The event that precipitated my removal from school would fit this. Circa 1981 (80…81…something like that) In first grade I was sent to the principal’s office where I was spanked. Repeatedly. The next day I was bruised from the lower back to nearly the knees.
If this had happened much later I would have grown up with a lot more money.
My friends and I used to go drinking with my History teacher.
I went to to high school in Ontario, Canada, where, in those days, you went to high school for five years (not four) if you were planning on going on to university. In addition, the drinking age in Ontario was 18. What this effectively meant was that being 18 in your last year of high school, you could legally drink.
One day, shortly after the school year started, my buddies and I got out of school for the day, and decided to go to the neighbourhood watering hole for a beer or two. We encountered our history teacher leaving school at the same time, and he asked where we were going. On being told we were heading for the local bar, he said he could also use a beer or two, and joined us. A nice time over beer was had by all, and the conversation was nothing more than typical guy conversation: sports, girls, cars, and (being as we students were still teen guys) the occasional fart joke.
The history teacher joined us a couple of more times over the course of the school year. He bought a round for us all usually, and would cadge the occasional cigarette from one of us. At those times, he wasn’t our teacher; he was just one of the guys. But given the changes that have occurred (the age in Ontario is now 19 and the fifth year of high school has been done away with, putting legal drinking well outside a typical high school age), as well as the growing awareness for liability on the part of teachers who interact with students outside of class, and I don’t think such a thing would happen today, even if it were possible.
When my family moved to Salem, OR in my freshman year of high school, I was surprised but not too shocked to find that the high school had a smoking section. For students…the teachers had their own.
Somehow I can’t see that happening today.
In 4th grade, a boy brought bullets to school. The teacher took them away, and that was the end of it.
The doors to the school were open, and anyone could just walk in. Now that same school system has double set of doors with a lobby between. You must be buzzed in to enter the second set of doors.
At age five, my parents got rid of the carseat, and sometimes I was allowed to ride in the passengers seat. In NY, kids today aren’t allowed out of a booster seat until age seven. There might not be a law on it, but people frown on letting kids under twelve sit up front.
When I was in high school, they had recently changed the weapons policy so that you were allowed to have a gun on campus as long as you left it in your car. You could bring the weapon into the classroom if a) there was a need, like you’re giving a demonstration, and b) you got permission first.
People were complaining because the new policy was so restrictive.
:rolleyes:
Sure, why not sue the school for dishing out a little whoop-ass. Every single day I see kids who have not been spanked nearly often enough, and the problem will only get worse. Ever wondered why kids have no respect these days? Because they know they can do what they like and not get a pounding.
Spanking is one thing, I was spanked at home and have no complaints about it. A school principal beating a 6 year old to the point of being black and blue is unacceptable and an entirely different matter.
I knew kids who were beaten entirely black and blue, thrown down the stairs, etc. by their parents as punishment for misdeeds such as cutting school. No one ever called social services about it.
When I was in kindergarten, I used to walk six blocks to school, across a couple of fairly-wide suburban streets too.
Hmm. looking at the map, it doesn’t seem so far. Bit I remember it as being a long way.
I seem to remember a quote from Pliny or some such person saying the same thing about children having no respect for their elders.
Some kids are asses. That has always been the case. Many kids are not. That has also always been the case.
Personally, having my parents hit me would not make me respect them; someone who has to resort to force does not gain any ground in my eyes.
My mother is a (literally) award winning sixth grade teacher. She’s also a single mother of a daughter (me), and while I was certainly put to work doing “men’s work” quite often, she would also invite certain boys (always boys) from her classes to come over to our house to do yardwork, help us build things, or just hang out. These were students she felt some special affinity for, usually one or two a year. Since we lived about 15 miles from her school, she’d often go drive to pick her student up and he’d spend the whole day at our house, hanging out and doing light work, eat dinner with us and then she’d take him back home. One in particular she developed a real fondness for and remained in touch, and occasionally went to his house and had dinner with his parents, and she went to his soccer games, his graduations, and his wedding a couple of years ago.
Nothing “funny” or sexual ever happened. She was simply “going beyond the call of duty” and turning around the lives of (in some cases) some rather troubled young men at a critical time in their lives by actually taking an interest in them and showing them that they were intelligent and capable people who were needed in her life. In another world (well, ours, 25 years ago), she was lauded for this behavior and won community awards for it. Nowadays she’d be under police surveillance quicker than a cat on ice.
She stopped inviting over her “special” students somewhere in the late '80s. Sad.
This doesn’t seem so odd to me. How old are you? I’m twenty-two and we did this in my elementary school (1991-5). Then in middle school and high school, you could leave at lunch if you wanted and come back (1996-2002). I assume they’re still doing it that way.
