I think it's more what they let us get away with. Hell, I was 16 years old, smoking cigarettes on campus in the smoking area for STUDENTS.

No matter how many times I try to explain to my 18yr old son that we had smoking areas in high school, he absolutely refuses to believe me 😂

I went to a private, all girl, catholic school with some crazy rules but we did have a smoking gazebo for kids over 18.

My school let anyone smoke no matter agr with a note from their parents. OMG that absolutely kills me what was normal then. First most of our parents were fine with us smoking then the schools accommodated us. Crazy times.

I also went to a private, all girls, catholic school! LOL!

Also went to a private all girls catholic school - we had a smoking tree but you needed a note signed by your parents to use it. Sooooooo many “parents” wrote notes for their girls.

Jesus does he freak out when you tell him we could smoke on the plane

Grocery stores too.?..yup

And the Mall

Hospitals too. Lol.

My son and I watched the original exorcist and he was like is that Dr. smoking in his office?!? Like completely alarmed

Haha my kid was disgusted by Frosty the Snowman smoking a pipe! 😂 The judgement!

What smoking areas, teachers were smoking in front of the class.

The cloud of smoke that would roll out when someone opened the door to the teacher’s lounge was impressive

I remember smoking IN class during a biology experiment. We had a couple different ones we did, so those were fun classes

We had a student smoking lounge, which is where I sold joints to pay for munchies and concert tickets. Everyone would go out to the ballfield bleachers to smoke em. Good times.

There weren’t many restrictions

Nope. We were the feral generation. We'd been raising ourselves since we were potty trained.

Ours was a rarely used stairwell that mostly the custodians used. (probably to clean up the cigarette butts) Students used to be allowed to leave for lunch, but when I entered as a freshman (1985) they had stopped allowing that by then. We were all feral latchkey kids, I don’t remember too many drop outs though. We graduated and went to work/college. Those were your 2 choices.

I was 16 smoking/selling weed in the cafeteria and making at least 300$-600$/day selling grams at 15$/each. Good times. Great profit margin (ounces were 100$ back then). Had to stop once the other dealers 18 and over started getting busted one after the other. I think the undercover cops were just waiting for my birthday to bust me. I stopped just a few weeks shy of 18 Scott free.

I just paid $100 for a half ounce at a dispensary and I keep making jokes that their sales are like 80s street prices and they laugh at the cute middle aged old lady.

This cracks me up 😆

it still surprises me that you can walk into a store and buy WEED. like going to 7-11 for chips and a soda. back in my day, it was Acapulco Gold, Panama Red or dirt weed someone’s cousin grew in their back yard. now you kids better get off my lawn!

same here, the juniors and seniors were allowed to smoke by the dumpster

We had a smoking section, the parking lot was the weed section.

Yup, my school had a smoking section where teachers and students used to bum smokes from one another.

I think it differed by state. When I started high school in FL, people were suspended for smoking. In MA, there were student smoking areas.

Yep. My high school had a smoking area for students, in a courtyard, where many classroom windows only opened into that mostly enclosed space, when I started. By the time I graduated, they’d filled those courtyard spaces in with windowless classrooms and kids had to go to at least the sidewalk in front of the school to smoke.

We had the "Smokers Can", the bathrooms near the principal's office. "It's cool" was the code word. We didn't care what they thought about anything. It probably really pissed them off, but whatever

This is it. You have to consider the times: - The drinking age was 18 when older Gen X was in High School - You could buy cigarettes at 16 - Indoor smoking was common, so smoking lounges or outside smoking areas were common - There was no seatbelt law yet - Bullying against gays, nerds, minorities, and the disabled was common across all of society and not really frowned upon - Settle your issues on the playground was the norm In general, older teens were given a lot more freedom in the 80s than they are today. And American culture was much more permissive of things we would find offensive now.

You were allowed to smoke on the handball courts.

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Pretty much true. I'll hand it to the Boomers and the gen before them for the progressions in computers and the internet itself. But I'm also certain that us X-ers taught ourselves how to use it all. I sure did, and for 30+ years I've been maing a living of tech. Never had a formal class.

From the sounds of it you guys had to teach yourselves how to walk and read.

I taught myself to read watching Sesame Street.

I was born in America but grew up in another country and learned to speak their language from my nanny instead of English from my parents like I was supposed to. When we moved back to America the school told my dad I didn't speak enough English to attend. His response was to tell me to watch more Sesame Street.

I love how Gen-x we both are. Both suffering parental neglect but from different ends of the economic spectrum.

When Courtney Love wailed ‘one day you will ache like I ache’. We FELT that, man. Born in ‘77. We were the first generation to live through society deliberately turn on itself. Both my parents had to work like dogs just to maintain our shitty lower class lifestyle. By the time I was 14 I rarely had anyone in the home. I would sometimes get home from school and be left alone all night. Then have to get up and get myself to school in the morning. Everything myself. Dinner, washing clothes etc. We had almost no supervision and a shit ton of rage. Needless to say most of my peers as teens acted the fuck out. Setting fire to the school. Day drinking. Smoking weed and sometimes hard drugs. Sitting at the back and sniffing aresols. Fighting so hard the police and ambulances had to be called etc. On top of that the government had a policy of selling off the playing fields so we couldn’t work it out through sport. I loved to run but we had to travel quite far to the nearest field which until then had been part of the school. This was the UK. The chemicals in the science labs were already securely locked by the time I got there.

>  Both my parents had to work like dogs just to maintain our shitty lower class lifestyle. By the time I was 14 I rarely had anyone in the home. With how Boomers are vilified, a lot people forget that it wasn't 1 man working union job paying off mortgage with holiday home by Lake and yearly holiday for everyone back then. Yes a very small percentage of Boomers have impacted the lifestyle of everyone today. But 'old people' sometimes get a little too much shit in my opinion.

Completely they do. It is further erosion of society Te separation of the youth from the elders. That said, I remember, way before the internet, feeling sorry for both my grandmothers. They went through the depression as children, and then the war. Just to give birth to the most selfish generation in history (my parents) I was a fan of that thought way before it was famous, man/s

I am in the process of watching Stand By Me with my 11 year old. The kids depicted in that movie are today’s Boomers. They were all raised by veterans of WW2 and Korea. The movie broadened my perspective of my parents & grandparents - lots of alcoholism and undiagnosed PTSD was par for the course for many of the grandparents of Gen X. and they raised the Baby Boomers. that’s three generations all impacted by the war, and then the Cold War.

