Obviously not every object belongs in a classroom, but these are some seriously bizarre banned objects!
Sharpies
“When I was in high school we got permanent markers banned. Someone organized a game of Assassins where everyone is given a target to “kill” and if you’re successful you inherit their target. It was $1 to enter and the winner gets the jackpot. We had around 150 students out of the 600 in the school participating. The objective was to mark your target with the sharpie on their skin and they were then declared dead. This could only be done in the hallway or the cafeteria, not in class or off campus. Well our vice principal decided she wanted to participate saying that if she won the money she’d use it to buy something for the school. Well one of my friends ended up with her as a target so in between classes one day he sneaks up behind her and does his best Sam Fisher assassination attempt, grabbing her mouth and slashing her throat with the sharpie. Well that was just too much emotional stress for our poor VP. She took his sharpie, had him serve ISS and forced us to discontinue the game. No more sharpies could be used by students or staff. And no one knows whatever became of the prize money either. We kept it in a jar in our principal’s office so no one could take it.” (source)
NetTrekker: It’s The Next Big Thing!
“Google.
Our high school had some kind of contract with this really shitty “school appropriate” search engine called NetTrekker. They banned using Google in school because “it wasn’t scholarly”, only NetTrekker was allowed. They tried extending this to beyond the school, they wanted us to use ONLY NetTrekker for internet searches outside school, and sent home a pamphlet about “Internet rules outside the classroom “. They said that students shouldn’t have Android phones. I got a referral for having a Moto X smartphone.
This was in 2015.” (source)
Candy Necklaces: Seriously
“Candy necklaces at my middle school. One day a couple of my friends came into the playground before school started with a candy necklace each, which immediately got everyone’s attention. After we all demanded to know where they got them and how much they cost (from the corner shop down the street and 10p as I recall) one or two others said they might go and get one for themselves before school started. That “might go” turned into them sprinting to the shop once one kid figured out how to weaponize them.
Holding one piece of candy between their teeth, stretching forward the elastic and biting down, it would catapult pieces of candy at whatever it was aimed at. That morning a few kids bought a candy necklace each, and played a game of firing bits at each other. The next morning all 400 kids that attended that school were engaged in all-out necklace war, every single one of us must have had at least one and our own technique for maximizing the firing rate.
After doing our best recreation of trench warfare all morning and having the kind of fun that only comes with an entire playground full of kids all playing the same game, we were all ushered into the assembly hall to be told that candy necklaces were now banned. Nobody lost an eye, just in case you were wondering.” (source)
K9s? Really?
“Drug dogs. They started bringing in drug dogs in my sophomore year. They would smell the lockers and cars and if one hit on your locker or car you had to go open them up and let the school search it. By my junior year a group of stoners had enough of it. They took bong water and put it in a bunch of spray bottles and sprayed it on all the lockers and cars they could. My school had about 1400 kids in it. It took one time of having 300+ kids pulled out of class to have the lockers searched to make them rethink the policy. What really got the parents to force the school to stop though was the cars. When drug dogs hit on a spot they kind of go nuts. Imagine 25+ cars getting a hit and having dogs scratch the hell out of the paint for a search that found nothing. Many parents didn’t push too hard but some were demanding that the school pay for the damage. So no more drug dogs.” (source)
Anything But Water
“Any liquid not in a clear plastic bottle. And then the only liquid we could have was water.
The ban was because a girl in my grade got caught with vodka in a clear plastic bottle. Everyone in my school never understood the ban because vodka is clear like water and the only reason the teacher even caught on to her was because another dumbass kid was joking around about alcohol and the idiot with the vodka threw the bottle away in the garbage next to the teacher’s desk.” (source)
Toasters
“Toasters. We got in trouble for making toast in a math class because our teacher was notoriously oblivious. Like we full on snuck a toaster into the classroom and made toast with jelly and distributed it under the desks two class periods in a row. After getting chewed out for being disrespectful, we then designed our class shirts with the “come and take it” flag with a toaster in the middle. The head of school somehow didn’t find out about the shirt design until we had them and wore them to school, despite the fact that he was a class sponsor.” (source)
“Shag Bands”
These plastic/rubber bracelet things. Basically, if someone broke your shag band you supposedly had to have sex with them.
A natural law according to some, but never, to my knowledge ever enforced.
The school got wind of it and became horrifed that a bunch of 13 years would ever think something like this reasonable and came down on us with an iron fist. I vividly remember one teacher scornfully say *So called Shag bands…” and then spit in disgust. It was hilarious. (source)
Short-Selling
“Short selling stocks. Our class was the first to go through new mandatory financial literacy classes and part of it was a stock market simulation. We began betting against the market when we set it up to crash specific stocks and each time our money rose exponentially.
We had to fill out paperwork for each trade which ended up amounting to around 30 pages of trades. At this point we had trillions. Our teacher was also very condescending about how great she was at the market, so we then bought huge percentages of her stocks and sold them pennies on the dollar to crash her stocks as well. After a while she checked everyone’s progress and found we were trillionaires and went into a rage, even calling the company to see how we had cheated. They said we had short sold which technically isn’t cheating but she still disqualified us from winning the class game and gave us B’s. Now there’s a disclaimer before every class that says you’ll automatically fail if you short sell.” (source)
Cooking Classes
“Superintendent decided that, I quote verbatim: “Cooking is an impractical art. Today, everyone can just buy pre-made meals and no one has time to cook or they could be smart and hire a personal chef.”
This person makes over $150k/year after taxes and is in charge of 3 schools in the district, totaling ~3000 students.” (source)
White T-Shirts
“Wearing a white T-shirt in middle school.. Lived in an area where there was suburban, rural, and a sprinkle of urban within a 15mile radius so everyone got mixed together.. well a small handful of the rural kids decided “White-Power-Wednesday” was gonna be a thing. You wear a white T-shirt to represent… At first it was a small handful, then the suburban kids saw a lot of people wearing white so they did it too, most not knowing why. Before you know it, things got bad quick so the school said no white T shirts.” (source)
Cafeteria Trays
“The events that led to this started with a fight breaking out in the cafeteria where one person stabbed the other with a fork. The next day metal forks had been banned and we were only given plastic sporks to eat with. A couple of weeks later another fight broke out in the cafeteria and a group of 3 students beat another student using the cafeteria trays. After that we had Styrofoam trays in the cafeteria.” (source)
“Sack Whacking”
“Guys would hit each other in the balls as a prank or whatever, apparently it was causing a big enough problem that the entire school had to attend an assembly where the deputy principal informed everyone. “There has been a large outbreak of. . . . Sack whacking. . .” Entire school was laughing so hard, even the deputy (who was a really strict and uptight guy) started laughing his ass off.
We were also banned from playing with “large balls” (basket balls/soccer balls) at the same assembly. That was also received very well.” (source)
Candy Canes
“Candy canes. Apparently, they were a safety hazard because you could suck on them and sharpen them into a point, which could then theoretically be used to stab somebody.
Most of our school suspected that it was simply a way of getting the “ugly Christmas sweater club” (a group of guys who wore ugly sweaters to school and roamed the hallways handing out candy canes while playing Christmas music) in trouble. It was by far the dumbest thing to ever happen at my high school.” (source)