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In 5th grade they defined every kid that can speak another language as ESL (English as a second language) even if you spoke English perfectly. Then they put all of the ESL kids in a different class on the opposite side of the school. The result was that the school became de facto racially segregated with all Asian and Latino kids on one side and all white kids on the other. It’s not like it served a purpose anyway since none of the teachers could speak anything other than English.
I wonder if segregation was the intention.
That’s the only thing that makes any sense
Sadly, that’s sounds very intentional
That’s ridiculous, as a father of a future bilingual baby I would raise hell or move schools.
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.
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.
Our alternative school was kind of awesome. Great teachers. They let us smoke outside. Work at your own pace.
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.
If you’re having fun and are aware of it, that’s a sin.
Wh… Why wouldn’t they encourage this?
I mean, I know, but how dumb can they be?
Cant have the jocks get weak and start viewing the other students as people and cohorts.
Get some contraband travel chess boards with magnets, doing black market chess moves in bathroom stalls. Great job your school
A similar thing happened in my school with a card game called Euchre. Heaven forbid the students enjoy the small amount of time between bells or in a class once their work is complete.
Did you go to school somewhere in the Midwestern US? Everyone I know who has even heard of euchre is from there (mostly Indiana).
Michigan, but I know what you mean.
Ohio following suit. Euchre seems more a Great Lakes thing than a Midwest thing.
I yes, we’ve got a Problem. And that starts with P and that rhymes with C and that stands for CHESS!
We had very few rules in high school until a new principal came in during my senior year. We didn’t even have attendance, as the school believed that it was the students’ responsibility to succeed and graduate (it was a laboratory school, basically part of a college, so it was weird. It was K-12, and I graduated in a class of 25.).
This new principal comes in and lays down new rule after new rule, most were either ignored or caused enough uproar from tenured faculty and parents that he caved. For some reason, one day, he walks through the hallway and cleans out all the lockers, as well as picking up the unattended backpacks left on the floor. He takes ALL schoolbooks, notebooks, supplies, and electronics. Amazingly, he left some lockers alone, deaming them organized enough to satisfy him. They all belonged to his daughter and her friend group.
Then he takes all this stuff into his office, and proceeds to charge students $50 each to get school issued books back. He keeps all other supplies and electronics, announcing that he will have a sale at the end of the year to raise money for school athletics (which, being an extension of the college, had shitloads of cash to play with).
The University Police department showed up and were ready to arrest him for theft. It took nearly a week to redistribute everything, and he ended up in front of a local judge who was the father of a student.
Then he abruptly ended music, theatre, art, and home econ. classes by locking the rooms and firing the staff by posting signs that these were a waste and unnecessary strain on the school budget. All of the teachers were tenured through, and the classes and programs paid for by a combination of parent donations and a hefty amount of money from the university, which is well known for its communications, theatre, teaching college, and school of music (these are the programs that sell the university nationwide).
At the end of the year, during commencement, the University president made a speech that basically dressed down the principal publically, and then he announced that the principal was not taking part in the ceremony, and should go home as he would not be returning next term. The principal was in his robes, sitting on the stage, and waiting to hand out diplomas while this happened. The entire gathering of parents and students cheered.
And that’s how a principal who thought he was going to be adored for “cleaning up” a school for the gifted like he was trying to run a drug riddled, inner city, school in the middle of Chicago, instead of school basically run by the students in a mid-sized University town surrounded by corn fields in Indiana.
At my high school, the administration banned the color and word “fuchsia” (kind of a purple-ish, pink-ish color).
For some reason, the senior class (year 12, the class one year above me at the time) had become obsessed with the color/word. They had taken to wearing fuchsia shirts with the word “fuchsia” on them. On a given day, you’d likely see a few dozen of these shirts roaming the halls with students inside them.
The ban came because, allegedly, somebody had made up a story about a Mexican hooker named “Fuchsia” (because that’s a Spanish name, right?) that was the supposed inspiration of the color craze.
So naturally, the admins banned the color and any mention of the word. Using the word “fuchsia” in any context, or wearing the color in any way was three days in in-school-suspension (during-the-day detention where you sat in a cubicle with literally nothing to do - you weren’t allowed to read, no schoolwork, or anything — just stare at the wall for 8 hours). Second offense was a week out of school suspension. Third meant you failed your year and had to repeat the grade.
