People Are Sharing The Dumbest Rules That Their Schools Ever Enforced, And Here Are 50 Of The Most Mind-Boggling Ones
Ugh, school, am I right? Nah, just kidding, school’s pretty awesome. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m wearing rose-colored goggles, but I also genuinely believe that our school days are objectively pretty darn good, overall. Well, except for a few… minor complications when it comes to rules.
You see, schools are like a microcosm of society: they’re full of some really cool stuff that is, unfortunately, balanced out by some rules and regulations that are absolute BS. Just how much BS are we talking about? As it turns out, cartloads of it. And it stinks to high heaven. One redditor proved this to the internet after asking their fellow users to share the dumbest rules their schools have ever enforced.
Check out some of the best of the worst ones below and upvote the ones that made you shake your head like a food critic being served microwaved meals. Oh, and be sure to share some of the mind-bogglingly bad rules that you’ve experienced first-hand in the comments.
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Toilet paper rationing. This was in 1997/98, btw. Apparently the high school girls room was going through too much toilet paper so the dean, a woman, stood outside the door and distributed a few squares of 1-ply institutional toilet paper to us as we went in. If she noticed toilet paper on the floor, our ration got cut down. If we asked for more for...bigger jobs...we were told to saved it for home.
There were several episodes of girls stuck in stalls until friends could beg for more TP because of period messes or unexpected bowel incidents. The dean wouldn't even hand it over--she would go in the bathroom and pass it a few squares at a time over the door. If you didn't catch it as it fell and it landed on the floor, well, that's your fault and you're not getting more. If you used more than she thought necessary, tough luck, go to class with blood/sh*t on your body.
It took about a week of extremely angry parents coming to the school and calling both the school and the school board, but we finally got our toilet paper back, unlimited.
How did we celebrate?
By TPing her car, of course.
Rule: No duct tape ON clothing.
Reason: Some girls thought they could get past the "no ripped jeans" rule by covering the tears with duct tape. It became a "fad" and everyone started doing it so it got banned. A kid in my AP literature class found a loophole and MADE an entire outfit out of red and black duct tape. I mean Shorts, A TShirt AND a jacket and SHOES. When the school tried to suspend him they couldn't because the rule Was " No Duct Tape ON clothes" It said nothing about clothes made OUT OF duct tape... He won the argument and even wore the outfit a few more times to Say "F***k you " to the school and principles lol .
I wasn’t allowed to test my blood sugar in class (type 1 diabetic). Some teachers didn’t care but most made a fuss about it. “Go to the nurses office if you need to do that, it’s a distraction to everybody and other students might get freaked out by the needles” even though it was just a little prick that nobody could ever even see, and none of my classmates ever complained.
Told my parents about the rule, my dad got furious and told me to do it anyways, and that I have absolutely nothing to worry about as far as getting in trouble at home goes. So to me, this was free reign to stick it to the f**kers at school. I tested every class, more than I needed to, just to spite them. Eventually I got sent to the office and my principal called my dad. Dad showed up, and I’ve barely ever seen him as furious as he was that day. He was cursing, yelling, tearing papers off of walls.
I was never, ever, ever bothered about it again.
Redditor SoLe123456’s thread went super-viral on the r/AskReddit subreddit. At the time of writing, in less than a single day, it already racked up 70.6k upvotes (and counting!). What’s more, the thread got over 34.7k comments and 400+ awards, showing just how many dumb school rules there really are on Planet Earth.
Nobody’s saying that rules aren’t needed. They’re incredibly important! They help create structure where needed, give us clarity, and provide us with a sense of security. This last one, security, helps us focus on what’s important. Without it, you’d constantly be living in a state of anxiety which will affect your performance at school and, later on, at work. In case you need further proof, just take a look at how much anxiety the Covid-19 pandemic introduced and how it affected your schoolwork and ability to concentrate.
My highschool had "coordinates", not a uniform. But they stopped selling the shorts like a decade before I started there... So me and a bunch of buddies tracked down used pairs and started wearing them.
Next year, shorts were banned outright... So me and a bunch of buddies on the rugby team started wearing skirts, because the rules said skirts were acceptable, but didn't specify gender. So you had a bunch of guys with hairy, hairy legs walking around in skirts we deliberately hiked up a little to show some thigh.
