Parent, student, or staff, what’s the dumbest damn regulation you’ve personally come across at an educational institution?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
deleted by creator
Have you seen the videos of students bringing anything but backpacks in opposition to this.
deleted by creator
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.
Had a similar issue with a science teacher, we had to copy down several pages of words and their definitions every single night. Made me hate science when I’d normally love it. I just refused to do it and failed the class. Explained to my parents why I failed and they were shockingly understandable about it.
Could you just fill the answer with garbage?
Yea, that’s what I ended up doing. It was stupid.
I wrote my first AP English thesis in high school on this exact issue: students being assigned too much homework and the detriment it caused them. I don’t remember the source, but an academic paper from around 2010 (I wrote the paper in like 2012) talked about how assigning more than 5-10 math problems per night could cause way more harm than good.
Not only was it incredibly time consuming for people who likely had sports/music/jobs/family obligations/etc, but it reinforced incorrect learning habits. Basically, if you were given 100 math problems, but didn’t understand how to solve them correctly, you’d just be reinforcing your mistake 100 times. Add in the fact I never had a teacher who would spend an entire class going over all 100 of them, and kids were basically learning the wrong way every night. Plus, at least in my experience, the assignments were turned in and then the class moved on to the next lesson, and by the time you were given the graded assignment back, you were already 3+ lessons ahead, still learning everything wrong because the foundation was built on sand, not stone.
Yea, I was always good at math but shit like that made me hate it. Like you said I either understood the concept or I didn’t. Having a higher volume of problems wasn’t going to help. The funny thing was, later on in high school, my english teacher gave me a list of all the assignments we would have that semester with how many points they were worth so I went through and figured out what I would be a able to skip (pretty much all the stuff that I’d have to get in front of the class for) and still pass. She did not give a shit about it other than initially being concerned that I was failing really hard for a while because most of what I skipped was at the beginning. I told her what I was doing and she was just like “… well ok if that’s what you want to do…”. I
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.
No facial hair. 15 year old me hated that he had to shave his sweet nu-metal chin goatee.
Taint nation just wasn’t the same afterwards
Taint misbehavin’
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’.”
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.
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.
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.
My high school had a “no hats indoors” rule and even that was regarded as dumb. No hats at all? Screw you if you wanna keep the sun out of your eyes I guess?
No hats. Toques are allowed, everything else is banned. Thankfully it was not enforced.
No hats. Toques are allowed, everything else is banned.
It’s always rough when a gang of Chefs take over a school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
