What is the stupidest school rule you've ever had to deal with?

altima_neo , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

In middle school, we had some militaristic gym coaches. Youd think we were in boot camp or something? They have very specific rules that had to be followed to a T.

You had to wear briefs, no boxers allowed. If you did have boxers, you had to have briefs under them.

You had to wear the school gym uniform, no exceptions.

The provided shorts were super short, so you could also wear sweats, but you had to wear the shorts underneath them.

You had to have your shirt tucked in.

You had to form a line in your designated spot and wait on the playground for the class to start before the gym coaches would arrive to take attendance. This was in the SoCal heat.

During attendance, the coach would also inspect your uniform. Youd have to show the band of your briefs and shorts to show compliance with the rules.

You had to use the gym shower, no exceptions. God that was awful and awkward.

You break enough rules and youd collected “non-strips”, like a demerit, which would earn you detention.

All that hubub and all we ever did was run laps on the field. We used the gym once or twice, but I cant even remember what we did. All the attendance, uniform crap, and shower took up most of the period.

Its no wonder I hated gym class and exercising after dealing with that shit. It wasnt till I hit my 30s that I realized I quite enjoyed working out and hiking.

wuphysics87 , 3 months ago

All the pants, underwear, and shower rules dude sounds like a pedo

altima_neo , 3 months ago

It’s was actually two dudes who ran the class. One was a bit more chill but the other was straight out of Full Metal Jacket.

Delphia , 3 months ago

The underwear rule could have more to do with accidental flashing if the uniform shorts have very short legs.

altima_neo , 3 months ago

He always said it was for support, as boxers don’t offer any.

claycle , 3 months ago

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

klemptor , 3 months ago

Yeah fuck gym class. I actually think it’s super important for kids to be active but the way it’s implemented, especially at the junior high and high school levels, is asinine. And your situation sucked, what a stupid amount of bullshit!

I was a habitual skipper of gym class from about grade 2 until I graduated high school. I’d only participate enough to get a D, and some marking periods I misjudged and got an F. The only times I didn’t try to skip were when we had the weight room, because I actually liked that. But failing gym class had exactly zero impact on anything in my life. My dad gave me the whole “I’d be disappointed in you, but I’ve learned not to have expectations so you can’t disappoint me” schpiel, which whatever, emotional manipulation was my parents’ bread and butter, so I didn’t really care. Other than that, no repercussions at all.

BlitzoTheOisSilent , 3 months ago

Yeah, I remember one of my teachers (I think my high school biology teacher) chastising us a bit one day because most of the class would come from PE before hers. She was complaining that we smelled like sweat and working out and all that.

But we weren’t allowed (or given even close to enough time at the end of the PE class) to use the showers. You basically showed up, had until the second bell (about 5 minutes after the first) to be in the gym ready to go, you’d run/play/workout/whatever for almost an hour straight, and then be given at most 5 minutes to change and go to your next class.

No shit we stank, and when we asked why we couldn’t use the showers, we were told there was no way for us to be monitored in there, so it left too many opportunities for misdeeds and shit.

altima_neo , 3 months ago

Our showers were strange. It was basically a wide hallway with showerheads along both walls. And considering how strict my gym coach was, he’d have everything on a schedule and timed. So everyone would go to the locker room at the same time, get undressed and hit the shower at the same time. We had to have a towel wrapped around our waists. Then wed have to all wait at the showers exit for everyone to finish, and only then would we be released back into the locker room.

NorthWestWind , 3 months ago

My school cannot do anything on Sunday except Christian fellowship. One time there was a competition on Sunday and one of the teachers is needed to guide the students, but got denied by the school.

(Before you ask me why did I attend a Christian school, it’s because other schools that are not Christian sucked academically)

kirbowo808 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Not allowing to go to the toilet whilst in your lessons and only during break/lunch time.

This was such an issue since needing a toilet is a natural thing and it’s not something we can control/control for very long and it’s very bad if we do so, yet teachers would literally send out detentions/warnings if we even attempted, which was so idiotic of itself.

