus usually rode the city bus. There was a colorful rabble who rode on the trip home in the afternoon, and we'd usually congregate outside a nearby convenience store to wait. One kid enjoyed trying to make collect foreign calls from the phone in front of the store (he once made it as far as China), and, being an utter jackass, loved to spit on those getting off the bus (I was once treated to this, but didn't wipe the glop off until I couldn't hear the bus, so that he'd think he'd missed and be denied the satisfaction of seeing me flailing around). I also had a thoroughly weird friend who enjoyed popping up and down in the seats behind normal passengers while making Muppet noises. One day we were sitting in the back of the bus and found an empty gallon-sized glass orange juice bottle. He set it against the back of the last seat, and when the bus decelerated it rolled perfectly all the way up to the front with a rumble and a crash. Fortunately it didn't break, but we had to hide behind the seats to avoid thirty people's hostile stares for the rest of the trip.