162 Fun Facts About Back to School

The 'lead' in a pencil is actually made of what?

Pencil cores are graphite and clay, fired together; more clay makes a harder grade. The 'lead' name stuck because 16th-century chemists took the black mineral for a kind of lead ore.

A 1500s find of pure 'black lead' in which country kicked off the pencil industry?

England: the Borrowdale deposit in Cumbria was so pure it could be sawn straight into sticks, and the same mineral lined the moulds for Elizabethan cannonballs.

Which shape is the most common for a wooden pencil?

Hexagonal is the standard shape because flat sides stop a pencil rolling off the desk; carpenters' pencils are made oval or rectangular for the same reason.

What colours are the ferrule (the metal band) on a classic Ticonderoga pencil?

Green and yellow: the band was plain brass at first, and the maker says wartime metal rationing brought in the green that stayed after the war.

The word 'Crayola' combines the French word for chalk with a suffix meaning what?

Oily: Alice Binney, a former schoolteacher married to the firm's co-founder, joined French craie (chalk) to 'ola' from oleaginous, and Crayola has been the trademark since 1903.

Crayola's 64-colour box of the late 1950s was the first to include what?

A built-in sharpener sat in the back of the box, behind four rows of sixteen crayons stepped one above the next so that every colour was easy to reach.

Which New York university's Teachers College hosted the 1939 conference that made yellow the standard school-bus colour?

Columbia: professor Frank Cyr gathered transport officials from all 48 states with bus builders and paint experts, and they left with 44 national standards, the colour among them.

Why was 'school bus yellow' chosen?

Black lettering shows best in low light, and the 1939 conference also wanted a shade conspicuous at a distance and unusual enough that drivers would link it with children; its name is National School Bus Glossy Yellow.

What were rural America's horse-drawn school wagons called, using an old word for a hired carriage?

Kid hacks loaded children through a door at the back, said to keep them from startling the horses, and that rear door lives on as the emergency exit of the modern school bus.

The word 'kindergarten' literally means what?

Garden of children: Friedrich Fröbel gave his play-and-activity institute the name in 1840 because he believed the young should be nurtured like plants in a garden.

The first U.S. kindergarten, opened in 1856 in Watertown, Wisconsin, was taught in which language?

German: Margarethe Schurz, who met Fröbel's ideas as a teenager in Hamburg, began with her own small daughter and four other children; meeting her in 1859 moved Elizabeth Peabody to open the country's first English-language kindergarten.

'Sophomore' is popularly explained as joining two Greek words meaning what?

Wise fool, from sophos and moros, is the popular reading; dictionaries trace the word to 'sophumer', a student who practised sophisms, and say the Greek pair probably only reshaped its spelling.

What is a Japanese randoseru, bought before first grade and built to last all six elementary years?

A firm-sided backpack: its shape copies the pack carried by Japan's 19th-century foot soldiers, and the name is usually traced to the Dutch word ransel.

What is the decorated cone of sweets given to German children starting first grade called?

A Schultüte, or 'school cone': children used to be told that the cones grew on a special tree, and that once they were big enough it was time to start school.

Classic schoolroom blackboards were cut from which dark stone?

Slate: with only hand-held slates, teachers once had to set each problem pupil by pupil; George Baron's 1801 maths class at West Point is the first recorded U.S. lesson on a wall board, and slate ones were standard by the mid-1800s.

Headmaster James Pillans, credited with inventing coloured chalk for his geography lessons, taught in which Scottish city?

Edinburgh: Pillans, rector of the Old High School, is often credited with inventing the blackboard as well, though the coloured chalk he drew his maps with is the surer claim.

Natural chalk is a soft limestone made mostly from what?

The shells of tiny plankton, shed by algae called coccolithophores, piled up on Cretaceous sea floors and built Dover's white cliffs; the sticks sold for blackboards and pavements are often gypsum instead.

Before rubber erasers, what did people use to rub out pencil marks?

Pieces of crustless bread did the job until the 1770s, when a springy gum from the tropics proved so good at rubbing out pencil marks that English speakers simply named it 'rubber'.

Where is Hogwarts said to be located?

The Scottish Highlands: Rowling has said the castle stands somewhere in Scotland, reached by the Hogwarts Express from King's Cross; the name may have come from the hogwort plant.

Which house does the Sorting Hat nearly pick for Harry?

Slytherin: the Hat weighs it up before choosing Gryffindor, and in the series epilogue Harry tells his own son, who dreads the same house, that his choices will shape his life.

Which animal is the mascot of Hufflepuff?

A badger stands for Hufflepuff, the house of hard work and loyalty, whose dormitories lie beside the kitchens behind a barrel-shaped door that opens only when the right rhythm is tapped on it.

