I never did that, but in my Chicago neighborhood that was called “skitching” (ski + hitching, probably).
The punishment for making trouble, at my first elementary school - grades 1-4 - was a 15-minute time-out. In the bathroom.
They didn’t lock you inside or anything, you just had to stay in there until they told you to come out.
I’m “only” 34, so this was the early 1990s. I doubt this would fly today.
It was a private school run by Quakers. It was and still is considered a prestige school locally, and the quality of education and access to books, computers, and interesting activities was top-notch. But looking back on it, it does seem weird to be punished by having to sit in the bathroom, doesn’t it?
Don’t forget the scalding. After your creature was ready in the Thingmaker, you used the detachable wire handle to dunk the metal mold in a water bath. It was so hot that it hissed and gave off real steam! Don’t get too close, kids.
Another thing I just remembered. Did anybody take “Shop Class” in middle school? There was plenty there that would likely not be permitted today. For example, I elected to take “Blacksmithery Skills” when I was 13 years old. This entailed using a forge to get a piece of steel nearly white hot, then using a hammer to bash the hell out of it on an anvil to make something. I ended up making a wrecking bar, complete with notch on a curved head, and a slight curve on the flattened other end. Yes, it has been put to good use in the years since, and I still have it.
Who, nowadays, would say, “Here’s how to use a forge, kid,” and let the kid go to it? Admittedly, I did have to submit a design, but once it was approved by the teacher, I was basically unsupervised until my project was completed, and I submitted it for marking.
Oh, let’s not forget the asbestos gloves that were required to work on the forge.
Heh. One summer when I was about 9 I got bored. So I took the cardboard roll from paper towels and taped one end closed. Then I sat all afternoon snipping off match heads and putting them in the tube. I bent off the silver stuff from about 20 sparklers. I threw in some paper caps for good measure. I made a fuse out of toilet paper and lit the sucker.
Started the shrubs on fire. It was one of only about 3 times I ever heard my Dad use profanity. “Peter, WTF did you do!?!” as he was stomping on the shrubs trying to put the fire out.
Seeing it was the late 60’s with no internet or cable TV, I have no idea where I got the idea from.
A hammer? I used to set off caps with my thumbnail.
The whole roll at once?
Did shop class with all the saws and stuff. But was already sort of used to it. Also took metals class (I think that was what it was called). I had a car so must have been 16 at the time. Overhead mills, metal lathes, gas and arc welders. I only set myself on fire once. Bottom of my jeans lit up. I stepped my foot into the cooling bucket. I did learn how to weld though.
Mod Hat on: Please refrain from Junior Modding & derailing threads.
This is only a mod note, but I am checking if it should be a warning instead.
ETA: No warning, just a note. But let’s drop the side issue completely please.
Re: t-shirts… at the beginning of my senior year I saw Aerosmith on their Permanent Vacation tour, and bought a t-shirt that said “shit happens” across the back. I, of course, proudly wore the shirt to school the next day. My first period government teacher decided to get all uptight about it, but basically just said “do not wear that shirt again.” After that, I was careful not to take my flannel off when wearing that shirt in his class. None of my other teachers ever said anything about it.
Towards the end of the school year, one day it was warm enough that I didn’t wear a covering over the shirt, and I forgot that Gov Teach didn’t like the shirt. He didn’t say anything during class, but when the bell rang, he followed me out the door and said “I told you not to wear that shirt. Go to the office right now.” The office was in sight across the quad, so he stood there and watched me until he saw me go through the office door.
Well, I had been a T.A. all year, and was in that office every day doing stuff for the teacher. They knew me. So I walked into the office like I belonged, said hi to the the admins as I blew by them, walked down the hall through the back, waved to the principal as I passed her office, and went out the back door and on to my next class.
So kind of a twofer here. Do students have that level of trust with the school office these days?
One at a time, but yes. I don’t think it was possible to set off more than a handful at a time with a hammer.
And I can still remember getting some of the burning “gunpowder” under my fingernail…
I had a Creepy Crawler Thingmaker II. Although I never burned myself, I always wondered about the Creepy Crawler Thingmaker One. It probably was just a hotplate with a few inset insect mounds.
A funny comedy bit about unsafe products.
Earlier time and different place (Orange County, California – Nixon country) but I remember the teacher-advisor and the print shop balking at the use of the word bitchin’ in the student newsaper as an adjective at the height of the surfer craze.
Central Indiana in the mid-eighties, I remember some kid got in trouble for wearing a T-shirt from a local radio station that said “Kick Ass Rock-n-Roll.”
Baking ShrinkyDinks in the oven and building bike ramps on the side of the street are just a couple of the fond memories I have of my childhood.
Tshirts were underwear when I was a kid, and they didn’t say anything at all (unless you count the label on the inside of the back of the neck, which said their size and what they were made out of.)
But my senior year one of my classmates pulled off early college admission, which was a new thing at the time, and disappeared mid-year to go straight to college without ever having finished her senior year. The administration was ticked off, and didn’t want her in the yearbook. They didn’t vet exactly what went to the printer, though, and the yearbook staff put her in there anyway: none of the usual stuff about awards and so on, just her picture and her favorite saying about the school.
Her favorite saying about the school was ‘I say we blow it up.’
Yearbook printers didn’t blink. Students thought it was fine. Administration, faced with the fact that yearbooks were already printed, decided to ignore it – and what they minded wasn’t the saying, but that the yearbook staff had included her in the yearbook.
I don’t think it remotely occured to any of us that somebody might actually blow up the school.
Ok, this one isn’t actually my childhood, but rather something from several decades before I was born, but it seems like this thread is the most fitting place for it.
Last month a blog I read posted a 1950s era California tourism ad that, among other things, touted Los Angeles’ freeways as a tourist attraction. The ad shows a family standing by the side of an off-ramp, looking at the interchange. And the author mentions older folks talking of having a picnic in a spot overlooking the freeway, just to look at the freeway. I imagine this must have been a fairly short-lived phenomenon, as the novelty of freeways began to wear off.
I do miss my radium dial watch.
I remember in elementary school in the late 80’s/early 90’s we would play the game “Oregon Trail” on our PC’s that was an educational PC game where you went along the Oregon Trail and tried to survive using your provisions and whatever you could scavenge along the way. The game was best liked for it’s young players for it’s interactive “Hunting” sessions where your character had a single shot gun and would hunt for food, and pretty much every single kid who played that game would immediately kill everything on that hunting screen despite the fact the game told you you were wasting valuable ammo and that you couldn’t carry more than 50 pounds of meat anyway back to your wagon, and yet everyone always just murdered every animal they could find squirrels included.
I feel a game like that today marketed towards children would probably get picketed by both Animal Rights Groups and Gun Control Groups.
We had a concrete slab for smokers in high school… students that smoked.<
Teen smoking was strongly frowned on by adult authority figures, while also being tacitly permitted–witness outdoor smoking areas like most high schools used to provide for the student body right up into the late 1970s.