Law of the Playground

http://www.lawoftheplayground.com/

This is an amazing site. It's a compilation of stories about school insults, tortures, weird kids, creepy teachers, and just generally the sort of floatsam and jetsam that you remember from school but never really have a chance to talk about in polite company.

Plus, it's fucking hilarious.

It's time to spill your guts, TV Tropes. Did you do terrible things as a child? Did other people do terrible things to you? Did you make up/were called some totally awesome/childish insult? Were there weird rituals you did at school that make no sense in retrospect? Kids you always stayed away from because they did strange things/were retarded/smelled bad? Did you have teachers that were weird/really weird/possible pedophiles? Any other stories?

Here's some of the (many) I've dredged up from the abyss of my memories. I'll be posting more as soon as I type them down.

"Chinny!"

One of my elementary school friends, a fellow named David, had a huge Bruce Campbell -esque chin. Naturally, he figured out how to use this to his advantage, and for much of elementary school he would sneak up behind you, shout "Chinny" and then...headbutt you with his chin. It's sort of hard to describe. The stakes were raised when David discovered pressure points and we discovered that spinning around at the exact moment of "Chinny!" allowed you to karate chop David in the face.

Inability to Feel Pain

Something that does not occur after one mixes Ny-Quil, Day-Quil, and Wild Turkey together and drinks the concoction. Announcing that you can't feel pain is a terrible idea when surrounded by a bunch of people who beat you up at the slightest provocation, as Barry quickly discovered.

SPOILER he could

Junior Hydrodynamics

The playground at my elementary school had a small creek running along the edge of it. For most of second and third grade, THE place to be if you weren't playing kick-ball was building dams along it. What started as simple mud and gravel blockages along the stream quickly evolved into complex systems of locks, dams, canals, and reservoirs that would spring up over the lunch recess. We took this activity INCREDIBLY seriously, and any attempts to meddle with it were met with violent physical retribution. As far as I know, none of us ever ended up joining the Army Corps of Engineers.

Ceiling Ball

The greatest game ever invented in High School PE. Involved throwing a volleyball at the ceiling of the Marie Drake gym until you knocked down one of the 40+ year old acoustical tiles, showering anybody nearby with asbestos-laden dust. I once got hit in the head with an actual tile, which hurt less than you might think. The game always ended when the PE teacher came out of his office to yell at us for "misusing school property". Throwing volleyballs as hard as you can at a solid surface causes them to go flat, you see. He didn't give a fuck about the ceiling either. Nobody did.

War Games

Being in Alaska, we never played cowboys and indians (does anyone anymore?). Any peer organized group war games were inevitably either Star Wars (where there was never any problem getting people to play both sides) or World War Two (where EVERYONE wanted to be the Nazis). This probably says something about my school, but I don't have time to contemplate it now since I'm late for my Aryan Nation meeting.*

edited 24th Jun '13 12:11:45 AM by Yongary

The kids in my kindergarten class played Cowboys and Indians sometimes, but it always descended into arguments about who got to be First Nations with the awesome warpaint and battle-cries and who got stuck as the gun-toting villains of the piece.

The game's... really changed a lot in the last fifty years. XD

That site blows away any preconception of British civility. Your kids can be downright mean!

Hehehe.

When I was in first grade, I was involved in 3 wars. I repeat what I remember about them every so often so I don't forget. All were divided along gender lines, but they had different causes and durations and whatnot. The fighting always just consisted of chasing the enemy around...what you were supposed to do upon catching them, I have no idea, because I sucked at running and never did catch a girl.

The fist was essentially a resource war over some small, hard, green berries. Completely inedible, they were more or less symbolic. The primary objective was one of the berry trees that our fearless leader Gordon dubbed the Nature Tree for no apparent reason. I can't remember how the war ended. I came to refer to it as the Berry Battles in the years that followed

Then there were what I call the two Great Wars. I don't remember the first, but the second was positively epic. Both sides had a commander, but I can't remember either of their names. I know it went on for a while (or at least what felt like a while) and no one really won, it just sort of died down amidst strife and infighting on the boys team and possibly the other side too.

