Odd doesn’t have to be insane, just rare at the time. For reference these things took place between 1987 and 2000. I’m sure a lot of the safety things on my list happen today, but were uncommon in the 80s. Feel free to correct me if your school did any of these things.
In middle school, we had “star cards.” They were pieces of cardboard about the size of a credit card with about ten stars printed on it. If you weren’t prepared for class, or if you broke a rule, the teacher would remove one of the stars with a hole punch. If you had at least one star left at the end of the quarter, you’d get to attend a party, or go on a field trip, or whatever that quarter’s prize was. This lasted a couple of years, then suddenly stopped.
Another middle school thing were the assignment notebooks. Those aren’t strange in themselves, but for a few months, the school suddenly decided that we needed to write something in the book for every class. If there weren’t any assignments, you had to write about what you did that day, then get them signed each night, and turn them in to be checked the next day. I understand the point behind it, but it took up so much time that it didn’t last long.
My school also called parents if their children weren’t in school that day - which made skipping more difficult than it apparently was at other schools. In order to take a child from primary and middle school, you had to be in the list parents filled out in the beginning of the year, and show ID. More on the over protective front - kids weren’t allowed to share home made snacks with the class, so no making cupcakes and bringing them for your kid’s birthday.
The only odd thing I recall is when I entered the 6th grade we got a note, before the school year started that there was a new policy and that all pens would have to be black ink, no blue ink or any other colors allowed. And this was like 1974 I think, so I don’t know why they did that.
This wasn’t unheard of in other rural places but we were allowed to bring guns to high school as long as we left them in our vehicles. Technically it was supposed to only be during deer season and only rifles but even that wasn’t really enforced. Lots of students, both male and female liked to go hunting and then drive straight to school later in the morning. It seemed perfectly reasonable then (and still does to me now). Nothing ever happened in the slightest in regards to that policy. I graduated in 1991 before the zero tolerance patrol got their hands on just about everything. They would probably call out the SWAT team and pursue terrorism charges for that these days.
When I was a kid we lived in Bakersfield, CA, which has thick fog in the winter. If it was foggy in the morning, you would listen to the radio to see if your school had a fog delay, which might be 1, 2, or even 3 hours. The fog was thick enough that it could be dangerous for the buses and cars to drive. We often couldn’t see our own sidewalk from the house.
Our school never ever had a fog delay, not once. It was out of town, in a bunch of cotton fields, and the fog could get very thick, but the superintendent lived downtown and never saw a reason to delay school. We were always so disappointed.
One foggy morning a car hit one of the school buses and punched a hole in it right near the driver. But we still never had a fog delay!
There was a policy where you had to show a empty lunchbox or bag or if you bought lunch from the school then a empty soup/stew can before you bought candy from a machine. This was a policy up to grade 6. I didn’t know about this till about 1 month remaining in grade 6, where the lunch monitor caught me, I told her I didn’t know about it, and was just going up on my own for 2 years, we both laughed about it.
We had something like that at my school: a system of “honours” and “stripes.” Honours were given out at the teachers’ discretion for any good action, whether scholastic, behavioural or whatever – similar to “points” in Harry Potter, even to the point of the house with the most at the end of the year winning a prize . They were written in these agendas that we had to carry around and have signed by our parents.
Misbehaviour earned you the dreaded “stripes,” which were equal to -2 honours. The rather chilling term may point to the system they replaced, which I think was somewhat more recently than I or my behind care to think about. You might get off with a “warning,” which did not deduct any honours but was still written in the book and would consequently still have to be explained to your parents.
Our current elementary school does both of these things. They have what are called “Oops Cards” - they get five at the beginning of the year. and they can lose them for the reasons you stated above. If they have one left at the end of the year, they get to go to a party. They do have end of semester field trips, but you can still go on those if you’ve lost all your Oops cards: you just can’t have three demerits.
Before I started ninth grade, I was reading the new school’s dress code. Among the expected “long skirts, long sleeves, high necklines” stuff was a prohibition against… cornrows. I didn’t know what a cornrow was. I found out it meant “those braids you see a lot of black girls wear”, and it cleared up nothing for me. What could they possibly have against small braids? For that matter, how many sheltered white Jewish girls were wearing cornrows in the first place? I never did find out what their problem was.
The same school had a policy against early marriage. Students who got married weren’t allowed to graduate. This one wasn’t as strange as it seems- apparently, in some of the more right-wing Jewish high schools, “senior kallahs” are a common occurrence. One girl got engaged in twelfth grade- since she wasn’t married yet, she still got her diploma, but she wasn’t allowed to go to the senior trip or the graduation ceremony.
(From school rumor, you’d think half the seniors were shopping for wedding gowns instead of graduation robes. I finally worked up the courage to ask the principle how many senior kallahs we’d had. Turned out there were only three).
My mother attended public schools and would have been Class of '73, but she got pregnant junior year (& married) and was not allowed back for senior year. Her husband was (because it was important for him to finish his education :rolleyes:). She was told that since she was past the compulsory school age they had no legal obligation to let her continue and it would be a waste since she’d just end up dropping out anyway since she’d be busy being a wife and mother. She’s still bitter.
