Things We Accepted As Normal in Highschool
No matter how old you are there’s a good chance you look back at your highschool years with mixed feelings. These four years of education were filled with all kinds of weird rules from the principal, teachers, and even your friends. You had to eat lunch as early as 11:35, and if you wanted to go pee in the middle of class you were at the mercy of your professor. There are so many questions that come up when we remember what was “normal” back then. We don’t think anyone would want to go back to using a hall pass!
We’ve collected the weirdest things people remember from their highschool years. Which of these are you happy to have left behind?
Strange Dietary Habits
Remember when eating chicken nuggets with a side of tater tots and 1% milk at 11:35 am was something you really looked forward to? The excitement was REAL. You were probably sitting through math class dreaming about that first bite of a mediocre fast food product. They were never as good as the McNuggets you got after school with friends, but they were the next best thing.
The second you heard the sweet sound of the lunch bell you were sprinting down the hall, ready to get your hands on that subpar school lunch. But seriously, 11:35 is an insanely early hour for lunch, we adults can confirm that this time of day is strictly reserved for brunches.
Asking To Go To The Bathroom
The human bladder is many things, one of those things is uncontrollable. However, in high school, teachers didn’t seem to understand or care about that simple life fact, not even a little bit. If you dare to ask to use the restroom within the first thirty minutes of class you’ll get hit with a “you should have used the restroom before class.”
It’s as if they don’t understand you can’t time your own bladder, or maybe they just want you to suffer. There’s nothing worse than a teacher who gets intoxicated by their power over students’ bathroom access. We shudder whenever we remember our own terrible memories of not having free reign over our trips to the toilet.
The Hall Pass
Let’s discuss the hall pass, shall we? In most high schools it isn’t enough to merely get permission to leave the room, you need a specific pass so you can prove that you’re authorized to roam the halls during school hours. If you’re caught in the hallway without a pass, some nerdy hall monitor will report you if you don’t have one.
There were the computer-savvy kids who were able to doctor a hall pass, thus giving them the ability to walk around the hallway freely during all times of the day. However, if the hall monitor has a good enough eye they’ll be able to spot your fake pass and you’ll end up with a bigger punishment than being shooed back to class.
Vacations Are For Showing Off To Your Friends
When adults go on vacation they might update their Facebook status with an album of photos, maybe they’ll even show some off to people at the office. But when highschoolers come back from a vacation? It’s like they brought the entire giftshop to school with them, just to make sure everybody knows that they went somewhere exciting over summer vacation.
We get it, Tiffany, you and your parents went on a cruise to the Bahamas, that doesn’t make your t-shirt any less tacky! Even though we might be giggling at their sunburn, we still felt a bit jealous that they went on vacation while we were home playing video games. Still, that’s a pretty great way to spend a vacation!
P.E.- Where Boys Become Men
When was the last time you ran a 5 minute mile and then went straight to math class? Probably when you were in highschool. Or if you weren’t of the athletic persuasion you probably wheezed your way around the track while sweating into your gym clothes. Highschool has to be the only place you exercise around your peers, and we bet there’s no one who misses it.
If you asked adults to run a 5-minute mile they would probably puke their guts out, or roll into a fetal position and start crying. The only people who remember PE fondly were those freakingly athletic kids who wanted to show their abilities off in front of the whole class.
That Mysterious S Shape That Everyone Drew
You probably saw a lot less of these after graduation. It seems as though this mysterious shape has been drawn on textbooks and school desks since the dawn of time. But does anyone really know where it comes from? Well for those of you who aren’t in the know, this cool symbol is actually the Stussy S, also known as the Cool S. It’s a bit like the infinity symbol, but not exactly.
This was a pretty basic shape to doodle all over your school books, on desks, maybe even scratched into bathroom stalls. Some schools even banned the drawing of these because they likened them to gang symbols. In reality, we just liked them because they were easy to draw and looked really cool.
