STUPID STUFF IN SCHOOL

STUPID STUFF IN SCHOOL

Talking to my high school senior son today I learned how school has changed.  There is no dress code.  You can wear jeans, shorts, or even sweatpants.  They do have to wear a shirt, but a tee shirt is just fine, sometimes even a tee shirt with a massage like “Go F Yourself.”  As long as the shirt doesn’t not mention a gun or even worse a God, most messages are just fine.

We used to have a dress code.  It may have been unwritten, but girls all wore a skirt and a blouse.  The skirt had to be no more than an inch above the knee.  Guys wore khakis, not jeans and certainly not shorts or sweats.  The shirt had to have a collar and be buttoned up.  I kind of like the idea of some dress code, I’m sure it leads to less distractions in school.  School kids and distractions do not make for a learning environment.

I remember my older children once complaining that their school did not allow “Hat Day.”  The kids had all planned on wearing hats one Friday.  I’m guessing the teachers did not want to deal with the hat stealing monkey in the middle games, hat flinging, and hat slapping that kids looking for attention often instigate.  

I think today hat wearing is allowed.

My son tells me they are now allowed to chew gum.  That was a big no-no in my day.  I never understood that one.  What harm could come from gum chewing?  Children can learn to chew without smacking.  I think the benefit of not allowing gum chewing is it gave us something to do that was wrong, but harmless. If you were caught you had to spit it out, or sometimes stick it in your nose for the rest of the class.

Generally we got away with the gum chewing.  Kids need to think they are putting something over on the teachers.  The more harmless it is the better.

We used to pass notes in class, now replaced by texting.  That was also pretty harmless, except today it may facilitate cheating.

I think some stuff we got away with simply because the teachers let us.

 During the World Series, back in the day, the games were played during the day…during the school day for crap sake!  We were mostly Yankee fans, and the Yankees played in almost every World Series in the fifties and early sixties.  Lots of kids snuck in little transistor radios the size of a pack of cigarettes.  An ear piece would be threaded through your long sleeve shirt into the palm and we listened to the game with our head resting on our hand.  No way could the teachers have figured that out, especially when half the class erupted on a Mickey Mantle home run.

I think maybe they threw us a bone on that one, probably made us behave better the rest of the year.

I think mostly we were pretty tame in school.  There may have been an occasional paper airplane thrown, or even a spitball.  In high school there was a game called physics hockey involving coins and a hole in the desk, and of course there was smoking in the boy’s room for the really bad kids.

I don’t recall much cheating on tests, sexual harassment, certainly no hot English teachers hooking up with young boys (what a horrible thought) very little fighting, never with weapons involved, and though I do remember bullying I don’t think it was as vicious as I read that it is today.

I think much of the problem today is technology makes bad behavior easier and parents don’t often support the teachers.

 It might be because they now allow gum chewing.