I never liked school. Ever.

Too many other people involved, and probably two thirds of them are insane or headed that way.

Want proof?

Take a look at the weird gleam in an assistant principal’s eye when he or she starts talking about detention. That’s the eye-gleam of a person who’s been there and done that as student, teacher and administrator, and it drove them around the bend and back again.

Which is sort of what you want in an assistant principal, I gather. Someone who scares everybody.

Not to mention back in my day there was always some big kid who laughed like Fat Albert while he sat in the back of the bus making life miserable for the rest of us.

I don’t know what that kid’s diet consisted of, but it was lethal. And he had clones.

Every school I went to had an overstuffed kid with a diet high in nitrogen and hydrogen sulfide, and he always sat in the back of the bus, chortling in the middle of a flatus cloud. Makes me wonder if they keep the seats in the back of the bus from year to year, or replace them with new ones.

Anyhow, that’s all behind me now. I’m an adult and know everything, and I’m college educated so I know more than that. That’s how I turned into a hack weekly newspaper editor fixing to wander off into the sunset.

That lofty status qualifies me to give advice to this year’s crop of students, so here goes: 

1. Do not put a tack in a teacher’s chair. My dad once regaled me with stories of how much fun it was to put tacks in teachers chairs in the third grade, and it sounded so cool I decided to put it into practice by smuggling a tack into school.

It wasn’t hard, actually, this was back when you could’ve brought a Bowie knife, a hand grenade and a loaded shotgun to school for show and tell and showed how they worked and nobody thought twice about it.

Tacks, though, were a no-no. Which made them a yes-yes. Hah! I thought, while placing the tack. Hahah! It was not funny to the teacher.

2. Do not get on the wrong bus by mistake, or on purpose.

I got on the wrong bus once as a grade schooler, and had to ride standing up with no air conditioning for 19 miles or so. It was no big deal, though for a while it seemed like nobody knew who I was or what to do with me, but it got figured out and I got out of a class in the process.

What’s more, it didn’t wind up on the evening news and nobody got sued. My parents told me not to get on the wrong bus again and that was that.

These days if you get on the wrong bus it’ll be all over all three local network channels, 45 websites and it will be dissected, argued about and fussed over on social media community pages until the cows come home. Which tends to take all the fun out of it.

Even better, ambulance chasing lawyers will fall over all over themselves to comfort the afflicted parents or legal guardians, who will demand a meeting with the superintendent to find out how a district responsible for educating 10,000 kids could somehow lose track of one to the point he wound up on the wrong school bus, which, after all, could’ve taken him all the way to Newfoundland or Thailand and sold him off to an animal testing facility before he was found and sent back to his proper place in the great scheme of things.

A lawsuit may well follow, at taxpayer expense of course, because the courts not only are a great way to right wrongs but also to fund billboards and vacations and pay off mortgages.

3. Don’t pick your nose and wipe it under your shirtsleeves. I never did it, but a kid I knew named Bobby Simpson did. He used two fingers, too, one up each nostril, then he’d rub them off under his armpits. My mother was horrified when I told her about Bobby.

4. Do stomp condiment packs. It is one of the great thrills of young life, taking a pack of mustard or ketchup or mayonnaise from the lunchroom and stomping it so the condiment squirts out onto other people. There were kids I knew up in South Carolina who were so good at it they could aim at and hit passersby from yards away.

The thrill should wear off by the time you’re in high school, however, and definitely by college, tech or trade school, unless of course you’re in a fraternity or an education major.

And if you’re in grad school at Georgia Southern and still stomping the innards of condiment packs at others, you’re probably on your way to being an assistant principal or maybe even a superintendent.