Several years later, my friends and I may have been the only upper elementary schoolers to ever "play Age of Empires" (by which I mean Ao E II) on the playground. Which basically just meant running around pretending to be your favorite unit. There was this one kid who wanted to play with us who was baffled by our continued assertions that he couldn't be "the Americans", because there was no America yet.

I have more stories to tell, about LOTR, going back to nature, the great business of snow forts, and yo-yos. But I must go for now...

EDIT: Just looked at the actual site that inspired this thread...eh...it's...er...harsher than what I'm telling! I had such a comparitively innocent childhood!

edited 8th Dec '10 6:26:35 AM by frog753

Ass Jackal

Totally excellent insult made up by Hans Peralta on a school trip. Why is it so good? Well, in two words, it implies that:

1. You are a dog. A jackal, to be precise.
2. You like asses, and are therefore gay
3. You don't even like fresh, clean ass. No,...
4. You like to scavenge nasty, decaying ass. Like a jackal, see.

Incidentally, this is a much better definition than the one in the Urban Dictionary. Which was added long after said trip.

One Banana And Four Gorillas Killed Me

The only proper mnemonic for remembering the order of the letters on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. It's effectiveness can be proven by the fact, four years later, I remembered the mnemonic but had to google the letter sequence to figure out what it was a mnemonic for.

Polar Bear

Popular winter playground game designed to show off how tough you were. To play Polar Bear, you found a large, slushy puddle and stuck your hand in. The winner was the person who lasted the longest.

I was the playground Polar Bear champion. To this day, I still have shitty circulation in my hands.

Teachers Shipping their Students

The storage room in the theatre department was down a corridor and up a long flight of stairs from anything else that Technical Theatre class was doing—perfect for a romantic couple. However, no matter how many times Mrs. Burrowman sent Alyssa and I to organize the room, love failed to blossom between us, since it wasn't a teen movie and Alyssa was a lesbian. I nicked myself a nifty set of epaulettes, though.

The Moose Game

A truly bizarre craze that swept through our school the second half of my sophomore year. You would call someone's name, and then hold your hand to the side of your head like a pair of moose antlers. The person who's name you called would have to hold one hand to their eye like a spyglass when they turned around/looked up at you. If they didn't, they would have to roll around on the floor on their backs. At its peak, at least half the students and a significant number of teachers were playing. I, never being a slave to trends, told anyone who tried it with me to fuck right off.

The weirdest part of the whole thing was the apparent amnesia that everyone had afterwards; In senior year I tried to write about it for the school paper, but was unable to find anybody else besides myself who even remembered it, let alone played it. This included people who, two years ago, wouldn't have looked up from their work without a "spyglass" around their eye just to be on the safe side. Mass hypnosis or collective shame? You decide.

I remember playing storm chasers with my friend in elementary school. I also remember getting into a huge building project to make a town of homes for frogs out of mud and pebbles... The thing is, I don't think we have frogs anywhere near the school. Hrm.

Also, I can remember the guys playing Deathball a lot, but whenever us girls would want to play they would get into this mini debate about letting us play before agreeing to play Wallball with the girls but deathball for the guys. (Does anyone else know these games? I can explain as need be) Now that I think of it, I think the only reason my friend and I were allowed to play is because we were friends with the leader of the boys.

^Is wallball where you line up with your backs to a wall and somebody throws a ball at you and you try and dodge it without moving away from the wall? 'Cuz we played that all the time at my elementary school. The hardcore version used a soccer ball instead of those rubber balls you use for dodgeball.

   The following story is, in retrospect, kinda squicky. Also it sounds sort of like something from South Park. Except that it really happened   

Blowguns

Missy was a girl in my fifth grade class who had three major memorable traits:

1. She was French
2. She had a cleft palate
3. She would give you a blowjob for two dollars

Most of you probably had some girl in your class who, according to rumors, would do something similar, but Missy actually would give you a blowjob for $2. Unfortunately, I misheard the kid who told me this and thought that she would give me a blowgun for my money. Which sounded awesome. I mean, who wouldn't want a blowgun? Also, I didn't know what a blowjob was.

