There was a jukebox in the cafeteria area, known as Commons, in my junior year of high school. This was at the height of the rock vs. disco era (and Chicago area where Disco Demolition took place) and the rock kids would unplug the jukebox when somebody played a disco song. So they took out the jukebox.
In freshman year the English department tried an experiment. Students had a choice of three books to study, and depending on which one they picked they went to the classroom of the teacher who would teach it. Problem was that one of the three teachers was universally disliked and no one wanted to be in her class no matter what book was being taught. So when it was time to choose a book, no one in the other two classes moved and that teacher’s class emptied out with students who stood in the other two classes and refused to leave. Eventually the teacher had some kind of breakdown and left teaching.
I think that high school fraternities and sororities were common quite a while ago, but have long since fallen out of favor.
My own experience of odd policies: I attended an elementary school that allowed students to leave school for lunch and recess. Some students went home for lunch, others went to a pizza place near the school (Of course, students could also eat in the lunchroom at school). However, students who went home for lunch weren’t allowed to play on the playground if they came back during recess. Students who went to a restaurant for lunch *were *allowed to play on the playground.
I’ve never figured this one out. Clearly, it wasn’t related to leaving school property, since kids who went to the pizza place could be on the playground.
There was a tunnel between two buildings that we were supposed to use during bad weather. But if you did, you would be late for class and get “written up.” So many of us would go out - however this would cause a mess due to tracking in snow and rain - so teachers would send stand at the entrance and send you back - where you would *still *track in snow and rain and also be late for class.
From what I know of this subject locally, there were quite a few in high schools around the country a century ago. In those days, most HS graduates didn’t go on to college so HS was the culmination of their academic life. It made sense that these students would seek to emulate college students in this regard; more surprisingly, national Greek offices recognized their chapters and members as brothers. High school probably got a lot more respect in those days.
Moving on to 1935, Los Angeles High School’s website offers a copy of the student handbook for that year, in which it draws the student’s “most careful attention” to the following, namely, the state Education Code statute outlawing fraternities or sororities in public schools. In my vast archives there exists a copy of the Winter 1923 Semi-Annual, and there’s no mention of Greek societies in there. So the law must have come down sometime in the prior twenty years or so.
Still, some high school kids apparently carried on the tradition nevertheless. What could make a secret society more alluring than official condemnation and the resulting need to make it even more super-secret? My wife says there were such clubs at her school in the late 1960s.
Was it a public school? IMO the generally restrictive nature of high school life–essentially that you have to be present for all your classes every day–“men” and “women” is a bit euphemistic. You’re still a child under the law until eighteen.
Now that I think about it, in my time there were no dress codes, or rules about hair. The guys didn’t wear the sort of saggy oversize attire that’s associated with gang life today, and so there really wasn’t much of anything there to make rules about. When there’s no dress or hair rules, there’s a good chance they won’t have to make any rule that specifically aims at males or females–so the question of whether to denote the students as “men and women” or “boys and girls” doesn’t arise.
My small town high school burned straight into the ground my senior year due to arson. It was probably for the best. It was built in 1923 in rural Louisiana and didn’t have air conditioning at all. I don’t know how the older generations handled it but we got so hot that all the textbooks were ruined by sweat stains and during a heat wave, so many kids were fainting that they had to institute mandatory water breaks halfway through every class which took up much of the class all things totaled.
After it burned down, the only big building left was the gym so the disaster recovery effort put in partitions to have fake classrooms. When we returned to class two weeks later, the remains of the main school were still visibly smoldering, emotions ran high, and chaos ensued.
Teenage boys can figure out how to screw up just about anything in about .2 microseconds and the solution to this problem was to throw random objects as far as you could above the barriers as soon as the teacher’s back was turned. So many coins were dropping around that it sounded like a slot casino on blue hair special night. You couldn’t let your guard down even for an instant because you knew you about to be popped in the eye by Abraham Lincoln himself.
That experiment didn’t work so they let us spend almost all day on the football field or in other recreational areas as long as there weren’t any visible tornadoes. We had some textbooks but they were donated from other extremely poor districts but deemed unworthy by their students which is to be expected for warped science books circa 1950. That plan could of worked, after all, our parents had the same ones, but they only had a mismatch of different ones available and it was first come, first serve, and no one really cared to enough to come. They just gave us grades based on their impressions on what we had done so far which was usually not much in almost all cases including mine. It was fun though although I would love to have some better pictures.