I grew up in St Charles <about an hour west of Chicago proper> in the 70’s early 80’s; the high school at that time had armed security guards, regular locker checks and 20 minute lunches, with no eating or drinking during class. Of course, this was also at the time when calculator during class was cheating, not necessary, so…things change.
Went to 3 high schools, another in Michigan and one in Idaho, and never saw the level of security as I saw at St. Charles. I am not complaining, but that town at that time was the very definition of white vanilla boring, and I remember very little if any crime.
Oh yah…also, stand-up video games were assessed a 100,000 yearly tax to discourage businesses from having them. I think the record store had one or two, and a bar, and that was it.
Let’s add the regular ‘disaster drills’ <how exactly is my desk going to prevent a bomb from getting me?> and the 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday-morning tornado alert siren checks <which were in fact air raid sirens left over from the wars, a fact I didn’t pick up on until MUCH later…>
…Oh, and having to sit through VERY graphic films about WWII concentration camps in 5th grade…that was definitely…something. O.o
…I remember those films far more than the ‘sex ed’ classes during the same year though. =p
Jr high, again in St. Charles…We lived less than 2 miles from the school, so we didn’t take the bus, we walked. Nowadays it seems everyone is afraid to let their kids walk; we had whole neighborhoods of kids walking together, across the river and through the parks. I even made money off that, as there was eventually a policy instituted that didn’t allow students to leave the campus for any reason during the day, so…I’d stop by this somewhat-shifty ‘store’ that was run out of this guy’s house and buy candy, and everyone at school would come to me to place orders for the next day.
Moved to Idaho when I was 16, and the first thing I went ‘whoah’ about was that there was a soda machine right in the hallway for anyone to use, and you could drink soda during class. SO weird in comparison!
If memory serves, that is about the time that colored lined notebook paper and matching ink pens were hitting the market. Nothing as horrible as trying to read green on green, purple on purple or purple on green homework…
This was also policy in CA universities way back when. My grandmother was at Berkeley in the early 40’s and dropped out to get married.* Right up through the 50’s, a woman could not go to the university if she was married. :rolleyes:
*To the utter fury of her mother, whose family had not allowed her to get the education she wanted. She finally got her BA in 1969 when she was in her 70’s! Then my grandmother followed her example and got her BA in the early 90’s. We got our Masters’ degrees the same year.
We arrived for our high school graduation ceremony and were given the traditional mortarboard and tassel, but with our names printed inside. We were told we’d have to turn in our hats before we could get our diploma. No hat=no diploma. I think it was meant to discourage people from doing the whole “throw-your-hat-in-the-air” thing. Does anyone really do that anyway?
Our high school had a rule that you could not tie your horse to the goal posts on the practice field.
Really.
This came about because one year we had a Western Days. A bunch of us owned horses and we thought it would be fun to ride in that day, so we did.
We parked the horses on the football field, because the only other place we could tie them up would have been the bike racks, and those were on concrete.
At the time, we actually had permission to bring the horses. Nobody had thought ahead to what happens during the five hours when the riders of said horses are in class, and the horses themselves are standing around on the football practice field.
Hence the rule. Not that those circumstances would ever have been repeated.
When I graduated from high school, the mother of one of my friends had graduated exactly 20 years before. Overcome with nostalgia, she got out all her yearbooks, scrapbooks, etc., and her diploma, which was neatly rolled up and tied with a faded maroon ribbon.
She untied it…for the first time…and what was inside was a rolled up, faded mimeographed sheet that said something to the effect that the real diploma would be handed over when she turned in her cap & gown.
Good thing she got married and didn’t try to go out and get a job with that thing.
I went to Catholic school and they had all kinds of goofy rules.
Like, we weren’t allowed to wear necklaces. I’m not talking about huge, chunky, ostentatious necklaces or anything- stuff like my little silver chain with a tiny pair of ballet slippers on it was forbidden. The reason we were given was that it was a strangulation risk- someone could grab your necklace from behind and strangle you. Okay, fine. far-fetched, but whatever.
The dumb thing, though, was that cross necklaces and saint medals WERE allowed.
We also had another completely stupid rule. We all had uniforms- they consisted of a plaid skirt and a white blouse and a uniform sweatshirt if we wanted. Sometimes, during gym or recess, people would get hot in their sweatshirts and want to take them off and tie them around their waists.
Well, this was absolutely forbidden. We got long, heated talks from our principal about how it was improper and vulgar for young girls to wear their sweatshirts tied around their waists because it drew attention to their hips and whole pelvic area and was just too sexy.
Our athletic code of conduct not only regulated the typical “drink/use drugs and you’re off the team” but also stated that any male on a sports team had to have hair shorter than collar-length and off the ears. This was in the early 1990’s, by the way.
For graduation, we did not line up by last name: rather, we lined up by…height, and alternating boy/girl, so as to “make a nice picture for the yearbook”.
Girls were not allowed to go stag to dances, but boys were. Single girls were not allowed to buy tickets and were turned away at the door. The logic was that single girls woul steal away coupled boys to dance, but since boys don’t like to dance, it was okay for them to come alone.