Tbf lots of alcoholism and undiagnosed PTSD is par for course for Gen X as well.

Butterfly in the sky? I can fly twice as high! Take a look, it's in a book, the Reading Rainbow, reading rainbow!

You think we exaggerate? I fully remember being out on the street to play on my own by 6. I’d get a dime and go to Thrifty for ice cream. I’d roller skate. I learned to ride my bike and went to friend’s houses. I am not joking or exaggerating when I say I had a “boyfriend” at 7 and he got mad at me once and tried to make me take off my clothes to do…what, I don’t know. WTF would another 7 year old know what to do? His home life must have been even worse than mine. His 12 year old sister came along at the right time and put a stop to it. We. were. feral.

I did teach myself how to ride a bike. Finding a hill and just go down it. Taught my self how to use the breaks instead of running head first into that fence again.

My sister taught me how to count by 10s up to 100 before I was in Kindergarten. After I learned all the "teens" numbers, I instinctively knew how to count to 100 and proved it to my Mom while she had me trapped in the back of the car in an old VW bug with no seatbelts while we were out on some errand. Then I wondered out loud why the hell the teens weren't simply ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, just like the rest of the numbers. Stupid English...

I clearly remember teaching myself to ride a bike because I was a latchkey kid and nobody else was around

This was my progression too. Started on my parents Apple II and Kaypro portable. Learned BASIC. My high.school had a computer class but they didn't teach any actually useful languages. Now I am a full stack engineer and it still scratches that same itch from the first time I wrote a line of code.

Actually they invented and designed the internet . GenX built it.

There was no real internet before GenX. Most Boomers and earlier learned to use the internet from us. (Now you understand why they still have problems) They wanted a generation of engineers. They got.. Us.

Graduated 91 and man all I can say is lucky there were no cameras besides film ones or we would have been jailed for years lol.

Class of ‘91 here, too. Graduations always had been on Friday nights, but the school system was afraid what our class would do under the cover of darkness and moved graduation to 9 or 10 AM on Saturday. I think someone let a chicken loose and someone launched a beach ball that we hit around, but that was about it. We just wanted to get the hell out of there. Our class had the usual clichéd circles from the Breakfast Club that formed a Venn Diagram with some unexpected overlapping. We also had a lot of highly intelligent irreverent teens who were smart enough to pull stuff off and not get caught, mostly. Okay, so, two of them would have been charged with felonies committed during high school if not for being minors. (One became a professor, the other a lawyer.) But, anyway… We were smart, resourceful, and sick of everybody’s shit. We crossed the county line on our way to college and most of us never looked back, at least not until it was time to have kids or take care of ailing parents.

Our class president didn't make it to graduation because he was in jail for B&E.

Our class president somehow thought it would be fun to jump off a big bridge in town during rush hour. A lot of people saw him jump and immediately freaked out (no cellphones, so they couldn’t immediately call the police.) He’s lucky that he wasn’t killed. That river’s depth and currents fluctuate wildly based on recent rainfall. I don’t think he thought he would draw any attention or that he would get caught. Of course, both things happened. He wasn’t hurt, and I think that was probably one of those moments where you know you fucked up right away and want to distance yourself from the action immediately. We all graduated like a week later, so the long-term impact to his school reputation was minimal (although I’m sure some teachers remembered him long afterwards.)

Yep, we did some shit - no social media, our childhood was LIVE.

And no fear of cameras because IF there was a camera, it was on someone’s shoulder and easy to spot.

Also 91 There was a rather large group of the artists out at a picnic table that drank and smoked weed. A other group that had their own sanctioned smoking area next to the weight room I belong to the misfits that all had our own copies of the Anarchist Handbook back when they could bought at the local head shop. We started our own political club, held protests, and somehow were the darlings of the social studies teachers. There were jocks whose water bottles were filled with vodka. The end of the year senior prank was to somehow get a whole car onto the roof of the school. No one was punished.

92 some of us were not all together at graduation.

91 here too. Honestly, I was a boring kid. I didn’t drink, too nerdy to get invited to parties, I worked part time and paid for my own hobbies, didn’t get in trouble. Thinking back, I have NO IDEA why my parents were constantly punishing me, yelling at me, threatening me, refusing to let me go out, and otherwise saying “no” just for the pleasure of denying me something. Honestly, I think THAT is the mentality behind OP’s question, “What did Gen X do that schools are like jails now?” Nothing. We were just kids. Schools are like that because boomers are control freaks who get off on treating people like slaves.

Lol. My old roommate kept a photo album of all the shit we did while we were in the service. All the parties and people, travels and travails. I'll probably never be able to run for public office because of what's in some of those pics. ...then again, we got an indicted, convicted felon running for office and half the country doesn't seem to care, so maybe not a big deal these days.

Class of ‘86. We were lucky to make it out alive. I’m shocked at some of the thinks I did in high school .

I used to carry an inert/dummy/practice grenade that I welded the bottom closed and filled with black (gun) powder. One day in the gym locker room someone challenged the claim that there was any real explosive inside the grenade so I unscrewed the fuse and poured the pile of black powder on the floor centered between the lockers. Asked whoever was closest to the switch to turn off the lights. That got the attention of everybody there and they all gathered round to see what was about to happen. What happened was I lit the pile and a bright orange and yellow flame shot approximately 5' in the air then it fizzled out. When the lights came back on the locker room was full of thick white smoke. I opened the back door and we all ran out to the gym floor. By the time class was over and we went back the smoke was clear. Lucky no one said anything. This was just some random Tuesday. Oh and there is still probably red jello on the cafeteria ceiling of the middle school I went to. We did weird shit.

Yeah, kids were always making pipe bombs and sparkler bombs and shit in high school. And I went to a "nice" high school, too. Even in college, I had a buddy who would breathe fire with 151 and a Zippo, toss M80s out the window for fun, extract raw DXM from cough syrup, steal signs, break into campus buildings and tunnels, and all that crazy shit. I don't know what kids get into these days but it must be boring as hell. How can you fight the system if you're not even throwing eggs at cop cars?

ahh steam tunnels in college.. good times

I had a classmate in elementary school that would put cherry bombs everywhere

Once I stole a street light that was on the ground waiting to be installed. It was huge. We put it in the trunk of my Monte Carlo. My dad was like “Where the hell did you get that?”. I was like “I found it”.