Anyway, one day after school I gave her my $2 and followed her off into the woods, already planning the shenanigans I would get up to with my newly acquired blowgun. However, when she told me to take off my pants, I began to get suspicious about what was going on. I mean, why would I need to take my pants off to get a blowgun? Couldn't she just hand it to me?

That day, I went away two dollars poorer and one vocabulary word richer.

I didn't get a blowjob. I probably should have. But, goddamnit, I really wanted a blowgun. Which I never got either. C'est la vie.

On an unrelated note, the friend who told me about Missy's money making venture later shot me in the neck with a real blowgun. I had to get a tetanus shot. Thanks a lot, jackass.

Not quite, I'm trying to remember the rules but... Wall ball is where you have one guy who's "it" until play starts. They have a tennis ball. Everyone is standing around in the well court as it were. You chuck the ball as hard as you can at the wall, and when it bounces off someone else has to catch it. I think if you mess up trying to catch it you have to run and touch the wall before whoever gets the ball after can throw it to the wall... Unless it's deathball... Then they peg you has hard as they can. I can't remember how you win the game though.

"Chinny" made me lol.

There was this one time in Christian school where a group of boys would follow me around and yell my last name really loudly and obnoxiously. I was in fifth grade about this time. Eventually I just got so annoyed that when one of them was alone I kicked his ass, literally. The best part of all of this was that when he went and told a teacher, the teacher told him he had it coming.

Toughness-Proving Exercises

At lunchtime in middle school, a popular way of proving your "toughness" was to smash an empty soda can against your forehead. The flatter it was crushed, the tougher and more manly you were.

One day, Chris Mendes decided to one-up us all by smashing a full, unopened can of soda.

We were all delighted that, even after he woke up and his concussion had worn off, he was left with a perfectly ring shaped bruise that lasted for several months.

"Psychic, miss"

Not an appropriate response when a sensitive teacher asks you how you would feel if your prediction that an absent student had "probably died of food poisoning" were to come true.

Snakeskin

Elmers glue, when smeared on one's hands and allowed to dry, peels off in sheets that strongly resemble snakeskin. In third grade, the collection of snakeskin became a major fad among the boys in my class. We accumulated pencil cases full of the stuff, which we jealously guarded in our desks. The craze only ended when our teacher announced that anybody caught "misusing school resources" would lose their next recess.

Red

A bog-standard high school sociopath who would occasionally hang out with us despite the fact that none of us liked him, Red became a school legend when he stabbed an old man in the face and got away with it.

According to the legend (and confirmed by Red), he was sleeping at a bus shelter when an old drunk guy tried to steal his wallet. Red woke up and stabbed him in the face with a hunting knife he happened to be carrying. The guy got a bunch of stitches and Red got arrested, but was quickly released. Apparently, Alaskan law states that you are not legally responsible for anything that you do less than five seconds after you wake up, or something like that. This all sounded really fishy to us, but we couldn't deny that he'd stabbed the guy since it got written up in the paper.

Oddly enough, Red's real name was Charles. None of us knew why we called him Red; he didn't have red hair, red skin, or wear red on a regular basis. Red later decided to live up to his nickname by dying his hair an eye-searing orange-red, which, combined with his goatee and fondness for leather vests, made him look sort of like a Mirror Universe Archie.

My school has something similar to the moose game. We say "Hey, (name)" and make a motion like we're blowing a dart gun. The person you said hey to has to act like they were shot by a dart in the neck until someone else gets it out. We also have Mr. President, which is when one person puts their finger on their ear and says "Mr. President, get down!", and then everybody else has to put their finger to their ear too, and the last person to do it gets full-body tackled.

I kinda figured this thread would be more successful. If only I'd made it so that you could talk about gender issues while sockpuppeting as a Homestuck character...

