Inspired by the thread on weird teachers. Several examples were given of teachers doing things 20-30 years ago which even the craziest in that thread (well maybe) wouldn’t dare do today (like body-slam a bully against a row of lockers, or a male teacher who hung out with some 13 y/o female students of his).
Those aside, what things did you or someone else do back in the day, seemingly innocent or taken matter-of-factly at the time, which simply wouldn’t happen today, unless you wanted to get hit with a lawsuit or thrown in jail or something?
When I was in junior high, there was a really young, always stressed out teacher. I used to go smoke after school behind the dumpsters on the one side of the building, up against the gym so I couldn’t be seen through windows. As our Junior High was county-wide and out of town, so all students in the county were bussed there, and my bus didn’t come for 20 minutes. I used to bum smokes off him when I needed to. One day, he showed up back there so I thought I was in trouble. Nope, he wanted to know if he could bum one off me. He stood there and smoked it while he talked to me, no big deal at all. I enjoyed it…
There was still a stigma toward smokers, and we knew it was bad, but no one I knew seemed really concerned. When my parents found out and yelled at me about smoking, I told them of the incident. They never said anything other than that I should quit.
I imagine now a call to the school board would occur in most places, at least.
I don’t think I’m old enough to contribute properly to this thread.
Oh, wait. Maybe.
Once me and my friend were screwing around (maybe in fourth grade?) and we grabbed her skinny little cousin boy and threw him down the hill in front of his house. We were laughing and joking as we did it too, because we had no idea how dangerous what we were doing actually was.
We broke his arm.
How my parents did not get the shit sued out of them, I’ll never be able to figure out. I wasn’t even grounded. I don’t think anyone would get away with that today.
Though I’m too young to have had anything happen to me ‘back-in-the-day’ movies I look at as hilarious (as do many other people) would NOT be able to be made today because they aren’t P.C.
The two that come to mind for me are Airplane! and Blazing Saddles *(entire post)
*not and original thought. I was tipped off by my mother on this
In Junior High I remember showing some of my buddies my new Swiss Army Knife. A teacher came by, saw what was going on and asked me to please put it away. I’d have been arrested for less than that today.
When I was wee I remember being terrified of some of the older kids who would whip out butterfly knives. They were apparently all the rage for a while.
As far as teachers (and in this case I use the term loosely) we had a coach who used to ‘teach’ Mississippi History.
In our town, we had 4 classes of folks: poor blacks, poor whites, bluecollar whites and professors.
This coach was a thick necked redneck bully. He picked out one small poor white kid to hate in our class and proceeded to paddle him - in front of the whole class- daily. For nuthin’. The poor kid finallly left school. I’ve never hated anybody in life as much as I hated him for that. Grrr.
A couple of years later, one of the Indian professors’ daughters was in his class. He called her a nger. TO HER FACE. To the whole class. "You ain’t nothin but a dmn nger just like the rest of em - you black as the inside of God’s Pocket’. Her dad made a trip to school (he was a bit of a big shot in the Engineering School) but you know what … HE DIDNT GET FIRED. What a putz.
This thread could be almost infinitely long, because The World Has Changed.
We did our Hunting Safety classes in the Middle School. Probably wouldn’t happen nowaways.
I remember riding my bike to my cousin’s house with my .22 rifle strapped across the handle bars. Then the two of us went to the local convenience store (each having our rifles with) and then rode out to do some shooting at a farm I knew. Yes, the cops saw us. No, nothing happened. It wasn’t a big deal back then.
Two of us stepped out of our High School Physics class to go to the restroom right around the corner. For some reason, the Physics class room was at the opposite end of the school from the rest of the science classes, in the basement with the pool, locker rooms and shop classrooms. The (psycho) shop teacher came along while we were returning to class, asking for hall passes. We didn’t have one, but we were right outside our classroom so he left us alone. Another kid didn’t. The teacher grabbed the kid by the throat and SLAMMED him hard into the wall, lifting him off the ground by his throat to scream at him.
Nowadays, that’s a great lawsuit and instant termination for the teacher.