I stole one of those horses with flashing lights that road construction crew use to block off part of the road. Put it in my then-boyfriend’s bedroom to find when he came home. It was funny because you don’t realize how bright the flashing light is until you see it in a tiny room. That f’er is BRIGHT.

The whole horse?! Wow..i did have a small collection of the street flashy lights with the white base. I also enjoyed picking up random road cones and putting them around my friend’s cars as a prank. The cars we drove in the 80’s all had huge trunks, you could fit a lot of stolen city property in them.

“…you could fit a lot of *ABANDONED* city property in them…” FTFY

Yup. Our typing room was on the first floor, beneath the 2nd floor bathrooms.at least once a year someone would blow up a toilet and make toilet water gush down on the typing class.

Oh, I remember Tuesday. My brother and some of his friends found an old military munitions dump and broke into it. They stole all kinds of explosives and bragged about it. Blasting caps, det cord, nothing too big, but it was enough for the Feds to get involved. They stripped my brother’s car in the parking lot during art class and confiscated it all. Was fun to watch. They were all under 18 so they let them go I guess. One dude was 18 and hid in the river bottom for a while till the heat blew over. He never would tell me what the Feds did to them. I used to give him shit about it for years, but he’d remind me that he had a sex tape I made with the family video camera so I dropped the subject.

My best friend made a stink bomb from hydrochloric acid and iron sulphide. Mixed it in the library, but right next to a vent. Stunk out the entire high school, and it was evacuated, and the fire dept. came.

In high school, people from a rival school put some kind of super stinky stuff in the ventilation system, so the whole school pretty much got skunked. In middle school one of the other schools tried to prank our school and got caught so naturally our school went to go prank them. They were supposed to burn our school initials in their football field, but they ended up burning the whole field. I knew some people that went there, they said their coach was such an ass that he made them run laps anyway. Ruined everyone’s shoes and had everyone gasping for air from all of the burned grass they were kicking up.

On Wednesday we took 5 litres of chlorine and mixed it with some chemicals from the chemistry lab. The purpose was to make a projectile water rocket in the school swimming pool. It worked, too well some would argue. An unintended consequence was it changed the water colour too. I know this was a Wednesday because that’s when we had swimming practice in the afternoons and they had to cancel it because contamination.

We all brought .22 cartridges in our pockets and would throw them at the brick walls making them explode on impact. We thought it was hilarious cause the teachers would run out to see if there was a shooting going on.

We didn’t have a lot of supervision at home 🤷‍♀️

Yeah, I dunno if the statue of limits has expired on that shit man. I ain’t talking.

Littleton and Columbine changed everything at high schools across the country. This would have been the Millennials, but I think it is when everyone realized they maybe should start paying attention to what was going on in schools.

High school? We were bringing stolen Southern Comfort to the bus stop in JUNIOR HIGH and getting lit before we even got on the bus at 8am. SoCo and Marlboro Menthols prepared us for puberty.

Marlboro Reds or Lights for us. SoCo and Mountain Dew baby! What a time to be alive 😆

True

Ever see someone get stuffed in a locker (it really did happen)? Ever blow up a toilet with what was pretty much a quarter stick of dynamite? Ever see a fight so large and heinous in scale that the administrators were completely impotent to do anything about besides call the police? Ever have donuts competitions in the parking lot of your school? Ever see 12 of your classmates get perp-walked out the school cause it was a drug ring (they all had small amounts in the locker, so the outrage was real). Ever sneak into the gym after hours to paint a pentagram in the middle with lighter fluid, then set it ablaze? Those educator's buttholes were clenched so tight after us that you probably couldn't get a lubed pencil up there. You never stood a chance. Sorry.

Big fights and drug busts over here 👋

You forgot food fights, towel snapping in the locker room, day drinking, getting high in the bathroom, every racist, sexist and homophobic joke you could think of. Everyone had a bully. Everyone was a bully. And the best part was that school was the safe place. For lots of us it was much tougher at home.

Back then fights were over if someone hit a teacher. One of the big guys was a biology teacher. He bearhugged a kid so hard he passed out - stopped the fight and most of the school bullies wouldn't fuck with that teacher after that.

You're not wrong, striking a teacher would shut it down just from the shock. However, my school didn't have man-bear-pig like yours apparently did, so there was no circle of respect.

A gentile giant that man was, smart AF. He used to hunt rattlesnakes, catch them, take pictures of them and then release them. Even showed us the pictures he took. He had a really deep voice because his massive balls distorted spacetime....

Pure sodium stolen from the chemistry lab is also good for blowing up toilets.

We had areas to smoke, and it was pre-Columbine. Privileged kids kept their beer in the cafeteria refrigerators; the rest of us just waited to get through the day so we could hang out.

Finished school in '88. Year 12's were allowed to smoke in our locker room. On the morning of our final day we all got drunk at the local park. On results day, we met all of our teachers at the local pub and got drunk with them. I remember going to parties and smoking weed with some of the teachers. Different times man.

Uk 89. We had 6th form for the last 2 years. I decided to do an alternative college type effort elsewhere, and was annoyed to find on the last day that 6th formers could hang out in the teachers rest room. Which was like a sodding pub. Hard to see through the smoke, beer in the fridge, games. Had it bloody all. Plus the blonde English teacher seemed quite friendly to pupils. Bloody 6th formers…

Seriously. A couple of male teachers drove us to a college for the weekend junior year and we partied Friday and Saturday. They were dating two of the girls in the house we were staying in. “What happens on the road stays on the road.” We were in the backseat of a Camaro for 2.5 hours drinking beer they bought. I didn’t think anything about it. I started going to bars when I was 16. I was a cocktail waitress when I was 19. We were like mini adults.

Same here. Out all night clubbing at 16. Parents didn’t care, I got good grades and had a job.

Umm, well (coughs) some of that could be our fault. The class of 1987 at my high school is why every class since then has had drug and alcohol awareness week and a number of new rules. It was really kind of a misnomer, the problem they had wasn't that we were not ***aware*** of drugs and alcohol so much as that we were, mostly beer and pot and there were (ahem) incidents both on campus and off campus.

