Mine did that in 1998 when John Glenn went back into space.
At my high school, all students were required to be in the building all day unless they had a class somewhere else (the county vocational school or the university branch, usually). Every student had an assigned place to be from 7:30 to 2:40, and not being there was truancy, even if it was a study hall. If there was a pep rally or an assembly for the last 45 minutes of the day, a teacher would be stationed at every single door to stop students from skipping it. (Oddly, that was the only time they really watched over the doors. Nothing stopped someone from just walking out when it was classtime, but god forbid you try not to show your school spirit.)
September 11th, 2001 we all sat in our classrooms and watched the towers fall. A lot of us were terrified to even be at school, but the teachers insisted we needed to watch history happen. On reflection, they were right.
Granted, that was 10th grade for me, but I know the same thing happened in middle schools.
Sheesh - we did the play with mercury thing, the drop a hunk of sodium in the sink of water thing [stalagtites of sodium from years of doing it above the sink:eek:] having everybodyhold hands and the end kid grounding and the first kid touching a van degraff generator. Mr Stenslic accidentally launched himself across the room when he touched the VdG generator with a ring on his hand when he wasn’t grounded out. He taught me to use a slide rule so I could inadvertantly cheat on the NYS regents AP chem test one year [the instructions changed from no slide rules to no electronic calculators that year. The next year they were no electronic calculators or slide rules :D] My school had a inner courtyard that was the default smoking lounge for the junior and senior class. Senior class had it’s own room set up as a lounge complete with coffee maker and fridge. It was not uncommon for the occasional joint to be passed around and the incense burner cranked up to cover the smell. It also had a TV.
mrAru’s chem class made TNT in the sink in the lab after school, they regularly wore belt knives and carried pocket knives. A number of them had shotguns on racks in their trucks [Kerman CA 70s]
If you were left handed it was a sign that the devil was inside you.
If you held hands with a boy you would get pregnant.
I walked to school every day alone until I got a car at 16. K-10,and i never died. Froze my ass off a few times. About a mile.
We use to play tag in church when it was empty . Good, good times.
My ex and his siblings went to Catholic school. They said if the constant smacking of the left hand didn’t work, the nuns would tie the lefty’s left hand to the back of the chair so he or she couldn’t use it.
When we had sex ed in 5th or 6th grade, when we learned about menstruation, we were taught that only married women could use tampons. I remember not ‘getting it’ at the time, and being very confused, because there were tampons in the bathroom at home that my sisters used, but I was too embarrassed to ask my mother about it.
In my high school (early-to-mid 90s), you had to be in the building the whole time - even the study hall teachers took attendance. I had signed up for an elective class for the first half of my senior year, which got cancelled due to low interest, so I was assigned a study hall instead. About the only time you could leave was during lunch - it wasn’t explicitly allowed, but since no attendance was taken, it was pretty easy to leave.
I believe that if you were a senior and didn’t have a full-day of classes, they would let you finagle a schedule that ended earlier, and just go home. My cancelled elective was in the morning though, so I was stuck with a study hall.
I had a high school teacher who would sometimes publicly ridicule students who had failed his tests. He was known to even hunt them down later in the day in different classrooms if they took his test in the morning.
Two incidents, both involving knives, oddly enough.
My Mom was teaching 10th grade English in an inner-city school (well, as inner-city as Oklahoma City in the late seventies had, anyway…). One day one of her kids didn’t like his test result and so he pulled a knife on her. She just looked him in the eye and said, “you give me that, right.now.” He did, and that was the end of it. She always says she knew he was basically a good kid, and that she could tell by the look on his face that he had regretted it the minute he pulled the knife out. I’m sure that if that happened today, the kid would at the least be expelled, if not spend some time in juvie. (It happened in front of a full classroom, so no keeping it secret.)
Second incident, me in second grade in the early eighties. I had gone “exploring” in my Dad’s closet one weekend and found a small pocketknife. Thought it was cool, so I took it to school to show all my friends. Teacher sees it, and gently takes it away to “keep it safe” at her desk for the rest of the day. And here’s the shocking part–at the end of the day she gave it back to me! She did tell me to keep it in my backpack, and that I shouldn’t bring any more knives to school, but I wasn’t in any trouble over it. I guess today if the school had a “zero tolerance” policy, they would have kicked me out even though I was a good student who never got into trouble, and the knife was just a dinky little dull pocket knife.
Some schools even today don’t list pocketknives in the same category as other weapons, actually. Mine banned them, but it was just a regular rule (which means you’d probably get a detention at most) instead of being in the dangerous weapons policy with its huge penalties.
ETA: The online handbook now lists them in the dangerous weapons policy, so I guess that era is over.
