Were there any rules at a school you attended that you thought were ridiculous?

[AGXStarseed]

I thought about this after watching a video on YouTube where the YouTuber in question has asked his followers on Reddit "what was the dumbest rule your school enforced?"
As such (and after listening to some of the responses), I decided to ask you guys here if your school had any rules that you - either back then or looking back at it now - thought were weird, stupid or just plain nonsensical.

For me, one of the rules I hated was when Sports Days rolled around in High School - which took place over the entire day (a school day for me was just short of 7 hours, including breaks and lunch).
We all had a timetable to say which events we were competing in and at what time they would be taking place, with the rule in question been that you weren't allowed to leave after you'd completed your events - by which I mean you weren't allowed to leave the school grounds to go home (unless you weren't feeling well) or leave the school field to go inside beyond obviously going to the toilets and going for lunch if you had school dinners.
If you'd forgotten your P.E kit (accidentally or deliberately), tough luck - you still had to sit outside and watch everyone else for several hours. You'd think they'd have it set up so that those who forgot their P.E kit could go to an empty classroom with a teacher/substitute teacher and catch-up on their work - be it regular schoolwork, homework or coursework - but nope.
Also, I found it stupid when a teacher would let you leave the school early if you had a sick note and mark you off the register without a word on any other day, but letting kids leave school early on Sports Day without a good reason (and irrespective of whether their parents could pick them up) was somehow a big no-no.
On a final note, it wasn't helped by the fact that if you were a social outcast like myself, then you'd be stuck outside on your own for hours and - with Sports Day taking place in Summer (British Summers potentially getting to 30° Celsius / 86° Fahrenheit or higher) - it was overall not an enjoyable experience.

I can't post the video here as some of the stuff mentioned involves swearing, but here's a breakdown of some of the dumb rules that people on Reddit said about their schools.

• Not been allowed to take off your blazer on a hot day (another UK school attendee here) - with the school rule stating that if one person took their blazer off in a class, everyone in the class would have to agree to do so everyone looked the same. If even one person refused, everyone had to keep them on.
  
• Certain colours and/or clothing items been banned because of "Gang Affiliation" or because the clothing in question displayed images that the school judged to be unacceptable (such as guns).
  
• A school adding thumb prints scanners at their gates to count as registration - the person in question admitting to pressing the thumb scanner and then skipping school until he/she/they were eventually caught a few months later.
• Attempting to stop school bathrooms/toilets been vandalized by locking the bathroom in question for a week after the first offense. The rule was revoked after all the bathrooms ended up getting locked on the first day.
• Not allowing anything with a brand name in the lunchrooms - with everything having to be in clear plastic lunch boxes and sandwich bags.
  
• Not allowing bottles of water in the classrooms, even on hot days.
  
• A Catholic High School for Girls would grade down any 100% test scores to 99% - their reasoning been that "only God is perfect". (Please - Don't start any religion-based arguments in the comments regarding this one).
  
• At an Arizona School in the 1990s, the school chairs were replaced by large rubber stability balls with the intent been to improve posture and the rule been not to bounce on them. Apparently, it was a disaster.
• Getting suspended if you were involved in a fight - regardless of context and whether you fought back or not.
• Backpacks been banned but purses been allowed - with the guys mocking the rule by using purses as well.
• Salt and Pepper been banned due to it been "unhealthy" - despite the school still having a vending machine that you could buy Mountain Dew from.
• Been forced to wear a belt or you'd get detention.

So, do you guys have/remember any school rules that you thought were ridiculous?

 

[Thinx]

First years had to wear their school hats, I recall. To and from school. That was a green felt hat with a pink and yellow ribbon in winter, and a straw boater with same type of ribbon in summer. I suppose it was to be able to tell who were first years. On the whole though there weren't many bad rules. We had to stand for teachers, and say good morning etc. Some teachers embroidered or laboured the rules, like making people stand and explain why their chemistry book wasn't covered yet. That'd be because I ve got a life.... but they were rogues.

 

[Wulven]

Wearing a school uniform.

And strange situation resolving fighting bullies.

 

[Kit]

It mattered what pencil you were using. To me it's just a pencil, why does it matter if it's not #2? Not all teachers enforced this but some were strict about it.

No hats or hoodies on inside, why did this rule even exist? To this day I still wear hats inside.

My high school had a dress code, they did not allow crop tops or cleavage. I didn't know how misogynistic this was till my mid thirties and how this discriminated again those with large breasts. Luckily only dress codes that were enforced were the ones with profanity on them or that had anything that had drugs or alcohol on them. Teachers couldn't careless about sleeveless tops. And I had large breasts so thank god I was never harassed about my tops. It wasn't enforced was why.

