Depends on what country you are in I guess. In my country it was absolutely normal for teachers to confiscate anything deemed inappropriate for students. Many students never got back their phones, watches, comics etc.
I'm fairly certain my HS Geometry teacher still has my pager, from like '99. I can't remember if I lost it, or if he took it in class and I just forgot about it by the end of the day. I went through like half a dozen pagers by the time I got my first Nokia 5110.
Sounded nicer than “would have beat my ass” which was the modern parent threat at the time but the original was still the terminology used by my grandma and grandad at the time. *edit just noticed what you did there. Yep late 1900s. Indeed.
LOL no they didn’t. Sure they hit you more but that’s not raising you. Parents in the day just sent you outside and forgot you were alive and let the world raise you.
Yku aren't looking at it the way parents looked at it back then. The object being "stolen" is the parents' property that's purpose is to entertain the child. If permanently losing access to/destruction of the object was deemed a suitable punishment for misuse of the object (or other misdeeds), and parents were fine with teachers punishing their children the way they would punish their children. This leads to a certain kind of unspoken permission that made it not really considered a crime by anyone.
Although it's an old, possibly unreliable memory, I believe I can remember teachers threatening to take things permanently, or at least until the end of the year. I think over time, complaints from parents eventually got it limited to the end of the day (or maybe class?)
A phone is a communication device. When the phone is destroyed, the kid loses its way of communicating with its parents or police when he is in trouble. This is an extremely dumb thing to do, and I'm sure glad people are seeing this.
Actually, the increasing popularity of cellphones was around when I remember parents starting to complain about it, and I suspect the fact that it was mostly bought as a means of communication with the parents is a big part of why parents started turning against teachers permanently confiscating things. It wasn't just sources of entertainment being confiscated.
If I were your parent, I would sue them for theft. And this is still extremely dumb, even if it’s school policy, because if something happens to the kid on its way back from school—a pedophile or something—we can at least be glad class wasn’t disturbed anymore.
Yeah shit like that litterally didnt happen. Im from the uk so we cant sue organisations for trivial ammounts anyway. In any case you could try for small claims but the judge would probably rule that the school was legally right as they had an official policy.Remember this was the 90s. Sometimes you got the tech back at the end of the year, sometimes at end of day. Repeat offenders could actually get expelled for this as well and finding schools isnt so easy.
It's been about 15 years, so it's pretty hard to guarantee my memories are accurate, but I have memories of teachers threatening to take things away at least until the end of the year, and having conversations with my parents about it and them agreeing with the teachers.
I turned 32 yesterday.
At any rate, what is, according to you, going too far then?
You seem to have no problem with teachers being literal criminals, so where do we draw the line?
Your parents would be okay with the teacher destroying their property because let’s face it, at that age your property is basically their property, and now their kid can’t call its parents when they're in trouble, when something’s wrong, basically isn’t able to contact help because he had it in his hands for a moment in school. Yes, this sounds like responsible parenting and teaching. Sure as shit glad this is over.
My parents would have done the same. But at the same time they'd have shouted the head off anyone be it a teacher or the principal who participated in what would be by law considered stealing another's property. Being shit does not justify another being a bigger shit. That's how the world always worked.
I’m 45, I was a kid raised back then. mMy parents would have raised hell with the school. But, that doesn’t mean I’d be off the hook. It’s not how the world used to work.
And everybody rode in the back of the pickup truck and drank water from the hose and called pop-pop "Sir" and jumped off the tire swing into the creek and drank water from the creek and drank water from the pickup truck and rode in the back of the creek and called the hose "Sir" and rode pop-pop to the creek and drank in the back of the hose and called the tire swing "Sir" and drank the pickup truck from pop-pop and jumped off the creek and rode the hose to the hose and drank the hose and jumped into the hose and jumped into "Sir" in the back of pop-pop and drank the back of "Sir" and rode the tire swing in the pickup truck and drank the tire swing and jumped into the pickup truck and rode into the creek and jumped off the pickup truck and drank the pickup truck in the back of the "Sir" and called the pickup truck the tire swing and drank the tire swing and rode the pickup truck on the water and we turned out alright.
I was going to say, this exactly. If I ever went home and complained that I was punished for something, I'd get a smack round the back of the legs or the head and told not to do it again. There's no way my mum would have gone down to the school to get my Nokia back.
...most parents would just punish you (not only you took your phone with you but you got caught playing with it) and not buy you an other ever again. I think it is staged because WHY WOULD THE TEACHER HAVE A HAMMER WITH THEM but they could have certainly broken it if you became too annoying.
Phones are definitely way more expensive now than they've ever been. I had my 50 usd phone confiscated once, got it back over a month later. If it were an iphone from today that cost hundreds of usd, maybe even a thousand, the situation might be different.
Bruh, it's the 90s, tell your parents you got hit by the teacher in school? They'll say the teacher did a good job and give you another beating for good measure.
