Parent, student, or staff, what’s the dumbest damn regulation you’ve personally come across at an educational institution?
In 3rd grade we had a rack of books in the class and we would sometimes be given half an hour to pick a book and read, I was a reader, I got like half way through a book and it was time up and we had to put the books back, well I wanted to finish it so I put it in my bag and went to ask the teacher if I could finish it later, she was busy talking to someone and told me she would talk to me “in a minute” and like a 7 or 8 yo I promptly forgot about it. An hour later she sees the book in my bag, calls me out in front of the whole class for stealing and when I tried to tell her Id tried to ask if it was ok to take it home so I could read it later but she was busy she called me a “liar and a theif” and back onto the shelf it went.
A few days later I took the book and hid it behind a cabinet near the door to our room, at reading time she noticed it was missing, demanded to know what Id done with it, accused me of stealing it again and tipped my bag onto the floor to find it. When she didnt find it, she told me “once a theif always a theif” and when the bell rung that day and she was busy packing up her desk, me the last kid out the door put his bag down to tie his shoe… and I stole the fucking thing.
If you’re going to treat me like I’m guilty anyway, might as well be guilty.
What a fucking shit educator: ‘Once a thief always a thief.’ Humiliating a student in front of the class.
If I was the principal I would have them fired, or at least suspended.
This was like 1992 or so… it was either 2nd or 3rd grade I dont remember. It also kind of predates parents siding with a 7yo over their teacher. She was a cunt though.
There was a pretty big rich/poor divide in that school, I learned young that you have to prove the rich are guilty and the poor have to prove they are innocent.
In hindsight as I get older I’ve realised that moment was one of those cornerstones that shape the way people grow, I wonder if I would have turned out not to be a hustler for most of my 20s if she hadnt been a twat. If people are going to assume the worst, might as well take the cash too.
It’s so weird how so many of the teachers I encountered in my school years were just like this. Of course you’re going to get some, but why do such a surprising amount of people that think this way choose to become educators? It sucks for them and all the people who had their ‘teaching’ inflicted upon them.
This is a bot ^
How can you tell?
Don’t mind him, he follows me around copy and pasting the same comment and downvoting everything I say. If you’re interested in beef and drama between 2 very unimportant people on Lemmy, here’s a wall of text explaining what happened below:
A few days ago I made a comment on an article about people being afraid to board planes manufactured by Boeing, the article said something about air travel being statistically very safe, but I tried to point out that given we have specific reason to be worried about Boeing aircraft, that’s not particularly reassuring since those statistics could likely change if poor manufacturing processes leads to lots of incidents bringing down the averages. Unfortunately for me, I tried to explain this with a really awkward and convoluted analogy that took a lot of text to write out so someone replied to tell me that they didn’t read my comment but that they assumed I was trying to say Boeing planes are safe and nothing to worry about and that they disagreed with that idea and Boeing should be punished and dragged through the courts.
I thought that was kind of ironic and replied to that person telling them that their comments might be more relevant if they read the thing they were commenting on. This triggered a sudden and significant pouring of downvotes upon my original comment and that second one and someone replied saying my original comment looked like it had been written by AI. Then our friend Zuberi here got really excited and started copy and pasting an AI prompt that he thought was going to trigger some kind of response. I didn’t really feel like arguing with randoms to defend this one comment that even I thought could have been written better so I ignored them but that seemed to really get on their nerves so now I have this goofy little Lemmy sidekick saying “this is a bot ^” and downvoting me whenever I say anything to anyone. I’d be tempted to think the repetitive and limited responses mechanically reproduced regardless of context within a short timeframe of whatever I post was behaviour indicative of a “bot” but frankly I think a bot would have managed to be a lot cleverer than that and it’s pretty clear this is someone who just got a little too excited and just can’t help themselves. I’m not sure if they ever really thought I was some kind of a chatbot or “AI” at first but I think now they probably know that’s unlikely and they’re just holding a grudge for reasons they likely don’t even know themselves and never bothered to interrogate. Ironically I can’t even see my original comment that caused the whole fracas because presumably this guy or his mates reported it for… something because it and a later comment explaining it got removed by a moderator.
