i remember that song!! like others have said, the boys always carried knives to school. there was always a student smoking area, usually under a big tree in front of the school. kids regularly had guns in the gun rack in the back of their trucks–and they were left out there all day in the parking lot! just don’t be caught chewing gum, though. that would get you a couple of licks with that big wooden paddle with the holes in it!
in shop class I made a knife with a blade length of 11". I used it as a bookmark between classes. Solid brass hilt with a walnut handle. The blade was polished to a mirror finish and the edge was sharpened so you could shave with it. Made a leather sheath for it. Got an A on it.
Always carried aspirin and other drugs to school.
Took a course on shooting handguns at school.
We used to play “Butts up” in Middle School. That would have been the mid 90s, I graduated high school in '99.
Carried a pocket knife (of the “Swiss army” variety.") Also, played with toy figures with guns, and sometimes, actual toy guns. The horror!
Also, in middle school, played a gamed we called “Smear the Queer” almost every lunch break. That game involved chasing whomever had the ball (usually a football) and tackling them until someone else was able to get the ball and run off. Repeat. Accompanied by yelling, jeering, cussing etc. No one ever tried to stop us, as far as I can recall.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I wasted my youth on obedience and virtue…
I loved that game! And we played that in elementary school, in maybe '99. Great game. Admittedly, this was a very backwoods farm town where the administration was ecstatic when parents simply made kids attend regularly, but still.
I went to high school from 1988 - 1991. We were free to bring rifles in our vehicles during deer season. Lots of students (including the hottest girl around) loved to deer hunt before school. It wasn’t considered controversial at all and neither were knives. My .357 magnum was considered marginal. Drugs and alcohol were not tolerated.
Fast forward 9 years. This was in a school district far away from mine. My youngest brother and his friend explored an abandoned barn and found this very old sickle type thing without a handle and rusted into nothing. They through it into the bed of my brother’s truck. My little brother forgot a book a few days later and policy dictated that only a teacher or the principle could go and get it. An hour went by and there was no book but there were plenty of police in waiting. He was ripped from the school campus straight to police headquarters.
Expulsions hearings were started even though my mother was an education professor and one of the foremost education speakers in the world and a author of two successful books. Nothing could be done. That is what zero tolerance means to worthless fucktards like them.
The story ends well however. My mother had him drop out immediately and go to community college until he was qualified to attend LSU. He did great at that and got a degree from a reputable university despite the smelly air of cunts and assholes stinking the place up in the beginning. They still don’t hold all of the power and anyone can potentially could get out of it with the right knowledge,
I think it would be great if all teachers were called into a security location one by one and have their purses, their body, and their vehicle searched. Substitute teachers can fill in as the charges get worked out.
We called that by the more politically correct name “Kill the Carrier” (unless it meant "carrier of the H.I.V. virus:eek:).
Our elementary school also had Thunderdome. Basically a geodesic dome shaped playground aparatus that seemed pretty huge to a fourth grader. Your social status was roughly indicated by how high you got to sit on outside of the dome. Disputes were obviously settled in the dome.
I never understood the recent negative connotations of Dodgeball or gym class in general. I wasn’t particularly atheltic, but do people really have nightmarish memories of gym or Dodgeball?
When the metalwork teacher wasn’t looking, I use the lathe to make a very small cannon - on the way home, I tried test-firing it with gunpowder that had been in my bag all day (removed from a couple of shotgun cartridges a friend had snagged from somewhere or other.
It was pretty disappointing really - it just went fwoof!
In Grade Eight, which would have been 1984-1985, I wrote a very long story for creative writing - it had to be thirty pages long - called “8A in L.A.” It was an extensive murder-mystery-comedy centering around the gruesome slayings of my classmates who had, for the purposes of the story, all won a big lottery and moved to Hollywood. (I went to the trouble of researching LA’s geography - not easy to do when I had never been there and when there was no Internet - for a sense of realism, and I remembered that story well 20 years later when I started doing a lot of business in LA and found, to my delight, that I’d been reasonably accurate in my descriptions.) It was exceedingly, brutally violent - I believe that by the end of the book almost eighty percent of both Grade 8 classes (8A and 8B, hence the title) had been shot, stabbed, thrown from high rise office towers, incinerated with a flame thrower, run over by cars, poisoned, or blown to smithereeens, along with scores of innocent bystanders and dozens of the henchmen of the shadowly villian orchestrating the murders. If you made a movie about it it’d make “Rambo” look like “Sesame Street.” At the end the evil mastermind turns out to be my teacher, Mr. Julian. The final confrontation went like this:
ME: “Mr. Julian! You! It was you all along!”
MR. JULIAN: “Yes, Rick. It’s me. And now I’ll have your head, too!”
ME: “But… why? Why did you kill all those kids?”
