Lessons That Last: The day we brought our treasures to school

Remember show and tell? That weekly ritual when you were expected to bring something from home, stand in front of the class and convince 30 other kids that it was worth looking at.

Some kids loved it, and the attention, others would have preferred a visit to the school dentist.

You could bring almost anything. A shell collected on holidays might earn a polite round of applause, but turn up with a live mouse and suddenly everybody wanted a front-row seat.

Every so often, somebody would produce that something that had absolutely no business being in a classroom.

Grandpa’s teeth stole the show

Take young Trevor, for example (name changed for privacy reasons), who arrives at school carrying an old biscuit tin and refuses to tell anyone what’s inside.

By morning playtime, half the class is desperate to know.

When his turn finally comes, Trevor marches to the front, puts the tin on the teacher’s desk and announces that he’s brought something belonging to his grandfather.

He lifts the lid.

Inside is a complete set of false teeth.

Trevor explains that Grandpa takes them out every night and leaves them in a glass beside the bed. He’s brought them along because they’re interesting, and because Grandpa won’t need them until dinner that night.

The teacher, already looking concerned, asks whether his grandfather knows the teeth are missing.

“Not yet, Miss.”

Then Trevor picks them up and makes them chatter together like a wind-up toy and by now the teacher has abandoned any hope of returning to the lesson.

Things get worse when Trevor drops the bottom set, which skids across the polished floor and disappears beneath a cupboard.

For a minute or two several children are on their hands and knees searching for Grandpa’s lower jaw.

Imagine the conversation when Trevor gets home.

“How was school?”

“Good, Mum. We nearly lost Grandpa’s teeth.”

The things we thought were treasures

Not every show-and-tell presentation involved somebody’s missing dentures.

There were children who arrived with carefully labelled collections of rocks or stamps, while others proudly displayed a new football, a family photo or something they’d dug out of the garden.

Country kids sometimes had an advantage. A box of newly hatched chicks or a large insect or even a dead snake could attract more attention than anything bought from a shop.

Pets were always popular, although bringing a guinea pig to school was probably easier than explaining to Mum why it had escaped during maths.

Then there was the child who brought along something that looked suspiciously like household rubbish but insisted it was a priceless family heirloom.

The best presentations usually ended with everyone crowding around for a closer look, despite the teacher repeatedly asking them to stay in their seats.

Your five minutes of fame

Looking back, show and tell gave children a chance to talk about something that mattered to them, even if the rest of the class couldn’t always understand why.

It also provided some of the best entertainment of the school week, especially when a presentation went completely off the rails.

I wonder how many former teachers still remember the strange things children proudly carried into their classrooms.

Somewhere, I suspect, there’s a grandfather who learnt to check the biscuit tin before putting his teeth back in.

What was the strangest thing you remember from show and tell and what did you proudly take to school?

This article is part of ‘Lessons That Last’, a new Starts At 60 series exploring the memories, traditions and school experiences that shape Australians across generations, presented in partnership with Schoolblazer Limited, a specialist school uniform company that works with hundreds of schools internationally. Through Lessons That Last, Starts At 60 is exploring the memories and experiences of school life across generations of Australians.

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