When I was in high school in Muncie, Indiana, we had a dress code that said students could not wear shorts. At all. Ever. Even if a solar flare was blasting directly onto the school, we had to wear long pants, although girls could wear dresses that reached their knees.
We couldn't wear shorts because our legs would be a "distraction from the educational experience."
I hated that phrase because it usually appeared on my report cards: "Erik is a distraction to the educational experience of his classmates."
I've always wanted a t-shirt that says "trigger warning," but I should instead get one that says "distraction to the educational experience."
I hated it, not because I was ashamed — trust me, I wasn't — but because it seemed like such a cop-out. It's the thing teachers said when they didn't want students to enjoy themselves or have fun. And they said it when they didn't want to discover the deeper reasons for actual problems. Like, why is Erik so easily distracted? Why is Erik reading books in class? Why is Erik bored with classwork?
It's like their other cop-out phrase, "If I let you do it, then I have to let everyone else do it."
No, they just didn't want to use their brains beyond critical functions that support life. Rather than using common sense and making independent decisions based on critical thinking, they clung to the Ol' Reliable like a drowning man clutching a life preserver.
However, they didn't like it when you used the same logic on them.
"Erik, why can't you do your homework for once?"
"Because if I did it for your class, I'd have to do it in everyone else's."
But in my senior year, our educational distraction was the heat. We were experiencing 90-degree days in the middle of May, and the school's AC wasn't quite able to keep up.
A couple of the boys on the track team decided to push the envelope and wore shorts one day. When confronted, they said they were dressed for track practice that afternoon.
"Oh, no problem then," the administrators said. "That's fine, just fine."
It was not just fine; they got into trouble.
"Why can they wear shorts and we can't?" the girls protested.
"Uh, well, you see, uhh, we're worried the boys will be distracted from the educational experience. Yeah, that's it! Boys can't control themselves."
The girls said the boys needed to learn to control their urges and to think with their big brains, not their little brains.
The administration agreed that this was indeed unfair, so they held an assembly for all the boys and taught us that sexualizing and objectifying women was wrong.
I'm just kidding. Of course, they didn't do that.
No, they sent the girls home to change clothes so the boys would not look like cartoon characters that caught a whiff of a pie cooling on a window sill. The administration also reminded everyone that girls were not permitted to wear shorts. At all. Ever.
Somebody's parents must have had sharp words with the administration, however, and thrown around words like "fairness" and "equality" and "lawsuit," because the next day, news came down that the shorts ban was lifted because of the heat.
The weather heat, not the lawsuit heat.
Also, we were only allowed to wear shorts for the rest of the school year, which equaled two weeks. And in order to save face, they said girls still couldn't show their bare shoulders because it would cause all the boys to immediately become stupid(er).
Still, even after every shorts-wearing student managed to finish the last two weeks of high school without our grades plummeting, the school returned to the "no shorts" rule for many more years. They're allowed now, according to this year's student handbook, but I'd like to think my class brought about the end of the War On Shorts.
The school still has a rule for "no clothing bearing suggestive comments." Which explains why, in that same year, my friend, Johnny, got in trouble for his t-shirt because it said "WAGAS."
It was the name of our high school bike race team that year and stood for "Who All Gives a Surely-you-can-guess." Of course, we didn't tell anyone that, which is why we got away with wearing them during the race.
But the following Monday, one of the teachers worried it might be gang-related or at least humorous, so he sent Johnny to the dean's office, where Johnny spilled the beans and got us all in trouble.
And thus, our shirt was banned for extreme disruption. They did it either because they thought kids didn't know what Surely-you-can-guess meant or because we would all be so busy giggling that our entire semester's knowledge would dribble out our ears.
I don't see why it was such a big deal. The shirt completely covered up everyone's shoulders.
Photo credit: Tulane Public Relations (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.