Anyway that’s how I got my first Lemmy follower (who’d have thought Lemmy even had those eh?). I try my best to be entertaining and a good influence on them, I hope their experience watching me enjoy Lemmy has been as enjoyable to them as just actually browsing Lemmy for themselves could have been.
Reminds me of a teacher I had in primary school. She was most of the time okay, but she had her moments where she’d pick a student (usually of a minority background) and just make an example of them.
One kid walked to school everyday because her mum worked and didn’t have time for her in the morning. Sweet girl, but she was often 10mins late. Teacher made an example of her, criticised her entire home life and implied her mother was a bad one.
I once got in a fight with “Bad” kid (he put me in headlock and I rammed him against a fence to try to get free). The kid was troubled and everyone knew it, but if you left him alone he left you alone. The “Nice” kid from nice background told me that I should tell my teacher what happened. I didn’t want Bad kid to get into trouble over me, so I opted to say nothing. Nice kid told his teacher, who then told my teacher, who then made an example by pulling me in front of the class and calling me a coward. At the point I learned that sympathy for your enemy yields no reward to the judgemental.
Reminds me of a teacher my dad told me about when he was in trade school (he went to a trade school for high school back in the 70s/80s). He said all the students called the guy Mr. Hitler behind his back.
He would regularly make fun of students, call them stupid for not understanding things, send kids to the principal for the slightest infractions, etc. My dad didn’t grow up with money but started working at like 14, and he said it always bothered him the most that Mr. Hitler would especially pick on poor kids.
“Oh, is that all your family could afford for you, rags and old shoes?” “Really, the same pants two days in a row, what, your family can’t afford to wash them?” Just shit like that, in front of the whole class, absolutely demeaning and stuff that wouldn’t be tolerated today.
Well, apparently Mr. Hitler suffered a stroke at some point during my dad’s high school days, and according to him, not a single student gave a damn to do anything to help him. He had trouble walking/was in a wheelchair, kids would let the door slam behind them despite him trying to get through. If he had several things to carry, students would ignore him requesting help to carry them, pretending like they couldn’t hear him.
Harsh, but I guess you reap what you sow
I got suspended once because someone “punched” me as a joke. By the letter of the regulation it counted as a fist fight even though (a) we weren’t fighting and (b) I didn’t do the punching. Good times.
Schools are pro bullying and this stuff is part of it
Lol similar things to me but only with a disciplinary letter saying I was being punched. We were joking, it was not a punch (it was more like a ticklish thing that I exaggerated a bit), and we had both to go in front of the school principal. Wonderful
You can’t be late more than x times. Sounds fair till u realise the school bus was always late hence racking up like 200 official warnings. School couldn’t change the rule cos government regulations bus couldn’t get there sooner cos government refused to change the shedule.
My school at some point tried to be very extreme about being late. A new rule was that if you were late for even 1 minute, you won’t be allowed in the school.
I was literally walking to the door and saw a kid go in, but I wasn’t allowed in because oh I guess I was a few seconds too late.
Me and other teenagers crowded around the front door and the exchange was basically this
“So you won’t let us in?”
“No, you were late. Go home.”
And we all shrugged and took the day off. Needless to say the rule didn’t last very long and there were many angry parents.
Homie! My school was neighbors to a bar right next to the train station. When they said, “no,” I said party!
Have psychologists studied this behavior? Like, what goes wrong in school personnel that makes them this dumb?
My school briefly had a rule that when you were late, you could take a note (3 notes = detention), OR you could go to headmaster and explain yourself during lunchbreak.
Lunchbreak was 40 minutes, so if you stood there for more than 40 minutes, you’d be late for the next class, meaning you’d of course show up again tomorrow. Repeat for a while and there were kids lined up through the hallway, standing in line to explain they were late due to standing in line.
The rule only lasted a few weeks. They changed it so that you could get 9 notes before detention.
Why couldn’t the school change the rule though? Weren’t they free to have implemented it in the first place? Once it became apparent it was unworkable couldn’t they have changed it?
This is a bot ^
Anyone who ate hot lunch had to eat everything on their tray, and we weren’t allowed to pass on any part of the meal because children in other countries were starving or something. Lunch ladies checked our trays before we were allowed to leave the cafeteria.