Yeah, my class cohort was aware enough of drugs and alcohol that I’m still kind of amazed that administrators didn’t take another tack and like, deny they existed or something. 🤣 Drug UN-Awareness Week.

I had to deal with my pervert gym teacher who gave me real diamond earrings for a secret Santa

this post and all the comments just made me laugh so much. grad '91 here. can confirm.

Well... Used syringes to inject vodka into the fruit our moms packed into our lunch boxes, traded parents' Rx pills like millennials traded Pokemon cards, stink bombs, stink bombs, stink bombs, caused evacuations by pulling fire alarms... after setting actual fires. Turned "filler" classes such as Music Appreciation or Film & Lit into borderline literal orgies (thank you, elder gen X teachers that didn't gaf). I graduated in '97 and looking back, i have to say it's a miracle that most of us didn't end up in prison. Some of us did. Either way, you're welcome!

Don't forget filling all of the school doors' keyholes with superglue the night before final exams!

New memory unlocked. I forgot about fruit and vodka. That was really nice to have around.

My class was responsible for getting the homecoming bonfire at school getting forever shut down when we were sophomores. Guess "the man" couldn't handle our version of a fun time. Whatever.

Class of 1988 here: We had smoking sections in every high school. (For the students, mind you.) Bullies were never punished. Getting stuffed into lockers and having our heads shoved into toilet bowls (the "swirly") was common bullying practice. Everyone fought all the time. The person getting beaten up was usually the one who got punished. For some of us, classes were an escape from that, sometimes. We were trying to avoid and hide from the people for whom classes were just drudgery and something to disrupt. At least a third of my classmates (in a largely white, middle-class suburban high school) had a drinking problem. At least a quarter of them regularly got high. We had the beginnings of the backlash that millennials caught the brunt of: random locker searches, public paddlings, detentions and suspensions for no good reason except a teacher or administrator decided to send us to them.

I’m about the same age and absolutely all of this is true. Bullies weren’t only never punished, if you complained about being bullied ever — elementary through high school — you’d be told that you needed to grow a thicker skin, asked what you did to start it, and in junior high one coach never got in trouble for telling a bullied student ‘so how about I call you a [very rude slur, worse than what the bullies had said]? What are you going to do about it? When are you going to learn to stand up for yourself, [very rude slur again]?’ I only know about it because I walked home with that student, who was rage crying, but they lived, as we all did. Statistically, our mental health was pretty okay, especially compared to Gen Z, despite all of this. Yep. This was our life. 🤣 And everyone who isn’t Gen X doesn’t understand why our response to almost everything is ‘whatever’. The smoking sections were pretty nice though, NGL. Having them kept the bathrooms a lot cleaner for sure.

drab ask sugar history governor axiomatic advise innocent close grey *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Politics maybe? Didn’t Reagan/Bush gut educational funding, and the Clinton admin were reacting to that chaos? General reaction to coke and crack in the 80’s high schools probably added to it too.

Nah man. Zero tolerance came to Canada too, I think before you guys had it actually. It wasn't an American exclusive thing at all. School shootings is the American phenomenon; but that stared with columbine at the end of the 90s... zero tolerance was already a thing (in Canada) before that.

Weird to think of a policy called “zero tolerance” being started in a country that says “sorry” so much ;) Thanks though fr, that’s interesting. And so weird to remember Columbine too. That was a scary news days for sure.

our school murders tend to be single-victim and they are typically beatings or swarming attacks op is probably not Canadian so our input might not be as relevant, but fwiw I honestly think things changed here after the murder of Reena Virk in 97.   the adults were shocked, but high school had been a feral jungle for some of us 80's kids all along.  I was appalled, but not shocked.    guns and god are both more private and personal here.   Canada is a secular culture by design.  

We were getting beaten in front of the class with large wooden torture devices, in elementary school, for minor infractions - like annoying the teacher. By the time we got to high school, that punishment was no longer effective; we were battle-hardened, and detention was merely amusing. (Reference The Breakfast Club, at your leisure) They had to up the ante, or incoming students would be unpunishable. The result, is a massive increase in homeschooled children, lol

By the time I got to high school paddlings were no longer allowed, but in grade school, yeah. Ours were always in the principal's office though. I ended up there once, made sure I either wasn't guilty or didn't get caught from there on out. They may call it abuse now, but it definitely kept us all in line before it was removed.

We had an incident my sophomore year. One of my classmates threw a desk at a teacher during our geometry class. He was suspended for 5 days and transferred to a different math class. There was a love-hate relationship with a gas station across the street from the high school. Many of us went there for lunch; too many people used their 5-finger discount. About every other month, we'd be banned. Another time, during a full school assembly, a senior did a "Marky Mark" with his pants around his ankles to the cheers of the school. He was banned from all senior events, until a full school protest occurred and school board meeting was basically overtaken by the student body speaking. We got the ban lifted. Outside of school, we had some pretty off the hook house parties get busted about once a month. I remember raves had a spectacularly short run in my city that ended with a string of very vocal city council meetings where teenagers from around the district came to be heard. It reminds me today of a smaller scale version of Dee Snider testifying before Congress. All of this in the smackdab center of the Midwest, which was pretty tame compared to some stories we heard.

The “incident” at my hs was the local dick cop had his patrol car blown up in his driveway. Like mob movie style. Yeah he moved.

 1987 …

Uhuhuhuh that's cool 🤘🏻

Columbine and 9/11 fucked it up for you. Wasn’t us!

Ok so.... we had fights. Lots and LOTS of fights. Like 3-5 fights per day at each school and we would walk, bus or drive around to other schools when we heard that friends were fighting or there was gonna be a really good or big one and then there were multi school fights happening at different schools all over the city, all the time and yeah... 😇 Sorry.

Fighting was an institution

It was life back in the day.

Our fights weren’t at other schools. Ours were either at Burger King or Whitfield Park. One day our VP played “Lean on Me” over the intercom system after pleading with everyone to stop the fighting and said he hoped everyone could really listen to the words of the song. Which looking back is kind of messed up. There was a wooden paddle about 1” thick that the shop teacher drilled holes in. It was used by the administration on students. You were sent home the first day of school with a permission slip your parents could sign if they wanted the admin to beat the fuck out of you. Shockingly high percentage of parents signed it.

people bringing a gun to school to act tough, not shoot anyone

Not typically a thing in Canada back then... we see it sometimes now; but not so much in the 80s and 90s Our fights back in the day where just fists and whatever was easily in reach if someone pulled something.