Who voices Ms. Frizzle in The Magic School Bus animated series?

Lily Tomlin won a Daytime Emmy for the role in 1995 and returned for the 2017 Netflix revival as Professor Frizzle, who hands the bus keys to a younger sister voiced by Kate McKinnon.

What is the name of the tyrannical headmistress in Roald Dahl's Matilda?

Miss Trunchbull, a former Olympic hammer-thrower, runs Crunchem Hall and swings pupils by their pigtails; Miss Honey is the kind teacher who tries to move Matilda up a class.

Dead Poets Society is set at a fictional boarding school called what?

Welton Academy, a Vermont prep school in 1959, was patterned by screenwriter Tom Schulman on his own old school, Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, and the script won him an Oscar.

Which dean of students spends Ferris Bueller's Day Off trying to catch Ferris skipping school?

Ed Rooney, played by Jeffrey Jones, sets out after learning Ferris has been absent nine times that semester and ends the day humiliated, riding home on a school bus full of jeering students.

Grease is set at which school?

Rydell High takes its name from Bobby Rydell, a teen idol of the era, a fitting choice for a story set among the class of 1959.

In Mean Girls, Cady Heron starts at which school after years of homeschooling in Africa?

North Shore High School, in the Chicago suburbs, is where Cady meets the Plastics; Tina Fey adapted the story from Rosalind Wiseman's book Queen Bees and Wannabes.

Which John Hughes film puts five high-school types in Saturday detention?

The Breakfast Club was shot inside a closed Illinois high school whose real library was judged too small, so the crew built the film's library in the gymnasium.

Christ's Hospital, believed to be the first school with a uniform, adopted its blue coats in the 1550s under which dynasty?

Tudor: Edward VI founded the school for London's poor children, and pupils still wear the belted blue coat and yellow socks; when a redesign was discussed in 2011, over 95 percent of them voted to keep it.

Frederick the Great's General School Regulation of 1763 made schooling compulsory in which European state?

Prussia: the decree was drafted by Johann Julius Hecker, founder of the kingdom's first teacher-training seminary, and American reformers who toured its schools in the 1840s took the model home.

Who is known as the 'Father of American Education'?

Horace Mann, secretary of his state's board of education from 1837, built the model of tax-funded common schools and teacher-training 'normal schools' that most other states went on to copy.

Count Rumford is credited with serving the first school lunches, to poor children in 1790, in which Bavarian city?

Munich: the American-born Benjamin Thompson fed his workhouse pupils a cheap barley-and-pea broth still called Rumford's Soup, and he also laid out the city's English Garden.

Which president signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946?

Truman signed it on June 4, 1946; besides feeding children, the Act was designed to help American farmers by using up the surplus food they produced.

Which country's Midday Meal Scheme serves free cooked lunches to children in government primary schools?

India's scheme went nationwide after its Supreme Court, in November 2001, told every state government to start serving the meals in its schools within six months.

The Courier-Journal, the newspaper of which Kentucky city, founded the National Spelling Bee in 1925?

Louisville: the paper merged local bees into one national final in 1925, won by 11-year-old local boy Frank Neuhauser on 'gladiolus', and Scripps took over the rights in 1941.

Why did the 2019 Scripps Spelling Bee crown eight co-champions?

Hard words ran out: the pronouncer warned the eight survivors that the list would soon have nothing left to challenge them, and each of them went home with the full $50,000 prize.

What property of a highlighter's ink makes it seem to glow on the page?

Fluorescence: the dye pyranine in a yellow highlighter absorbs ultraviolet light and gives it back as visible light, which is why the ink blazes under a black light.

The Post-it Note's weak adhesive was found in 1968 by a 3M scientist trying to make what?

A super-strong glue: Spencer Silver was trying to make a stronger aerospace adhesive in 1968 and got a weak, reusable one instead; Art Fry later used it to anchor a hymn-book bookmark.

Why are original Post-it Notes canary yellow?

It was the scrap-paper colour next door: the lab beside Art Fry's had only yellow scrap on hand when the first test notes were cut, and 3M later registered the canary shade as a trademark.

Norway is often wrongly credited with inventing which office item, worn there as a wartime symbol of resistance?

The paper clip: Norwegians wore them on their lapels under occupation and later credited Johan Vaaler's 1899 patent, but his clip was never made, and the familiar Gem design was never patented at all.

László Bíró left wartime Europe for which country, where a ballpoint pen is still called a 'birome'?

Argentina: Bíró filed a new patent there in 1943, his surname fused with that of his partner Juan Jorge Meyne to make Birome, and the country now keeps Inventors' Day on his birthday.

Elmer's Glue is named after what?