The reason we couldn’t use the toilet whilst we were in our lesson, was cuz to the teachers, they though it was an excuse for us to skip lessons, which already caused many ppl inc myself to immediately lose trust in our teachers and therefore internalise our problems, which was a huge case at my secondary school.

I hid so much shit from people at the time cuz of teachers behaviour like this but also didn’t help that coming from a toxic household, just made things ten times worse due to it.

Delphia , 3 months ago

We had one teacher who decided this was the rule in his class and the school backed him. We also had an absolute madlad who insisted for 20 minutes that he needed to go to the toilet and when constantly refused shit his pants on purpose.

The teacher was fucking apoplectic demanding he get up and get out and he just sat there “You said no, deal with it. Call the principal down here if you dont like it but I’m not moving from this chair for another 10 minutes.”

Nobody ever gave him a hard time about it, we all appreciated him taking one (or a 2) for the team they rescinded that policy shortly after.

PM_Your_Nudes_Please , 3 months ago

We had a fucking legend shit in a teacher’s trashcan when the teacher wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom. Teacher was one of the infamously strict “zero bathroom breaks, you should have gone before class and can hold it until afterwards” types. So after asking a few times and getting denied, the kid just dropped trou and squirted molten hatred into the teacher’s desk side trashcan.

And yes, the teacher changed his rule following the incident.

Admetus , 3 months ago

There’s a school nearby us for which the teacher must call a duty teacher for the student to go to the toilet. That’s at least 30 seconds of the class wasted.

At ours, I say to the student they better be fast, and they are. If it’s 5-10 minutes to the end of class I ask if they can hold it, respectfully (they’re 16, honestly) and they usually acquiesce. If it’s a girl I wouldn’t be harsh and let me them go, but that’s because I almost rarely get requests from girls. Boys just wanna piss.

Tessellecta , 3 months ago

TBF, students using going to the bathroom as an excuse to do other things is very real. Not all student do it, but some do and these people cause a lot of issues.

I generally keep the rules: leave your phone in the classroom and be back in 10 minutes.

The amount of students that suddenly don’t have to go anymore once they’re reminded they need to leave their phone is very high.

tetris11 , 3 months ago

That’s genius

sexual_tomato , 3 months ago

TBF, students using going to the bathroom as an excuse to do other things is very real.

Can confirm, I did this to skip parts of band rehearsal on days where my part was super dull to play.

wuphysics87 , 3 months ago

Shaving. I was obstinate enough about it they ultimately gave up. A coach would pull you out of lunch and hand you a razor. Fuck that. I’m not doing it. What are you gonna do? Shave me yourself?

tetris11 , 3 months ago

guy, right? or do they enforce this for girls?

sexual_tomato , 3 months ago

What are you gonna do? Shave me yourself?

They put you in a tiny cubicle in a room where you do your work and nothing else in total silence for the entire school day. Or send you home unexcused.

BlitzoTheOisSilent , 3 months ago

My dad’s trade school had this rule back in the 70s/80s. If you showed up and weren’t clean shaven, you had to pay $0.25 for a disposable razor and small little pouch of shaving cream. If you refused, you were sent home for the day.

He had a teacher that he said was really well liked among the students, former Marine who I think served in Vietnam. The guy had a coconut carved into a monkey’s head on his desk, and he’d tape a cigarette in its mouth. But he had some odd rules and, according to my dad, could be a scary dude at times.

Like, if he caught you yawning, he sent you out of the class because “You aren’t full awake, and therefore didn’t prepare for class properly with a proper night’s sleep.”

If the class got off track, or really pissed him off, he’d either: A. Lift one of those old-school metal drafting tables off all four of its feet and slam it back down, causing a HUGE boom sound that got everybody’s attention, or, B. He’d drop-kick the coconut monkey head down the hallway before returning to the class.

Tar_alcaran , 3 months ago

I went to a religious highschool, and at the time I was (shocker) a teenager. You could sign up either for religious education, or for Christian classes. Me being an atheist (and, I stress again, a teenager), went for the least terrible option.

After the first guest teacher came in to talk about their own religion, we got a new rule.

“Students are not allowed to ask more than 5 questions each to guest teachers”.