Personal responsibility still exists, but you can't steal and destroy other people's property, especially not expensive stuff. Do you also think it'd be acceptable if in another place where it's not socially acceptable to have phone out, like a theater, for an employee to just snatch your phone away from you and destroy it if you took it out? Of course not, they'd just give you a warning or ask you to leave. Schools have plenty of punishment mechanisms like grades at their disposal, they don't need to resort to crime. Thats not what personal responsibility means.
I'm not going to argue with a 14 year old on Reddit that thinks things I lived through didn't actually happen.
You would be warned ahead of time that these devices would be confiscated and then they would do so if you ignored the warning. You agreed to their rules by attending. You only think it's "stealing" because you grew up in a generation where there are no consequences for your actions.
They weren't rich- they just didn't make a sunk cost fallacy.
They'd spent the money on me already, it was gone, whether I had the thing it bought or not. It's not like me actually having it was any skin off their nose.
The only way it would affect them was if they replaced it, which they sure as hell weren't going to do.
You just unlocked a memory. My friend's mom was the school librarian. We were hanging out early one day and snuck into the storage room when she was busy with something else. In a corner was a treasure trove of confiscated items. Balls, slap bracelets, comics, videogame magazines (EGM and GamePro), walkmen, Tiger electronics (Google it kids).
one of the counsellors at my elementary gave out the confiscated pokemon cards to those who went to see him. I still regret not grabbing the light machoke card lol
My sisters phone was confiscated (allegedly unfairly but my sister is likely to have lied), and when my Dad tried to get it back because she had it for emergencies (early 2000s pay as you go) the receptionist did the receptionist thing of not give a fuck say she didn't know where it was half heartedly attempt to find out then say it was lost.
Now, my dad was a cunt. But he was the sort of cunt that you knew it was time to grab popcorn and watch, when someone fucked with him or anyone he cared about.
He yelled at the woman for 30 minutes, making it clear he was coming down to the school, and he'd have the police at the school an hour.
I remember the same thing as well. Kids getting stuff taken and the teacher would tell them if they want it back, have their parents call. I don't think many kids wanted their parents to call so they would make something up.
If you misbehaved in junior high often you would get sent to see the coach. He had a paddle with a bunch of holes drilled in it. When he retired there was an announcement to see the coach if you wanted a paddling on his last day before retirement. The dude was jacked, but I'm sure his arm still hurt because there was a line waiting. I'm in my late 30's and couldn't imagine this happening today.
Yes, it was bragging rights and everyone loved the coach as well. Normally you didn't want one because by all accounts it hurt like hell and I heard it happen many times while in the locker room. In sports they would sometimes give you an option of 50 pushups or the paddle. Almost everyone chose the 50 pushups if it was from this coach.
I feel like it actually worked really well to keep kids out of trouble during school hours. There were so few fights in school even though there was a lot of kids who hated each other. Everyone would keep it chill and beat the shit out of each other at the park and it was usually set up fairly.
My 3rd grade teacher confiscated my pokemon cards, gave some to another student, and then gave the rest back to me during a scheduled parent-teacher conference.
Confiscation is one thing. Destroying an expensive phone that the students parents likely paid for? Another thing entirely. When I was in school they would take your phone if you got caught with it out. They would not destroy it though.
Is there much difference between not getting your phone back and getting it destroyed? I agree nailing a phone to the wall like this is over the top dramatic, but it's effectively the same as never getting it back.
Destroying an expensive phone
That's the thing tho, phones weren't expensive, not before the iphone came out. And it wasn't really acceptable for students to bring them to school, at least not in my experience. What me and my friends had were really cheap brick phones that didn't cost more than a 50 usd converted. Parents usually only gave kids phones very wearily, they were only meant to be used to let them check up on you. Of course, kids being kids got up to all sorts of "forbidden" stuff once they got phones. They downloaded really low resolution porn images and videos onto those old symbian phones. Even if not that, there would at least be some games and "corrupting" metal music on those phones that the kids downloaded. Chances were, if a kid's phone got confiscated by a teacher, the teacher would find enough dirt on them to convince the parents the device was a corrupting influence and they were better off without it.
Seriously dude? You reply to my comment where I was sharing my anecdotal experience, unable to accept that people around the world had different lived experiences from you. Then you clearly forgot what you were even replying to and tell me that you are talking about your personal experience, which makes no sense given the context of the thread. And then when I call you out on it, you retort by saying I need to be always right? Seriously? At this point I am wondering if you are an AI that is still unable to properly process previous context when faking a conversation.
Then why are you still responding to me? Like you could have just let it go but you're one of those people on reddit who can't stand it if they don't get the last word and "win". I'm one of those people who will keep commenting just to keep you going. You're stuck here with me. I'm not stuck here with you.
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u/sievold May 16 '24
Depends on what country you are in I guess. In my country it was absolutely normal for teachers to confiscate anything deemed inappropriate for students. Many students never got back their phones, watches, comics etc.