Shorts were allowed again in a week.
These people (the ones in skirts - not the school) are genius.
I got Saturday school for missing a day of classes when I was 16. Seems reasonable, except I missed to go complete my US citizenship and officially become a citizen alongside my mom (it took us 12 years to go through the legal process, btw. Whole other issue). I had a note from my mother as well as a signed official Federal form they give you to explain to school/employers why you were absent. Apparently the only acceptable absence excuse was illness. I got punished for becoming a citizen
"Don't damage school property" sounds reasonable enough until you get detention for staining a chair after suddenly getting your period.
But! And there’s a big ‘but’ here! Not all rules are created equal. Not by a longshot. They have to be fair. They have to make life easier. They have to make sense. And some ‘rules’ fail on all counts, making us ask, why the ever-loving-frick they even exist at all if they only work to make everything more difficult. Can’t the teachers realize that they don’t make any sense??!?
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as creating the perfect set of rules. It’s just not doable. However, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to make life better for students and teachers alike. Perfection is a process. A process of constant growth and improvement. And that means letting some rules go the way of the dodo. Though, that’s a bit unfair to the dodo—I’d pick the bird any day of the week over most of the rules featured in this list.
Different staircases for boys and girls.
We suddenly one day weren’t allowed to stand in circles during recess because, and I quote “we could be dealing drugs.” I will add that for the years prior we had been standing in circles no problem.
Next recess, we stood in a triangle, cue principle going apes**t. Next day we stood in a square, principle kept us inside for a week. And threatened us all with detentions if we did it again etc.
I believe their idea was open ended circles so they could see what we were doing. Still stupid.
I got a suspension for holding a stick. The phone call with my mom went something like this (only slightly dramatized):
School: Mrs. TheQueq, your son has been suspended.
Mom: Oh my goodness, what did he do?
S: He was holding a stick.
M: Did he hit someone with it?
S: No. He was just holding it.
M: ...Did he threaten to hit someone with it?
S: No, just held it.
M: Did he refuse to put it down when you asked?
S: No, no, he was very cooperative.
M: So... what did he do wrong?
S: He held a stick.
M: And I should be upset about that?
S: Absolutely, you know we have a zero tolerance policy.
M: Right... well, I'll talk with him.
As you might guess, I did not get in trouble at home.
Rules (and their consequences) have to be communicated very clearly, they have to be enforced consistently, and they must be timely. However, at the core of our need for rules is the fact that they’re supposed to solve a specific problem that we have. If instead they create additional chaos, demotivate students and teachers alike, and make people wonder why they’re in place at all, they’re awful rules. Get rid of them.
What’s more, rules can’t be created in a metaphorical bubble. The people who will be affected the most ought to at least have a say because they might notice some glaring flaws that would otherwise be ignored.
Early 2000s our school banned mp3 players with the reasoning, they would make us anti social.
As protest, we blocked the access to the teacher's lounge by silently stand there reading books and shush-ing every Teacher trying to get past, while also making a petition to include books in the ban, since obviously they too made us anti social.
"Zero Tolerance"
Just means that if someone starts a fight with you, you fight back as hard as you can. You're going to get suspended for defending yourself anyway, might as well make it worthwhile.
If my daughter defends herself she knows she won't get into trouble at home even if she gets suspended.
Girls MUST have a male escort them to prom as their date. If your date bails, you can't enter.
We were an all girls school. Many of us had zero guy friends. Finding dates was hard. I remember one year a girl's boyfriend dumped her when everyone was starting to show up for photos. She showed up at the venue, mascara running, begging the principal to let her go in. Principal wouldn't let her. One of the senior homeroom teachers ended up calling her nephew and said, "I need you to put on your suit and get here ASAP." He showed up with flowers and everything. So like... it was salvageable but totally avoidable.
The worst part? It wasn't always a rule until one year a group of girls went as friends and kept "stealing" other people's dates. Way to punish everyone forever because of one group of bi**hes.
Furthermore, you can’t expect rules to be perfect the moment you make them. They have to be improved and adapted over time. Yes, it’s difficult, exhausting, and everyone would rather just get on with it, but on the other hand, the rules we live by form the foundations of our lives. We deserve rock-solid foundations, not fractured ones.
