In high school, the vice-principal would often grab a student from study hall and send him across the street for a pack of cigarettes. It was a sought after position, since he never made you go back to study hall.
Hm, first year back in the US I was in kindergarten, I walked to school, back home for lunch then back to school again, then back home. I believe it was about a half a mile to school. [1966, I was 5] There was a fairly steady stream of kids wandering back and forth to school so it was more of a herd situation. There was only trouble once, when a kid ran in front of a school bus when I was in first grade. Nowadays the school would close, there would be little herds of therapists wandering around telling people it was OK to feel sad or something. Meh. They washed the blood off the street with a hose and told everybody that was what might happen if you ran into the street without looking both ways first. I don’t think it scarred any of us for life.
I got in trouble in 4th grade for singing the only lyrics I knew to “My Bonney” which I learned from my Dad and a bunch of his army buddies. Danang Lulaby. [I find it interesting that this guy copyrighted it in 1997 when Bull Durham has been performing it since the mid 60s…] Definitely did not go over well in the hippy dippy singalongs organized in school. :rolleyes: Ended up with my Mom being called in to talk with the principal, I never heard what the results of the talk were. Knowing my Mom, she probably told him off as it wasn’t my fault that I never heard all those stupid kiddy songs. At home I listened to what mom or the maids listened to. I happen to have loved Cab Calloway and would sing along to Minnie the Moocher and Reefer Man and Jitterbug 
At the age of 8 I got a book,Portraits of Nobel Laureates in Medicine and Physiology. In it was a chapter on the discovery of the vaccine for Yellow Fever. Oddly enough there was a segment on the yellow fever vaccine in the history book. And even more oddly Max Theiler was never mentioned as the person who actually developed the vaccination for it so I told the teacher the book had the wrong information on it. I got sent to the office, and told I had to apologize to the teacher for lying. This one, my Mom actually stormed into the office the next day and gave the Dean of Discipline a piece of her mind, gave him a photocopy of the correct information, and told him that I was not going to apologize for having the correct information, nor was I going to serve any sort of disciplinary detention for it either. [Walter Reed only discovered that mosquitos carried it, he had nothing to do with the vaccine:rolleyes:]
When I was in 3rd grade, my teacher had her husband bring his handgun to class, where he walked us through gun safety, and stripped it down, to show us how all the parts worked. He wasn’t a cop or anything, just a farmer with a gun. This was in a rural N. California town in the late 70s. Some parents would go batty over that these days.
In the mid-late 80s, we had a “smoking quad” in high school. Even as an ex-smoker, I would probably go apeshit over that myself if it were in my kids’ school.
My HS photo teacher got in a spot of trouble for taking a tastefully covered topless picture of one of his underage female students (think sheet pulled over the chest sort of glamour shot), but he didn’t lose his job or anything. And the pics were very good. No way, no how, a teacher is keeping their job after something like that these days.
He talked a lot about drugs and stuff he had done as a kid, and admitted openly in class that he still smoked pot. I think the capper was when he walked in on a couple kids having sex in his darkroom, and just walked out and told the class to stay out of the darkroom for 5 minutes. When the couple came out of the darkroom, he led the class in a round of applause.
We all thought he was pretty cool, but now that I have kids, I can see how he was occasionally a tad irresponsible.
When I was in grade school, Wednesdays were Movie days at the local library. After school they would show old 35mm shorts in the back room of the local branch. (Mostly Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang). There was a librarian (Jim, the Kid’s Librarian, who hated kids) who started the movie, and then wandered off to do his job, so no adults were right there (granted, there were at least 3 librarians right on the other side of the door, but you know…). Very innocuous, but not something that I can see going on today
Similar thing happened to me in first grade. A boy pulled on my pigtails, causing me to shout out in surprise during story time. Evil Witch of a Teacher sent me to the corner and told me to not speak until she told me I could.
Lunchtime comes and goes. Recess comes and goes. The end-of-day bell rings, and everyone else herds out of the room. Teacher turns off the lights and locks the door. I was too scared of her to say “Boo!” so I just sat there silently. After about an hour of this, I realized that the teacher was NOT coming back to get me. So I banged on the locked door until a janitor found me. He took me down the long, dark ahllway to the principal’s office and I was petrified because I thought I was going to be in trouble.
The teacher was fired the next day. It turns out she had a habit of locking up kids. She had even locked my older sister in the school bathroom two years earlier!
When I was in high school (late 80s) there was this guy who had all kinds of offensive t-shirts he used to wear. The one I remember most had a picture of a great big penis on it and some vaginas that appeared to be running away and I believe it said something like, “Here kitty kitty…”
When some of the girls complained it was offensive, they were told not to look at it.
