• yiliu@informis.land
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • oktupol@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

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

  • Pazintach@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • randint@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      banning local languages was also done by my local government around 50ish years ago. in every school. take a wild guess at where I’m from?

      (no, I’m not dutch despite being on feddit.nl)

      • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Canada, I’m guessing? We did all sorts of horrible things like that even til the 1990s to the First Nations peoples.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

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

  • lunaticneko@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • viridian@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • lastrogue@lemmy.einval.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • spiderman@ani.social
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      1 year ago

      bruh some of my friends weren’t even allowed to talk to the opposite gender in their schools.

      • Wahots@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        This is honestly one of the weirdest things I’ve heard in awhile. Seriously, are people not allowed to have opposite sex friends? Jesus.

        • spiderman@ani.social
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          1 year ago

          eventually my friend’s class had this rule after a parent complained about their daughter talking to a boy at 11pm. i mean india is a pretty conservative country if you exclude big cities.

          • Wahots@pawb.social
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            1 year ago

            School: not allowed to have opposite sex friends

            Society: not allowed to have same sex relationships

            Parents of millenials/gen z: why is everyone antisocial, not talking to girls, and not having kids?

            Lol

  • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I get the fact that reading too high above your grade means you may be way over your head in vocabulary and grammar, but it’s not entirely applicable to everyone. I read Pride and Prejudice and one friend said I sounded posh from the language I accidentally started using. So if a high schooler or junior high schooler can handle it, why not?

    • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      The AR Reading program that was popular in the early 2000s was an absolute disaster. It basically killed my love of reading for almost 10 years. They wouldn’t let me read books “above my level” based on some BS test that used timed reading. I wasn’t dumb, I just sub-vocalized when I read like a lot of people, so I read slowly. Read slow, don’t finish the test, grade poor, so “no books for you!” said the school.

  • nparkinglot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • vagrantprodigy@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • funnyletter@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      My middle school required all shirts to be tucked in and they meant ALL SHIRTS. They went around making kids tuck in sweatshirts. It was dumb. And also racist because it was the 90s and the rule was made in response to baggy clothing being popular especially amongst black kids, so they considered large untucked shirts to be gang related.

  • Shambling Shapes@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • LANCESTAAAA@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, my high school had a similar issue. There was an “alternative” school that was basically worse in every capacity and every deviant student or pregnant student was “encouraged” to transfer. The wild thing was you would still walk the stage with everyone from the initial high school so graduation day was like 20% people you didn’t even know or thought they moved away.

  • dan@upvote.au
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Rin@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Drama_durch_Lama@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      My school had the same thing. In fifth grade I had to give a presentation about computer viruses, but the firewall even blocked the standard Wikipedia article for it. Porn however? No problem!

  • Sluggles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “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.

    • Salix@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I really don’t understand why schools have this rule (at least in many places in the US). Are they trying to teach you to not practice self defense and just let it happen? Doesn’t sound like a great thing to teach.

      • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s easy for the administrators. No investigation, no attempt to understand what happened.