What is the stupidest school rule you've ever had to deal with?
What is the stupidest school rule you've ever had to deal with?
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.
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.
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.-
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
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.
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.
Where I live, the winters get very cold. Not like Canada cold, but cold by my country's standards - think a top of 9°c during the day. My city also has an odd culture where no one remembers how cold it gets, given our summers are so hot, so we're all left confused and freezing come winter - no one has proper clothes for it. It's like a citywide, seasonal amnesia.
That was certainly the case when I was in highschool 20 years ago. At lunch/recess time, the only time students were allowed inside the building was if it was raining. I understand that this was for the teacher to student ratio of supervision. Everyone outside or everyone inside - much easier to manage.
But it meant that every time it got really, really cold, half the student class would go inside to huddle against the radiators to keep warm. Periodically a teacher would come in and kick us out. You'd repeat this process a few times over recess/lunch.
So while it wasn't a stupid rule, given I understand the teachers need to not be spread too thin, it was also ridiculous to expect kids to hang around outside in the freezing cold, in a place where people act like wearing a beanie is being dramatic.
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.
My math teacher one year made a rule that if you skipped more than 3 problems on the homework you got a zero on it. This was because she was assigning 80-100 problems a night and I had only been completing just doing enough to get a passing grade because I didn't have an hour to spend just on math every night.
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.
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.
My high-school math teacher made us all submit our work in these tiny notebooks that were like less than half the size of an American standard notebook, with unlined paper. He would write the homework problems on the board and then you had to copy them into the tiny-ass notebook and then hand write all your work on the single tiny-ass page, he would fail you if you used more than one page or side of a page because "One page is all the room you need to work out a problem."
I am really horribly bad at math and even writing numbers down is hard for me, sometimes i can't even read what I wrote, so being forced to write them even smaller was a nightmare. I barely passed his class. Plus he was just a total dick in general to anyone who struggled in his class, and most students did (it was already the math class for dumb people), and we could all tell he didn't want to be there.
I hope he's miserable whenever he is now.
not really a school rule but it is one they tried to push on my mom when i was in elementary school.
i was the tiniest kid in class and my mom wanted me to take karate lessons. to give me some self esteem. the teachers tried to tell her the only thing it would do would make me want to get into fights. but somehow playing football would have been completely ok. so a high impact physical sport where you grab people and throw them to the ground is ok... as long as there is a ball involved. but giving a little kid some self esteem in an environment that encourages restraint and self control is not ok.
this was sometime around 1982-1985 i forget exactly what year.
moronic way of thinking.
I was punished for missing mandatory dorm meetings by washing the same car that multiple other people had already washed.
I missed said meetings because I was doing night classes and workstudy.
All of the content of said dorm meetings could have been taken care of with a paragraph email, hut apparently I was supposed to hunt down the RA whenever they felt like giving me their time, when I was already taking, like, 18-25 hours, doing extracurriculars and workstudy, and also regularly puking my brains out from the uncontrolled migraine disorder.
I stopped caring about their authority after that.
I guess this is less of a regulation and more of an individual teacher. I had a math test that was multiple choice, with space in-between each question to do the work. I did everything correctly for a particular problem, including writing down the exact correct answer, but I circled the wrong multiple choice answer. There was a minus sign instead of a plus sign for one of the terms, and I just missed it.
When we got the tests back, and it was marked wrong, I asked the teacher if I could still get points for it because I clearly actually did the math right. The teacher said that only the multiple choice answer I circled mattered, so I still got points off.
The next test was 5 pages with 5-ish questions on each page. The front of the last page only had 1 question, so I wrongfully assumed that was the last problem on the test, but there were 3 problems on the back. I only noticed this when I went to turn it in, and with the teacher watching, I just circled 3 answers at random. It turns out, I somehow circled the correct answers, but the teacher marked them wrong because I didn't actually do the work; I just got lucky.
I complained, and to their credit, the teacher relented and gave me the points.
In middle school, we had some militaristic gym coaches. Youd think we were in boot camp or something? They have very specific rules that had to be followed to a T.
You had to wear briefs, no boxers allowed. If you did have boxers, you had to have briefs under them.
You had to wear the school gym uniform, no exceptions.
The provided shorts were super short, so you could also wear sweats, but you had to wear the shorts underneath them.
You had to have your shirt tucked in.