Don’t hold on to a rule, regulation, or school-life structure just because you’ve gotten used to it and because it’s been the way things have always been done. Think about better alternatives. Adapt, otherwise what you’ll end up with is a bunch of rules that people remember not because of how awesome they sounded on paper but because of how incredibly dumb and flawed they were in reality.
In high school, the supervisor told the prefects and head girls to break up girls hugging in the hallways .I went to an only girls school and teachers discouraged girls from hugging each other. Apparently they thought that it encouraged 'lesbianism'. smh.
First of all, lesbianism is perfectly normal and should be treated that way. Second of all, girls hugging doesn't always mean their lesbians. I am sick and tired of people thinking that any two people showing affection means that they're together. Affection is normal in every relationship.
Skirt had to be a certain length. That's not the dumb part. If a teacher thought it was too short you had to KNEEL SO THEY COULD SEE WHERE THE HEM CAME TO ON YOUR LEGS. Was this a Christian private school where old male teachers were making middle school girls kneel on the floor to check their skirt length? Why, yes it was. I never wore skirts, so I was spared, but God, I hated that school.
Locked the only boys bathroom because someone wrote on the wall in sharpie. It wasn't even anything rude or inappropriate either. It was just the word "hi" or something like that.
Didn't unlock the door until one boy wet himself and parents threatened to sue.
No coloured bras. I went to an all-girls school and we wore uniforms and the top was a light colour and very see-through for some reason (so it was easy to tell if you had a pink bra on for example). The weird thing was it was always the male teachers who called students out for breaking this rule.... yikes
I spent 2 years in a private christian school where girls could not wear skirts or dresses unless it covered their whole legs all the way down to their feet. We were between 3 and 8 years old and that rule was meant to make sure boys wouldn't have any sexual temptation. This is not a joke.
Guys were free to wear pants in cold days but girls had to wear a skirt no matter how cold it was
Us too. We were allowed to wear stockings, which i despised. And the skirts were short and would blow up in the wind.
At my high school, girls could not wear sandals or shoes that showed toes because, “toes make boys think of babies”. And babies made boys think of sex, and naturally sex is the devil.
my high school decided to ban women’s athletic shorts one day which was ridiculous for many reasons. the next day every girl showed up in athletic shorts & the rule was removed by second block
If you throw snowballs, you get a one day suspension. The first long weekend after a snowfall everyone would throw snowballs to get an additional day added to the long weekend.
You have to wear your tie all the way home. Some sad bastard teachers would stand on the main road away from the school and try to hand out detentions in presumably their own time
Banned all backpacks / bags on campus. Students were expected to somehow carry everything they needed in hand.
This was especially challenging if you had a non ideal locker placement.
‘No ripped jeans’
They enforced it to the point that when I fell in school, scrapped me knee and ended up needing stitches (obviously ripping my jeans in the process). They still dragged me to the office to suspend me for the day because me jeans were ripped. I was left there, stitched up, blood drying on my jeans as the vice principal yelled at me that my outfit was “inappropriate”.
Add on: I went to a private school outside of the US, we had a doctor on call so he stitched me up at school, notified my parents and gave the okay on me going back to class. The vp didn’t notify my parents I was getting suspended for the day until after I went home and told them myself.
There is stupidity and there is this! I don't even know what that should be called...
Girls weren’t allowed to show their ankles. The dean had a pack of socks in her office she would give the students and make them wear. Only girls tho. This was the 2000s.
In grade school, we weren't allowed to play on the playground equipment when it snowed. Eventually, were weren't allowed to play with snow or even go near it- I got in trouble for sitting in snow.
This was in Minnesota where it snows half the year. Recess basically consisted of milling around the blacktop for thirty minutes.
I remember one day in primary school it hailed so much, we had never seen so much hail before. Our teacher let us outside (after it stopped) and let us play with the piles of ice. It was so much fun. Never experienced anything like that again.
Can’t be standing around in groups more than 4 “gang mentality”
Girls were not allowed to wear cycling shorts under their PE skirts. They wanted us to wear these dark green PE pants, basically just underwear and it was gross. My year protested, we said shorts or nothing and they backed off. This was 20+ years ago and it's totally different now, girls wear what they want for PE.