One class later that was changed to

“Students are only allowed to ask 3 respectful questions to guest teachers”

That rule was then dropped, and I get a stern talking to explaining that I, personally, was allowed to ask only a single question during religious education classes.

And then I didn’t have to follow those classes anymore, which was nice. But with a couple of years of maturity on me, I feel like I could have been nicer to the poor guest teachers.

betterdeadthanreddit , 3 months ago

Sounds like you did the right thing. Advocates for anti-truth don’t deserve to be treated nicely.

kromem , 3 months ago

Man, I loved my middle/high school’s religion classes as an Agnostic.

It was a super fancy prep school, so they went all in with the religion classes being ‘academic’ with the teachers needing a relevant PhD or Masters.

I still remember my very conservative Old Testament teacher writing all sorts of passive aggressive statements across my envelope pushing essays and then begrudgingly giving them A- grades.

The other teacher for NT and electives was awesome though. Instilled a real passion (pun intended) for the material with fun classes that did things like look at early Christianity as a cult and the sociological factors going into it or reading bizarre apocrypha like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which in later years I realized was less ‘bizarre’ and more subversive and probably even satirical).

Religion could be a really cool class, and it’s a shame cowardly institutions try to make it “indoctrination by any other name” as opposed to “let’s learn about the criterion of embarrassment and Peter’s denials.”

Delphia , 3 months ago

In 3rd grade we had a rack of books in the class and we would sometimes be given half an hour to pick a book and read, I was a reader, I got like half way through a book and it was time up and we had to put the books back, well I wanted to finish it so I put it in my bag and went to ask the teacher if I could finish it later, she was busy talking to someone and told me she would talk to me “in a minute” and like a 7 or 8 yo I promptly forgot about it. An hour later she sees the book in my bag, calls me out in front of the whole class for stealing and when I tried to tell her Id tried to ask if it was ok to take it home so I could read it later but she was busy she called me a “liar and a theif” and back onto the shelf it went.

A few days later I took the book and hid it behind a cabinet near the door to our room, at reading time she noticed it was missing, demanded to know what Id done with it, accused me of stealing it again and tipped my bag onto the floor to find it. When she didnt find it, she told me “once a theif always a theif” and when the bell rung that day and she was busy packing up her desk, me the last kid out the door put his bag down to tie his shoe… and I stole the fucking thing.

If you’re going to treat me like I’m guilty anyway, might as well be guilty.

Admetus , 3 months ago

What a fucking shit educator: ‘Once a thief always a thief.’ Humiliating a student in front of the class.

If I was the principal I would have them fired, or at least suspended.

Delphia , 3 months ago

This was like 1992 or so… it was either 2nd or 3rd grade I dont remember. It also kind of predates parents siding with a 7yo over their teacher. She was a cunt though.

There was a pretty big rich/poor divide in that school, I learned young that you have to prove the rich are guilty and the poor have to prove they are innocent.

In hindsight as I get older I’ve realised that moment was one of those cornerstones that shape the way people grow, I wonder if I would have turned out not to be a hustler for most of my 20s if she hadnt been a twat. If people are going to assume the worst, might as well take the cash too.

Jimmycrackcrack , 3 months ago

It’s so weird how so many of the teachers I encountered in my school years were just like this. Of course you’re going to get some, but why do such a surprising amount of people that think this way choose to become educators? It sucks for them and all the people who had their ‘teaching’ inflicted upon them.

Zuberi , 3 months ago

This is a bot ^

quicksand , 3 months ago

How can you tell?

Jimmycrackcrack , 3 months ago

Don’t mind him, he follows me around copy and pasting the same comment and downvoting everything I say. If you’re interested in beef and drama between 2 very unimportant people on Lemmy, here’s a wall of text explaining what happened below:

A few days ago I made a comment on an article about people being afraid to board planes manufactured by Boeing, the article said something about air travel being statistically very safe, but I tried to point out that given we have specific reason to be worried about Boeing aircraft, that’s not particularly reassuring since those statistics could likely change if poor manufacturing processes leads to lots of incidents bringing down the averages. Unfortunately for me, I tried to explain this with a really awkward and convoluted analogy that took a lot of text to write out so someone replied to tell me that they didn’t read my comment but that they assumed I was trying to say Boeing planes are safe and nothing to worry about and that they disagreed with that idea and Boeing should be punished and dragged through the courts.