Double Edge(y) Pencil
If you ever had your eraser fall off, or you just wore it down to an invisible nub, you would be familiar with the photo below. There was nothing that felt cooler than writing with one of these babies. If your pencil got dull you could simply flip it over for a freshly sharpened tip! Of course, there was always the risk of stabbing your hand with the other end, but it was worth it.
Sometimes having one of these freshly sharpened on both sides made you feel like you were holding a double-sided sword. You may have ended up puncturing your hand and drawing blood, but it was all part of being the high school badass.
Mathematical Typing
The world before smartphones was so much more wholesome, back when you would try and figure out how many messages you could write with your calculator. There are the more commonly known number combinations such as 80085 to spell “boobs”, but there are much more creative and less juvenile ones out there as well. Who would have thought that in about a decade these little tricks would become a thing of the pass.
Considering the fact most schools didn’t allow phones or other electronics, calculators ended up being raised to a much higher status than they should have been. As an adult, you probably have no interest in them, unless you need one as a paperweight. If you need to add numbers you can always use your phone!
The Devil’s Eyes
There are some of you who won’t be able to even glance at the image below without feeling sick, and then there are some of you who will snort with laughter remembering these kids during your high school days. The weird kid who would do this kind of thing to his eyes during lunch is someone who you won’t soon forget after graduation.
In fact, if you’re the squeamish type then the image of kids making “devil eyes” will probably haunt you while you’re trying to sleep, or at least it did back when you were still in high school. Hopefully, you were able to forget all about that weird kid and his freaky eye trick once you left.
Disappointing Your Favorite Teacher
While many students may feel distant from their teachers, there are others who have a closer bond with them. Those students are sometimes called “teacher’s pets”, but usually they just like to put the extra work into impressing the instructor of their favorite subject. Sometimes you might even hang around after class to talk to them, you just love their class that much.
But the worst feeling in the world can be letting that favorite teacher down. If a teacher you already dislike is raising their voice it’s really no big deal, but when it’s the professor you looked up to it can feel devastating. Any of us who had a teacher whose opinion we valued can relate to that kind of pain.
Dress Codes
Every high school has different rules for what students are and are not allowed to wear. Some schools are so strict that you have to wear a designated uniform, while others only enforce a simple dress code. That is, the dress code SHOULD be simple, but really it ends up being a complicated set of rules that are enforced with an iron fist.
If your skirt is even a centimeter above the length it should be you might find yourself being sent home to change. If you unbutton your top button, oh boy, you’re in for a pretty bad talking to. As high school students, we never understood what the big deal was, but these rules seemed to be the more important thing on our teachers’ minds.
Drastic Physical Changes
There are only two kinds of people in this world; those who were beautiful in high school and those who glowed up after graduation. That nerdy kid with acne and glasses? He might’ve ended up working as a model once puberty was over and he started using exfoliating wash. That girl with the bushy brown hair? Her curls could currently be popping.
Having good looks in high school shouldn’t be that important, but for some reason it is. Being an ugly duckling during those four years of education can feel like the worst thing in the world, but there’s nothing better than turning into a beautiful swan a few years later. That’s certainly a better situation than peaking in high school and having it all go downhill from there!
The Weird Noises People Would Make
Every time your teacher left the room your class was bound to turn into an absolute zoo. But that’s nothing compared to that one girl who wanted to pretend she was a cat. In her head, she probably saw herself as the ultimate feline badass, but in reality, people couldn’t help but giggle whenever she would hiss in anger. These types of students sometimes wear collars or even headbands with cat ears on them.
But we hope people were at least kind to the cat girl and tried not to laugh too obviously when she licked the back of her hands to clean behind her ears. Sure it was super weird but sometimes that’s the kind of phase people go through as teens.
Senior Ditch Day
Even though this was a recurring event every year, teachers and principals had no idea what to think on senior ditch day. It’s almost as if their memories were wiped clean every year after it happened, otherwise you would think they would see it coming. Some seniors go so far as to pull pranks, but the easiest option to celebrate the end of high school is to pick a day to not show up!