No farting in class.
They would say "if u need to fart then go to the toilet" but then 9 times out of 10 if u asked to go the toilet they'd say no
One particular professor at my university would lock the door a minute after class began. If you had to leave to go to the bathroom, you couldn't get back in.
Somehow this ancient fossil is still teaching and pulling similar stuff.
We have classrooms that have these hotelroom locks. You can only open it from the outside with a staff pass (it opens normally from the inside). If a student needs to go out for a moment for whatever reason, I need to leave the door open or they can't come back in. I usually teach with the door open anyway, but there are times when it's preferable to close the door. And with these classrooms I just feel I can't. I hate them. What's wrong with a simple key? -- Also, I've locked myself out more than once, because I'd left my pass on the desk. With a key you can just go back in because you couldn't lock the door, but with these rooms I need to find someone to let me in to grab my pass. Grrr ...
We weren’t allowed to wear thongs. I don’t know how they caught people who did tbh
So staff looked at all the girls' butts to check for panty lines? Not creepy at all. Nah-uh. /s
No leaving the dorm unless it's for a fire alarm.
I went to boarding school from the age of 7. That rule meant we couldn't get out of our dormitory to have a wee in the night. We had a plastic tub one of the girls brought in and went in that. Then we had to smuggle the tub to the bathroom in the morning without matron seeing. Stupid bloody rule!
No beads. Apparently they thought beaded jewelry was gang related?
They outlawed bracelets because there was an article in a magazine somewhere saying they advertised what sexual acts you were open for based on their colour.
Then someone tried to outlaw wrist watches for the same reason.
This kind of crap is always brainless to ban. if you take away something you 'think' is serving that purpose, and it actually was, they just come up with something else.
You had to wear your ID around your neck on a rope thing.
Then the chokings started.
"No Satanic Drawings"
What qualified as Satanic was anything the teachers or faculty deemed as such, including the Star of David
In high school, hair length on men and stubble. Look, a bunch of 15-16 year old guys are going to have a bit of stubble no matter how thoroughly we shave. Forcing us to go to the principal's office to dry shave nearly daily is freakin absurd.
Elementary school principal banned talking at lunch. If you were caught talking or even signing to someone, you had to go sit by yourself on a folding chair with no table.
There was once my mom came to eat lunch with my older sister and I. The principal was like " Oh you should go eat out in the hallway with your daughters" and she was like "nah, I'm gonna sit here with my daughter and her friends and talk to them and enjoy their presence" (usually if a parent came for lunch the student could invite one friend to join, unless you had siblings. Then it was too many people so you couldn't invite a friend). Anyway, one of my older sister's friends whispered to my mom that she was going to move so she wouldn't get in trouble for talking. THIS WAS A NINE YEAR OLD.
We once had a rule that we could only go to the bathroom during class. Not in the breaks. Only during class.
We were not allowed to put our coats on until we were outside
During winter when we would have a storm, we had to go outside in the rain to put our coats on or face receiving a detention if we put them on in the corridor
First case of pneumonia will break the budget for the next ten years.
Dumbest Rule: Zero tolerance for fighting. This meant both the kid who started the fight AND the kid who got beat on were both suspended. If the kid who got beat on just took it, he was just sent home for the rest of the day. If he dared to fight back, he was suspended for a week just like the kid who started the fight. Here's the truly stupid part: The school administrators couldn't explain how this led to MORE BRUTAL fights.
"No fighting", enforced by punishing the kids who were getting hit.
My theory is that people in power admire bullies and think that those who are being bullied deserve it.
My primary school had this wierd obsession with safety. When we played dodgeball the boys had to throw with their non-dominant hand while the girls got to throw full force. And we could get detention for going where the teachers couldn't see us. But the worst rule by far was that we weren't allowed to run on the playground, I'll never forget the time my teacher literally said, "the playground is no place to run."
Ugh. Another sexist school that thinks men are always more athletic than women. I hate people who think like this smh.
My friend nearly got suspended for wearing a trench coat, it was the Late 90s, probably didn't help that he had long hair, was shy, and weird
America - thanks to the worshipped 2nd amendment, teens have easy access to lethal weapons, but as long as they can't get trench coats everything will be fine
Candy canes were outlawed because you could sharpen them to a point and use them as a shiv.