The bull married to Elsie the Cow: Borden made the glue from casein, a milk by-product, so the dairy borrowed its mascots and put Elsie's husband Elmer on the bottle.

The Trapper Keeper binder was created by which company in the late 1970s?

Mead launched it in 1978 and named it for its two parts: the 'Trappers' were the company's own pocket folders, and the 'Keeper' was the binder sold to hold them.

Which Tucson brand filled 1990s classrooms with rainbow-coloured folders and stickers?

Lisa Frank started with a line of plastic jewellery called Sticky Fingers while still an art student in Arizona, and her young sticker company soon landed a million-dollar order from Spencer Gifts.

Schoolhouse Rock! began after an ad exec's son could memorise Rolling Stones lyrics but not what?

Multiplication tables: ad executive David McCall hired jazz musician Bob Dorough to set them to music, beginning with 'Three Is a Magic Number'; ABC ran the shorts on Saturday mornings from 1973.

Which Sesame Street Muppet began orange?

Oscar the Grouch soon turned green and has stayed that way; his own story is that a holiday at Swamp Mushy Muddy, a place so damp it changed his colour, did the trick.

Contrary to the summer-vacation myth, in which seasons did 19th-century American farm children mostly attend school?

Summer and winter: planting and harvest kept farm children at home in spring and autumn, so rural schools ran short terms in between; the long summer break was a later creation, shaped by sweltering cities.

Japan's school year begins in which month, so that the six-week summer break falls partway through it?

April: the year runs from April to the following March, so the six weeks off from late July arrive in the middle of a grade rather than between two of them.

What is 'recess' called in British schools?

Break or playtime: primary schools mostly say playtime and secondaries say break, while to British ears a 'recess' is what Parliament takes when it stops sitting.

What do the Japanese call a packed single-portion lunch in a lidded box?

Bento: many Japanese parents shape the rice and toppings into cartoon characters, a style called kyaraben that began as a way of coaxing children to eat a wider range of foods.

Which U.S. state was the first to add pupil transportation to public education, in 1869?

Massachusetts moved first in 1869, when the ride was still a converted farm wagon, and by 1919 all 48 states had followed its lead.

McGuffey's Readers rank in sales with the Bible and the works of which lexicographer?

Noah Webster: histories rank the Readers beside the Bible and his dictionary or speller, yet William McGuffey compiled only the first four of the six; the last two were the work of his brother Alexander.

Which industrialist, raised on McGuffey's Readers, moved the author's log-cabin birthplace to his own museum village?

Henry Ford was taught to read from the Readers at his one-room school, and the cabin was not his only trophy: the Wright brothers' cycle shop from Dayton, Ohio also stands in his Greenfield Village.

Which 1957 Dr. Seuss book was written with just 236 different words to replace dull Dick and Jane primers?

The Cat in the Hat began as a challenge: publisher William Spaulding, worried that boring primers were putting children off reading, is said to have asked Seuss for a story first-graders couldn't put down.

What was Dick and Jane's pet Spot in the 1930s editions?

A cat: in the 1930s editions Spot was a cat; in later editions Spot became a dog and a new cat, Puff, joined the family.

What reading method were the Dick and Jane books built on?

Whole-word or 'look-say': pupils learned to recognise whole words by sight through repetition, hence 'See Spot run'; Rudolf Flesch's 1955 Why Johnny Can't Read attacked the method in favour of phonics.

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for an 1892 school celebration honouring whom?

Christopher Columbus: the 1892 celebration marked 400 years since his landing in the Americas, and The Youth's Companion magazine printed the pledge as part of its own drive to sell a Stars and Stripes to every schoolhouse.

The 1943 Supreme Court ruling that pupils cannot be forced to recite the Pledge was won by families of which faith?

Jehovah's Witnesses, who regard pledging to national symbols as idolatry, won West Virginia v. Barnette only three years after the same Court had ruled against them in the Gobitis case.

Congress replaced the Pledge of Allegiance's original salute because it looked too much like what?

The Nazi salute: the original gesture ended with the right arm stretched straight out, and in December 1942 Congress swapped it for the hand over the heart that is still used today.

Which animal material, pressed into see-through sheets, protected children's alphabet tablets in the 1500s?

Horn gave the hornbook its name: the paddle-shaped tablet, in common English use by about 1450, kept its alphabet sheet under a thin translucent layer of it, later sometimes mica.

On the pencil grading scale, what are the letters 'HB' commonly taken to stand for?

Hard Black is the usual reading: H grades get harder and B grades blacker and softer, which leaves HB in the middle as the standard writing pencil, the one Americans call a No. 2.

Which U.S. state was the last of the then 48 to pass a compulsory school attendance law?