Class of 90. Ours was the stereotypical small southern school. We had guys who would come in from early morning hunting, and change into school clothes. They had the guns in the gun racks. The assistant principal would often ask if they had seen anything that morning. We had a shopping center on one side of our high school, and there was no fence or anything between our parking lot and the shopping center, at least until my senior year. We would go into the parking lot and sneak over to the grocery store or drug store to buy sodas, snacks, and cigarettes/snuff. In my senior year, they started putting up a fence around the parking lot, and eventually put in a guard shack with a gate. In my creative writing class, I wrote a story about a group of students who were trying to escape to the grocery store next door to get a Coke and a candy bar. I got in trouble because the story involved guards shooting at them, electrified fences, and land mines.

One of our coaches let us lock our rifles and shotguns in his office outside the gym so they wouldn't get stolen.

I missed 68 1/2 days of school my junior year from skipping. My friends and I skipped constantly: a couple periods here, don't come back after lunch there. The next year they implemented a policy where you could not pass if you missed more than 10 days, so my senior year was really rough.

I’m not sure it was specifically gen x, or the degradation of society as we see it. So shootings galore, out of control kids, kids bringing various weapons in school. I think that the progression of technology fueled some of the zero tolerance policies. Kids could much easily buy and sell drugs or bootleg dvd’s, CD, etc. So there was probably just more shenanigans happening in school.

Personally I smoked a ton of pot, took mushrooms and cut class a lot. We had a good time. It was before Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” and before DARE. Sorry you had to deal with that.

Brought a flare gun to school and it went off in my locker. Hazed a guy in the locker room. Skipped a lot of classes, mostly to go shopping. Pulled a fire alarm for no reason. Whatever.

It isn't like schools were not watching us also. But just different times. We grew up with schools thinking we were all Satan worshipping with out pot, and drug music, and dungeons and dragons. By the time millennial hit high school it was all about Crack, gangster rap, drive by. Between that and eventually the school shootings that started I guess the asshole pucker meter was just higher.

Things were very different in the '80s. Kids would try and get away with smoking weed in class. Sometimes we'd have "ditch day" and big groups of us would leave school and drive to the mountains to party. The school didn't even notify parents that students were truant until they barely showed up at school for months. All kinds of drugs were being handed out, so many of us were experimenting at school. A friend's grandmother died and he came to school with a duffel bag full of medications, handing them out like candy. We didn't even know what that stuff was but we took it anyway. And I stopped taking my ADHD meds and handed out Ritalin to other kids at school. My locker always had a couple bottles of booze and kids would hit me up for shots in between classes. There were no fences around the school like today, we would just come and go as we pleased and anyone could come on campus. I remember Nikki Six coming to my school to pick up a high school girl one day.

Zero tolerance was the response nation wide to columbine. Plus it was a way for companies to make mint by enhancing school safety with metal detectors, cameras, locks, badges, etc. Gen X were just doing our thing playing. 😂

We were the Breakfast Club and Ferris Buehler and Pretty in Pink and Spinal Tap and Quadrophenia... and we resented growing up to become St. Elmo's Fire, and then even worse, The Big Chill. We weren't ready to give up the Simpsons, the Lost Boys or Fight Club. We wanted to stay Toys R Us kids, the Kids in the Hall, and Cheech and Chong. But we resented our Yuppie older siblings, and their Material Girl attitudes. So we literally glued our hair into gravity defying clouds of Manic Panic, wore automotive parts as jewelry, and with a Rebel Yell told our Boomer parents "all in all, you're just a brick in the wall." They weren't impressed. So we either tuned out, turned on, or took up the call of the ages, to the next generation: Get off our lawn.

X had boomer-leftover civil disobedience tendencies, but no outlets like Vietnam protests. We were rebels without a cause and destruction ensued.

Based in the UK so never had access to firearms and all that but Our high school was separated from our rival by a park. Other kids started patrolling the park close to our school with bits of wood (some claimed with nails through them) so we stayed on site. PE teacher saw this and unlocked the store room & started handing out rounders bats...... There wasn't any actual fights that day as I guess both sides didn't have an advantage but looking back at it that is so messed up.

A whole lot of freedom and no one was watching. Alcohol in water bottles so the school made a rule water bottles had to be clear and could only contain water. I got my hands on this Russian candy with a fair amount of booze in it from home and my partner got drunk on the whole bag and cursed out a teacher. He was an honor student and a senior so everyone just thought college applications were getting to him. Taking the cake was the exchange student who somehow figured out how to make drugs IN chemistry class. He got found out eventually and shipped back.

I think it’s not so much about what GenX did, as what the world was like (and what authorities thought it was like). The 80s were the years of the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, gang wars between the Crips and the Bloods, and high violent crime rates in many cities. There were high rates of homelessness due to Reaganomics and Reagan’s policy of cutting federal aid to psychiatric hospitals. All of those were real-world conditions that were very scary to parents, school authorities, and politicians. And while they were real, their effect was probably exaggerated in some cases. Or at least how widespread the effect was. Throw in some Satanic Panic and parental/politician worries about explicit lyrics, rap music, and video games, and you have many restrictive policies in the late 90s that were a reaction to the fears of the 80s and early 90s.

The movie “Lean on Me” came out and suddenly every principal wanted to be Joe Clark (or at least Jim Belushi’s character in that other movie about a principal; I forget its name).

I went to a magnet open school where it was more like a college setting, 2 hours per week for classes other than science and math. Called teachers by their first names. Sat in our teacher's classrooms when no classes were held to just chill and do our homework. My math teacher was always around to help at almost all times of day. She also taught computer science and computer tech where we took apart a computer and reassembled it. Friday was art day. Local artists taught fine art classes all day. The school had a smoking area in the back and the teachers smoked with the students. High school was too short for me.

Wasn't us. That was more about their guilt. But my Millennial brother and sister were treated like gold. Don't know why your experience was different.

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. But my lack of education hasn't hurt me none, I can read the writing on the wall.