So, the seniors started wearing other obscure colors with the name printed on the shirt. “Indigo” “Chartreuse” “Vermillion”. Every single one of these colored shirts had the name of the color, and the words “You can’t ban all the colors” underneath.
It was by far the dumbest ass rule I’d ever seen.
Haha this is amazing and ripe for suing the district for a freedom of speech violation. Surprised it didn’t happen but sounds like the kids were just way smarter than the admins in that case.
Schools are in loco parentis. Essentially they act as parents while children are at school. Children at school are not afforded all the same rights as normal citizens against the government. Like searches and seizures. School officials, in loco parentis, can approve for police to search a students belongings while the student is at school. Even if the student themselves tries to invoke their right to protection for unreasonable searches.
Same with speech, as parents can “ban” words in their homes. Schools can ban and restrict speech as in loco parentis.
That only goes so far with rulings like Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District and Safford Unified School District v. Redding
Certainly. And those are great citations. I’m really glad you posted them so I could read into it further.
While students don’t lose all rights and protections, the concurrent opinion on Tinker does say that they don’t have the full protection of the 1st.
Well, anyone who makes a child (or any person) just waste eight hours of their life doing absolutely nothing in some room for wearing a color or saying the name of that color is most likely very unsmart and/or on a power trip.
I’m gonna go with unsmart.
Our principal got indicted for stealing money from the school. He was swiping cash from the concession stand register.
Know how he got caught? He got busted by the security cameras he authorized the SRO officer to install because… wait for it… money kept disappearing from the concession stand register.
This happened exactly one year after being quoted in the paper saying “Stealing in any form is wrong” after half of our football team was arrested for running a small-time counterfeiting ring.
Banning words is so idiotic, because I have never seen it working. People will always just find an euphemism, then they ban that euphemism, people come up with another euphemism and the cycle goes on and on.
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.
bruh some of my friends weren’t even allowed to talk to the opposite gender in their schools.
This is honestly one of the weirdest things I’ve heard in awhile. Seriously, are people not allowed to have opposite sex friends? Jesus.
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.
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
My middle school banned Pokemon back in the early 2000s. It probably would have worked out for them if they didn’t try to escalate things too far though.
Like at first you could bring a gameboy or the trading cards and play during recess. First they banned gameboys, then they banned the cards, and eventually we literally weren’t allowed to say “Pokemon” or we’d get in trouble. I don’t think they ever unbanned gameboys, but I think it took less than a year for them to walk everything else back and soon enough everyone was playing the TCG at recess again.
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.
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)
This was done in Hawaii
Canada, I’m guessing? We did all sorts of horrible things like that even til the 1990s to the First Nations peoples.
Taiwan actually. They banned anything other than Mandarin.
Are you Spanish? In Spain local languages were forbidden during Franco dictatorship.
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 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?
If a kid is truly over their head with a book, it won’t be long until they get bored and quit, unless they’re just trying to impress someone and aren’t interested in the book itself.
Kids should be allowed to unlimited learning and curiosity, this spark you have as a child is very powerful if you let it happen and nurture it instead of trying to fit all students in an iron cast thinking that you know what’s best for them.
Also reading a book with words you don’t understand can teach you new words and concepts. So this is basically just a school not letting their students learn.
Yep! I read To Kill a Mockingbird in the Third grade. I learned all sorts of new words.
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.
Who put the “removed” there and what word was it before?
Taking a guess, your instance (not the authors) has the profanity filter mentioned in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 in effect. You can switch instances to avoid it. IIRC, it’s disabled by default now (and isn’t active on my instance).
They also tried removed
This! This right here! This comment was edited by the mods or a censor bot! I fucking told you guys they were doing it!
I raised hell under a different name for a politically motivated mod changing my comments to agree with them, so I copied all the original comments into a word document and would edit them back to the original after the mod kept changing it, and they banned that username. This is some bullshit, and it needs to fucking stop.
I don’t understand. You are on lemmy.ml, which is an instance that does not display slurs in an effort to create a better social environment. It is totally automatic, and doesn’t involve an angry mod manually changing them, because if there really were to be a problem with your post, then the entire post/comment would simply be removed. If you disagree with this, then lemmy.ml isn’t for you, but don’t worry there are many other instances ou there.
I don’t know what you’re on ab, i can see the whole comment?
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 think you know pretty precisely what I’m on about. Was the rant about censorship not clear? 🤣
Then change instances? Host your own?