This was an amazing act of solidarity that almost every senior student could get behind, except for that one goodie two shoes who just had to show up and ruin it for everyone else. As we all know, ditch day only works if the whole class does it!
Suddenly Scared Of The Dark
Most of us stop being afraid of the dark long before we enter highschool. But somehow, there are always those kids who scream when the lights go off in class. Your teacher might have been about to start a PowerPoint presentation and flicked the lights off for the projector, and like clockwork, a random student would scream the very second it was dark.
In reality, this probably had nothing to do with fear of the dark but rather the fact that you can get away with screaming in class if your teacher isn’t able to pick out who exactly made the noise. Is this an immature thing to do? Absolutely. But it happens in nearly every high school class to ever exist.
The Constant Vomiting
High school was a time where you would point to some kid in the hallway and whisper to your friend “he threw up in gym last year.” A student vomiting was something that would forever remain in the collective memory of everyone around him. For some reason, someone upchucking is a lot more common in high school than anywhere else. If we had to pick a culprit we’d blame it on the school lunches.
God bless those school janitors that kept the school floors clean after a student got sick. The only time you’re barfing as an adult is after a wild night of drinking, and usually, you make it to the toilet instead of making a huge mess on the floor.
Early Morning Energy
There was once a time in all of our lives when starting your day at 9 AM was considered late. Now it seems absurd to wake up and get ready for the day at 7 o’clock in the morning, or even earlier. There’s something about that age that allows high schoolers to function as normal human beings at that ungodly hour, and once you graduate that special ability is gone.
You can arrive to work at 10:30 and it will take at least two coffees to keep you from falling asleep at your desk. If only there was some way to get that youthful energy back, but still live freely as an adult out of high school. Guess you can’t have your cake and eat it, too!
Good Cop Bad Cop
Every teacher is different in terms of their strictness levels and behavior toward students. Some teachers have the energy of a cool older sibling, while others are a bit more like a drill sergeant. Generally speaking, you could probably figure out what your teacher’s personality would be like based on the subject they were teaching. These are just stereotypes, but we think you’ll find them to be mostly accurate.
Your English teacher was the one you weren’t afraid to share your super deep and profound poetry with, whereas your math teacher might have haunted you in your dreams at one point or another. A history teacher might dig your comparison of Marie Antoinette and Kim Kardashian, but your gym teacher will do nothing but bark and blow their whistle at you.
Chewing Gum Made You an Outlaw
In high school, gum was an illegal substance comparable to cocaine. If you were caught chomping down on some Bazooka or Juicy fruit then you’ve earned yourself a pretty sizeable punishment. Of course, the reason for this was due to the fact that troublemaking students would often stick chewed up wads of gum anywhere and everywhere they could think of.
There was definitely one time or another where your hand brushed the bottom of your desk and felt some chewed up hardened gum. But after highschool gum goes back to being a boring old candy, nothing exceptional or dangerous about it. You might munch on it to freshen your breath or calm your nerves, but you certainly won’t feel like a rule breaker.
The Best Years of Our Lives?
There are many people who will look back on their high school years fondly, they may even go so far as to say that those four years were the best of their lives. However, there’s an even bigger chunk of individuals who don’t share the same sentiment, in fact, they feel the complete opposite when remembering their high school years.
Many teenagers will have had a hard time fitting in with their peers or were going through such an awkward puberty phase that it kept them from opening up. High school isn’t an easy environment to survive in, and there is an endless number of reasons why someone might not have had the best time during those years.
Teachers Who Don’t Know How to Use the Projector
When your teacher rolls out the projector you know the class is going to be interesting. At the very least, you’ll get to sit in a dark classroom and maybe catch up on the sleep you’ve been missing all week. But if you can keep your eyes open during the first few slides you might notice that they’re completely blank, yet your teacher is still prattling away about the subject.
It’s no secret that teachers are often technologically challenged, screens, computers, and projectors often have functions that bewilder them. It’s always an awkward moment when one of the students needs to point out that the projector isn’t working unless the teacher was planning on presenting blank slides for the rest of the class.