No way would that shirt be allowed in schools today.
During my junior year, two different teachers grabbed me by the throat and slammed me up against the wall for mouthing off.
Is this a rule? I’ve never heard of not being able to leave HS whenever you wanted. In my HS in the 80’s you could do the same thing.
When I was growing up all of us kids got the slipper in junior school, and the cane in senior school if we were badly behaved, nowdays if that happened the kids would no doubt be in counslling for twenty years after, and be an excuse for them to mug old people when they were adults.
Truth to tell it didn’t do us any physical or mental harm, and kept us in line.
Or to be honest the threat of it kept us in line.
At my high school in the early 2000s, you could only leave the campus during lunch and only if you were a senior and had specifically signed up for some kind of lunch pass at the start of the year. If the school’s responsible for its students, it makes sense that the administration would want to know where they were.
“Open Campus” rules vary from high school to high school. There’s no hard and fast rule for everywhere, but many schools do still operate by letting students leave as long as they don’t have a class.
Not to me but to a friend. There were 2 Stephens in my 3rd grade class, and the teacher made my friend spell his name “Steven” so she could tell their papers apart.
Sadly, because of school budget cuts one of those reasons is “there is no nurse at school any more.” Plenty of districts these days have just one nurse for the entire district–or none.
A couple of things:
The bus broke down near the end of the route but still several miles from our homes. This was before cell phones. I believe there was maybe a radio on the bus to call for help. Rather than wait, we persuaded the driver to let us walk the rest of the way home, since we knew the route by heart we’d just follow it. This was either grade school or middle school, oldest age we would have been was 13.
In 8th grade my band teacher took me aside, alone, into his office, to tell me how much I had matured and how pretty I had become. I was 13, had NOT been an early bloomer, rather I was a late bloomer, but I was so flattered. Holy crap that is creepy as hell now that I look back, and not innocuous at all.
Also, no school I ever went to, grade through high school, ever had a school nurse.
Oh and we had a smoking section outside for seniors who had their parents’ permission.
You know those bright red guards on paper cutters, to keep people from chopping off their fingers? Well, paper cutters didn’t have those when I was in Junior High, back in the early '60s. A girl in my homeroom cut off a few of the fingers of her left hand. And that was before surgeons could reattach things.
No lawsuit.
Another classroom with a substantial amount of mercury in it, here. (Kept in a mason jar, unsecured on a shelf.) I remember spills of it that would probably close schools until the Hazmat teams were finished, today.
Also, bare-bottomed spanking by a microbus-drivin’ tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippie kindergarten teacher.
I had a grade five teacher for music who spent almost the entire class talking about her cats, every day. She would hand students her keys and have them go down to fetch a fresh bottle from her car from time to time. She made it to retirement with no disciplinary actions for that, as far as I know.
I see that there have been a couple of mercury related stories already.
Mine was circa 3rd-grade, and a kid brought in a whole vial of mercury for show and tell. A handful of it was passed around and poured from one kid’s hand to the other as we all got to play with it.
These days, if such a thing were to happen in a school, the hazmat team would shut down the school, and lawsuits would be flying around like mad.
ETA: Dang, simulpost with yet another mercury story! Maybe we’re on to something about our generation…
That reminded me of something that happened in grade 6 (1981). A boy was wearing a shirt that said “If you’re Canadian, show me your beaver!” and had a picture of a lady lifting up her skirt and a huge, happy beaver right where her crotch would be.
He wore it a couple of times and the teacher would tell him not to wear it again. Finally one day when he wore it, she sent him home to change it.
I can’t imagine a shirt like that being made for an 11 year old boy now, never mind parents actually buying it and sending their son off to school wearing it.
Agreed on all these points. I’m a debate coach and I’ve given kids rides home before- sure, I try to protect myself as much as possible (making it multiple kids at once, asking kids to give other kids rides, etc), but I’m not going to abandon a kid at 10 PM after a tournament because mom isn’t answering the phone to come pick him up.
As the mother of two middle schoolers (12 and 13), I agree. Many of the things on here are still permitted. And many of the things that are a big deal now, could be big deal when I was in school. I got it trouble for walking home from school in Kindergarten and the school was in my backyard - I didn’t even have to cross any streets (the Mom who was supposed to pick up was late, and I knew my Mom had someplace to be, so I took off - there was a hill and a little bit of woods between my backyard and the school - possibly 1/4 of a mile of walking - but NO streets).
Physical discipline and sexual harassment ARE much less tolerated.