Professor Umbridge from the Harry Potter universe is the queen of ridiculous school rules, establishing rules such as students could not be 5 meters apart. What if I told you there are some real life schools out there that have actual rules like that. Well there are and here are students sharing the crazy rules they had to experience when they were in high school.
No Arguing
“In the 6th grade two girls were caught arguing with each other in the bathroom. They were literally just arguing about which Backstreet Boy was hotter or something. So the logical course of action was for the school to ban all ‘arguing’ and if you got caught disagreeing with another student it was automatic detention. I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
No Phone For The Semester
“Back when cell phones weren’t really what they are now. If you got caught with it, the principal would take it for the rest of the SEMESTER. Well sure enough I got my phone confiscated and my mom went in there raising hell. She told them they don’t pay the cell phone bill and that holding it for months was basically theft. They ended up changing the rule after that. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking.”
My Yellow Raincoat
“I wasn’t allowed to wear a yellow raincoat because it ‘reminded people of Columbine’. It reminded me of Paddington Bear.”
Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’
“Around the time Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ came out, students were forbidden from playing ‘Another Brick In The Wall pt 2’ on school grounds. Students got a letter to give to their parents from the School Superintendent. He felt the lyrics, ‘We don’t need no education’ & ‘Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone’ were ‘revolutionist’ & anybody playing the song was considered a ‘dissident’ by the School Superintendent. This is 4th, 5th & 6th graders were talking about here. Parents had a field day, citing all sorts of free speech violations. Superintendent was fired at the end of the school year…”
It’s Not A Uniform
“When I was in high school one of my classmates was diagnosed with cancer. As a form of fund raising to help his family, some students/parents organized a t-shirt sale at the school where all the proceeds went to his family. Pretty much everyone ordered one and the day they came in we all put them on over our usual uniform shirts. Later that day the principal came on the PA to say we all had to take the shirts off because visitors were coming to the school and he didn’t want them to think we had substandard uniform regulations. For a school that preaches ‘family’, I thought that was completely ridiculous and kind of insulting.”
Not Liable
“If you drove to school you had to park your car at least 1 kilometer away from the campus, apparently so that the school would not be liable in the event that you died in a car crash. We weren’t allowed to bring playing cards of any sort to school because it would look like we were gambling. This was when cellphones were just getting popular, so elementary school kids started having them and schools had no idea how to adapt to this. Our school made a rule: everyone with a cellphone had to drop theirs in a bag at the principal’s office before school and then pick it up after school was over. Gameboys were also similarly confiscated. So yes, picture people having to line up to drop their Nokias and gameboys into a bag at the start of every day. Naturally, at one point, the bag and all its contents got stolen.”
No Locker Room
“During middle school, the locker room lockers weren’t allowed to be used because ‘some students leave food in there’. Surprise, surprise, a lot of people got their sh-t stolen and the administration didn’t give a single f–k. The school did nothing about it until a PE teacher got his iPod stolen, THEN they started having people monitor the locker room occasionally, but theft still occurred.”
No Reading
“No reading during lunch. Lunch is for friends so you can talking during lunch and not class. We would have to take books away from students who were reading. It was awful for the loner kids.”
My Gambling Ring
“My high school banned sporks. I created this game where everyone buys a spork for two dollars, and if you eliminate other players by stabbing them when they don’t have their own spork on hand. Last man standing wins all the money. What I didn’t expect was how many people wanted to play, and how committed everybody was going to be. I ended up with close to $250 dollars and a f–king 3 week Battle Royale in the halls, at home, at sporting events…f–king everywhere. I was sent to the principal’s office being accused of starting a gambling ring and creating the biggest distraction the principal had ever seen in his 30 years of education blah blah blah. The school banned sporks pretty soon after. Good times.
No Hair In Ear Lobe
“All boys had to have short hair. No hair below the ear lobe. If it is then you had to go to the headmaster to get your head shaved completely. No exceptions, not even religion. This was an area with a high Sikh population (it is against their religion to cut their hair). The headmaster was racist and implemented the rule to try and drive Sikh pupils to another school.”
Don’t Say Pokemon
“It was the pokemon craze of 1997. Teachers were sick of students being so distracted by pokemon. They banned cards and anything related to pokemon at our school. If we utteered the word ‘Pokemon’ we’d be suspended. We called them pocket monsters instead. Teacher didn’t get it.”