I thought that was kind of ironic and replied to that person telling them that their comments might be more relevant if they read the thing they were commenting on. This triggered a sudden and significant pouring of downvotes upon my original comment and that second one and someone replied saying my original comment looked like it had been written by AI. Then our friend Zuberi here got really excited and started copy and pasting an AI prompt that he thought was going to trigger some kind of response. I didn’t really feel like arguing with randoms to defend this one comment that even I thought could have been written better so I ignored them but that seemed to really get on their nerves so now I have this goofy little Lemmy sidekick saying “this is a bot ^” and downvoting me whenever I say anything to anyone. I’d be tempted to think the repetitive and limited responses mechanically reproduced regardless of context within a short timeframe of whatever I post was behaviour indicative of a “bot” but frankly I think a bot would have managed to be a lot cleverer than that and it’s pretty clear this is someone who just got a little too excited and just can’t help themselves. I’m not sure if they ever really thought I was some kind of a chatbot or “AI” at first but I think now they probably know that’s unlikely and they’re just holding a grudge for reasons they likely don’t even know themselves and never bothered to interrogate. Ironically I can’t even see my original comment that caused the whole fracas because presumably this guy or his mates reported it for… something because it and a later comment explaining it got removed by a moderator.

Anyway that’s how I got my first Lemmy follower (who’d have thought Lemmy even had those eh?). I try my best to be entertaining and a good influence on them, I hope their experience watching me enjoy Lemmy has been as enjoyable to them as just actually browsing Lemmy for themselves could have been.

tetris11 , 3 months ago

Reminds me of a teacher I had in primary school. She was most of the time okay, but she had her moments where she’d pick a student (usually of a minority background) and just make an example of them.

One kid walked to school everyday because her mum worked and didn’t have time for her in the morning. Sweet girl, but she was often 10mins late. Teacher made an example of her, criticised her entire home life and implied her mother was a bad one.

I once got in a fight with “Bad” kid (he put me in headlock and I rammed him against a fence to try to get free). The kid was troubled and everyone knew it, but if you left him alone he left you alone. The “Nice” kid from nice background told me that I should tell my teacher what happened. I didn’t want Bad kid to get into trouble over me, so I opted to say nothing. Nice kid told his teacher, who then told my teacher, who then made an example by pulling me in front of the class and calling me a coward. At the point I learned that sympathy for your enemy yields no reward to the judgemental.

BlitzoTheOisSilent , 3 months ago

Reminds me of a teacher my dad told me about when he was in trade school (he went to a trade school for high school back in the 70s/80s). He said all the students called the guy Mr. Hitler behind his back.

He would regularly make fun of students, call them stupid for not understanding things, send kids to the principal for the slightest infractions, etc. My dad didn’t grow up with money but started working at like 14, and he said it always bothered him the most that Mr. Hitler would especially pick on poor kids.

“Oh, is that all your family could afford for you, rags and old shoes?” “Really, the same pants two days in a row, what, your family can’t afford to wash them?” Just shit like that, in front of the whole class, absolutely demeaning and stuff that wouldn’t be tolerated today.

Well, apparently Mr. Hitler suffered a stroke at some point during my dad’s high school days, and according to him, not a single student gave a damn to do anything to help him. He had trouble walking/was in a wheelchair, kids would let the door slam behind them despite him trying to get through. If he had several things to carry, students would ignore him requesting help to carry them, pretending like they couldn’t hear him.

tetris11 , 3 months ago

Harsh, but I guess you reap what you sow

QuantumBamboo , 3 months ago

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one. Same school had an assembly that informed us that listening to heavy metal would make us want to kill our friends.

maynarkh , 3 months ago

listening to heavy metal would make us want to kill our friends.

Maybe they mixed up cause and effect there

Hamartiogonic , 3 months ago

Yeah, it’s well known that you can’t listen to heavy metal if you haven’t killed anyone yet.

colonial , 3 months ago

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that’s an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

shinigamiookamiryuu , 3 months ago

That I was required to attend.