Trying to Reach the Minimum Word Count
Whenever a written assignment rolls around you can bet your teacher has a minimum number of words or pages you must meet. You can forget about choosing a large font size because the requirements will always mention that you must use Times New Roman size 12. As students, how did we manage to reach the 3,000 minimum on our essays in high school?
The solution was always to pad your writing as much as humanly possible. Every introduction to our essays started with “The subject of which I am discussing on this day henceforth is…”, just so we could squeeze as many words as possible into every sentence. In retrospect, this probably made our essays harder to read, but you can blame the teacher for that!
Freshmen are Constantly Getting Lost
Most high schools are big enough to get lost in. Most places will give freshmen a tour of the building on their first day, making sure none of them get lost and roam the hallways aimlessly for the rest of the school year. But new students are bound to get lost at some point during their freshman year, even if they’ve been given proper orientation.
It’s not uncommon to see 9th graders waltz into the wrong classroom, possibly more than once per day! This is usually met with laughter, sometimes even ridicule, which is why you should always be 100% sure whenever walking into a high school classroom. It’s important to stay alert, those doors all look very similar!
The Toilet Paper That Made Your Booty Go- OUCH!
This photo probably makes your butt recoil in fear of the memories of highschool toilet paper. It’s as if school institutions were determined to get the most sandpaper-like toilet tissue possible, most likely because it was the cheapest. But perhaps it was also a way to keep students out of the toilets, and thus preventing the bathroom from getting too smelly.
More likely than not you held in any number 2 business until you got home. That rough single-ply makes us want to go over to a pack of 3-ply rolls and give them a big hug. One of the blessings of being an adult is being able to select your own TP, and that’s a privilege we wouldn’t give up for anything in the world.
Making it Look Like You Didn’t Start at the Last Minute
Most teachers will alert students of an upcoming assignment early on, if not at the beginning of the semester there will be at least a few months notice. But do students take advantage of the days they have to work on their papers? The answer is a resounding “no”, and we’re sure all you readers can back us up on that.
High school was a time of doing everything at the last minute, and somehow we managed to power through and get decent if not good grades. Of course, we didn’t want our teacher to know that we only finished our essay the night before, so we would always change the date at the top of the paper to make it seem like it took weeks to finish!
Getting Your Teacher to Ramble
There’s something about being a teacher that makes them very willing and eager to talk about their life. Whether it’s about their days as high school students or what they did over the weekend, it seems they’re always ready to open up and share a personal story. Students are well aware of this, and sometimes even use it to their advantage.
For example, if there’s an upcoming exam an easy way to stall your instructor is to get them rambling. It never matters what they talk about, it could be their feelings on the political climate or their favorite pasta recipe, just so long as it keeps them talking long enough for people to brush up on the material before the test is handed out!
You Were NOT Ready
Midterm and final exams should come as no surprise to any high school student. Usually, these tests and the subjects they’ll be on are announced at the very beginning of the year, giving students an ample amount of time to brush up on the material. But more likely than not, they will wait until the night before the test to cram in all the information they should’ve learned over the course of a few months.
We might have thought that this was a fool-proof plan, that we could easily ace the exam because we were just that confident in our abilities. But when the morning of the exam finally arrived we were shaking in our boots, far from being prepared!
The Concept Of Being Popular
Being popular in high school meant everything and nothing at the same time. If you were lucky enough to obtain this title for yourself you were practically put on a pedestal by the rest of the student body, your status was elevated above the rest. However, there was nothing important people actually did to become popular, sometimes it just happens without trying.
Of course, throwing parties and wearing expensive clothes helps a lot, but at the end of the day, it’s the rest of the high school population that determines whether or not you’re part of this elite group. And once you leave high school that status no longer means anything. In fact, the “popular kid” personality in highschool usually doesn’t translate to popularity in college or the workplace!
Teachers Think Your Life Revolves Around Them
High school involves a variety of different subjects and classes; science, math, English, and history are among the usual suspects. In addition to cramming all this information into your developing teenage brain, you must also complete assignments from each of these classes, and sometimes it feels like each teacher thinks they’re the only one handing out homework. You’ll have two assignments from one class and then another three from the next, it’s like they think there’s no life beyond school!