See Through
“Our school had a uniform with a shirt as part of it. One year they switched the color to white shirts (from navy), but because they had a cheap supplier, they were pretty see-through. As a result, every female student’s bra was visible. Instead of acknowledging their mistake and changing the color back or just switching to a uniform manufacturer that didn’t use fabric as thin as tissue paper, they implemented a bunch of rules about what color underwear girls were allowed to wear. It was only for girls, too. A boy with a blue undershirt was fine, but a girl with a blue bra–heavens no! Everyone thought it was stupid, including many parents, but the official line was, ‘If you wore tasteful clothes, this wouldn’t be an issue’. Having a rule that forces male teachers to comment on the bras of girls as young as 13 is pretty messed up, IMO. Especially when many of these children didn’t even get to buy their own clothes, but relied on their parents.”
No Sitting On Ground
“We could not sit on the ground, the reason for this was that ‘people would have sex’ because that’s exactly what happens when children sit on the ground.”
The Bathroom Sign Out List
“We had to sign out to go to the bathroom BUT if we signed out over three times a quarter (9 weeks), we would get a grade deduction.”
2 Minutes Passing Period
“You had 2 minutes to get from one class to the next. Sounds good on paper until you realize we had one way halls only and if your next class was on the other side of the school, you were pretty much f–ked. If to were late to class, you had to go to detention the entire period. What made this rule more f–king stupid was that you couldn’t take your backpack into class so you had to put it into your locker. So between each class, you had to put your books away and get your other books for the next class, eating up your time to get to the next class. Eventually the school got rid of the time rule and the backpack rule when they realized how stupid it was.”
Distracting Socks
“No socks with logos on them because they could distract other people’s learning environments…”
Inspecting Sideburns
“As a boy, I could have long hair down to the middle of my back. But so help me God if my sideburns made it past my earlobe. Every day I passed up a principle or ROTC officer they would stop me and ask I pull up my hair so they could inspect my sideburns. The stupidity of it was not lost on me.”
Abandoned Hallways
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“I taught at a school where students couldn’t be in the hallways during lunch for any reason at all. My last week there my students wanted to throw me a going away party in my classroom during lunch. I told them it wasn’t necessary but they insisted, which I thought was a nice gesture. About 5 minutes into lunch no students had stopped by and when I went into the hallway they were standing there in front of another teacher who was telling them they couldn’t go to my room. When I politely approached my colleague and explained the situation, she tried to stand steadfast and tell me no. Even after I told her they had permission and they’d be under my supervision the entire time, she still said no. Finally, knowing it was my last week, I told my students to go to my room anyway because I wasn’t having this sh-t, and it wasn’t fair to my students who’d spent a lot of money on a cake. My colleague went and told our boss who pretty much just ignored her.”
5 Minutes Of Silence
“At my elementary school during lunch time, we had the 5 minutes of silence. After everyone sat down to eat, the teachers would call 5 minutes of silence and if as much as noisily crunched on a cracker, they sent you to detention. You can imagine how hard this is for 1st through 5th graders.”
Safety First
“My elementary school took the safety first rule to mean that anything where someone got hurt became banned. This meant that any popular game inevitably got banned after a few days. After the conventional games like basketball, soccer, tag, etc. got banned we were left with safe games. Then they banned yo-yoing after a kid got hit with one, invisible sword fights, jump ropes. Once they banned all physical activities, things started to be banned for causing emotional harm. TCGs (Magic, pokemon), slumber party games (Mafia, detective). It became a game in itself to see how quickly you could get something banned. They wondered why kids couldn’t pay attention in class.”
Zero Tolerance
“‘Zero tolerance’ Any fight (or schoolyard scuffle) resulted in both parties being suspended regardless of the circumstance. One kid could walk up to another kid and punch him in the face without warning or explanation and both get suspended. Brilliant. My dad actually told me to fight back as hard as a I wanted after I told him my friend got suspended for something like that. If you’re getting suspended regardless of who’s at fault, punch the guy in his face. You’ll still be in trouble but at least you’ll give as good as you get for it.”
No Moving Seats
“We had a rule in our dining hall where you weren’t allowed to move seats again, after you’d sat down at the first one. To this day I have no idea why, but it was official, and clearly written down. Not too rigorously enforced mind you. Also, they briefly banned talking at my junior school’s dining hall. For a six year old this was genuinely very oppressive, keeping in mind how much stricter and more aggressive teaching practices were in the early 1990s. It’s also worth noting that many of my teachers at that time were middle-aged or nearing retirement, hence they had their teaching ‘heyday’ in the 1960s and 1970s where you could be shot for not doing your homework. Some parents complained and the ban was lifted.”
Why Is This Even A Rule???