ThatWeirdGuy1001 , 3 months ago

My highschool had a no yoga pants/tights/stretch pants/leggings rule. But only enforced it for the not hot girls.

One day I wore a pair of my (at the time) girlfriend’s yoga pants to school. When a teacher stopped in me the hallway I just pointed out all the other girls wearing them with no issue. I got detention but yoga pants were never brought up again.

Also the volleyball team wore yoga shorts as part of the uniform.

wer2 , 3 months ago

I do love the “shorts can be no more than 1 inch above the knees”, but “cheerleaders get to wear the equivalent of bathing suits to class because it is a ‘uniform’.”

Aggravationstation , 3 months ago

No facial hair. 15 year old me hated that he had to shave his sweet nu-metal chin goatee.

tetris11 , 3 months ago

Taint nation just wasn’t the same afterwards

Aggravationstation , 3 months ago

Taint misbehavin’

lightnsfw , 3 months ago

My math teacher one year made a rule that if you skipped more than 3 problems on the homework you got a zero on it. This was because she was assigning 80-100 problems a night and I had only been completing just doing enough to get a passing grade because I didn’t have an hour to spend just on math every night.

CluckN , 3 months ago

Could you just fill the answer with garbage?

lightnsfw , 3 months ago

Yea, that’s what I ended up doing. It was stupid.

BlitzoTheOisSilent , 3 months ago

I wrote my first AP English thesis in high school on this exact issue: students being assigned too much homework and the detriment it caused them. I don’t remember the source, but an academic paper from around 2010 (I wrote the paper in like 2012) talked about how assigning more than 5-10 math problems per night could cause way more harm than good.

Not only was it incredibly time consuming for people who likely had sports/music/jobs/family obligations/etc, but it reinforced incorrect learning habits. Basically, if you were given 100 math problems, but didn’t understand how to solve them correctly, you’d just be reinforcing your mistake 100 times. Add in the fact I never had a teacher who would spend an entire class going over all 100 of them, and kids were basically learning the wrong way every night. Plus, at least in my experience, the assignments were turned in and then the class moved on to the next lesson, and by the time you were given the graded assignment back, you were already 3+ lessons ahead, still learning everything wrong because the foundation was built on sand, not stone.

lightnsfw , 3 months ago

Yea, I was always good at math but shit like that made me hate it. Like you said I either understood the concept or I didn’t. Having a higher volume of problems wasn’t going to help. The funny thing was, later on in high school, my english teacher gave me a list of all the assignments we would have that semester with how many points they were worth so I went through and figured out what I would be a able to skip (pretty much all the stuff that I’d have to get in front of the class for) and still pass. She did not give a shit about it other than initially being concerned that I was failing really hard for a while because most of what I skipped was at the beginning. I told her what I was doing and she was just like “… well ok if that’s what you want to do…”. I

Default_Defect , 3 months ago

Had a similar issue with a science teacher, we had to copy down several pages of words and their definitions every single night. Made me hate science when I’d normally love it. I just refused to do it and failed the class. Explained to my parents why I failed and they were shockingly understandable about it.

AnarchistArtificer , 3 months ago

By far not the stupidest, but it’s one that’s coming to mind.

The school was in a poor area and had a mandatory school uniform. One of the rules was that for boys, “school shoes” must be worn, not “boots”. In many cases, the distinction is obvious, but in ambiguous cases, the distinction came down to how high up the shoe/boot went. I think they defined a length that was the boundary.

What’s silly though is that this length was such that if you were wearing regular school trousers, it would be impossible to discern whether it was a shoe or a boot. At uniform inspections, they would literally have people pull up their trousers legs enough that they could see the top of the shoe/boot, and measure it with a ruler. Inspections were usually overseen by a senior member of staff (not the same one each time).

My brother was sent home from school because his brand new school shoes were 0.5cm too high and were therefore boots. He wasn’t meant to return until he’d replaced them, but my mum called the school and went nuts because she couldn’t afford to replace them for such a stupid rule. They “made an exception” in this case.

tetris11 , 3 months ago

Girls schools have the same deal with skirt length. They make a fuss over it because they know the kids will rebel over a stupid rule like that, instead of the kids rebelling by doing drugs.

spiderwort , 3 months ago

Ah yes. Controlling that rebellion energy by giving them something harmless to be rebellious about.