MR. JULIAN: “Hated 'em.”
In the ensuing battle, I slay Mr. Julian with my .45. It was deliberately over the top and hysterically funny, an assessment I base on the fact that both Mr. Julian, his student teacher, and the 8B home room teacher laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks. I got an A+. I proudly brought the story home to my parents, who found it equally hilarious.
I was a perfectly normal, nice kid who never set animals on fire or did anything psychopathic. I just was out to write a funny story, and that’s how everyone took it.
If a kid wrote a story like that today they’d be expelled, no question about it. If the school board allowed the kid back at all, it’d only be after a battery of psychiatric tests.
Carrying several hundred rounds of [blank] ammunition to work and selling it to some classmates. In front of a teacher.
Streaking on the back of a Kawasaki down the middle of the hall at lunchtime.
Unbelievably, the first result in MSN is this.
We sang that song too! Except at our school the target was always, always Barney (the Dinosaur).
Oh, good grief - I still remember that from third grade or so.
<clears throat>
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school.
We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule.
We have wrecked the principal’s office, we have kicked her out of school.
The brats go marching on!
Glory, glory hallelujah,
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine
And the juice came pouring down.
That would probably get you juvenile detention until age 18 and then 20 years these days.
I’ve read into the history of public schools in the U.S.
Believe it or not, it appears that whittling was a serious offense in those days.
1957 to 1961 Cathloic High School run by Nuns.
Carried a .25 Beretta every day my Junior year.
Everybody had knives, big ones.
Senior year in a different Catholic school, we had Cristian Brothers as teachers for the boys. The girls still got Nun’s for most classes except Chem & Trig which the Brothers taught. ( It was a consolidation of two Catholic High schools.)
The Brothers would beat the tar out of you if you needed it. Had a dress code. Not much else but no smoking on campus, etc…
In my freshamn year, the principal was a little Nun about 5’ tall. She would make a football playing senior jock who messed up pick her up and put her on the top of her desk and then stand there while she knocked him silly, bloody nose and all. then they would lift her down and apologize for causing trouble. Happened to many a tough guy.
There was no trouble for the week or mild in those schools.
I have a lot of stories but the point being, they used common sense, the parents back them and helped them and they got-er-done. Flunked those that need it and they just repeated that grade or class. Not scared for life , most did well.
Today they don’t educate, they ‘ware house’ and they are scared because we won’t back them.
Even the public schools did not have the trouble of today. They did not have to call the cops, they could handle it.
Using a sling shot to put M-80’s on the roof of the school on warm nights cause the Nuns would sleep outside. The actually lived on the top floor of the school.
I worked as a janitor for two years and keys to everything, could run the old boiler that made the steam for heating, etc… We were allowed to take all the responsibility we could handle.
After school while I was pushing the broom, I was king and could keep teachers out of rooms until I was finished, etc… You have no idea the power feeling that telling Nuns what to do, is for a Catholic kid in a Catholic school…
Not expelled, but in sixth grade I wrote a short story for a book-binding project that netted me a counselor visit. I was a precocious reader, so a story involving, in part, the abduction, torture, and death of a female character didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Heck, it’s not like I had her raped or anything, though I suppose the torture was a bit like BDSM. Now, that would probably have gotten me sent to a child psychologist at least and if any of the kids had found out about it, I probably would have been hounded as a “freak” or “psycho.”
Then (mid-80s) it wasn’t as big of a deal, though they did check to see if I was being abused. Nope. While my father is an on-and-off alcoholic, he wasn’t physically or sexually abusive.
That experience put me off writing for a while. It was a long time before I wrote anything that required even a bit of imagination after that.
After Matt Shepard got killed, I wrote a poem with some dark, violent imagery. A teacher encouraged me to submit it to a poetry competition, in which I got fourth place continent-wide. [insert obligatory text about what said poem would net me nowadays]…
…actually, we still seem to be semi-sane about that sort of thing in these parts, or at least I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. Actually, I’ve yet to see a high school with a metal detector during my various interventions for GRIS-Montreal.
One of my husband’s cousins, who graduated from high school about 2 years ago, was told that they couldn’t play “School’s Out” on the last day because it suggested that the school was going to be destroyed. IIRC, they were just told to turn it off, but still…
Not at school, but a couple of years ago, post 9/11, my husband and I were joking around about pictures that little girls drew in school compared to pictures that little boys did. So I started drawing them; the girl picture had unicorns and princesses and fairies and butterflies and probably a puppy or kitten or two. The boy picture had robots and tanks and airplanes and guns and bombs and ninjas, and then, just because it’s what boys do, I “set” the whole thing on fire with colourful flames.
Sadly, it occurred to us that the “boy” picture probably wouldn’t be acceptable in schools anymore, or would at least have a note sent to the parents and/or time discussing the image with a counselor or something.