There are indeed solutions to these issues
You… Didn’t read the other comments. This was already settled.
You ever read a 1-star review on Amazon from someone who was clearly too stupid to know how to use the product? Like someone complaining that a USB-C charger doesn’t work because it doesn’t plug into their iphone?
That’s you. That’s the type of person you are.
Jesus Christ you’re late to the party. Ever had the perfect thing to say to someone a day too late, after they already left? That’s you. Read the comments, and get over yourself. Like Chandler without the laugh track.
I see the uncensored word.
Sorry you have to find out this way, but your home instance is run by the authoritarian fanboys who build Lemmy and engineered a filtering of “slurs” like bit–ching (modifying it for your benefit as people not from lemmy.ml can see the original word) directly into the source code. Vote with your feet against this type of idiocy.
Well that settles it. I’m moving to another instance.
Yeah everyone else can see the sentence as it is. It’s just an instance thing.
“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.
I ran afoul of this.
Someone came up and suckerpunched the absolute fuck out of me from behind, Was someone who I never even interacted with, commented towards, or even thought about. I still think, to this day, he just wanted to look like a bad ass by hitting the biggest kid in the grade.
Because they used a crutch to get around due to a gimpy leg, and because I was over a foot taller, I was deemed the aggressor… and no amount of witnesses saying otherwise would convince the principle of my innocence. and because the office was so convinced of it, no one in my family believed me either, so no one fought against it. I had to complete a program for “violent” teens before I was allowed to return to school… a program that was little more than slave labor in the hottest not-summer-break months, where I got accused of being a (gay slur) because only (Gay slur)'s drink their drinks the way I did, apparently. Was a super happy fun time learning experience.
I totally don’t still carry the rage and bitterness about it to this day at all. Nope. not at all.
Zero tolerance anything is just lazy and worthless. Only reason to implement is so you don’t have to think or acknowledge any nuance. Admin can just shrug their shoulders and go “Sorry nothing I can do. Zero tolerance.”
If they are truly zero tolerance then any teacher or security guard who steps in to break up the fight should also be suspended. They participated.
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.
It’s easy for the administrators. No investigation, no attempt to understand what happened.
Since the late 90s, school admins have become increasingly “police state light”; multiple vice principals with walkie-talkies, metal detectors, 3 hour after school detention, saturday detention, in-school suspension (you go sit in a room in silence for literally the entire school day), and zero tolerance. Imagine getting punched in the face and THEN being expelled for it. And I’m not even talking about “rough inner-city schools” or whatever; this shit happened in the Berkshires.
Of course, all their security theatre commands a budget increase and attempts to instill a sense of fear of the state into students.
We’re worried about school board meetings being taken over now but the administrations went full right wing fascist 30 years ago.
Looking at it from the other side, it’s actually rare that an innocent kid is beat up without context.
Usually there’s 2 kids that have a beef and have been egging each other on for days. Eventually one kid says something and the other kid snaps and makes the first move but the second kid was just as guilty.
If you only look at “who started it” the second kid gets off scot free, while the first kid gets punished. Not really fair.
"Zero tolerance " attempts to fix this by recognizing that both kids likely played a part.
You are delusional to the highest degree. Kids in school don’t fight even, it’s one-sided 99% of the time.
The reason for this (and the rule) is bullying. Bullies fight bullied, and everyone gets suspended because “they were fighting”. Since you announced in advance that was the policy, this enables you to conveniently ignore the bullying that has taken place, and instead act as if all bullying-related fights (read: all fights pretty much) are simple fights that do not require any more attention because the issue has been dealth with with punishment.
In turn, this means that a bully who already has a bad rap and generally doesn’t care about grades or standing with school admin because both are already at rock bottom can target any one kid and make their admin standing rock bottom because it will appear as if that kid is fighting all the time and constantly suspended.
There’s no “other side”. The kid who initiated violence is the one in the wrong, even if the other one has been egging him on. “Oh but what if the egging on is one sided and the kid can’t take it anymore?” That is a symptom of your bullying reporting being garbage, not of the natural order of kids. If that kid is taking it out violently it means they’ve tried every other avenue including telling an adult and nothing has changed.
I’m not saying it’s right, just that’s their rationale. I literally discussed this with a middle school principal a few days ago and that was what she said.
Regardless of what you think about the policy, the fact is that your kids will have to abide by it.