You had to form a line in your designated spot and wait on the playground for the class to start before the gym coaches would arrive to take attendance. This was in the SoCal heat.
During attendance, the coach would also inspect your uniform. Youd have to show the band of your briefs and shorts to show compliance with the rules.
You had to use the gym shower, no exceptions. God that was awful and awkward.
You break enough rules and youd collected "non-strips", like a demerit, which would earn you detention.
All that hubub and all we ever did was run laps on the field. We used the gym once or twice, but I cant even remember what we did. All the attendance, uniform crap, and shower took up most of the period.
Its no wonder I hated gym class and exercising after dealing with that shit. It wasnt till I hit my 30s that I realized I quite enjoyed working out and hiking.
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.
Write each vocabulary word 20 times if you have to go to the bathroom during class. Not a great policy for seven year olds and resulted in several accidents (including me).
We also could not talk to each other during lunch at all. Paddling was also still allowed.
Not a rule, but I got in trouble by jumping near a brick wall. The school I went to had bars on the bottom windows, and kids used to jump off the wall and hang off them. During recess, I was jumping beside the wall, and got yelled at.
It was a catholic school. Most teachers were garbage. Except this one Australian teacher. He was awesome.
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.
Sophomore year of highschool my school had a new attendance policy where if you miss more than 4 days of class you automatically failed the class unless you did after school detention for each day of class pass 4 that you missed. What made the rule stupid was that there were no excuses allowed, so that if you were sick for 5 or 6 days you'd either fail or have to do a bunch of after school detention. The school changed it the next year to allow for excused absences, which is what it should've been to begin with.
I attended a Catholic high school. One of the rules was that if you did not serve detention within a week of it assigned you could face suspension. During my school’s weekly mass a friend next to me cracked a joke. And I burst out quietly laughing. The assistant principal, sitting in the pew behind me, scolded me then gave me 7 hours detention. This was a on a day before a long weekend so it was physically impossible for me to serve all 7 hours within a week. My parents were called in and the school informed them I was facing suspension. My dad ask what I did to warrant to 7 hours detention leading to the suspension. The assistant principal said well he laughed during mass. My dad looked at me then looked at the assistant principal. He sigh and said “that’s fucking stupid”. My dad then turned around and walked out of the office. Days later at school the assistant principal said they were going to show me leniency. Removing the suspension charges.
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.
Most of them are stupid especially when related to uniforms. Example: jumpers must be worn in class even if in a heatwave. (I kicked off about this and they amended but the fuss was unbelievable). Coats off at the door even if it is cold and raining. You have to put coats on once you have left the building. Insane.
My school cannot do anything on Sunday except Christian fellowship. One time there was a competition on Sunday and one of the teachers is needed to guide the students, but got denied by the school.
(Before you ask me why did I attend a Christian school, it's because other schools that are not Christian sucked academically)
I'm sure I can think of more but I remember an assignment in middle school where I could type it out or write it out by pen, but if you wrote it in a pencil, you get a zero.
The school where I did the equivalent of elementary/middle school education had a strict "absolutely no hats" rule.
I have no clue why, but if you were caught wearing a hat (or cap or...) you'd get into trouble. First time a warning and you take it off. Second time they take the hat away from you and return it after seven days. Third time you get suspended.
They tried to ban phones in the hallways and cafeteria, while only providing online schedules which could change at a moments notice.
Ban went into effect, no one complied. Ban was lifted next week.
In elementary school, we were only allowed to have up to 8 people at each lunch table. One day we sat 9, and all got detention for it.
Teachers are not allowed to finger prick a diabetic child to check their blood sugar. Hell, teachers aren't allowed to remove a fucking splinter.
I'm in Ontario, Canada. Fear of liabilities have made us a brain-dead society.
My secondary school had a card system based on behavior. If you got in troubled 3 times that semester you had to go to the "trainee" lunch line which had really long lines and less variety of food. You was also restricted from areas of the school at lunch like IT suite, music room and library.
There was this show on TV in the 90s where I live. They were making fun of what's happening in the news and politician.
One of the characters was a lowlife rocker called Bob Binette, and at 11-12 years old, boys found him very, very funny and would sometimes impersonate him in show and tell, or speak like him on the school grounds.
Well, of course, it got to a point where they would apply an interdiction of imitating Bob Binette on school grounds and in class.
I gotta admit, this guy was pretty funny.
That I was required to attend.
Well in such case I can see a little rationale behind that