On the days when sauerkraut was served, we’d take turns being the sauerkraut smuggler, cramming that dank crap from about a dozen 8 year old kids’ trays into an empty milk carton, so we could toss it all without the lunch lady catching it. One day when I was the kraut smuggler, lunch nazi grabbed my carton and marched me back to the table. She said I had to eat every strand of the milky garbage we’d all stowed before I could leave.
I tried, but kept gagging and retching. I sat huddled with the collective slop at the table, crying for about 3 hours before my teacher found me and released me from lunch jail.
Supposedly there was a similar policy at my elementary school early on, which led to a kid being forced to eat something they were allergic to. As the story goes, they vomited violently all over the lunch monitor and then had to be taken to the nurse’s office. Their parents were not amused. The policy did not stay in place.
I literally dont understand how teachers or school staff can be so authoritarian that theyd rather a kid die than that kid possibility be lying
They’ve got a tiny scrap of power and by god, they intend to use it! More enjoyable than going to therapy for the abuse they suffered as children.
Holy shit, that last part though. That’s the kind of shit that scars children. I’d be going to jail if you were my kid.
I hope you came through it without too much damage and is in a better place now.
Got detention for having the wrong shoe texture.
Texture.
What was the texture? What was the texture supposed to be? We’re missing valuable context!
they wore alligator skin shoes and not beaten baby seal skin shoes.
chewy
This is a bot ^
During a grade 6 camping retreat, my best friend and I got in trouble for gambling, playing five card draw with evenly dealt chips and no actual money.
It was eventually officially decided that the chips were the problem. We collected rocks from the gravel road and played with those instead. Our roommates who originally complained were pissed, but five card draw with pebbles instead of chips was apparently allowed
When I was in 8th grade year, right before the end of the year in one of my classes, we ended up having a substitute teacher. For some reason, she and a few of us were talking about poker and that we, the students, didn’t know how to play.
The next day, she brings in cards and chips and is trying to teach us how to play! She did say that she probably shouldn’t be doing this, but continued anyway. Interestingly, this was in Utah, in a suburb of Salt Lake City, which is the capital of the Mormon church. And she herself was Mormon. I always thought it was funny that our Mormon teacher was teaching us how to gamble in school!
I was in middle school when the Columbine shooting happened. The following year, they updated the dress code to require everyone to tuck in their shirts with the stated reasoning that it would prevent people from concealing weapons.
I too was in middle school when Columbine happened. The next year we weren’t allowed to wear trench coats… In Phoenix…
To be fair, some places go a little hard with the AC.
My school did the same thing. Seemed kinda pointless. They also required belts then as well.
I went to a religious highschool, and at the time I was (shocker) a teenager. You could sign up either for religious education, or for Christian classes. Me being an atheist (and, I stress again, a teenager), went for the least terrible option.
After the first guest teacher came in to talk about their own religion, we got a new rule.
“Students are not allowed to ask more than 5 questions each to guest teachers”.
One class later that was changed to
“Students are only allowed to ask 3 respectful questions to guest teachers”
That rule was then dropped, and I get a stern talking to explaining that I, personally, was allowed to ask only a single question during religious education classes.
And then I didn’t have to follow those classes anymore, which was nice. But with a couple of years of maturity on me, I feel like I could have been nicer to the poor guest teachers.
Sounds like you did the right thing. Advocates for anti-truth don’t deserve to be treated nicely.
Man, I loved my middle/high school’s religion classes as an Agnostic.
It was a super fancy prep school, so they went all in with the religion classes being ‘academic’ with the teachers needing a relevant PhD or Masters.
I still remember my very conservative Old Testament teacher writing all sorts of passive aggressive statements across my envelope pushing essays and then begrudgingly giving them A- grades.
The other teacher for NT and electives was awesome though. Instilled a real passion (pun intended) for the material with fun classes that did things like look at early Christianity as a cult and the sociological factors going into it or reading bizarre apocrypha like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which in later years I realized was less ‘bizarre’ and more subversive and probably even satirical).
Religion could be a really cool class, and it’s a shame cowardly institutions try to make it “indoctrination by any other name” as opposed to “let’s learn about the criterion of embarrassment and Peter’s denials.”
My highschool had a no yoga pants/tights/stretch pants/leggings rule. But only enforced it for the not hot girls.