Mississippi came last, some 65 years after the first state had acted in 1852, and in 1982 its Education Reform Act had to make school attendance compulsory all over again, hiring truant officers to enforce it.

One origin story for the sloppy joe points to a bar that drew Prohibition-era American tourists to which Caribbean capital?

Havana: bar owner José 'Sloppy Joe' Abeal y Otero is said to have served a simple sandwich of ground beef stewed in tomatoes, and Hemingway later talked a Key West bar owner into borrowing the name.

Japan's private cram schools that prepare students for entrance exams are called what?

Juku run after regular school hours and at weekends; a student who fails the university entrance exams and spends a year cramming to retake them is nicknamed a ronin, after the masterless samurai.

Which birthday soup do South Korean students avoid before the Suneung exam?

Seaweed soup: in Korean, to slip also means to fail an exam, so the slippery birthday dish is off the menu, while sticky yeot toffee is eaten for luck because to stick also means to pass.

What happens to aircraft during the English listening section of South Korea's Suneung?

They are grounded: take-offs and landings are halted across the country so that engine noise cannot disturb the listening test, and the stock market opens an hour late that day.

Taiwan celebrates Teachers' Day on 28 September, the date kept as the birthday of which ancient Chinese thinker?

Confucius, honoured as the model teacher, is remembered that day with a memorial ceremony that Taiwan's government has kept going without interruption.

Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher, was educated where?

Perkins School for the Blind: Anne Sullivan, partly blinded by trachoma at five, graduated as valedictorian of the Boston school in 1886, a year before she went to teach Helen Keller.

Jaime Escalante won national fame by coaching East Los Angeles pupils through which Advanced Placement exam?

Calculus: when all 18 of his Garfield High candidates passed in 1982, the testing service found their scores suspicious, so most of them sat the exam again and passed a second time.

Which film stars Edward James Olmos as teacher Jaime Escalante?

Stand and Deliver won Olmos a Best Actor Oscar nomination; Escalante called it '90 percent truth, 10 percent drama', pointing out that the real results took him several years to build.

Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' stalled at number seven in the U.S. but topped the singles chart in which country?

The United Kingdom kept it at number one for three weeks in August 1972; Cooper said he set out to capture the last three minutes of the last day of school.

Which band's 'Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)' was the UK's 1979 Christmas number one?

Pink Floyd had not released a single in Britain since 1968; this one, with pupils from Islington Green School on the chorus, became the last UK number one of the 1970s.

Van Halen's 'Hot for Teacher' opens with a 30-second solo on which instrument?

Drums: Alex Van Halen's double-bass shuffle opens the song, the video casts the band as both grown-ups and schoolboys, and it proved the last single of their first David Lee Roth era.

Which band's 'Be True to Your School' borrows the University of Wisconsin fight song's tune?

The Beach Boys meant it as a tribute to Hawthorne High, where the Wilson brothers and Al Jardine had been pupils, and brought in girl group the Honeys to sing the cheerleader chants.

Which western U.S. state effectively abolished homework for pupils under 15 in 1901?

California's legislature acted a year after magazine writer Edward Bok had campaigned against homework for under-15s; the practice only came back into favour in the 1950s, under Cold War pressure.

Which children's book star is the official mascot of the publisher Scholastic?

Clifford the Big Red Dog grew from Norman Bridwell's sketch of a girl with a horse-sized bloodhound, which an editor told him to turn into a story; his wife named the dog after her imaginary childhood friend.

Scholastic began in 1920 as a paper called The Western Pennsylvania Scholastic, published near which city?

Pittsburgh: Maurice 'Robbie' Robinson put out the first four-page issue from a sewing room in his parents' home in nearby Wilkinsburg, covering high-school sports and social life.

Which classroom newspaper, launched in 1928, was folded into Scholastic News in 2012?

Weekly Reader was famous for its presidential straw poll of schoolchildren, which from 1956 backed the eventual winner 13 times out of 14, missing only in 1992.

What is the tagline of Highlights for Children?

Fun with a Purpose nearly had no future: the magazine was losing money within six months, until the founders' son began placing copies in doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms.

In Highlights magazine's long-running cartoon about manners, what is the name of Goofus's counterpart?

Gallant and his rude opposite were created by psychologist Garry Cleveland Myers for an earlier children's magazine in 1940, where the pair were first drawn not as boys but as elves.

Which film star chaired the President's fitness council under George H. W. Bush?

Arnold Schwarzenegger chaired it from 1990 to 1993 and took the job on the road, visiting every one of the 50 states to preach exercise.

Which LAPD chief, who resigned after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, founded D.A.R.E. in 1983?

Daryl Gates launched D.A.R.E. with the Los Angeles school district in 1983, sending police officers into classrooms; at its height it ran in 75 percent of U.S. school districts.