I went to school in rural Washington. We were definitely weren’t somewhere that shankings were to be expected
It wasn't really the rule that was dumb but the reason for it. In my last year of high school, the school issued a rule that all students had to wear student IDs. If you didn't, you had to immediately go and pay for another ID. While you can see how many students may have saw this a way to skip class, the reason for this was the school shootings that happened the previous year.
The reasoning was that it would be easier to spot who is a student and who is not a student to then see who has malicious intent.....except that most shooters were students....so....
I was expecting to read they wanted to use the school ID as a dog tag to make it easier to identify shot students or something. Glad for the clarification in the last paragraph - but yeah, that won't prevent a shooting at all.
Not really a rule, but the toilet paper Holders are OUTSIDE of the Stalls on a wall. So you have to calculate before taking a dump how much you need and hope that it was enough
Probably just led to everyone taking more than they need, causing the waste that they were trying to prevent in the first place?!
If you were caught on your phone they’d take it until the end of the week. you’d get it back at half 3 on friday. parents went mental and a few even came together and sent bills through for part of the phone bills, they ditched that rule after 2 weeks.
My school made it compulsory to wear uniform in online classes
A few weird ones and their reasoning behind making them:
- Girls weren't allowed to wear tops with spaghetti straps because they could be easily cut with scissors.
- No tube tops either, because they could easily be pulled down
- No bra straps showing whatsoever, because it was considered indecent
- No soft drinks with actual sugar because if it spilled it would make a sticky mess. Diet soft drinks were fine because they wouldn't get as sticky
- No beverages of any kind (only in certain classrooms, depending on who the teacher was. Not like, computer labs where it was obvious drinks shouldn't be allowed, I'm talking like...random math or history classes based on who your teacher was, whereas the same class taught by a different teacher, it was allowed), because f**k you if you're thirsty.
- No shirts from the company "Billabong" because it says "bong" and that's a drug reference
And last but not least, because this one is a really funny one and I'm hoping someone from my class sees this and can confirm:
No wearing the Alice in Wonderland joint smoking caterpillar shirts that we designed for homecoming week because that's absolutely not a paintbrush. This one makes sense...no idea how it got approved.
Seems like the person coming at you with scissors should be the one punished. What the heck is wrong with bra straps? 50% of the populations is female. Just get over it.
Many many years ago when the Simpsons first came out, my school banned Bart Simpson t-shirts that said "Underachiever". It just sent the wrong message to students!
So I wore my "I'm Bart Simpson, Who the hell are you" T-shirt instead.
....until they banned that one too.
When I was in Junior school (UK boarding school in the 80's), we were not allowed to say OK as it was considered slang and not befitting the young ladies and gentleman that we should aspire to be.
We also had to have a comb and a hankerchief on us at all times.
On top of that, we weren’t allowed to have our hands in our pockets because, ‘it looks slovenly’.
I was wearing a regulation uniform jacket in a classroom during winter that had no heating. The teacher demanded I remove my jacket and I refused because I was cold. She sent me to the head mistress.
When my older sister was in the same school I attended later too, the school was heated by coal. Sometimes there wasn't enough coal to heat the (biig, old, made out of stone) building, so there was always cold. Students went to strike by wearing coats, shoes, hats, gloves and sleeping sacks in the classrooms. They got a week of coal-holiday. When I was at that school, it had normal gas-heating. But the school was always cold, especially in winter. There is some regulation in our country, that you cannot have less than certain °C in classrooms and gym, so they tried their best to keep it about 1°C above the line, but we were allowed to wear coats inside when we were cold. Only PE was cancelled several times during winter, because they couldn't heat the gym enogh to stand the regulations.
No hot drinks. Rumour said it was because the principal burnt himself while drinking something so he banned it
You could only go to the bathroom twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
Mind you this is from 8-3 and you had to get a new pass every week and keep it the whole time or you couldn’t use the bathroom.
Bet the diabetics loved that. I don't know how it is for Type 1, but my average is 1 to 1½ hours.