Guitaro

In middle school world history, we watched a NHK-produced documentary about the Silk Road which, as the narration felt compelled to inform us at the beginning of each episode, had "music by the internationally acclaimed artist Kitaro. One of my friends misheard this as Guitaro, which we all agreed was a totally awesome name, and so Guitaro was born.

Guitaro was a Japanese stick figure man with a big floppy musketeer-style hat, a ninja mask, and a cape. Armed with only a sword and a guitar, he fought evil wherever it was to be found, which was usually in the margins of our history textbooks. Eventually, our doodles evolved into lengthy collaborative storytelling epics, with Guitaro fighting Martians, cyborg Osama bin Laden, and Deros.

POSTSCRIPT: Years later, I watched a show called Iron King. It's main character is a Japanese guy named Gentaro, who wears a big floppy cowboy hat and, armed with only a sword and a guitar, fights evil wherever it is to be found (usually not inside of textbooks).

Wow, my school has something eerily similar to the Moose Game, only here it's called "Birdman". Instead of moose antlers, though, you do that thing where you make a ring with your thumb and index finger on both hands and then put that around your eyes. You don't necessarily have to call their name out since the only requirement is that the target sees you making the birdman face, but it's usually the best way to do that; sometimes though, you can get ambushed as you walk into class or as you are giving a class presentation. Instead of the spyglass thing, you have to constantly hold up an "OK" sign. The lying down on the floor part is the same. If you put the OK sign (just one hand) around your eye, it reflects and the person targeting you has to lie down on the floor. Anyway, this is what I've picked up from watching others play the game and listening to people explain it to others.

As far as I know this is mostly only guys in the junior class with some others, and no teachers have participated. It's also not quite as popular.

My other stories are all from elementary school and are less interesting and pretty common...

I kinda figured this thread would be more successful. If only I'd made it so that you could talk about gender issues while sockpuppeting as a Homestuck character...

You know this site far too well.

My stories? Well, in my cub scout troup we did the "Junior Hydrodynamics" thing almost excatly as it's described in the OP. The only thing preventing us from setting up a hydroelectric plant at the creek was lack of funds.

And in second grade two of my friends and started a club dedicated to throwing dirt clods at girls. We didn't accomplish much, though, because after we recruited a good number of members there was a violent schism between my two friends over the whose territory a small tree at the edge of the playground was in, which I was sadly caught in the middle of. Out aggressions were turned inward, and it was all-out civil war until summer break.

During the sex education class in which all methods of contraception were explained and demonstrated, our MALE teacher squatted, knees apart, and held a diaphragm beneath his undercarriage to show all the girls just what laid in store for them. "I've never had to do it!" he joked, to which I replied "Yeah, right, sir!"

I regretted my heckle when he said "Come here, you, and be my vagina."

So, I was forced to stand before the class and make a ring with my hand, while the teacher inserted a coil between my fingers and explained its intricacies.

Sometimes I lie awake crying, just thinking about it.

D:

That's just... horrible.

And this is the Law of the Playground
As old and as true as the sky
And the bully who keeps it shall prosper
And the nerd who shall break it shall cry.

I don't think my school was as interesting as yours. I enjoy your stories though.

Most interesting thing that I witnessed was the first night I got properly smashed, feeling like a right rebel as I moshed half-heartedly to the awful rock band that was playing in the school hall, the entirety of the year below me was found in the school toilets, all of them (or as many of them as made no difference) snorting mounds of cocaine.

I realised that day that I'd never be as adventurous as the average man, and that being cool probably wasn't worth being expelled and/or arrested and/or wrongly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Although I have since tried cocaine, I certainly didn't enjoy the experience.

I've subsequently found out that seemingly everyone had some variation on this, but for a while while we were sophomores my friends had a game we would play in cars called "Beatrice". In theory you would see someone walking by, guess their name, and roll down the window and yell it to see if they'd look. In practice we were mostly just yelling old person names at people - "Beatrice" was a favorite, hence the name of the game. Somehow people we knew who were old enough to drive tolerated us doing this in their cars.