Seriously, teachers need to get a grip and understand that every teacher in high school wants to pile on a variety of assignments, but it’s impossible to manage all of them! They might think that all 24 hours of your day belong to them, but they’re wrong!
Over Protective Teachers
Some teachers will go to pretty ridiculous lengths to make sure their stuff isn’t stolen by students. In fact, if it were a practical solution they would probably nail every one of their belongings to their desk, and then superglue their desk to the floor. We’re not sure what kind of sticky-fingered students these professors have taught, but they were definitely impacted by the experience.
As much as teachers may have annoyed us in high school, we have to acknowledge that they work incredibly hard. Most of the time they pay for their supplies out of pocket, so it’s really no wonder that they’re so protective. But still, gluing a brick to your calculator? That’s just a bit much.
The Different Levels of Teacher Anger
The level of anger your teacher displays towards screwing up will depend on where you are in the school system. If you make a mistake in preschool you’ll probably be easily forgiven, you might even get a piece of candy. Teachers get a little more miffed with elementary and middle school students, but it’s nothing compared to the way they fly into a rage with high school students.
For some reason, teachers in high schools are the toughest and the most easily angered. You might guess that it’s because high school students are older, but that wouldn’t be the case. Once you enter college teachers become a lot more laid back, it’s almost as if they don’t care when you mess up!
College Professors are Super Chill
High school has a way of preparing you for college, and it doesn’t involve actually teaching you things that you might learn in your higher education. Instead, they decide the best way to get you ready for post-high school education is by scaring the ever-loving crap out of you. They’ll emphasize how much tougher university professors are, even though that’s not the case.
They’ll insist that college exams and assignments are super strict and that the classes are difficult and must be taken with the utmost seriousness. But once you actually enter college you’ll realize that it was all exaggeration, and you won’t understand why. We guess high school teachers just seem to like terrifying students about the future?
The Never-ending Assignments
Many high school students will find themselves buried under an avalanche of homework. You’ll have one essay due in two weeks, math homework to do every night, and of course all those midterm and final exams to study for. Just when you’ve made progress on one of your tasks another one seems to join the pool, it’s like a never-ending river of tasks.
Suddenly you’ll find yourself with all these unfinished assignments, not to mention ones you haven’t even started yet. Your stress and anxiety levels might spike as you wonder how on Earth you’ll be able to finish everything in time. When you think you couldn’t possibly take anymore that’s when it happens, one of your teachers gives you yet another piece of homework!
The Bell Means Nothing!
Teachers and students have very different ideas of what the school bell means. For students, it’s a strict gospel that cannot be challenged, once you hear it class is over for good. But for teachers? They think they’re the ones who give the final word on when class is over, and that can last to a few seconds or a few minutes after the bell rings.
It’s almost as if teachers only remember a very important fact when the bell finally goes off, like some kind of Pavlovian reaction. You probably remember hearing the words, “class isn’t over until I say it’s over” coming from one of your teachers. There’s no sentence in the world more horrible than that!
Teachers Who Contradict Themselves
Teachers have a tendency to say a lot of contradictory things. Perhaps they simply forget the things they say at the beginning of the year, or maybe they just really like being oxymoronic. Whatever the reason, we are all too familiar with a scenario like this. Your teacher starts the year off with a smile and announces that they believe in students asking questions.
Then as the semester continues they begin to change their tune. Now whenever a student has a question on material that’s already been covered they snap back with “Why didn’t you pay attention?”. It’s a kind of Catch 22, and there’s just no winning on the students’ end of the dynamic. You just have to cross your fingers and hope you get a friendlier teacher!
“This Knowledge Will Help You In Life”
While highschool does bother to teach you genuinely important things like maths and English, it does lack in the education of subjects you will desperately need once you graduate high school. You can analyze Shakespeare like a pro, but if you don’t know how to properly file your taxes then you’re going to have a hard time entering the adult world.