Sounds like that gender stuff we’re seeing so much of.

xorollo , 3 months ago

Similar story. Few years ago in a previous life, I was a teacher. Our administration would make an announcement in the morning that we had to check uniforms in first period and send non-compliant students to the office. Kids were generally in uniform, but a lot of the rules were nitpicky. One of the uniform rules was that students had to wear a certain color sock of a certain length. I don’t care what socks kids are wearing so never checked. They’re under their pants. Our assistant principal would stand in the hallway and check uniforms. When he found kids out of uniform, he would figure out who their first period teacher was and send a nastygram. Imagine living a life where you allow your blood pressure to rise because of the kind of socks on somebody else’s feet.

meanmon13 , 3 months ago

My highschool insisted t-shirts were designed to be tucked in and thus anyone wearing a t-shirt had to have it tucked in or be sent home. I have always worn button-up shirts untucked and they didn’t seem to have a problem with that…

Anticorp , 3 months ago

That’s really odd, since it’s pretty much the opposite. Button up shirts are usually designed for tucking, and T-shirts for wearing untucked.

grasshopper_mouse , 3 months ago

My high-school math teacher made us all submit our work in these tiny notebooks that were like less than half the size of an American standard notebook, with unlined paper. He would write the homework problems on the board and then you had to copy them into the tiny-ass notebook and then hand write all your work on the single tiny-ass page, he would fail you if you used more than one page or side of a page because “One page is all the room you need to work out a problem.”

I am really horribly bad at math and even writing numbers down is hard for me, sometimes i can’t even read what I wrote, so being forced to write them even smaller was a nightmare. I barely passed his class. Plus he was just a total dick in general to anyone who struggled in his class, and most students did (it was already the math class for dumb people), and we could all tell he didn’t want to be there.

I hope he’s miserable whenever he is now.

nudnyekscentryk , 3 months ago

But why? Did they collect the notebooks to check the homework?

grasshopper_mouse , 3 months ago

Yup, you had to take the page out and turn it in.

nudnyekscentryk , 3 months ago

Well in such case I can see little rationale behind that

Anticorp , 3 months ago

My algebra teacher was an ex Army Airborne Ranger who hated kids, and probably people in general. Whenever I asked a question because I legitimately didn’t understand why a formula worked the way it did, he would tell me to shut up. When i finally protested and said “I can’t shut up because I don’t understand!”, he made me stand outside the door to the classroom for the rest of the period.

BigLgame , 3 months ago

I had a teacher like this senior year, finally one time when she made me stand outside I just went out to the parking lot and drove away and never went back to that school. Switched to a virtual program and passed that way.

Anticorp , 3 months ago

Wow, that’s wild. There were no virtual programs when I was in high school, so that wasn’t an option for me. It wasn’t until several years later that colleges started offering remote learning programs by sending VHS tapes in the mail. Haha.

BigLgame , 3 months ago

Yeah it was the early days of that kinda thing, went from a c-d student to an A student right away. Should’ve been working that way the whole time for me.

son_named_bort , 3 months ago

Sophomore year of highschool my school had a new attendance policy where if you miss more than 4 days of class you automatically failed the class unless you did after school detention for each day of class pass 4 that you missed. What made the rule stupid was that there were no excuses allowed, so that if you were sick for 5 or 6 days you’d either fail or have to do a bunch of after school detention. The school changed it the next year to allow for excused absences, which is what it should’ve been to begin with.

Anticorp , 3 months ago

This is the kind of shit that made me lose all faith in school administrators. Extreme mandatory attendance rules have absolutely nothing to do with curriculum, and everything to do with money. They - almost without fail - disproportionately impact disadvantaged students. I’m lucky that I finished on-campus college before they implemented mandatory attendance at college too, or I would have outright failed. There were so many times that I’d have to miss class because I got stuck at work. I would cram extra hard for tests when that happened and still pass with good grades. But under the new rules I would have failed all of my classes.