Fact: if your kid is being bullied, they need to communicate to a person of authority. Answering a bully with violence is the wrong choice 99% of the time. They are usually bigger than you and have backup.
Also usually it doesn’t progress to a fight the very first time, usually it takes weeks, and during this time you would have many opportunities to tell a teacher or something.
Again, not advocating that this is right, but that’s their rationale.
Bullying is a one directional situation. It’s straight physical and mental abuse. And saying zero tolerance is right because it’s two way or the bullied kid can tell an adult is akin to saying a woman could just leave the man beating her.
It’s naive. It’s harmful. And it’s ineffective.
Your middle school principal you discussed with this is only a single administrator. I’m sure different schools have had various rationale for implementing the policy and any anecdotal response doesn’t speak to the entirety of school administrators.
And what I’m saying is that the school administrator has a vested interest in “removing bullying” by making all bullying-related in incidents be actually something else.
I agree that violence is never the answer, but maybe next time instead of talking to someone who wants to not have to deal with bullying, talk to the students who are being bullied. I guarantee you that every single one of them has tried to alert an adult and the reaction was either “well he’s not doing anything too bad so I can’t do anything” or “he’s been put in detention temporarily and I am the only one aware that it was related to bullying”.
Every single instance of kids fighting in schools can be fixed by having actual support systems in place against bullying. Figure out who the bullies are, and remove them from the bullied’s life. Treat bullying as we treat parental abuse currently, it should be unacceptable that a treacher knew what was happening and did nothing, yet it happens daily.
Fact: currently, if a kid is being is being bullied, they need to learn how to end a fight.
What exactly is a person of authority going to do of you go to them? If they are going to actually do anything, is that thing going to stop it? I guarantee it won’t. Their rational might be this, but as it stands either you are blissfully unaware of the reality of bulling or you are aware and simply do not care.
No shorts, even when it’s really hot and there’s no AC.
So some older boys started wearing skirts.
They changed the rule.
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.
Everyone should have started wearing pants with a ton of text on it.
“Juicy” across the ass.
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.
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.
wdym in school or not. How can they regulate what you do in your own time. surely that must be illegal
It is illegal but so far nobody wants to raise an issue with it because it’s a school that has a lot of govt officials, diplomats, expats, and businessmen sending their kids there. No one wants to risk stinking their own reputation by raising an issue.
As for “how”, apparently if someone accidentally snaps a picture of those kids riding things they shouldn’t be, anytime, and a school disciplinary officer sees it, anywhere, he can give out the warning. Has done so a few times actually.
The rationale of the rule is that vehicle operation is something not befitting the image of a student, especially a student at this (supposedly) prestigious school.
Suffice to say the damn rule made me apprehensive of riding in a friend’s car for a while, and of the idea of getting my own license when I became of age.
When I decided to ask the school about the apprppriateness and legality of the rule (as an alumnus), they said “we are disappointed in you. You were a great student. We did not expect you to become someone who tries to force us to change our ways of life.” That said, unless you grow up to become a nationalist or a right-winger, you are a disappointment to them, so maybe even without this vehicle use thing I’m still a disppointment to them anyway.
This story sounds absurd but yes it is supposed to be this absurd.
I still pass by this school many times as it’s on my way to work. I wish I could tell those kids and new parents who might not be aware of “the system” something they should know …
What is this, Okinawa or something?
https://www.hellowoodlands.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/IMG_3037-660x400.jpg
Swan boats? Like that?!? At a school? Lol
As the rule is blanket, you can ride one maybe in your school uniform but on a Saturday (maybe after you’re done with cram school – some crams ask you to wear your uniform because it’s how they improve their reputation by recording live sessions with students from many good schools). If that happens and the disciplinary officer knows, you’re given a strike.
If it’s all-inclusive then it’s not that bad. Rather a great idea for schools, actually.
How the fuck would a blanket ban of VEHICLES be a great idea?? Follow up: which culture do you live in that apparently hates transport and also, what have you been smoking?
This is the most American shit I’ve read.
What’s the worst that a vehicle ban could do, make you walk? What’s so wrong with sacrificing convenient mobility for 0.005 square miles in exchange of even a marginally cleaner and safer environment?
A bicycle is a vehicle too. What’s wrong with biking?
No D&D in the halls during recess like seriously? Gotta love the “everything I don’t like is witchcraft” period of the 90s