No headphones or Gameboys in class. Why did this even matter if they did their school work and had nothing to work on, luckily not all teachers enforced this. Why is it a issue to listen to music while you read or do your assignment, not all teachers had this enforced either.

 

[Gracey]

Back in the early Seventies, before gated security, locked doors, biometric registration and metal detectors,

by last break time I'd had enough and didn't want to socialise in the yard with rowdy crowds so I walked home.
Seemed like a more agreeable idea to a five & half year old unaware of the rules.

At the same school and around the same time,
having to sit on an itchy waxed parquet floor, cross legged, arms folded, finger on lips and remain quiet and still while listening to another story.

Not quite being able to manage it all and remember the teachings from the story (parts of the bible read aloud) was ; back then, deemed disrespectful and punishable.
Now, it seems straight up ridiculous

 

[Unclewolverine]

I always hated the no hats because I loved hats at that age. We also had one that we could not wear shorts for part of the year. Didn't affect me, always wore jeans. The misogynistic rules are still there, my 12 year old daughter has already been dress coded a few times.

 

[Aspychata]

PE- we wore ugliest green shorts and top. I looked like a leprechaun because l was very very pale with very dark hair. It was required gym wear. My high school teacher actually asked me if l dyed my hair. It was just dirty. Lol.

 

[dragonfire42]

I got in trouble quite a few times for reading when I finished my work well before the time was over. What else was I supposed to do?

 

[Progster]

My school (UK) was more like a bootcamp than a school where it came to rules.
Rules about not wearing jewelry. Small, discrete earrings were allowed, but not necklaces or chains round the neck. I had a simple, discrete chain that I wore round my neck, that you could hardly see. Most of the teachers didn't see it or ignored it, but one teacher made it his mission to check and tell me to take it off. So every morning I came to school with it, every morning that I had a class with this teacher he told me to take it off.

Part of this was that I always resisted authority, hated (and still do) people telling me what to do. Particularly where I can't see the reason for it. If I can understand the reason, I will want to do it of my own accord, but if someone comes at me with a do-this-because-I-say-so attitude, then I resist it tooth and nail.

I can understand rules that have a purpose, but this one seemed to have no particular reason. I wasn't causing any danger to myself or anyone else. It was just rules for the sake of rules.

Another one was assemblies. I hated assemblies, and considered them pointless, it's not like you actually learned anything from them and you had to sit on the cold, dirty, hard floor with all the other kids - horrible - but they were compulsory to attend. I started skipping them, but then got caught.

 

[Misery]

There was this rule where I had to be there every day.

In all seriousness though, while I was never the "troublemaker" sort, I still at the same time WAS the sort to just do whatever I bloody well wanted to if the alternative was just too blasted dumb. Oddly, nobody ever tried to stop me...

Worked well during gym. Which is to say, I didnt join in sports during gym. Didnt matter what was said to me: I'd get up and just wander off. Every. Freaking. Time. Like, no, I dont really want to play a game of Crash At High Speeds Into The Guy Holding the Magic Leather Egg, thanks. Nor do I want to play Bounce the Orange Thing Alot. All a recipe for trouble, and with kids I hated, too. And you could not freaking pay me to take my shirt off for any reason. They often did "shirts VS skins" as they said, for the boys at my school. This always seemed to be a level of dumb that I had trouble even mentally processing. Needless to say, I did not take part.

The gym teacher though wasnt a bad guy, nor was he a doofus. So this very quickly resulted in a change for me: instead of doing normal gym class at all on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I'd go with this small group (very small) to the nearby driving range (by bus) to hit golf balls. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, all I was required to do was just walk, at my own pace, around the track while everyone else did the daily derpy activity.

This also had the highly entertaining side effect of me constantly carrying a big metal golf club AT ALL TIMES because I tended to just carry EVERYTHING as another dumb rule was only having 5 minutes to get to your locker, swap your stuff, AND then still somehow get to your next class. As I often couldnt remember what day it was, I tended to carry the club EVERY day, because heck with it, that's easier. Hilariously, there was no rule that said I could not do this. And most of the faculty knew me anyway, so it's not like any of them thought I might cause trouble with it.

Gotta say, bullies tended to not mess with me too much after the golf club thing started. I wonder why...?

