Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain–and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done…I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play–not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem…solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.

No listening to music during breaks. If you were caught with headphones on you without even using them, you could face punishment.

It’s not enforced by my schools, but when I was little, speaking local languages at school was forbidden. It’s getting better now, but at that time, only the official language was allowed.

Another rule was boys weren’t allowed to wear longer hairs. If the hairline was below the ears, they would be asked to cut it shorter. From time to time, boys from my class were forced to cut their hair during classes with the company of a teacher.

No D&D in the halls during recess like seriously? Gotta love the “everything I don’t like is witchcraft” period of the 90s

My school strictly prohibits vehicle use, and considers all violations a strong offense that is on a three-strikes out rule.

Yes, it includes e-scooters and swan boats.

Yes, it includes whether you are in uniform or not.

Yes, it includes whether you are in school or not.

Yes, even if you are licensed.

Yes, it is enforceable anywhere.

The rule is obnoxiously blanket.

At my high school, we basically had no enforcement of the dress code except for one incident. For context, everyone wore hats, crop tops, shorts, and stuff kinda like Euphoria. Certain teachers and administrators would ask you to take off your hat, but I haven’t heard anyone get dress coded until senior year.

My school had a small trend where the senior guys would wear crop tops which lasted a few days until we heard that they banned guys wearing crop tops to school and dress coded one of the guys wearing them. Keep in mind, the girls could and did wear crop tops and no one dress coded them. Kinda ironic considering that the majority of dress code enforcement is towards girls, but the only time someone got dress coded (to my knowledge) in my four years of high school, it was a guy.

I went to a private religious school and they made a rule that there couldn’t be any PDA (public displays of affection) between opposite sexes. And they ruled that pretty well with an iron fist.

So we took that in the opposite direction, and I don’t think the administration ever saw so much guy on guy slapping of butts, “Hey bigais”, or pecks on the cheek in their lives.

My high school had a rule about the “difficulty” of books you could read. You weren’t supposed to read too high “above your grade”. I assumed this rule was something with the school library and their Accelerated Reader program.

Nope! Tried to give me ISS because I was reading “Screwjack”, which I brought from home. It wasn’t even in class! I was a fucking junior. A high school junior should be able to handle Hunter S. Thompson.

According to them it was “college level” and therefore I shouldn’t be reading it. My father raised absolute hell in that office. Don’t think they tried enforcing that rule again.

They also tried bitching about girls tops until a group of very pissed off redneck fathers had questions about how they were touching the students to measure the width.

I wish I could remember the specifics but my high school had an extremely ridiculous dress code policy at one point. Mostly targeting girls, of course, but also had weird shit like “no large/long coats.”

What I do remember perfectly though, is that a friend of mine and I, angrily pouring over the details of the stupid dress code, realized that capes were perfectly fine according to the code as written. So we both got huge capes and that was like a whole year of high school.

We weren’t allowed to wear shirts with text on them. Didn’t matter what they said; there could be no words of any kind on your clothes. It was some old ass rule that was still in the charter for the school or something from like 50 years ago, and one of those things most people just wouldn’t enforce. My school enforced it, though. Fuckin VP would be out front every day turning every kid he saw with text on their clothes back home to change.

Our idiot principal for my first two years tried to come up with his own rule that shirts had to be tucked in. The written rule added the caveat “if it was designed to be tucked in”. I purposely bought shirts that said they were not intended to be tucked in just so I could be a problem, and then made sure other people know which ones to buy.

A couple got caught behind the high school. Girl giving the blowie was made to apologize to the school over the PA system and then “encouraged” to go to a different school where she would “fit in better”. Boy got no punishment.

My school only allowed us to use 5MB of internet per day, even though their connection was essentially an unlimited T1 line (1.544Mbps). This was around 20 years ago when a lot of people in Australia still had dial-up.

Not a rule, but some stupid thing that was allowed to slip by for way too long.

My highschool’s firewall would often block the most innocuous websites, but that somehow did not include Pornhub. While they did eventually add it in, by that point it had been a known thing for years with even multiple cases of students going on it during classes.

“Zero tolerance” policy on fighting. Any “active” participation resulted in automatic suspension. That part sounds fine, but active participation included things like holding up your hands in self defense or trying to push the person sitting on your chest while punching you in the face off of you.