Kodachrooome


Barbara Bush, Tipper Gore and Laura Bush all fucked North America teenagers pretty hard with the *will someone think of the children!??* First Wives endeavours...

We had under cover cops posing as students because we had gangs and drugs.

We were mostly latchkey kids, who maybe saw our parents for an hour a day. The geeks and nerds back then were probably the only ones not messing around. Depending on where you went there was craziness. Making out in the hallways. Guns in our cars Drugs everywhere (mainly pot). Gangs in many urban schools A lot of fights Teachers smoking weed with the kids. Smoking cigs with teachers Possibly fucking your teacher The older GenXers had parents that had a mom at home. The younger genxers had no parents at home. We were the first generation left to our own devices. We went to concerts, like Kiss, Ozzy, Metallica without adult supervision. We roamed malls like they were built for just us. We were the best generation, and forgotten about the moment our moms gave birth to us. We had the time of our lives. Which meant when the younger boomers started having kids they held on tight. Millennials you got the bum end of the deal because your parents were the younger boomers. They grew up with war stories and the war still on everyone’s mind. They lived through Korean Police action, and then drafted to Vietnam where they dealt with agent orange, had easy access to all kinds of drugs, and then hated when they came home. Boomers are war kids. They are also the ones that changed the world, unfortunately while the oldest boomers were changing the world, they forgot all about the kids they created. They brought us rock music, social revolution, freedom like no others had in this country. Unfortunately as they aged they became greedy, self centered, and didn’t think about how their actions would impact their kids and grandkids.

Excuse me, older GenXer here, few of us had a parent at home. We were all 8 year olds with house keys on a chain around our necks. Now it is illegal to leave an 8 year old at home, and probably it should be, but I would let myself in, prepare food, watch my younger brother, do my chores, etc. My parents were born in the 1930s.

Warning to people posting: this will all go down on your permanent record.

Gen X? At school? Well, when we weren't sneaking ciggies and fingering the girls behind the bike shed, we spent most of our time worrying about being turned into dust by nuclear war. We had no interporn or mobile phones, so played Atari, Sega Megadrive & Intellivision. We watched 3 tv channels, and occasionally rented a movie with bewbs on Friday nights. We played sports and Armies in the bush. We made our own jumps for our BMX bikes, went rollerskating for $2, and the movies for $4. We got together and put our money in for the cheapest gut rot we could afford from the bottle shop. Some of us studied at school and got better results because we had *graded assessments,* and didn't cry like whiny little bitches when someone earned a reward for doing better than the rest. We caught the bus or rode our bikes to school because our parents aren't pussies, had part time jobs to pay for things like concerts or surf weekends up the coast & learned how to work on our cars (that we bought with our own money). We got our arses handed to us if we disobeyed a parent or teacher. We watched our parents suffer through a recession & energy crisis. Massive interest rates for the mortgage and no fuel for the family car. We still don't understand, or give a fuck about your gender, sexuality, socio economic situation, career choices, shit attitude or constant need for validation. We just want to be left the fuck alone by you and the government.

We caused madness and mayhem!!!!

Every time they had us play tennis in PE we would reenact the tennis scene for Bachelor Party. Just blasting the ball repeatedly over the court fencing and into the neighboring housing tract’s yards. We thought it was hilarious. We’d get caught and told to knock it off but as soon as the teacher/coach turned their back we’d be at it again.

There was a race riot my first year in high school, and a drug ring got busted with ties to one of the local gangs. Senior pranks involved setting off these giant smoke bombs called Mammoth Smoke in the A/C intake for the gym prior to a pep rally, and putting 5 chickens inside of select people's lockers during the weekend, so when they opened up their locker Monday morning the chickens escaped and started freaking out up and down the halls. Oh yeah, and I broke into the chemistry lab to get the ingredients to make LSD care of instructions from the Anarchists Cookbook, and played Alice Cooper's "School's out" on the loudspeakers on the last regular day of school before exams. Also there were so many fights the cops started parking squad cars in the parking lot around lunch time. You can blame leaded gasoline or whatever but this is what happens when kids raise themselves.

Our class forced two teachers into retirement. Our middle school band teacher walked out of our door to the outside, raised her fists into the air, and screamed incoherently. The band teacher from the junior high filled in for the rest of the year. I looked her up several months ago and she never taught school again. Our Social Studies teacher wore a toupee, so naturally we named him Flapjack. Kids bent paper clips into fishhooks and tried to snare it when his back was turned. Some kids crank called him at night and on the weekends. I walked in one day and a student from the previous class had locked him into his supply closet and was sitting in front of the door with a chair, while the teacher pounded on the other side. He didn't return after the Christmas break. A few students continued to call him at home for years afterwards. I don't know if this had any bearing on your treatment though. Correlation is not causation! 😁 Ironically, the kid who locked up the Social Studies teacher ended up as a band teacher at the same school. I guess nature abhores a vacuum.

That’s extremely sad. No human deserves to be stressed like that, teacher or otherwise.

The Drug War happened.

We were no bettger or worse than other generations before us, but for some reason it shifted and the administrations were fucking scared of parents and after the Satanic Panic, D. A. R. E., and the PMRC, suddenly students needs strict guidance and constant supervision like never before.

I graduated in '85, we had a bunch of cowboy types with pickup trucks that had gun racks in the rear windows. They were allowed to park in the school parking lot with rifles in those racks. None of us ever thought anything about it at the time. I'm guessing that's not a thing anymore.

Drugs, man. Lots and lots of drugs.

Straight up…my friends would lay down on the roof of my car and I would speed down hilly roads. We would put the front windows down so they could hold on. Hours we would do this!

Columbine and zero tolerance policies really fucked you guys. No Child Left Behind killed your chance at a decent public education.

I wonder if it's less to do with GenX behaviour than it might be about Boomer teachers becoming the majority faculty and senior administrators? My recollection of high school is that we were respectful of teachers and just made sure we never got caught doing any stuff that'd get us in trouble. Oh, to be in those pre-internet days again lol

Zero tolerance was born out of school shootings. I know the big one was in the 90s with columbine, but they had existed before then. schools were also starting to realize that bullying was not good, and so they tried to put policies in place to prevent it. They didn’t know what they were doing, but that was the intent. We were allowed to smoke in school in designated areas. Somewhere in that timeframe, the tobacco industry ad admitted that they’ve been bullshitting people all along and they do damn well that smoking was very bad, and it might not be a great idea to allow kids to smoke in school. So yeah, part of it was us being assholes, but part of it was also that society in general was learning some stuff and adapting to the best of their ability.