“I went to a private high school they had a ton of stupid rules, in the driving section it stated that students were not permitted to park their vehicles on top of school buildings. The only way you could get anything on those roofs was with a crane. My favorite rule was no running on school grounds, including sports fields. The rule was removed after students realized that it would be breaking the rules to play any sport above walking pace, hilarity ensued as prefects started handing out detentions at the finishing line in our annual school olympics.”
No Hair Nets For Lunch Ladies
“The lunch ladies weren’t required to wear hair nets because they had some sort of spray-on replacement that was supposedly effective at doing the same thing. Eventually, we all got tired of picking hair out of our food, so a group of kids decided to boycott the school lunches by packing ~300 paper bag lunches and handing them out to whoever wanted them. That day, there were only around 10 people who ate the school lunch (and most of them were special needs students who were forced by their ‘supervisors’ to not participate). So a few hours after lunch, we all get called in to an assembly, where they begin lecturing us about how rude we were to the lunch ladies. Apparently, we’d hurt their feelings, because we didn’t want to eat their food. Thus, a new rule was born: you aren’t allowed to eat a lunch that someone else brought to the school for you. They claimed it was not only rude of us to boycott the school’s lunches, but it was also a safety risk (some lunches contained peanut butter and jelly sandwiches). But there was a cluster of peanut-allergy lunches available that day as well. All in all: some grade-A bullsh-t rule was implemented to make sure that the school didn’t ever lose as much money on lunches as they did that day.”
Toga Day
“Not a permanent rule, but we had dress up days for homecoming. In my area, at least, Thursday was always toga day for the seniors. So we had toga day and all the seniors were sitting in first period when an administrator came in. He told us we had to change because we were showing our shoulders. They approved toga day. Do they not know what togas are?!”
One Hand Only
“You can only write with one hand. Doesn’t matter which one left or right, but it only can be one. If you are ambidextrous and write with both, that was against the school rules. You had to pick a hand, and the hand that you didn’t pick would be tied to the chair for the rest of the day. Oh, you can only use scissors with the hand that is tied down? Too bad. That sounds like something that would happen in the 1950s, except this was 1995, in the UK.”
Mandatory Showers
“In Middle School (11-13 years old or so for my friend’s across the pond), we had to take showers after gym class. They were mandatory. That wasn’t the dumb rule though, it was just the norm of the time. The dumb rule was we got our school issued towel as we walked into the locker room and it had to stay in your locker until you got back to the locker after your shower. So you walked to the shower buck naked, showered and walked back all dripping wet THEN you can use your towel. The reason? Rat tails (that’s what we called them – You twist the towel and the snap it like a bullwhip). One kid a couple years earlier got hit in the eye with one and lost a good bit of vision. Rumor had it some kid got hit in the balls and it split the sac open, but I’m not sure if that really happened though. Either way, that was the rule. They’d rather have soaking wet floors and naked kids slippin’ and slidin’ then deal with 30 boys armed with rat tails.”
Hair Has To Be In A Ponytail
“Guys with long hair had to have their hair up in a ponytail at all times. Girls could have their hair whatever way they wanted. Most of the teachers would let this slide but my art teacher in early high school, when I forgot my hair tie, forced me to sit holding my hair in a ponytail with my left hand while drawing with my right.”
The Swing Set List
“After reports of older kids hogging the swing-sets, my elementary school’s principal implemented a plan to ensure complete fairness. In order to use the swings, students would be required to fill in a sign up sheet in advance and wait to be assigned a 15 min swinging time slot. Students were issued colored pinnies during their time slot so the noon-hour supervisors could enforce the rule.”
Can’t Use The Front Entrance
“Hooo boy. My high school had some f–king stupid rules. Firstly, we weren’t allowed to use the front entrance. Ever. For visitors only, apparently. Right, OK..the main block of the school was a long, narrow three story affair with a staircase at either end. For some bizarre reason one staircase was labelled as the girls stairs, the other was the boys stairs. So if you finished a class in a room next to the girls stairs, even if your next class was immediately below you down one flight of stairs, you’d still have to walk the length of the building to the other staircase, down one floor, then all the way back again. To be fair, most teachers didn’t really give a sh-t and neither did we but there were some archaic fossil specimens well overdue for retirement who would stand there and enforce it. Once I said to one miserable old crone ‘do you really not have anything better to do’ when she tried telling me to go back up and around the other end of the building. Got a detention for that but it was worth it. Last one I can remember for now. Some of the aforementioned old fart teachers insisted that we all stand up when they enter the room. Again, most teachers didn’t bother with that kind of pretentious sh-t but some insisted on it. This wasn’t a posh private school, but a run down state comprehensive with delusions of grandeur.”