Parent, student, or staff, what’s the dumbest damn regulation you’ve personally come across at an educational institution?
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.
listening to heavy metal would make us want to kill our friends.
Maybe they mixed up cause and effect there
Yeah, it’s well known that you can’t listen to heavy metal if you haven’t killed anyone yet.
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 was taking classes at a community college around I wanna say 2011 or 2012. Teachers didn’t want you to use phones during class because they didn’t want you to cheat or be distracted, but there was a big push from the administration to get students to buy digital copies of the textbooks (I assumed because physical copies can be sold used and that was eating into their profits). But reading the digital textbooks on your smartphone was in direct conflict with the no phone policy. So the workaround they found was to say, “phones are not allowed but tablets are ok and encouraged” (which is silly because a tablet can do anything a phone can do). To add confusion around this time phone manufacturers were exploring with making bigger and bigger screens, meanwhile tablets were exploring being more portable, so there was ambiguity in the distinction between the two both in function and physical dimensions. So how did they determine what devices were allowed and which ones were banned you ask? They landed on an arbitrary dimension of 7 inches. Anything smaller than 7 inches was a phone and was clearly being used to cheat, anything larger was a tablet and was an instructional tool. Teachers were given rulers to measure devices and if you were caught using a device smaller than 7 inches you would be disciplined for academic dishonesty. Mind you we also had laptops that also were not viewed as an issue, the school had free WiFi everywhere on campus, and we had apps like fb messnger for messaging and Skype and google voice for phone calls and also access to just Google, so there really was no distinction in mechanisms for academic dishonesty or for distractions between the two.
Imagine if this rule was still around and you brought a foldable
I’ve got 2, both from middle school:
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No card games: Like, why? I even had a classmate who during one period didn’t exercise on PE. Perhaps due to previous sickness, I don’t remember. As he wasn’t the only one, he played some card game with others. The PE teacher noticed it, took that card deck, AND FUCKING RIPPED IT IN HALF. How much strength does that…? Anyway, I remember he cried, I’d say rightfully so. “You are supposed to pay attention!” Pay attention to what, people running?
Card games were even banned during breaks, not just free classes. What’s the problem? Teachers didn’t care if someone was beating the shit out of someone else with a chair, they didn’t care if someone was playing with a butterfly knife, but card games? “That’s dangerous for the youth.” -
No smartphones: I mean, not even during breaks, except for “A” classes. A classes had the “better” students. The weirdest stuff here was that I haven’t taken the phone with me to school. After all, why? I could break it, I’d have no use for it and I lived 2 minutes away from school. But, when it came to collecting them, no one believed me. “Everyone has a phone nowdays, so you’ll either give it to me, or I’ll have to search your bag.” Thankfully, after a week our class teacher finally understood that I in fact do not carry a phone with me.
Or perhaps I could also add something from elementary school. I have no idea what rule it would break though:
Some girl reported me (a boy) for apparently having a mascara. Our teacher then searched my bag, as if it was a grenade. I did in fact not have it.
And no, she didn’t report me stealing a mascara, just me having one as a boy. And the teacher took that seriously.Some girl reported me (a boy) for apparently having a mascara. Our teacher then searched my bag, as if it was a grenade.
Which of the former(?) Confederate states did this happen in? Sounds like a grenade might have been okay with them if you’d had one, they’re manly enough.
Oh, you’re going to be surprised. Slovakia, central Europe.
A little surprised but I know we don’t have a monopoly on dipshittery here in the land of pickup trucks with pink rubber scrotums flapping in the wind. Just seems that way sometimes.
They come up with some serious bullshit in school.
I got lucky in that they didnt care about cards when I was in middle school. Wed be playing poker, California speed, etc. I rememeber wed be in woodshop when all the equipment was in use, so wed just play card games to pass the period. Or during breaks between classes. And especially the last day, it was a free for all for some reason. Testing was all done, teachers had nothing else to teach. Wed just go to each class like normal, and just hang out playing card games, getting our yearbooks signed, etc. But this was the 90s, before anyone had cellphones or gadgets.
And I thought that my school is weird. Well, maybe I should reconsider that
I literally have the opposite experience with the phone thing lmfao
at some point I had a calculator (one of those slick 1990s casios) in my pocket, that king of looked like a phone. When I was passing one of the admins, I actually thought she thinks I have a phone in my pocket, so I gestured to it to say it’s a calculator which she misinterpreted as me somehow boasting that I got a phone, so she was like “Oh so you got a phone, so what? Everyone does nowadays”
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This just oozes pure American energy
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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!
One of my math teachers spent an entire semester teaching us how to gamble. He used it to teach us how statistics and probability worked. Final assessment was to set up mock bookie offices for a fairly famous local horse race.
No backpacks. We had to have all of our books and class work on us at all time due to poor locker placement as the school was being renovated.
But hey, messenger bags were 100% fine. What the fuck.
Have you seen the videos of students bringing anything but backpacks in opposition to this.
No, but I want to now. I’m glad I am out of school for this reason.
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.
TBF, students using going to the bathroom as an excuse to do other things is very real. Not all student do it, but some do and these people cause a lot of issues.
I generally keep the rules: leave your phone in the classroom and be back in 10 minutes.