For some reason, we learned a ton of impractical information about the periodic table and the mitochondria, but we graduated without a number of important adult skills. Unless you ended up with a career in science, a good chunk of that information was probably useless to you, unless you want to sound like a smart guy at a party.
Everything Was Super Breakable
We’re not sure how, but so many high schools seem to have a pretty shoddy infrastructure. Unless you went to a fancy private school, you were probably spending your days studying in a building that was built in the early 1900s and never renovated. Door knobs across the school were likely to break off if you turned them too hard. You may have even seen a bathroom stall door fall off if it was slammed shut.
And that’s not to mention paint peeling off your lockers or finding gum stuck to the bottom of your desks. If you didn’t go to a school like this then you should consider yourself lucky. All of us out of high school are glad to have sturdier door knobs now.
You Really Think the Exam Wasn’t Confusing?
Most teachers create their own exams, but there is a wide variety in how they decide to construct them. Some teachers like exams to be straightforward and test the most basic knowledge of the student taking it. Other teachers want to make the most confusing test possible, and try to trip students up at every possible turn. This kind of exam is bad, but that’s not even the worst thing about them.
After this convoluted exam has been graded the teacher will fail to understand why so much of the class failed. It never seems to occur to them that maybe everyone got bad grades because the test was confusing, they just shrug their shoulders and assume the students didn’t try hard enough!
Sniff The Magic Marker
Did you ever start a new year of high school with a set of scented highlighters? Even if all you had were regular unscented markers, there was just something about smelling them that gave you a certain thrill. This isn’t a habit that is likely to carry over to your office supplies in the corporate world, but it seems like a pretty natural thing to do in high school.
There was always that rumor floating around about the kid who sniffed his highlighters too much and passed out, something that made it even more exciting because of the danger involved. If you weren’t lucky enough to get a set like the one in the photo above, you bet you were trying to befriend the kid who was.
People Randomly Sticking Things Into Their Skin
Maybe it was just because certain classes carried on way too long, or perhaps it’s because people are at their weirdest and grossest during their high school years, but there is a certain body-centered fascination in high school. We’re not talking about working out or losing weight, we’re talking about how sticking a needle through your skin was something that was considered cool and edgy to do.
If you were too scared to play around with needles then you might have ended up the butt of jokes by your friends, maybe you were even called a scardey cat. But maybe if you had spent more time paying attention in class instead of messing around you would’ve passed all your exams…
Glue Lagoon
High schoolers have a large range of things that satisfy them. There are the normal things like video games, mac and cheese, and clique drama, but then there are the few that get satisfied by doing strange things like this. There was just something so pleasing about peeling dried glue off your hands, even if it ended up drying and irritating your skin.
Though it was a whole lot better than peeling your actual skin or biting your nails, so it couldn’t have been all that bad. Whether you were using Elmer’s or some off-brand glue, we have no doubt that you tried doing this at one point or another in high school. Just don’t get caught doing it as an adult!
Crazy Hype From The Theatre Geeks
Have you ever wondered what it was about those theater kids that made them so energized early in the morning? We doubt that they were chugging coffee or doing expresso shots, we think it was the pure thrill of getting onto that stage. The rest of us who weren’t in on their activities would look upon them with confused expressions, we just didn’t understand their world of theater.
And of course, there was always the one kid in drama class who took everything way too seriously. They probably thought they were going to move to Hollywood and break into showbiz the second they graduated. If you weren’t especially into performing, these kids made drama class a whole lot more painful.
Cracking Your Back with these Plastic Red Chairs
For some odd reason, high school is a time where everyone constantly has the urge to crack their backs, and there was something about these red, hard plastic chairs that made it so satisfying. Maybe you sat behind that one kid who couldn’t stop doing it, and as a result, he always ended up looking right at you several times during class.
That would’ve been enough to startle anyone, and would probably get very annoying after a while. It was probably a terrible idea to crack our backs as much as we did in high school, but that was nothing compared to the kids who seemed to be able to crack literally every bone in their body.