One day I wore a pair of my (at the time) girlfriend’s yoga pants to school. When a teacher stopped in me the hallway I just pointed out all the other girls wearing them with no issue. I got detention but yoga pants were never brought up again.
Also the volleyball team wore yoga shorts as part of the uniform.
I do love the “shorts can be no more than 1 inch above the knees”, but “cheerleaders get to wear the equivalent of bathing suits to class because it is a ‘uniform’.”
Not allowing to go to the toilet whilst in your lessons and only during break/lunch time.
This was such an issue since needing a toilet is a natural thing and it’s not something we can control/control for very long and it’s very bad if we do so, yet teachers would literally send out detentions/warnings if we even attempted, which was so idiotic of itself.
The reason we couldn’t use the toilet whilst we were in our lesson, was cuz to the teachers, they though it was an excuse for us to skip lessons, which already caused many ppl inc myself to immediately lose trust in our teachers and therefore internalise our problems, which was a huge case at my secondary school.
I hid so much shit from people at the time cuz of teachers behaviour like this but also didn’t help that coming from a toxic household, just made things ten times worse due to it.
We had one teacher who decided this was the rule in his class and the school backed him. We also had an absolute madlad who insisted for 20 minutes that he needed to go to the toilet and when constantly refused shit his pants on purpose.
The teacher was fucking apoplectic demanding he get up and get out and he just sat there “You said no, deal with it. Call the principal down here if you dont like it but I’m not moving from this chair for another 10 minutes.”
Nobody ever gave him a hard time about it, we all appreciated him taking one (or a 2) for the team they rescinded that policy shortly after.
We had a fucking legend shit in a teacher’s trashcan when the teacher wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom. Teacher was one of the infamously strict “zero bathroom breaks, you should have gone before class and can hold it until afterwards” types. So after asking a few times and getting denied, the kid just dropped trou and squirted molten hatred into the teacher’s desk side trashcan.
And yes, the teacher changed his rule following the incident.
There’s a school nearby us for which the teacher must call a duty teacher for the student to go to the toilet. That’s at least 30 seconds of the class wasted.
At ours, I say to the student they better be fast, and they are. If it’s 5-10 minutes to the end of class I ask if they can hold it, respectfully (they’re 16, honestly) and they usually acquiesce. If it’s a girl I wouldn’t be harsh and let me them go, but that’s because I almost rarely get requests from girls. Boys just wanna piss.
By far not the stupidest, but it’s one that’s coming to mind.
The school was in a poor area and had a mandatory school uniform. One of the rules was that for boys, “school shoes” must be worn, not “boots”. In many cases, the distinction is obvious, but in ambiguous cases, the distinction came down to how high up the shoe/boot went. I think they defined a length that was the boundary.
What’s silly though is that this length was such that if you were wearing regular school trousers, it would be impossible to discern whether it was a shoe or a boot. At uniform inspections, they would literally have people pull up their trousers legs enough that they could see the top of the shoe/boot, and measure it with a ruler. Inspections were usually overseen by a senior member of staff (not the same one each time).
My brother was sent home from school because his brand new school shoes were 0.5cm too high and were therefore boots. He wasn’t meant to return until he’d replaced them, but my mum called the school and went nuts because she couldn’t afford to replace them for such a stupid rule. They “made an exception” in this case.
Girls schools have the same deal with skirt length. They make a fuss over it because they know the kids will rebel over a stupid rule like that, instead of the kids rebelling by doing drugs.
Ah yes. Controlling that rebellion energy by giving them something harmless to be rebellious about.
Sounds like that gender stuff we’re seeing so much of.
When I was in high school boys would get suspended if their hair touched the collar of their shirt. I was suspended all the fucking time because I refused to cut my hair. I eventually ended up getting sent to a different school.
deleted by creator
Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one. Same school had an assembly that informed us that listening to heavy metal would make us want to kill our friends.
Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.
FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that’s an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.
I got in trouble for doing homework at school. Because it was meant to be done at home.
I loved doing my homework at school. It was so easy to concentrate, all the textbooks were there, and then afterwards you have whole evening to yourself at home to watch whatever you want without any guilt or stress
Lol Nerd
deleted by creator
What the fuck even happens in a dorm meeting? “Keep it down, don’t smoke inside, drink responsibly”?
deleted by creator
That’s actually insane