"No body armor of any kind"-The hell was we gonna get body armor? Most of us barley could afford to go to school. The fact that this was a rule also makes me wonder what the f**k happened to make them institute this.
there was a student shooting in school but was hard to take down cause he was wearing armor. so to help police take down a student shooter, no students can wear armor. we're keeping them safe lol
No running shoes on the new gym floor - playing floor hockey barefoot is painful.
I got detention for pooping more then 10 minutes but I have serve stomach cramps and I asked why and they had no answer.
Playing cards at lunch was prohibited because it "promoted gambling".
Conservative Christian College. A group of us played Age of Empires one weekend. They didn’t like it and called a meeting. Everyone involved got misdemeanors on their records. There was nothing in the handbook about it being against the rules. The only person that didn’t get any punishment was the son of the president even though he was just as involved as the rest of us. Was quite interesting explaining the write up on my record when I transferred. “You got a misdemeanor for what?!”
But how can you get punished for something you do outside of school? Was it a boarding school?
In the late 90s in my elementary school Pokémon cards were banned.
When stuff like this was banned at my school it was to stop kids fighting over trades and to prevent theft.
The dumbest one I suffered was in the early 90s my junior high banned all jackets and jacket like clothing in class because there was a story about how some kids in an inner city school had brought guns to class in Starter jackets. Keep in mind that my junior high school was in a medium sized college town, not anywhere with an actual “gang” problem. The school also had a terrible climate control system and was always cold.
The rule was really absurd, you couldn’t wear jackets or hoodies but pullover hood less sweatshirts were ok, as were sweaters. The rule was finally revoked after we had a fire alarm incident in the middle of February that had the whole school standing outside for 45 minutes in freezing weather while the Fire Department checked for whatever had set off the alarm.
My middle school had the "no hoodies or hoods" rule. And it extended to everything with a hood. Yes, even that furry scarf with ears on the hood and pawprints on the ends. No hoods!
After 9/11 they made us wear school ids on our shirt or hanging from a lanyard around the neck.
For some reason they decided it would be smart to also put each students medical history on the back.
Mine just had “nosebleeds” written in cursive
Took all the doors off the men's room bathroom stalls because of vandalism for 2 months.
We were not allowed to have facial hair at all.
Like to the point where the principal would walk around during lunch with razors and shaving cream and do "Stubble checks".
Absolutely ridiculous and he would send tons of us to the bathrooms to shave during lunch, no matter how small the stubble was.
They installed vending machines and later banned pocket change, so if you wanted anything from the machine you had to get it in the morning before classes started, or just get it cheaper in the shop next to the school.
Just go to the shop. Vending machines are rented and if there isn't enough money made from them then the company that supplies them will investigate, see the dumb rule and remove the machines
you had to have black shoelaces. no dark blue, no white, no grey. only black.
there was also the rule your tie had to be a minimum length. so sometimes one of the assistant head teachers would come in and measure the length of your tie with a ruler.
Dildos were banned. The school never thought they would have to print those words. You would think it was a given. Until a senior bought 100 dildos and snuck them around the school every day for 2 weeks straight
I was sent to the principle in elementary school for getting a drink of water out of line (as in we walked down the hall in a formation and we had designated water drinking stops). To this day I still remember the principal asking angrily well what if every one started getting water without permission? And I still don’t have an answer.
No unnatural hair colors.
Except for Lily, who dyed her hair the school color (maroon). It was dark enough to argue it was a weird red/brown, but it was clearly maroon and I think she got away with it because it was “school spirit”
The new Principal made a "morning round-up" rule where anyone arriving to class after the last bell had to go to the cafeteria and listen to a lecture about not being late for class. This took about an extra 15 minutes, making the students even more late to class than they would have otherwise been. Needless to say, everyone hated it, even the teachers. That principal didn't last long...
Lucky, we weren't even allowed entry into the school. Even after just one minute, literally. Not kidding
If found with socks lower that the knees: warning, 3 warnings: detention
needless to say I got a couple of detentions
We had an up staircase and a down staircase. You could only go up the up staircase and only go down the down staircase. If you were caught going the wrong direction on either staircase, you would get some kind of warning/strike.
I will admit that it did help from keeping the stairs get congested in between classes, but it was a huge pain in the ass if you had a class right next to the up staircase and had to go downstairs for your next class, because the down staircase was way at the other end of the floor,so you basically had to book it to your next class.