On a related note, around the same time, but in the summer, one of my friends had a tape of Bohemian Rhapsody - people were coming and going from my house pretty often then, and somehow it was decided that 1) anytime someone got driven back by my mom, we'd all go along for the ride, 2) every time we all got in the car, we had to play "Bohemian Rhapsody", and 3) we would then reenact the Waynes World scene involving that song every time. Again, a case of having a very patient driver.

The first time I ever heard "gay" used in the non-happy sense was while I was playing cops and robbers with an older kid who most likely was using the whole thing as an excuse to make fun of me - because of the context it was brought up in, I became under the impression that being gay meant you were a deliriously happy kleptomaniac.

edited 2nd Feb '11 10:57:52 AM by MikeK

Nobody else has interesting stories from school?

Why the pre-Kindergarten teacher hated me

"Would you like to pick your jacket up off the floor?" "No, [teacher], I wouldn't."

"Let's all play the kitty-cat game!" "[Teacher], I don't wanna play!"

"The ghost of pre-K must have left us these cookies for Halloween!" "There's no such thing as ghosts, [teacher]!"

These were among the reasons this teacher decided to humble me by any means possible.

I see molecules I learned the birds and the bees from Babies and Other Hazards of Sex. I quoted a joke from it to my second-grade teacher (something about floating molecules that can only be seen by tiny baby eyes.) I then said that such was a misconception (though not in so many words), since I could often see small things floating in the air around people, and I wasn't a baby. I meant floating dust and hair. The teacher believed that I had Aura Vision. To the best of my knowledge, she never did get corrected.

Your Permanent Record I was often taunted by other students, but only kicked by them once. I usually hit students who taunted me. (I must not have hit very hard, since it didn't stop them from taunting me again.) Both taunting and hitting were punishable, but we were told that students who taunted would be cleared once they'd been punished, whereas students who fought would have the offense marked down in their permanent record, which would go with them till they left the school. It wasn't until high school that I found out said record never existed.

Why I am a Writer I was bored in Gardening class in kindergarten. I pictured an explosion engulfing the town, then the world, then the universe, and spreading beyond it, creating a ripple in a giant pond. Combining this with the plot of Myst (I'd read the walkthrough), I thought up a multiverse in which all stories were true, and each universe budded off new universes as its inhabitants created more stories. (One universe had as part of its mythology the gods that supposedly created the whole thing—said gods did everything they could to keep anyone else from finding this out, since they wanted to be viewed as rightful masters rather than just more creations in a loop with no clear origin.)

Needless to say, I blew everyone else away the first time I was assigned to do creative writing in second grade. (My closest competition was a bit of South Park fanfiction in which an evil chicken chased the protagonists and killed Kenny.)

About stupid games: In sixth grade we had a new game, that consisted of one person scatting down and hyperventilating for a few minutes (or, rather 30 seconds because we were not very patient), then the person would stand up quickly, lean against a wall and let the other people apply a strong pressure on her sternum. Usually she would then faint, for only a few seconds. We liked the feeling of it, and for some time repeated this in nearly every break. The fad ended when eventually one girl stayed unconscious longer than expected and had to be carried to the nursing room. I wasn't present, then, but that was pretty much the end of the fainting game. What I find interesting is that, later, I talked with people about that game and I realised that it had been (or still is) played in many schools.

Ummm...bump?

When I was a little kid, we had a woods out back in the school playground, so we'd used the fallen logs and things to make forts. Then we'd conduct full-scale wars with the other kids, trying to capture the enemy fort. The fighting mostly consisted of Flynning with sticks, and the rule was, if you got hit anywhere besides the hands holding the stick, you were "dead" and had to sit out the rest of the battle. When three people were in the enemy fort, the fort was considered captured.

I was never any good at the toe-to-toe "fighting," but I did make quite a name for myself as a tactician and "officer."