What is the name of D.A.R.E.'s lion mascot?

Daren the Lion is D.A.R.E.'s mascot; after studies found its lessons did little to cut drug use, the programme adopted the research-based 'keepin' it REAL' curriculum, taught through discussion rather than lectures.

The original text-based Oregon Trail was created in 1971 for what setting?

An 8th grade history lesson: Don Rawitsch, a Carleton College student teacher, wrote it with Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger for his Minneapolis class in 1971, played on a teletype.

Which illness completes the famous Oregon Trail death notice, 'You have died of …'?

Dysentery: the blunt death notice became the game's best-known line and ended up on T-shirts; the series, begun by three student teachers in 1971, has sold more than 65 million copies.

The word 'dunce' began as a jibe at followers of the medieval Scot John Duns Scotus, who was what?

A philosopher: Duns Scotus was admired as the Subtle Doctor, but when his followers resisted Renaissance humanism, the humanists turned 'Duns' into a word for someone incapable of learning.

Which marker brand did Sanford Ink launch in 1964 as the first permanent marker shaped like a pen?

Sharpie: Sanford, an ink maker since 1857, launched it in 1964; astronauts on the International Space Station favour Sharpies because, as Chris Hadfield put it, they work held any which way.

Liquid Paper's inventor was the mother of a guitarist in which band?

The Monkees: Bette Nesmith Graham, a Dallas bank secretary, mixed the first correction fluid in her kitchen blender to paint over typing errors; her son Michael Nesmith became the band's guitarist.

What was Liquid Paper originally called?

Mistake Out: Bette Nesmith Graham bottled her white tempera mix for fellow secretaries under that name, and in 1958 her bank fired her, freeing her to build the business she renamed Liquid Paper.

Swingline added a red stapler to its range only after a custom-painted one appeared in which 1999 film?

Office Space: fans kept asking for Milton's red stapler, which had been painted for the film, so Swingline began selling a red model in 2002. The firm started in 1925 as the Parrot Speed Fastener Company.

'Satchel' comes from a diminutive of the Latin word that also gave English the name of which bag?

Sack: Latin saccus, a bag, gave English 'sack', and its double diminutive saccellus, a little money bag, became Old French sachel and then the schoolchild's satchel.

Thermos was originally founded in 1904 in which country?

Germany: two glassblowers there saw that James Dewar's laboratory flask could keep drinks hot or cold and formed the Thermos company in 1904; Dewar had never patented it, and lost when he sued for the rights.

Which cartoon star was printed on the first licensed character lunch box, sold in 1935?

Mickey Mouse got there in 1935, but character lunch boxes only took off in the 1950s, once television gave children a stream of new heroes to carry to school.

Aladdin's 1950 lunch box based on which TV show sold 600,000 units in its first year?

Hopalong Cassidy: Aladdin Industries put William Boyd's TV cowboy on a steel lunch box in 1950 at $2.39 and sold 600,000 in the first year, launching the character lunch-box boom.

The title 'valedictorian' comes from Latin words that mean to say what?

Farewell: Latin vale dicere means 'to say goodbye', because the top-ranked graduate traditionally gives the last speech of the ceremony before classmates go their separate ways.

Which sandwich's first known mention ran in a 1901 Boston cooking magazine?

Peanut butter and jelly: Julia Davis Chandler proposed 'peanut paste' with currant or crab-apple jelly as a dainty tea-room sandwich, years before cheap mass-produced peanut butter made it a children's staple.

Which ballpoint pen has sold more than 100 billion units?

Bic Cristal: Marcel Bich launched the throwaway pen in 1950; the tiny hole in its clear barrel keeps the air pressure equal inside and out, which helps stop the ink leaking.

László Bíró, who patented the modern ballpoint pen in 1938, worked in which profession?

Journalist: Bíró edited a Hungarian newspaper and, frustrated by fountain pens, borrowed the quick-drying ink of the press for a pen with a rolling ball; his 1938 patent followed.

Why does the best-selling ballpoint's cap have a hole in it?

Prevent choking: the vent cuts the risk of suffocation if a child inhales the cap, and safety rules now call for one; the pen's other tiny hole, in the barrel, is the one that balances air pressure.

The Japanese electronics firm Sharp is named after which early product of its founder?

A mechanical pencil: Tokuji Hayakawa invented his in 1915 and came to sell it as the Ever-Ready Sharp; after the 1923 earthquake wrecked his Tokyo factories he restarted in Osaka making radios, and the name stuck.

Henkel's Pritt Stick, the first glue stick, was inspired by which product's twist-up applicator?

Lipstick: Henkel researcher Wolfgang Dierichs borrowed the twist-up tube for a solid glue, and within two years of its launch the Pritt Stick was on sale in 38 countries.