Another stupid rule was only having three minutes in between classes. I went to a huge highschool, so you basically had to speed walk or jog to classes that were far. And with the whole staircase issue mentioned above, it resulted in people being late for class constantly.
We have all these rules. I think it just causes even more havoc. You have 800 students trying to come up the one staircase you can use after lunch; that won’t end well.
I got in trouble for humming to myself in the bathroom and told I was disturbing another class
At the end of the school day, buses were not allowed to depart until the flag was lowered on the flagpole outside the main entrance and properly stowed.
I feel like the Principal was a Trump supporter... or maybe just a bigot.
So many... You weren't allowed to wear a coat or a backpack (always freezing with tons of books), no card games at all, 5 minutes between classes (sprawling 1 story building barely leaves time to pee)
We weren’t allowed to share cough drops, and you had to have a note to have them at all. This was apparently because they were considered “medication.”
They're considered drugs at my school, basically. Just like Tylenol or other OTC painkillers, like for girls on their periods.
Went to school during the time where health and safety suddenly started going crazy, they introduced a "no contact under any circumstances" rule i.e no touching another person, we were like 6 or 7 years old. Suddenly one day not only is tag suddenly illegal, but they actually enforced it, I remember one day like 70% of the schools population was pulled off of the playground and made to sit on the floor in the hall, for the crime of just playing the games that children play.
"Don't play on the golf course. "
Our tiny community got a burst of cash in the 70's due to having mineral rights on land with oil. It was amazing some of the things we had access to for a school in the plains in Montana: computer lab, ceramics, photography, and a freaking laser! They also bought the grade school a miniature golf course in the center of the play ground.
A majority of the playground was concrete squirrels, turtles and a whale. These looked like a lot of fun to play on for a kid. We couldn't touch them. We couldn't get near them. We couldn't land our star wars figures on them, incorporate them in our games in any way or even walk near them when running from someone playing tag. Once in PE we got out the clubs and played a few rounds in my entire time in school. Other classes never even got that.
After about 30 years, during a student clean up, they got some of the upper level high school kids to take hammers to them and pulverized them.
"Don't let your underwear show."
This was directed at the girls when Madonna was in fashion. One school official went to war on visible bra straps. While no girls even attempted copying Madonna, this official was making a preemptive attack. She made announcements and would bust girls in the halls.
About this time the Varsity boys basketball team got new uniforms. Rather than spend money on the other teams, their old uniforms were given to the junior varsity girls team. Jerseys with huge arm and neck holes made for 17 year old boys where now being worn by 15 year old girls. Girls that were as active as possible and in public. If they pose for a picture, you could almost not see their bras. While playing the front of the jerseys flopped from side to side. At least one cup would be visible at any time. Suddenly girls basketball got a lot more popular.
No clothes from Hollister or Abercrombie and Fitch or you get suspended for 3 days.
I went to a private school and those stores had clothes that worked in the dress code guidelines. So, school starts, then a month after school starts, they decide a&f is too pornographic or whatever and told us we would get suspended for wearing anything from those stores. I didn't have any from there, because they were too expensive.
I get making a rule like before people shop for school clothes (for a strict, religious private school, even though it's silly). Students' parents refused to go buy new clothes after already buying new ones. A friend of mine got suspended for 3 days for wearing a red polo, because it had whatever tiny embroidered logo was on it.
That if you say/do anything back to your bully it becomes a mutual conflict and isn't bullying, so if they start calling you slurs and making you feel bad every day and you call them stupid once or twice the school probably won't help. Also dress code required school branded hoodies... they were 50 dollars. If you wore a non school hoodie you got in school suspension
Yeah, the cost of 'school branded' uniform is a joke. You want kids to wear something with your logo on it? Make it affordable then. The PE kits are like £50 for a tshirt and shorts. Luckily my school never bothered about this but my sister spends a fortune on my nephews school clothes because of it.
Prom was a mandatory lockdown for the night in order to avoid students going to parties after prom.
Prom was held at various house parties across town instead.
My friend is an administrator at a private school in NJ and the faculty has to sign in and out of the bathroom using Google sheets.