We were never, EVER allowed to have hats. I never was told why. I knew it to be bull back then, even if I didn’t know the term. It apparently was a given. No posters or anything it was just fact, no hats at school.
In public elementary school, we N E V E R had Recess. We had P.E. but it was always 15 minutes or so of actual exercise, and then 15 minutes of what ever sport we were learning.
My mom once inquired about the school Nurse. I was not in on the conversation, but she tells me, she was told that the Nurse was only on campus on Tuesdays. (Elem)
“And what happens if he is sick on any other day?”
Our schools did not have any Auditorium or presentation room. We had a company from Calif wanting to “Adopt” us [read sponsor] they wanted to show us video of their company, and what it was they did, etc. (Elem)
Apparently, schools in Calif have auditoriums. – We had, and I am not joking, a ““Cafetorium””. This was school system wide, Cafetoriums - Lunch Rooms and Auditoriums one room double duty. For the school I went to, it got real fun, because our Music room, was the Stage in the Cafetorium. - A single curtain seperating Music from Lunch. (Elem)
One time in high school, during a study hall type period, I was told I could not read the book I brought from home. (Despite the fact I had nothing else to do.) The book had to be assigned to me. I can understand the spirit of the law here. Except
It was DUNE.
Oh, and I never picked the book up ever again since that day. Years later, I considered asking my Homeroom teacher to assign me the book.
We tried a version of the star cards, coupons being handed out when ever we were “caught being good”. The idea was even magnified on a class level. The entire class having its own version, and classes competing with each other. (Elem)
We could not play cards at Lunch. Despite that, we got a few games of Magic the Gathering in, anyway. Apparently, all cards mean gambling, even if they don’t have Bicycles on them. (High)
One year, security was increased on Halloween day. Everyone was checked, bookbags were checked for raw eggs. (High)
To protest this, I simply threw my bag down on the floor at the entrance. I asked the Vice Principal if he thought eggs were in there. He agreed with me that I wasn’t packing. [I wasn’t]
Despite this, I saw someone get egged 10 minutes or so later.
And the one that takes the cake :
**No student is allowed to bring their bookbag to school on the final day of school. **
Yeah. (Elem)
DeKalb County School System, Atlanta GA 1990s-2001.
We had a rule were guys could not wear sleeveless shirts. When challenged that this was sexist, it was revealed that the administration thought the male body hair would be distracting. So a bunch of guys got together and shaved their armpits so they could wear them, too.
When my dad went to school, there was a rule about facial hair. But by the time I made it to school, the handbook mentioned some sort of ruling stating that people could not be discriminated against based on their hair. We always thought that someone didn’t like the old rule and sued the school and won.
Oh, and now I found out from my cousin that my school no longer lets you carry a backpack. I could see that between classes, now that every classroom has its own set of books. (Although I’d hate not being able to get my homework done while I’m waiting on the teacher in my next class to finish telling us stuff we’ve already learned.) But they can’t even bring them to school. So you have to figure out other ways to carry anything.
My Korean high school had all sorts of stupid rules, but the one that really annoyed me was the rule against socks that wrinkle around your ankle area (the kind you push down a bit to make them wrinkle). Apparently wrinkled socks were a sign of vanity unbecoming a student.
I can understand the rules against colored socks and knee socks. (Well, not really, but I can understand what they were thinking.) But WRINKLED SOCKS? Seriously, WTF?
I once had the temerity to wear wrinkled socks to school. They were confiscated and I had to go around in my stockings. I got shit all day from my teachers asking me why I wasn’t wearing socks (NOT wearing socks was also against the rules).
The elementary school I went to required a doctors note if you wanted to drink anything other than milk. Everyone was always jealous of my orange juice.