When I was 8, we moved into a new neighborhood. The kid across the street, who was two years older than me, started picking on me. My father marched me striaght over there, demanded to see the other kid’s father and told him that this sort of thing stopped immediately, or HE would knock the shit out of the kid. The father tried to tell my dad to let me fight my own battles, but fortunately, my father wasn’t interested in allowing some neighborhood punk to beat me up on a regular basis. (Unfortunately, that was his job. )
Eighteen years ago, I was an intern at a regular talk-only psychological treatment center in Nijmegen, Netherlands. One of the psychologists, not trained in any way as professional masseur, offered massage as a regular extra.
Even at the time, it felt fishy to me.
I grew up in Virginia and my high school (in the 80s) had a smoking court. Basically, kids could get a note from their parents (not needed if the student was 18) and they could smoke on this patio next to the building. I didn’t smoke, but I would walk past the doors on the way to class. I think even teachers smoked on the same patio with the students.
I took a rifle safety class in middle school at the school. I would have been in sixth grade, so I was twelve (eleven years ago). It wasn’t part of the regular curriculum, but something offered after school and only to interested parties. I don’t know if they’re offered any more, but I would be very surprised if it was ended for any other reason than the teacher who taught it retired.
When I was in elementary school if you lived close enough you could leave for lunch. Can you imagine a six or seven year old child leaving the school on their own according, walking a block to eat their lunch at home and then returning to the school. I think the schools have a lock down policy now.
In high school I took cosmotology and I had some hours I needed to make up. The teacher had to work for several hours on a Saturday so we arranged that I could come in then to make up the hours. After about an hour or so we both needed a smoke. She let me go to the teachers lounge with her to have a cig.
There was also the time I dropped my smokes on the bus but didn’t realize it. The bus driver gave them back to me the next morning.
I was amazed when I went to my old high school several months ago to get my daughter signed up for a work permit. There was only one door you could enter and there was a table set up with a guard that made you sign in and out and you had to wear a guest badge.
I remember a shop teacher that was missing the middle two fingers of his right hand. He was strong as a bull. If you fucked off in class or outside of class, he would pick you up by the neck and pin you to a wall using only the index and pinky finger. He was a bully to his family too - they all went to my father’s church but he only did about once a year.
It’s still the normal thing to do in all but the four biggest Spanish towns. There’s school lunchrooms, where the meals are provided by the school. If the kids are staying in for lunch, the school fee is higher than if they eat at home.
Mind you, my lunch “hour” from K1 to 12th grade was from 13:30 to 16:00, more than enough to get home if you lived in town. Then like now, the kids who eat in are from another village or have nobody who can cook for them (some of my classmates had parents who were factory workers with no lunch hour break and would eat at their grandma’s).
So um, how do these kids get to school and back nowadays? Do their parents drive them a few blocks?
I guess I’m having trouble believing that this doesn’t happen even now, since I regularly see crossing guards helping groups of kids go across the street before/after school. Maybe not at lunch (but maybe so - I just don’t specifically recall lunch), but it’s more or less the same thing, right? Kids who live close to school walk to school?
For me, I did indeed live close enough to school to go home for lunch, and did so a lot starting when I was about 8 (previously to that we lived in a place where I was bussed to school.) I even remember skiing to school a lot during the winter. It wasn’t uncommon to see lots & lots of cross-country skis piled up against the side of the school during the winter months.
When I was in grammar school (in those days, the late 40s and early 50s grades K through 8) nearly every boy from about grade 5 on carried a pocket knife (we called them jack knives then) and we used to play knife games in the school yard before school and at recess. This was fairly rough neighborhood and yet I don’t recall a single “bad” incident with the knives.
Also, every Spring there would be a period of about two weeks when all the boys would bring water guns to school and before school and at recess (and in school when the teacher was not watching) we would have water gun fights. Most of the guns were hokey looking, but some were very realistic looking. Nowadays kids get expelled for drawing a cartoon picture of a gun!
And you wouldn’t believe what we used to do after school with our BB guns.
Grade 9 history. I brought my father’s Lee-Enfield No. 5 to school for a discussion on the types of weapons used in the Pacific Theatre. Assembled it, loaded the mag (dummy rounds, not that they knew), cocked it, and pulled the trigger. Nobody even blinked.
Nowadays I’d be frogmarched outta there, cuffed and shackled, in less than 10 seconds.
Not a school thing, per se, but whilst in highschool, a friend of mine and I had a really bored night where we drove out to the local airport (O’hare) and just wandered around for about 4 hours, getting into all manner of ‘restricted’ areas. No way it could be this easy post 9/11.
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