Hymen Lipman's 1858 patent made which lasting addition to the pencil?

An attached eraser: Lipman set a strip of rubber into a groove at one end of the wood and sold the patent on, only for the Supreme Court to void it in 1875 as a mere pairing of two known things.

The Brown v. Board of Education case involved the school system of which city?

NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall argued the appeal.

What was the vote in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision?

It partially overruled Plessy v. Ferguson's 'separate but equal'.

Which War on Poverty programme began in 1965 as an eight-week summer course for children about to enter school?

Head Start: the Office of Economic Opportunity ran it as a summer catch-up course in 1965 and 1966, and it then grew into the year-round preschool programme that has served tens of millions of children.

Which future film star played Sweathog leader Vinnie Barbarino in the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter?

John Travolta: Barbarino was his breakthrough role, and Carrie, Saturday Night Fever and Grease kept him so busy that he appeared in the final season only as a special guest star.

Which Disney Channel film follows basketball captain Troy Bolton and newcomer Gabriella Montez?

High School Musical: Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens starred as Troy and Gabriella, whose audition for the school show divides East High's cliques; its soundtrack went to number one on the Billboard 200.

Edna Krabappel of The Simpsons teaches which grade?

Fourth: Mrs Krabappel teaches Bart Simpson's fourth-grade class, and in the twenty-third season it emerges that she has married Ned Flanders in secret.

Which actress voiced Edna Krabappel until her death in 2013?

Marcia Wallace, who had played Carol on The Bob Newhart Show, voiced Krabappel from 1990 until her death in October 2013, after which the character was retired.

What is the first name of Principal Skinner, who runs Bart's school in The Simpsons?

Seymour: a 1997 episode claimed he was really Armin Tamzarian, an impostor who took the real Skinner's name after Vietnam, and ended with a judge ordering the town never to mention it again.

Which actor plays George Feeny, Cory's teacher and next-door neighbour, in Boy Meets World?

William Daniels, the voice of the talking car KITT in Knight Rider, played Mr. Feeny for all seven seasons, rising from Cory's teacher to his high-school principal and then his college professor.

Boy Meets World is set in which US city?

Philadelphia: Cory Matthews starts the series as an 11-year-old there; by the sequel, Girl Meets World, he and Topanga have left for New York.

What is the name of the school in Disney's Recess?

Third Street Elementary, in Disney's 1997 series, is where T.J. Detweiler's gang of six navigates a playground ruled by sixth-grader King Bob.

What kind of animal is Arthur Read?

An aardvark: in Marc Brown's first book, Arthur's Nose (1976), classmates tease Arthur about his long snout and he visits a specialist to change it, then decides to keep it.

Which reggae star sings the theme song of PBS's Arthur?

Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers recorded 'Believe in Yourself', which opened all 25 seasons from 1996 to 2022; Chance the Rapper released his own loose cover of it in 2014.

Who sings the theme song of The Magic School Bus animated series?

Little Richard had reinvented himself as a children's entertainer, recording 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' and a Disney album, before he sang 'Ride on the Magic School Bus' for the 1994 series.

The Magic School Bus books were written by whom?

Joanna Cole began the series with At the Waterworks in 1986, illustrated by Bruce Degen, and said Ms. Frizzle acted a little like a teacher she had as a science-loving child.

Reading Rainbow's host LeVar Burton was known at its 1983 debut for which role?

Kunta Kinte in Roots: Burton was 19 when the 1977 miniseries made him famous; Geordi La Forge came four years after Reading Rainbow began in 1983. The series won 26 Emmys and a Peabody.

In 2014 LeVar Burton raised more than $5 million to revive Reading Rainbow through which crowdfunding site?

Kickstarter: the campaign passed its $1 million goal in under twelve hours and went on to raise more than $5 million to bring Reading Rainbow back online and into classrooms.

Before television, Bill Nye worked as a mechanical engineer at which aircraft maker?

Boeing: Nye, a Cornell engineering graduate, designed a hydraulic resonance suppressor tube used on the 747 before quitting in 1986 to write and perform comedy.

Bill Nye became 'the Science Guy' on Almost Live!, a local sketch comedy show in which Pacific Northwest city?

Seattle: when a guest cancelled on KING-TV's Almost Live!, host Ross Shafer told Nye to fill seven minutes with 'that science stuff', and the Science Guy was born.

In which fictional Connecticut town is The Baby-Sitters Club set?

Stoneybrook: Scholastic editor Jean Feiwel, seeing how well a novel about babysitting was selling, asked Ann M. Martin for a series; Martin invented the town, the club and its founder, Kristy Thomas.

Which children's horror author edited the humour magazine Bananas?

