My American high school did this in preparation for prom night. Two teachers would play the role of the parents, and they would tow a couple of totalled cars onto the football field. The entire school would be paraded out into the stadium to watch the police come and tell the parents their child was killed after driving under the influence.
The DJ at my senior prom played a song where the chorus said something along the lines of “Put your hands up if you’re an alcoholic”. Of course everyone (17 & 18 years old) threw their hands up and danced to that one.
Ours had some theater kid pretend to be dead for a week and did a fake memorial on the football field. They played it like he was actually killed while driving drunk.
I also remember not really caring cuz I didn’t know him, and wondered why the whole school had to pretend to care. I kinda wonder if it was puberty that made me not care or if I just ain’t got that empathy in me.
That’s very extreme lol.
There were a few deaths throughout my time in public school. I didn’t think too much about the people I didn’t know. Only 1 person that I was friends with, so I did attend his memorial at which i cried. I think its normal to not spend too much time thinking about the deaths of people you don’t know.
People die every day. I still feel bad for them and their families’ pain, but if you truly mourned each one, it’s all you’d be able to do.
In America they do that in between active shooter drills.
in between active shooters
drills.Ftfy
They have to do drills to make sure the shooter is ready.
And tornado drills. Americans love drilling.
Terrified at a young age, it may not be weird people take to the one legal drug if they finally reach the age of legality.
We had to wear goggles that simulated being drunk like that one episode of the Simpsons and then try to do basic tasks like walk from one point to another or whatever so they could show how it impaired your motor skills. But it backfired because they just really exaggerate the visual impairment you get from drinking, they’re basically putting on a really too strong pair of glasses. But we did several rounds and eventually got somewhat used to it, it was a big game of who could seem the least impaired, the message was completely lost on us, etc
And this is why I refuse to be a high school teacher. 😂
My school had a wreck towed on campus to look at, but no skit. No, that was too tame. They held periods during which they had a speaker come and show us gorey slides of the results of car wrecks. You could opt out of it of course, but most attended and traumatized ourselves. It sounds fake, and now I’m wondering if I am relaying a false memory about it or not. Did this happen to anybody else?
No pictures for me, but instead we got anecdotes from parents and first responders of fatal accidents in our own town. Someone talked to us about scraping brains off the street after collisions without seatbelts.
We definitely had the wrecked car before prom at my high school. Not the slide show though. I think one year we did have to attend a presentation where a parent who lost their kid in an accident gave a talk, which is also a little fucked up.
I think they only did that once every 4 years at the school I went to. They didn’t do any funeral stuff, just the crash scene part.
One year they had a student laying on the ground near a car and a firefighter accidentally stepped on her(thought she was one of the dummies?) and broke some of her ribs.
Didn’t do shit to stop drunk driving, nor did the victims of drunk drivers that had their lives changed in the accidents.
It is worth noting that this sort of thing was only done for a very brief period of time. It’s not like this is how all American schools have warned students since 1978.
Still hilarious when you look back on it.
2004, we made my buddy laugh when he was supposed to be playing dead and got in trouble lol
Making friends laugh when they are supposed to be still/silent is like… Half the reason to have friends. All thebsrupid charades we used to do whenever someone was on the phone with their parents or girlfriend lol. Or the moaning and making ridiculous comments loudly lol.
I don’t often remember highschool fondly but it happens once in awhile.
No. We were shown why you don’t use water in an oil fire. Was a fun practical demo.
My science teacher had a balloon and he lit the string saying “check this out”
The balloon was filled with hydrogen
I don’t think that would be okay to do today
We had a community science day when I was little where they did that. Hydrogen is pretty safe to ignite in a birthday balloon.
I loved it, I’ve never felt such an explosion pressure in my chest!
It’s quite a pop!
They exploded some other balloons too, iirc, but I don’t remember too well. I think I was 8.
I wanna get some hydrogen…
My partner would have a heart attack. They can’t even be around a gun shooting or firecrackers, much less that kinda boom! I wouldn’t do that to them.
For me it was less intense than a gun or firework, maybe your balloon was bigger lol.
You can get hydrogen by running electricity through water but I forget how it works.
Oh yeah his balloon was like a nitrous mafia-sized whip it balloon. It was huuuuge!
Also that’s fun! Take out the o… and a H
At least yours did that outside. Ours did it inside and burnt all the hairs off one arm
Oh no, it was in a classroom hahaha
At mine, on that day, they started it by announcing over the intercom one morning that a popular classmate had been killed by a drunk driver on the way into school. Even though it should have been obvious that’s not how it would really have been handled, it got the shock it was intended to get. A few people even ran out of classrooms crying. That was before everyone had cell phones.
I guess they wanted to make a point about the fatality rate statistic, too, though, so they kept going, announcing another person every however many minutes. It immediately became really obvious to everyone what was going on when they announced the second person. I think it lost more of its desired effect the more they continued.
We did the same. It was called every 15 minutes. They started with a teacher instead of a kid though. We also got the wrecked car and dead students. But they had the drunk driver teen live and show us them going through court and being sentenced to jail.
Yes, but it wasn’t fake. Three students died playing drunk motorcycle chicken, two guys and one of them had their girlfriend on the back. The whole school was in mourning and I got written up for pointing out that they were clearly fucking idiots.
In my school, one student was pronounced dead at the scene, one was taken by ambulance, and another was airlifted.
Every day, we would hear a car crash and heartbeat come up on the announcement system and then a grim reaper would walk into a classroom and tap a student on the should who “died” from drunk driving. They were taken to another room, where they put on makeup and a tombstone was placed for them in front of the school. At the end of the day, all the “dead” students would stand behind their tombstone. The “dead” would still attend class, but say nothing.
At the end of the week, there was a big presentation, where some people who survived a drunk driving accident spoke about their experience and statistics. He had suffered third-degree burns across his body and took off his shirt and walked around the auditorium, so that we could see the aftermath.
Fatal Choices was intense
We had a day when they simulated a group of students being killed in a drunk driving accident. They still had to come to school, though, so they wore white face paint and weren’t supposed to interact with anyone.
My school had this too. The fake crash was on the grass by the bus loop, and the theatre kids involved went to class with ghost facepaint and didn’t talk until school was dismissed. NGL it stuck with me, but I was already afraid of alcohol and drugs because of DARE* 🤷♂️
*Discredited program that only worked on me apparently.
DARE worked on a lot more than just you. It even worked to get a lot of kids into drugs!
They not only did this whole skit at my high school, they literally had a helicopter from the local hospital airlift the “injured” students off the football field where the assembly was held.
I was kinda jealous of my friend, who was one of the two kids who got to ride the chopper. I’ve never ridden in a chopper. 🥺
I’m sorry you didn’t GET TO THE CHOPPA!
I don’t really remember this, but I remember them showing us literal crash photos and whatnot
Yup. Caused minor PTSD in the actors and I was one of them. A bunch of students still drove drunk though…
So apparently I’m not a real American. Never had this happen