 

[Booknerd515]

Here's several of the ones mine had:
-It mattered whatever pencil or pen you were using, number 2's were preferred, if you used any others you were looked down on.
-Certain calculators mattered. It had to be a TI-84 in a higher math class, not a TI-83, otherwise the exact instructions wouldn't work because the teacher did not want to go through extra instructions.
-The teachers were super picky about whatever binders or notebooks people used. They gave out pamphlets at the beginning of the year detailing even colored tabs, and if you didn't have the correct materials, they wouldn't let you use it and would give you spares from past years. Some textbooks had to be wrapped in paper bags or you would be docked a few percentage points in the beginning of the year because they were hand-me-downs and the teachers did not want them getting worse.
-Speaking of material usage, you weren't allowed to doodle in class. You could make lines on the page darker, but not doodle. They looked at your notes and walked around the room in between talking.
-You were almost always required to use a hall pass whenever you left a classroom for bathroom breaks or something that went around your neck.
-They made sure I had a study hall, but when my classes were too many to fit in a lunch, they didn't do anything about it because they were more concerned with graduating. I went for 7 1/2 hours, 5 days a week, for 2 whole school years without any lunch (or water) and now my parents complain why I'm unable to feel hunger.
-"You don't need any special requirements outside of class time (and some other things), so we will downgrade your iEP plan to a 504 plan because your disabilities aren't as extreme." Well I had anxiety among other things and that didn't work so well. They didn't only do that to me-they did that to at least half the kids I had heard of with iEPs. People nearly sued the school.
-When I was in high school, I could read books on my phone in certain classes once I reached grade 10 after I finished tests or did homework early which was handy in math. This was only after I asked the teacher's permission after every single tests. Other teachers did not let me read on my phone at all after I had done the homework.
-Each class needed an available substitute, even if they had no idea about anything in the subject. I had an orchestra substitute that slept and a math substitute that didn't have a clue about math so we just worked on worksheets ourselves which was fine for me but not so much for some of the others.

I still don't know how I never got detention.

 

[unperson]

I was so lousy at team sport (hate running, really bad at it, have like exercise asthma) I was always allowed to just sit in the stands, used to do homework behind other kids. I think we could wander off after 2:30, and it was only a half day of sport.

Too many people fainted in assembly (outdoor) so that got cancelled.

I always though caning boys was really creepy and nasty, but that got cancelled later in high school.

Wasn't too bad at my skewl.

 

[SDRSpark]

I always hated the no hats because I loved hats at that age. We also had one that we could not wear shorts for part of the year. Didn't affect me, always wore jeans. The misogynistic rules are still there, my 12 year old daughter has already been dress coded a few times.

The "no hats" thing I thought was ridiculous then, and I still think it's ridiculous now. It comes from the utterly ludicrous idea that wearing a hat indoors is somehow impolite...it's a thing in the adult world too but it makes no flipping sense whatsoever. (Many aspects of society are hung up on tradition in defiance of common sense it seems.)

Sometimes the school used hats as a fundraiser (you could wear a hat if you paid $2 toward [cause] and got a sticker).

The high school I graduated from was obsessed with drugs (as in, everything that could possibly hint at drugs was banned). For example, in art class we weren't allowed to draw or paint anything containing a toadstool or mushroom (the difference between a common toadstool and a magic mushroom was lost on these bozos). Basically any sort of fungus was considered "drugs" and you weren't allowed to paint any nature scenes containing fungus.

 

[AGXStarseed]

I always though caning boys was really creepy and nasty, but that got cancelled later in high school.

Geez, caning was still going on when you were at school?

 

[unperson]

yes, but I'm in my 60's. I think they abolished it when I was about 16.

 

[Martha Ferris]

Punishing someone for defending themselves in a fight. NO FIGHTING! Both people got punished the same. It's easy way to solve a problem but not just.

 

[AGXStarseed]

Punishing someone for defending themselves in a fight. NO FIGHTING! Both people got punished the same. It's easy way to solve a problem but not just.

Funnily enough, in one of the stories from the video I mentioned where the school had the same problem (both people getting punished/suspended for a fight, even if one person never retaliated/was only defending themselves), one of the individuals who was suspended told his mother about what had happened and the rule in question.
She then proceeded to agree that the rule was stupid and then told her son "If you're going to get suspended for fighting regardless of whether you fight back or not, then at the very least earn the punishment".

As such, the next time the bully started with this kid, the victim in question snapped and proceeded to lay into the bully with punches, kicks, slamming him into the ground, etc.
At the end of it when the teachers broke them up, the bully was on the floor - battered and bruised with black eyes and a bloody nose. After they both came back from suspension again (during which the mother of the victim had rewarded him for sticking up for himself by buying him a new video game), the bully never bothered him again.

 

[Butterfly88]

One of the high schools I went to had a rule that the students weren't allowed to date each other. Seems ridiculous to not let that age group date.

 

[Isadoorian]

Getting suspended if you were involved in a fight - regardless of context and whether you fought back or not.

Here in good old North America, this is what's called the Zero Tolerance Policy by many schools. It's utter crap and as you can see, does more harm than good.

I had a friend in high school get suspended after a kid punched him at lunch, completely unprovoked. Kid who punched him got off scott free iirc.

 

[ForestGumpett]

Math