R. L. Stine: as 'Jovial Bob Stine' he wrote dozens of humour books and ran Scholastic's Bananas for a decade before publishing his first scary novel in 1986; the original Goosebumps run then reached 62 books.

Which R. J. Palacio novel about Auggie Pullman starting school was partly inspired by a Natalie Merchant song?

Wonder: Palacio began writing it the night her children reacted badly to a girl with a facial difference outside an ice cream shop and she hurried them away; Merchant's 1995 song shares its title.

Andrew Clements's Frindle won which prize in 2016, twenty years after publication?

The Phoenix Award, which the Children's Literature Association gives to a book that won no major prize when published twenty years earlier; Frindle, Clements's first novel, illustrated by Brian Selznick, took it in 2016.

Ramona Quimby first appeared as the pesky little sister in which Beverly Cleary series?

Henry Huggins: Ramona began as a minor pest in Henry's 1950 debut; Cleary modelled her on a little girl who lived behind her childhood home, whom she once saw eating from a pound of butter she had been sent to buy.

Which author created Junie B. Jones, the outspoken kindergartner who first appeared in 1992?

Barbara Park: her first book, Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, follows Junie through her first day of school, at the end of which she is too scared of the bus to ride it home.

Which 2007 film stars Hilary Swank as Erin Gruwell, a first-year teacher handed a class her school had given up on?

Freedom Writers: Gruwell set her Woodrow Wilson High students the diaries of two girls caught up in war, and the ones they then kept themselves were published in 1999 as The Freedom Writers Diary.

Which veteran actress plays kindergarten teacher Barbara Howard in Abbott Elementary?

Sheryl Lee Ralph won the 2022 supporting-actress Emmy for the role, the first Black woman to take it in 35 years, and began her speech by singing Dianne Reeves's 'Endangered Species' unaccompanied.

Freaks and Geeks is set in a suburban high school near which city during 1980-81?

Detroit: the school is in Chippewa, Michigan, a made-up suburb that creator Paul Feig named after Chippewa Valley High, where he had been a pupil; NBC aired only 15 of the 18 episodes.

In School of Rock, Jack Black's Dewey Finn forms a band of students from which grade?

Fifth-graders: posing as substitute Ned Schneebly, Dewey turns the fifth-grade class at Horace Green prep into a band to win Battle of the Bands and pay his rent.

Napoleon Dynamite was shot around director Jared Hess's old high school in which US state?

Idaho: Hess filmed at Preston High, where he had been a pupil, and in 2005 the state legislature passed a resolution commending him and the town for making the film.

Clueless moves the plot of which classic novel to 1990s Beverly Hills?

Jane Austen's Emma gave Cher her matchmaking and her blind spots; director Amy Heckerling observed pupils at Beverly Hills High to get the slang right.

Which president urged public schools to require uniforms in a State of the Union address, citing killings over designer jackets?

Bill Clinton made the pitch in January 1996 and followed it a month later by ordering a manual on school uniforms sent to every public school district in the country.

What does the Latin phrase 'alma mater', used for the school or university a person attended, literally mean?

Nourishing mother: the Romans used the phrase as a title for goddesses such as Ceres and Cybele, centuries before universities borrowed it for themselves.

'The ABC Song' shares its melody with which nursery rhyme?

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: both borrow the French tune 'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman', published in 1761 and later spun into piano variations by Mozart; Charles Bradlee copyrighted the alphabet version.

The oldest known base-10 multiplication table, from about 305 BC, was found where?

China: the table is inked on bamboo strips that were dug up illegally, bought by an alumnus and given to Tsinghua University in 2008; Babylonian tables are far older but count in base 60.

In French, Italian and Russian the times table is often named after which mathematician?

Pythagoras: yet one of the earliest Greek times tables appears some six centuries after his death, in an arithmetic primer by Nicomachus, a later follower of his school.

What is China's national college entrance exam, first held in 1952, called?

Gaokao: the exam was cancelled in 1966 in favour of admitting workers, peasants and soldiers on recommendation, and was not held again until Deng Xiaoping revived it in 1977.

The ACT's multiple-choice sections are scored on what scale?

1 to 36 for each section, averaged into a composite; Iowa professor E. F. Lindquist launched the test in 1959 to examine what pupils had been taught rather than the reasoning measured by the SAT.

Which education movement began in 1919 with a school for a Stuttgart cigarette factory's workers' children?

Waldorf: Emil Molt, who ran the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, asked Rudolf Steiner to open a school for his employees' children, and the factory's name stuck to the movement.

Eton's scholars were meant to go on to which Cambridge college?

King's College: Henry VI founded both within a year of each other and paired them, so that Eton's 70 scholars, schooled free of charge, moved on to Cambridge; Etonians no longer get special treatment there.