The amount of students that suddenly don’t have to go anymore once they’re reminded they need to leave their phone is very high.
TBF, students using going to the bathroom as an excuse to do other things is very real.
Can confirm, I did this to skip parts of band rehearsal on days where my part was super dull to play.
That’s genius
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.
Was in an AP English class, and we were given a book on AP format for writing essays and such (think proper way to cite sources, alphabetize authors, other grammatical and formatting rules, etc). The class was given an example handout and told to group up into fours and go over the handout, finding mistakes and such based on the book previously mentioned.
When we went over it as a class, every group found basically every mistake except one. Every group missed this one mistake, and none of us flagged it because the book we were supposed to base all of this off of stated that it, in fact, was not a mistake. Since it was a graded assignment, we started debating with the teacher that since everyone didn’t flag it, and the book we were given said it was actually correct, we shouldn’t be penalized for it.
The teacher, however, refused, stating that it was incorrect based on AP formatting standards. Students even showed her, in the book we were given, where it said that the “mistake” was in fact correct. She refused to budge, and arguing continued.
The discussion ended when she (the teacher) finally said, “I’m the only one in this room with a Master’s degree in English, you got it wrong, I’m not hearing further debate on this,” and took the points off from all of us.
Same thing happened with a math teacher (who was an absolute piece of shit, literally everyone including the staff hated him, but that’s for another time). Everyone got a problem wrong, and when he went over it, several students pointed out the answer we all got was correct based on how we were initially shown how to solve the problem. He pulled the same “I’m the only one here with a degree in mathematics, so none of you are getting the points for it because you’re just wrong.”
Several students went to other math teachers and showed it to them, who in turn went to the piece of shit and not only pointed out that he was wrong, but the head of the math department was basically demanding either the points be restored or the question thrown out. The next class he went on a long spiel about how “after conversing with several of my other academic colleagues, it was brought to my attention it was a poorly designed question, and thus I will be removing it from all of the tests.”
Just fucking admit when you’re wrong, all you’re teaching us with your fancy degrees is that you’re a prick and to resent authority figures.
Just fucking admit when you’re wrong, all you’re teaching us with your fancy degrees is that you’re a prick and to resent authority figures.
This is correct; there is a section in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook about this. It is important for a teacher to establish themselves as a subject matter expert, you absolutely should appear knowledgeable and competent. There are ways to do this wrong. For instance, if you don’t know something, just make shit up. If a student asked a question I didn’t know the answer to, I had a go-to technique for handling it: I would turn it into a lesson on aviation reference materials. “What book would you look for that in? Let’s see if we can go find it.” Another way to undermine your own credibility is to insist you’re right no matter what. Your students WILL see through that and it WILL undermine your credibility.
And it’s one thing to pull that shit when you’re a high school English teacher and you’re not responsible for anyone else’s safety. A flight instructor is not only a teacher, but also sometimes the only qualified airman on the plane. “I don’t want to fly with you anymore, you scare me. A real expert pilot doesn’t have to pretend to know what he’s talking about.”
Your students are smart, capable scholars and they should be respected as such. It’s remarkable how many people are in education professions that don’t get this.
Yeesh. I’ve had teachers that will give points back if all (or nearly all) students get a question wrong on a test because they know it’s more likely their own failure than the students. Maybe the question is confusing or poorly worded, maybe the material wasn’t covered or it’s too difficult with the amount of time available.
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.
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.”
Sounds like you did the right thing. Advocates for anti-truth don’t deserve to be treated nicely.
What was the texture? What was the texture supposed to be? We’re missing valuable context!
My guess is suede instead of smooth, shiny leather.
…don’t ask me how I know that.
they wore alligator skin shoes and not beaten baby seal skin shoes.
Classic mistake. When in Yellowknife, do as the Yellowknifers do.
chewy
Lose your punishment stamp card? We’ll assume it was full and get the next card(it went green, blue, then red.) and detention essays. Fill or lose another card double the previous punishment. I burned the cards I got and handed the ashes to the principal at the end of the year.
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.
No talking during lunch. This was in a public elementary school in the early/mid 90s, at the first school I attended through second grade. Literally the only school I attended that was like that. It was so fucking stupid.
Of course, kids tried to talk to their friends, whispering and such. I got in trouble once because a teacher saw me whisper to my friend who asked me a question and so I got moved to sitting with older kids I didn’t know for the rest of the lunch period. That was the first time I got in trouble at school, so I was crying.
Never understood why we couldn’t talk. I think because it’d eventually get too loud in there? Which, who cares? Didn’t matter; family moved and I switched schools. Where it was totally normal and acceptable to socialize during lunch.
Nope, this was in the Midwest! Missouri, to be somewhat more specific. I do know our principal (who I didn’t mind) was often in the lunchroom. Maybe she was from the south? No clue.
HOLY SHIT! Mine had the same stupid-ass rule! It was the mid 2000s for me, and I managed to get myself in trouble ONCE. The yard duties told me that I had to spend the rest of my lunch in the multipurpose room instead of getting to leave for recess. And you know what I did? I sure as hell didn’t stay. I snuck out as discretely as I could because even at my small age, I knew that rule was bullshit. Never got caught, but I’m still salty that I even got in trouble in the first place. Thanks for reading.
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.
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
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.
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.
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’.”