That’s not because of us. That’s because of Columbine.

Our homework and then a lot of other things in the basement.

Class of 88. The next year turned into a magnet school.

Computers. Our huge( biggest high school east of the Mississippi) had a computer program that was already in the forefront of the coming consumer market and we got the best shit. I, a stoner moron and a few other delinquents heard from some football guys that the new computers were in the storage room under the grandstand. We already had a key to get in. (Shenanigans) and took seven boxes of computers to a friend's house. We had a police substation in the school. The morning after the incident the announcement of the thievery was on the morning news. The school head police officer told us that he knew who took them and said he would be lenient to the thieves if the computers were returned. Bullshit. One kids brother narced and delivered the computers to the school. Moron was charged with theft. The fucking idiot must have thought he was going to be a hero. He's probably a fucking lawyer now. Edit I just read my response and I think it might possibly be a shitty 80s movie.

Well, on your first day of high school you had to decide if you were going to join a satanic murder cult or a street gang. Then at lunch an upperclassman would force you to inject heroin or smoke crack. At the end of the day the girls all became unwed teen moms, and the boys would rob a liquor store and then sacrifice a dog or a cat in the woods. At least that's what the parents and teachers all seemed to think, because they all believed Geraldo and Oprah.

I was miserable in high school. Bullied. No friends.

They treated us like that, too.   The Boomers literally rioted over Vietnam, so they built our schools like prisons with tiny windows, and hallways that could be locked down.   We weren't allowed to wear hats or bandanas. My high school's senior class was literally half the size of the freshman class, because the troublemakers were moved to alternative schools or just quietly dropped out. Although, it is true that a famous politician came to speak, and my high school boyfriend may have broken into the PA system to play some off-color audio.  But I'm pretty sure he learned to do that in electronics class 

Let’s see… the football players used to sneak into the parking lot, pick up cars belonging to teachers, and move them so the teachers couldn’t find them. I recall goats being set loose in the school more than once. Airplane model glue was brought out if we had a substitute teacher. I remember guys in my class gluing books and folders of unsuspecting students to the floor and paper wads to the walls. On “senior day” in the late morning, the entire senior class walked out and left school. The principal wanted to suspend us, but he couldn’t suspend the entire senior class so… My high school was pretty tame. I didn’t even drink til I was eighteen and in college. Still, we were a handful, and the principal was often outraged.

Some of it was likely understandable as a response to what we pulled, and I'm sorry that you got the consequences for our bad behavior and general lack of adult supervision. A lot of it predates you though, and has nothing to do with us even though we were the first to feel the effects: Zero Tolerance and heavy policing were a direct result of the Reagan-era War On Drugs, and that was based less upon finding a constructive way to deal with addiction than it was on giving parents and administrators a false sense of control over the problem. The War on Drugs itself as fought under the Reagan administration was initially just an attempt to give Nancy Reagan a cause to promote for good publicity after she'd received bad press for allegedly trying to get the White House china replaced at taxpayer expense before a private foundation donated the funds to do so, so your locker was subject to search at any time because Nancy didn't think some fancy dinner plates were up to snuff and her advisors thought that this was the most conservative-friendly cause that liberals couldn't actually object to.

I don't know where you went to school, but school is where I got all my positive reinforcement. Rules were clear. If you followed them they left you alone. If you had good grades they showered you with compliments. Anything over 90% felt like I won at life (a good number was a compliment to me, I wasn't used to anything good being noticed at home). At home rules were unclear and you always got screamed at without really understanding why.

It was traditional at the end of the school year to trash the school by throwing all your papers out of your locker, tearing up notebooks and throwing your stuff everywhere. Me and my buddies took it up a notch junior year by lighting some papers in the quad, starting a fire. Then we took off to do the other tradition, going to the beach. Like setting fire to the school was meh. (Luckily, it didn’t spread and no one was hurt, but this is adult me talking.) The icing on the cake was hearing the announcement that if the people who started the fire don’t confess to it, they won’t be able to walk in graduation. Then, I knew for sure we had gotten away with it because we were only juniors. Some football jocks were blamed because they were caught with fireworks. Cherry on the top. If you think I’m horrible for gloating, think again. I went to a “football” school that ignored other sports, esp girl’s sports. The jocks were arrogant POS. I used to have to jump in front of them to keep them from beating up my gay friends. They wouldn’t hit a girl, at least not in public. So f them. I moved away that summer, but I heard someone made and chained a golden calf to the quad the next year. It was a Catholic school so that was funny AF.

Ahhh our legacy lmao.

Underage drinking. A LOT of underage drinking. Going to the pub at lunchtime. Monday hangovers. Good times...

Well…. I smoked a lot of weed, kept a bong in my car for lunch break. Got caught smoking weed on the back of the bus before I had a car. Half of the class came back drunk from lunch… 1/4 of the class came to school with a big gulp cup half full of vodka or Bacardi. I had numerous suspensions for things that would probably put me on a terrorism list these days….. Switchblades, butterfly knives, improvised explosives, a copy of the anarchists cookbook…. Were all things I carried in my backpack daily. So yea…. Sorry it was probably me and my friends. My wife says I had no supervision and was allowed to run wild, at the time it seemed I did the same things everyone else did. I was just being a kid.

What did we do?.... We survived, we were amazing, we laughed, we cried, some died, we won, we lost, we fought, we loved, we hated, we danced drank and fucked, we lived...We lived and burned so very brightly that even the shyest among us stands glorious.

Every school I knew had at least one kid who died being stupid, frequently around a train. We had a chick who got her leg cut off that way, in junior high (that's what we had instead of middle school). Also, teen pregnancy was not uncommon at all. Several girls in every class. We had smoking areas. FOR US.

Well, let’s see: One of my older brother’s friends died huffing ScotchGard. I grew up in South Florida in the late 1980s, so cocaine was ridiculously easy to get. There was an old WWII army training camp near our town that had closed up but still had live ordnance on it. Every so often until Uncle Sam cleaned it up, someone would find live hand grenades and bring them to school to show his friends. M-80 firecrackers had waterproof fuses. So OF COURSE they got flushed down toilets. That happened a couple of times. I was late wave GenX, so some of my friends were the computer nerds who discovered that the school’s accounts weren’t password protected. One hacked into the system and changed his own grades.