What does Eton College call each of its three school terms?

A half: Eton's year had two terms when the name was coined, and the word survived the move to three, the Michaelmas, Lent and Summer halves.

Science fairs began in the 1930s in which US metropolis?

New York City: the American Institute of the City of New York ran children's science fairs from the 1930s; Morris Meister, who led the effort, went on to found the Bronx High School of Science in 1938.

What are crossing guards called in Britain, Ireland and Australia?

Lollipop ladies or men: the nickname comes from the round stop sign on a pole that they hold up to halt the traffic, which looks like a giant lollipop.

Which melody is commonly played as the school bell in Japan and South Korea?

Westminster Chimes: the quarter-hour melody of the bells that hang around Big Ben opens and closes lessons in most Japanese schools, and Indonesian railway stations play it to announce trains.

In The Magic School Bus, what is Ms. Frizzle's first name?

Valerie: Ms. Valerie Felicity Frizzle drives the bus; Wanda, Dorothy Ann and Phoebe are pupils in her class.

Which Texas Instruments graphing calculator launched in 2015 with a colour screen and rechargeable battery?

TI-84 Plus CE: released in 2015, it is 30 percent slimmer than the original TI-84 Plus and replaced the C Silver Edition, which had brought a colour screen to the line only two years earlier.

Which company bought schoolteacher Reynold Johnson's pencil-mark-sensing machine and sold it as the first automatic test scorer?

IBM: Johnson, a Michigan science teacher, built a machine that sensed pencil marks on answer sheets; IBM hired him and sold it as the 805 from 1937, and he went on to be called the father of the hard disk drive.

What are the sheets shown on an overhead projector called?

Transparencies or foils: a teacher could write on the sheet while facing the class, then wash it clean and use it again; in the 2000s computer projectors and interactive whiteboards replaced the machines.

Scotch tape is said to owe its name to a car painter's complaint that 3M's 'Scotch' bosses were being what?

Stingy: 3M's Richard Drew had put adhesive only along the edges of his first masking tape, and the painter's jibe, using 'Scotch' to mean cheap, stuck to the brand and to Drew's clear tape of 1930.

In Superbad, what single name appears on Fogell's fake Hawaiian ID and becomes his nickname?

McLovin is the lone name on Fogell's fake Hawaiian licence; Christopher Mintz-Plasse, in his film debut, was 17 during the shoot, so his mother had to be on set for one of his scenes.

Glee is set at the fictional William McKinley High School in which Ohio town?

Lima, Ohio: co-creator Ryan Murphy, who grew up in Indiana, chose a Midwest setting he knew from childhood trips to Ohio's Kings Island theme park, though the series was filmed in Los Angeles.

Which lunch-meat brand created Lunchables in the 1980s to sell more of its bologna?

Oscar Mayer designed the trays in 1985 to shift more bologna, swapping bread for crackers because they kept longer in shop coolers; Lunchables went on sale nationwide in 1988.

The mortarboard cap worn at graduation is named after a flat board used in which trade?

Bricklaying: masons hold wet mortar on a square board, and by the 1850s its name had passed to the flat-topped academic cap, probably because the two look alike.

The school 'prom' takes its name from a shortening of which word?

Promenade: the march of couples that opened a formal ball was clipped to 'prom' on American campuses by the 1890s, when an Amherst student's journal recorded a trip to one at Smith College.

Saved by the Bell's teenagers attend which fictional Los Angeles high school?

Bayside High: the show began on the Disney Channel as Good Morning, Miss Bliss, set in an Indianapolis junior high, before NBC retooled it and moved the pupils to the Palisades in Los Angeles.

The Canadian school drama franchise Degrassi is set in which city?

Toronto's De Grassi Street gave the franchise its name; Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler created it.

Which rapper's acting career was launched by Degrassi: The Next Generation?

Drake, then billed under his real name, Aubrey Graham, played Jimmy Brooks from 2001 and was still on the show when he put out his first two mixtapes.

Which college produced the first formal modern yearbook, in 1806?

Yale: its 1806 'Profiles of Part of the Class Graduated at Yale College', a bound set of silhouettes, is counted as the first formal yearbook, decades before photography reached campuses.

Which classroom modelling compound was first sold in the 1930s as a wallpaper cleaner?

Play-Doh: Kutol's wallpaper-cleaning putty found a second life when a teacher showed that children could model with it more easily than clay; reworked for Cincinnati schools, it took its new name in 1956.

Superbad, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg as teenagers, was produced by which comedy kingmaker of the 2000s?

Judd Apatow produced it; Seth Rogen had meant to play Seth himself, but had outgrown the part by the time the film was made, so Jonah Hill took it and Rogen played a policeman.