In my high school, they had visitors sign in and out and teachers had to wear little badges, but if you walked in like you knew what you were doing, it’s not like they were going to really stop you.
I walked to and from school from first grade on through 6th. I also came home for lunch for a while, but stopped because I wanted a cool lunch box like the other kids.
I know the principal had a paddle, but I never experienced it first hand.
I was also discouraged from hanging around a certain girl my age who I had become school friends with because her parents were divorced and her mother didn’t act like a nun.
I also had much more freedom to just wander around the neighborhood. At our lake cottage, my brother and I and our friends would spend the whole day in the woods or the water without really checking in much.
We also rode in the backs of pickup trucks (not on the freeway), in the back of the station wagon and, most memorably, on lawn chairs in the back of an old beater van my dad bought.
One of the top three reasons I’m so glad I grew up when I did was the lack of car set/seat belt laws.
Every summer my family would pack up the TravelAll, hitch up the camper and we’d spend 3-5 weeks seeing the country. With the back seat folded down, I had roughly a 4’x5’ play/nap/read/whatever area in the back of the TravelAll. When you’re spending eight or ten hours at a clip in the car, I thank God I didn’t have to spend them strapped in (and, obviously, that we never had an accident).
That reminds me! When I was little (like 2-3 years old) we had a 1973 Chevy Suburban. My mom liked to drive down from Ohio to visit family in Tennessee and Florida and there are photos of me playing in the back. She says I used to play and sleep back there for those trips.
In middle school, my buddy and I donned Hezbolah-style head scarfs made from beach towels, a couple of those old battery powered waterguns that look like real Uzis and Mac-10s from a distance. We waited after school and ambushed my little brothers schoolbus (the elementary school bus came later in the day). We may have even fired a bottle rocket (we did that a lot too),
I can’t help but think instead of a warning from the principal to never do that again, we might get in a bit more trouble today.
Speaking of car trips, we used to take turns lying on the deck behind the back seat (under the rear window) and look up at the sky as our parents drove along. It gives me shudders to think of my kids doing that.
In 2000 I sat in the cockpit of an Air Canada flight from London to Toronto. I was in the extra seat, with a headset and everything as we landed at Pearson. It was flat out one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced. I wasn’t a kid either, I was 25. My husband is a pilot and chatted up the crew during the flight, and got me up there.
We later told the story to an American pilot, who was stunned that doors weren’t locked on Canadian carriers. Apparently on US carriers they’d been locked for a while pre 9/11. He thought that I was pretty lucky to experience that, and hoped that there wouldn’t be any security “incidents” to ruin it for everyone. 
Can you even imagine doing that now?
I stayed overnight at a friend’s house when I was no older than seven, and she warned me that I had to wear underpants to bed because her older brother would come into her room and pull the bedcovers off the bed and expose her.
Because of that one sleepover, I started wearing underpants to bed until one night my mom noticed and asked me why. And I told her.
Most parents today would call the cops.
Here are a few:
When I was in high school (mid-70s), there was a designated smoking area for students right next to the art/auto shop building. All kids on “the hill” were officially invisible to the teachers.
Around that same time, a friend and I stopped at the army surplus store after school. We each bought a big bayonet. Since we were concerned about concealed weapon laws, we strapped the sheaths to out belts and walked around town for a couple of hours wearing these 14" knives.
When I was in middle school and high school, everybody carried a pocketknife.
In middle school, I had a teacher who kept a wooden paddle hanging on the wall behind the desk. It had the words “Board of Education” routed into it. If you mouthed off in class, you were brought up to the front of the room and made to bend over and grab your ankles. I saw this happen to two or three boys, but never to a girl (in case that distinction matters).
When a friend of mine was in elementary school (also mid-70’s), he took the .22 he got for Christmas to school for show and tell.
Of course, depending on where you live, a lot of strange things can still happen. My wife was driving in to town from our ranch a couple of years ago. This is a state highway, although the speed limit drops from 70mph to 25 mph in town. Right in front of the school, a little kid on a big 4-wheel ATV (I’m talking one of these ) came flying around a corner and tore down the street faster than she was going. So, to reiterate, this was a little kid driving a large open motorized vehicle at least 30mph on a state highway. She tracked down the parents and discovered that the kid is FOUR YEARS OLD. The parents said, “What can we do? He knows the keys are always in it.”
Darwinian evolution was supposed to remove those parents before they reproduced.
Added after reading JimmyFlair’s simulpost: When I was little, I remember getting cockpit tours on commercial airlines in the U.S. all the time.
