If it’s a Friday afternoon, they’d better leave when the bell rings….(shakes a crotchety fist)
Circa 1972:
My HS had a building-wide integrated clock/intercom/bell system that never worked properly. The classroom clocks were supposed to be synchronized but in reality could be off by as much as 20 or so minutes from one room to the next. This meant that there could be no “official” school time standard.
The electronically generated “bell” was also funky. It randomly varied in loudness from earspiltting to barely audible. It also had a random warble.
Some students got VERY good at imitating the funky bell sound, including the warble. With the clocks also being funky nobody knew exactly when class was supposed to end anyway. Teachers fell for it often enough that a few well-timed, bell-like student vocalizations would cause chaos in the hallways. Good times!
Replying to a 7 year old post, but that exact thing happened to me in high school. As punishment for being loud and disruptive, my Spanish teacher made the entire class stay for like 10 minutes after class sitting in silence, which was the last period of the day. “Since you wasted my time, I’m going to waste your time”, she said. I think she just assumed we all had cars and drive ourselves to and from school - most people took Spanish I their junior year, but I was an overachiever and took it as a sophomore so I could take three years of Spanish. So I was not yet driving age and rode the bus. And I missed the bus due to being held after class, and had to call my mom to come pick me up. I really should had spoken up and explained to the teacher why I needed to leave, but she told us not to talk, and I didn’t want to disobey her.
I see no way that this improves anything whatsoever, and in fact it would seem to me to cause a lot of problems for no reason.
Now, a warning bell between classes, that has some value, especially in schools with unusually long between-classes time. One school I’ve taught at, some of the classes were literally across the street, so they needed 6-minute passing periods, and there was a warning bell at the 5 minute mark. Then, they finally finished the addition so they could have all the classes in the same building… but due to poor planning, the hallway connecting to the new addition was way too narrow, so they still had to keep the 6 minutes.
I fortunately don’t remember any teachers powertripping on period bell nonsense. Around 1990, a bunch of us got digital watches that would beep on the hour and they were were way more accurate that whatever analog system the school must have used at the time. You’d hear a watch beep, then another, then another. I distinctly remember us packing up and starting to leave with a Lithuanian teacher saying “But where are you going? The bell has not …” BRRRRing!
I saw this photo of an old bell system from a school just yesterday. Don’t get your necktie caught:
I’m a bit surprised that this has been the experience of so many people in this thread. Unless I’m misremembering, the bell was always the signal that class had officially ended and students should head out and get to their next class (by way of their lockers or the restroom, if necessary) and let the next class come in; and it never occured to me that it might work differently elsewhere.
“I end the class, not the bell.” Mlle. Rheault, high school French teacher, 1982-85 [direct quote].
Then, since she was the only teacher who held so strong to that rule, we all had to scramble, because we had limited time to go to our next class (four minutes, IIRC).
Then to drive the point home, she’d throw in a couple of words. But even she realized we had limited time.
As I said, she was the only teacher who did that. SE Michigan, in the middle 80’s, as I said. I graduated in 1986 (four semesters of foreign language were mandatory).
I had the same experiences as other posters. Sometimes teachers would pull the “I dismiss you, not the bell”, but the administration frowned upon it and it could cause drama with other teachers. Usually that drama stayed behind the scenes except for the occasional eye roll from your next teacher, but this one time my English teacher apparently was doing this to all her classes; my biology teacher seemed to keeping track because she was writing names down and I saw her storm into the office later that day. We only had 3 minutes between classes to get to our next class, and my any locker or bathroom pit stops. Nor could we carry backpacks, even on PE days. Oddly enough, for all their faults the boys PE teachers consistently offered hall passes or early dismissals to anyone who wanted to shower.