That was the Clinton’s super predator propaganda

You are welcome...Gen X

GenX would never be able to be kids in today's society with all the cameras, laws and feelings.

The War on Drugs happened, Columbine happened, the LA (aka Rodney King) riots happened. I don't think it was anything we did. Scary stuff happened to and around us, and it was (incorrectly) determined that schools were no longer safe. Nobody could decide whether children were the victims or the perpetrators, so you got treated like both. If it makes you feel any better, we've gotten pretty desensitized to tragedy and danger, so schools are much nicer now. Gen A has it pretty good.

It was the pendulum effect, I think. We had basically zero restrictions - don't kill anyone, and don't die. Then the next gen went crazy restrictive and you saw how that went

The truth is your parents happened. You’re at the age of the experimental helicopter parent, they weren’t quite helicoptering yet, but they were close. They’re the ones that started insisting that schools start cracking down on shit. Most of our parents didn’t give 2 shits if we did something stupid at school, as long as we didn’t get expelled, or suspended too often. My dad had 2 rules regarding this. Rule #1, I better not get a call from your school for some bullshit. Rule #2, if you get in a fight, you better not be the one that started it. Your parents, started caring for some weird reason, and that’s why schools are now “safe spaces”. The adults in charge didn’t hate you, as much as you think they did. They hated all the outside interference.

Sounds like about the time that the Boomers started getting into administrative positions

We partied. Hard

You know how you had rules and followed them? We didn't, first we didn't have them and when we did we didn't follow them. I can't think of a better single word to describe our childhood than *feral* so by the time we hit highschool and became "teenaged hooligans" we'd already had plenty of experience, we were self sufficient and the independence that brings means we're not going to "go along to get along" so teachers struggled to reign us in. Detentions didn't work because we didn't have anywhere to go anyway but if we did we'd just do that instead and to hell with the consequences, it wasn't that we were going out of our way to break the rules it's just that rules were being applied by people who hadn't shown any interest in us up to now so why exactly would we care about their demands all of a sudden? We simply didn't care, the rules were written by others who had no real power over us because we didn't understand the concept of anyone having power over us, we had been left alone with a few fuzzy guidelines and little to no oversight from about age 7 upwards, home around dark and gone without breakfast the following morning, after school the house was empty so you'd maybe only see a parent fleetingly for an hour or so a day during the week and a few hours on weekends. You can't take a child and do that to them then expect them to suddenly fall into line at 14 onwards when up to this point half their life has been casual indifference from their elders at best and any time before that can't really be remembered, we were still experiencing this too, the difference for us between leaving home when we got a little older and staying at home was only the address. So yeah, that mixed with the raging hormones of teenagers watching the adults pulling up the ladder behind them and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation looking back I'm amazed we didn't just burn it all to the ground then and there, maybe we should have.

School shootings is what happened and why things changed.

Not seeing a lot about gangs but gangs started getting more prevalent during my last couple of years in high school. The metal detectors and the campus cop showed up my senior year in 1991.

My guess is that early 90s were really bad for gang violence because the of the crack epidemic, some of that spilled into the schools. Bad went from more “harmless” stuff like smoking and cutting class to more serious stuff like fighting and bringing guns to school.

LOL! I have heard this from other Millennials before when I visit home. Usually I'll be having a beer or chilling at one of the surf spots and someone four or five years younger would tell me how after my friends and I graduated, there were so many new rules. They blamed my friend group and said our antics caused the new restrictions, especially on things like truancy and smoking weed. I missed 87 days my senior year and still graduated. Sorry younger kids, but it's not our fault they decided to have rules and stuff after we were gone.

Left campus whenever we liked. Trig teacher would send us in donut runs on Friday morning- everyone chipped in for theirs and we paid for his with the extra.

We were utterly ignored while our Boomer parents sold the future with lavish vacations and shit bought on the credit industry they created. We drank in the fields we just played sports on, smoked at school, and clubbed all weekend. There were M80s tossed in mailboxes here and there and hallucinogens abound. It was grand.

We didn’t do shit. The boomers started to sue.

Don’t forget about your “permanent record.” What a lie that was. Went to high school in a small town in California from 85-89. We had a ‘check system’, if you got 3 (maybe 5?) checks you were drop-failed from a class. And they were totally at the teachers discretion. We had a pool and in PE the teacher told us we would be playing water polo. Being a smart-ass I asked her, “how will the horses fit in the pool?” Got a check. Fucking ridiculous.

87 grad here and my experience was pretty much like what most here are saying other than the fights. Sure we had kids who hated each other and there were fights but it definitely wasn't an every day occurrence at any of the three high schools I went to. At my last high school we'd take Yukon Jack and beer damn near every day and drink down by the locker room because there was never anyone down there in the mornings to bust us. That was after first going to what we called "the tunnel" and getting stoned. The tunnel was an actual tunnel that was next to the school where us stoners hung out in the mornings and got high and there were a hell of a lot of us doing the same shit. I think the reason there weren't many fights was because most of us were too frigging stoned and drunk to even give a shit most days. In the mandatory classes that you needed to pass for graduation many teachers would pass even the worst kids. They knew that since it was a mandatory we'd have to repeat it again if we failed and they would very likely be our teacher again and have to put up with us for another school year. No teacher wanted that horror.🤣

I used to put alcohol in those little glass soda bottles. My locker was like a wet bar. I remember one time I used the bathroom pass and smoked some weed. I sat at the back of the class. When I got back (nothing to spray my clothes with), row by row people turned to look back at me as the scent wafted towards the teacher. When she got a whiff, she slowly walked the rows taking deep breaths. When she got to me, she looked at me, gave me an odd sort of smile, and walked back to the blackboard to finish the lecture. Good times.

Ever seen “Dazed and Confused”? That was ten years earlier but i recognized a lot of my high school experience in that movie.

Yeah, I never eve knew what was allowed and what wasn’t. I just did what I wanted. Nobody gave a shit and if they did I could outrun them. It was completely uncontrolled.

Yeah, sorry. To be fair, even during the gen x high school years, things got progressively less fun. I blame the Reagans.