9am, 10 minutes, M-F
Yoyos. Somehow it became a thing in high school and, well, eventually they got banned.
Yoyo's are a gateway toy. Next thing you know, you're strung out on hula hoops!
There were certain staircases assigned to each grade to use. Like we couldn't go down certain staircases because "tHoSE are THE kinDERGARTEN and GRaDE 1 STAIRS", even if the stairs were not in use by them at the time
my elementary school had a whole lot of other cultish behavior lol. It was an over the top Catholic school
my middle school had this, but only because the 7th-grade classrooms are on one side and the 8th-grade classrooms are on the other, so there were designated staircases for each grade. we also had the designated up-stairs and down-stairs from #80- the up-stairs were on the sides (the 7th- and 8th-grade stairs) and the down-stairs were in the middle (in front of the cafeteria and extracurricular classes, the ones that both grades can attend)
“No spaghetti straps“…this was enforced from kindergarten to the end of elementary school
edit: I just remembered, each grade had a different section of the school yard and they couldn’t cross the “line” separating them. This really sucked because only kindergartens and grade 1-3 could use the play structures.
My parents had me in a Lutheran School in second grade. I was more shocked by the fact that I grew up LDS. The only thing any student from second grade on would be able to spend recess on was the lawn with one tree. You had no toys to play with such as soccer balls, Etc. I would go and either stand or sit by the tree by myself. Note.. No longer active in that faith
I went to school in the 90's and the school banned us from having pagers.
"No watches during exams", because it could be a smart watch and it's to hard too differentiate between those and normal ones.
I mean, it wouldn't be a big problem if there actually were working clocks in every room. Hm.
We have that rule at my school as well, and it's not that bad. I usually just project an online clock on the SmartBoard (we have clocks in the exam rooms, but they're high up and usually a minute or two wrong). Problem solved.
A kid went to the hospital after falling from a wall. Then the school painted yellow lines around the school as a border which the kids weren’t allowed to cross.
So the teachers had to stand guard and make sure no one crossed it.
We weren't allowed have personal drinks in classroom unless we had doctor's note.
No shorts allowed between some day in October and some day in usually March/April (maybe May even). It was a K-8 school. We live in a 4 season area. It's hot in the summer, cooler in the fall/spring, and can sometimes snow but is usually just cold during the winter. It was a stupid rule.
This was probably made to protect the less fortunate kids. The ones whose parents would send them to school in anything. Including shorts in winter.
Holy...when I was at school in Germany in the 70s and 80s, almost nothing was forbidden - we had snowball fights in the winter, played ballgames in summer, gathered in groups, most of the boys had swiss army knives in their pockets...
Throughout secondary school we were made to shower completely naked. We weren't allowed to take towels in or cover ourselves. We were watched going in and had to prove we'd got water on us when we came out. The boys showered in shorts. Not a great experience for girls in different stages of puberty on a weekly basis!
Something tells me the staff are 🎶peeerrveeertsss🎶
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These are so weird, but even weirder is how just last month (Apr 2021) Florida lawmakers pass a Bill that legalizes Teen Genital Inspections if they are suspected of being trans. This is to "allow young girls the chance to prove their skills in sports." WTF! A teacher/coach is actually allowed to inspect your childs gentiles and there is nothing legally you can do about it. And we are supposed to just have faith that isn't going to be abused horribly?
Holy...when I was at school in Germany in the 70s and 80s, almost nothing was forbidden - we had snowball fights in the winter, played ballgames in summer, gathered in groups, most of the boys had swiss army knives in their pockets...
Throughout secondary school we were made to shower completely naked. We weren't allowed to take towels in or cover ourselves. We were watched going in and had to prove we'd got water on us when we came out. The boys showered in shorts. Not a great experience for girls in different stages of puberty on a weekly basis!
Something tells me the staff are 🎶peeerrveeertsss🎶
Load More Replies... These are so weird, but even weirder is how just last month (Apr 2021) Florida lawmakers pass a Bill that legalizes Teen Genital Inspections if they are suspected of being trans. This is to "allow young girls the chance to prove their skills in sports." WTF! A teacher/coach is actually allowed to inspect your childs gentiles and there is nothing legally you can do about it. And we are supposed to just have faith that isn't going to be abused horribly?