Lunch was optional in high school. There were eight periods in the day, and when you were picking your classes you could elect to take eight classes, and have no lunch period. If a student did this, they in theory were supposed to get a note from I think the guidance office on the first day of school, saying that they don’t have a lunch, and give this note to either their fourth, fifth, or sixth period teacher, and that teacher was obligated to let the student brown-bag it in class. In practice, they scheduled the classes for the program I was in such that you couldn’t have an actual lunch period, so we all just inevitably grazed through the middle of the day.
We were not allowed to have White-Out anywhere in the school, including the teachers.
My middle school once tried to keep kids from skipping out before/after lunch by padlocking all the outside doors in the rear wing of the school. It worked, up until a friend of mine told his dad, who happened to be the chief of the local fire department. As it turns out, you’re not really allowed to do that (and for god’s sake, if one of the students is the son of the head of the fire department, don’t even try it).
My junior high school was really screwy. We had six classes, but there were only five periods per day, and the schedule would rotate. So on the first day of school we had periods ABCDE, on the second FABCD, etc.
On top of that, they staggered the lunch period. Each teacher was assigned a lunch: 1st, 2nd or 3rd. So if your fourth class/teacher of the day had “first lunch,” you went to lunch before the fourth period; if it was “third lunch”, you went to your fourth class and then to lunch. “Second lunch” meant you went to class for half an hour, had lunch, then returned to the same class for another half hour.
Of course, this made it incredibly easy to cut the fourth period - we’d just stay out for all three lunches.
My school had One-Way halls. Seriously, they enforced this. Due to overcrowding (they were operating at about 40% more students then the school was designed for.)
Woe was you if your classes were close together (but you had to go the wrong way down the one-way hall to get there.) You had to go around the ENTIRE SCHOOL, during the 5 minute passing period, and it required a very brisk walk. If you got a late start, you had no chance. After 5 minutes, the doors were locked, and the tardy kids were rounded up and sent to in-house suspension, a sort of hour-long detention holding tank. If you decided to circumvent the system and walk the wrong way to save yourself the trouble - the hall monitors would invariably catch you and send you to in-house suspension anyway.
My senior year of Catholic high school (1970-71) Sister Mary Corona decided that she wanted to use a contemporary novel for English class. She chose Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. I am sure she did not read the novel before ordering one for each and every senior. In the first class we were taking turns reading aloud. the third or fourth reader got to the portion of the first chapter featuring Sonny Corleone having wild monkey sex with Lucy Mancini against a door.
I have to admit that the nun carried on, and we read the whole novel.
It seems unusual (to me at least) that your high school had someone called a ‘dean’. What was the person’s job (aside from cutting hair)?
I don’t recall any unusual policies, but from fifth through mid-seventh grade the school I attended had some odd facilities. I lived in Singapore from third grade until the middle of seventh grade, and I attended the Singapore American School (SAS [more like ASS, am I right?]). When I started fifth grade, SAS opened up their new campus. That is campus, singular, one MASSIVE building, containing ALL SAS classrooms, from preschool to high school. The building did have discrete sections (one for second grade and lower, one for third through fifth, one for sixth through eighth, and another for high school), but it was, in the end, one GIGANTIC building. If that wasn’t weird enough, the cafeteria for the High School section had a Burger King and a Pizza Hut within it. I remember that if you were good/lucky you could earn/win a pass to the HS cafeteria and bring back pizza/a burger and fries. Of course the ‘ordinary’ lunch was made by a private contractor and was pretty damn good… or at least a hell of a lot better than what I got when I moved back to the States for the second half of seventh grade.
My high school had a Dean of Students. It was a Prep school where the students lived in dorms (because they came from all over the country). I suspect most Prep schools have Deans while most public schools have principals.
We had a school superintendent fresh from Georgia that once called in a snow day for 4" of snow. Why’s this weird? Because I lived in a ski-town that gets 360 inches of snow a year. Yea. After that, there were never any snow days ever ever again. Even with 5’ drifts blocking the roads and not even plowed yet.
We had a strict ‘no-hat’ rule too, I have no idea why. I think it was the in thing to do in the 90’s.
Yep, same rule at my schools, and they enforced it pretty rigorously too. To this day, if I’m wearing a hat and I go indoors, I’m inclined to take it off.
But during homecoming week, we did one day designated as hat day, and that was the one day of the year that you could wear a hat indoors.
(High)