Was your high school violent?

I was looking at some pics in an old yearbook and was thinking about high school. One thing I remember is how violent it was. I was in gym class and school was just about to get out. As I was standing there waiting to leave these two guys started yelling at each other right in front of me. I don't think they cared I was right there. So I thought it would be a good idea if I moved and as soon as I did they started punching and kicking(thank god I moved). We also had many gangs and things of that sort. I saw so many fights that after a while it seemed normal.

Every now and there there was the odd kicker or jock fight, but nothing unusual.

However, the "crazy" people were those of us in band :P

On BOTH sides.

I was beaten up in 11th grade, and I had
a knife pulled on me in 7th grade (middle
school).

Desegregation was a huge failure here in
Detroit. It would have worked if cross
DISTRICT busing had occurred, instead of
just busing us around the city.

Believe it or not, I still got a great
education.

I have nothing but praise for public school teachers.

My high school consisted of poor, working class, farmers and affluent Houston-area and Galveston County-area kids. It was a great mix, no de/segregation, no racial problems (that I was aware of while there) and very few fights. I have never been beaten up in my life, and I wouldn't say I live a "charmed" life, either, or I wouldn't be unemployed right now ;)

They (white anti-integration groups) succeeded in stopping cross-district busing,
and when the whites moved out of the city proper,
there was no one left to "desegregate".

Shameful.

http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=161

It's really difficult to imagine that kind of thing happening in real life, for me anyway. I'm sorry you had to experience that kind of thing on a daily basis. But I guess it taught you something about human and sociological nature, too.

It made me aware.

and sports weren't that big - too many kids in Hebrew school during the key junior high team skill development years - we were more a tennis-and-golf high school than a testosterone-filled jock high school.

he was heckling her (such a dumb idea) and she swung around and belted him and he hit the wall and slid down it like in a movie.

She was one tough cookie. No one reported her, not even the band geek.

me, i was a girl geek.

we had a local reputation - Falls Church 'Get High' School. :smoke:

I remember my farm class, don't really remember the real name, but it was an old farmer teaching it. Kid in front of me went home across the street each lunch and got totally stoned, pretty much every day. We would slowly tilt his chair back until by the end of the class he was lying on his back facing the ceiling.

The teacher never seemed to notice. Could be because he was more concerned with making sure no-one ever opened the cabinet where he trapped the acid spider monster thing. let that out, and chaos would ensue.

How's that for "violent"?

Too much pot and most people were at least civil towards each other. I saw like maybe 2 fights my entire high school career.

The kind who got a BMW on their 16th birthday. The kind who looked down on you if your family didn't have a ski cabin in Lake Tahoe. The kind who loved Reagan (this was early 80s).

UGH! I hated high school. Longest four years of my life.

I do remember one event, but that was more a result of a football player too dumb to realize that the only 2 minority students in the school might be related, and thus saying something in front of a Very large lineman, about his sister, that they shouldn't have said anyway, but really shouldn't have said about anyone's sister in front of them.

But one event a violent school does not make.

there were fights amongst the boys (when hasn't there been?) but for the most part, no. There was one guy who took a bunch of acid and started flipping out and breaking windows but that's about as big as it got.

in what was then lily white South Houston, Texas, in 1962-64. A lot of pranking went on, but I don't remember fights. The only time I remember violence in school was at North Junior High School in Colorado Springs about 1959.

decades before Columbine....part of the plot included chaining the some of the doors shut & shooting anyone who got out of the doors they left open (they ditched those ideas at the last minute)....none of the asshats went to jail because the DA let 'em join the military instead..... :grr:

dg

no gangs, and the students weren't all that violent at all- but the teachers were physically/emotionally abusive.

You werent even allowed to defend yourself if someone started hitting you. If you fought back then you would be in cuffs to. Our high school was modeled after a prison with all the gates locking us in during school hours.

..."alternative" school for the "smarties," so I think a lot of the people with whom I went to school were ... too focused on their studies and being dorks. :P

2 of which I dropped out of, yes, there was violence. This was the 70's, and some of it was due to racial tension, some of it to teenage posturing. Since I didn't bother to go much and I do remember the violence, I assume it was significant issue.
I don't remember a lot of gang activity at those schools.

I ended up at a early "alternative" school for fuck ups (dropped out of that one as well) A much smaller population with a greatly improved teacher to student ratio led to less violence. There were other issues, most of us were stoned on one thing or the other all the time for one instance. There was a nursery downstairs for teenage mothers for another.

Got a GED and went on to college. I've never regretted high school, but that's just me.

;-)

I went to four high schools in the mid to late 1970's. I graduated in '79.

Artesia High School in Lakewood, California was the bad one. Two complete cholo gangs going to the same school: Artesia (ARTA) and Hawaiian Gardens (HG). There were a couple of really bad one-on-one and several-on-one jumpings, and some really epic lunchyard free-for-alls.

We did have a couple gangs mostly comprised of pot heads. But pot heads are usually pretty mellow.

and in those days about the worst thing anybody did was smoke in the bathroom.

Towson High: I never saw any fights, but the verbal bullying was brutal. Students picked on some many other students. One of the reasons I got my parents to get me out of there. The other reason was that I tried to kill myself.

Forbush: High school specially made for the mentally ill. It was violent. I saw a couple fights. Students were brutal with teasing, too, but it was a very small school so it was easier to who was picking on you...

My advice for anyone NOT living in a small New England town who's bought that myth about small New England towns being peaceful, idyllic, and safe?

Get your friggin' HEAD examined. I've been a Californian since I was 16 years old and NOTHING I've seen here matches what I went through in Massachusetts. NOTHING.

Example #1: Neighbor "does a Hemingway." Takes the 12-gauge, goes out into his back yard, climbs up a tree, gets comfy on a branch, blows his fucking brains out.

Example #2: Girl next door gets "bad boy" boyfriend. Dad doesn't like him. Knocks on the door one night to have a talk with dad and "get things straightened out." While he's distracting him, two of his buddies go around the back of the house, empty the contents of a five-gallon gas can all over the back porch, and set it on fire. When he runs out of the house, all three jump him and beat the ever-loving shit out of him.

Was my high school violent?

Is a duck's ass water-tight?

:toast:

There was a lot of violence at my high school (Lowell), it was during the early 90's and things were crazy, daily fights, lots of gang battles...we had three to four major gangs with over 30 smaller ones, lots of stabbings, shootings and murders. Plenty of people (including myself) brought weapons to school daily. There was a lot of racial tension between asian and latino gang members...sometimes I'm surprised I got through it. I've been attacked both inside and outside school during that time by people I didn't know and didn't have a problem with.

Every day on the school bus, the local bullies would pick someone to beat up. There was one kid who was a complete psycho (and now is a "regular" on the Classmates.com page for my high school)...

...He would sit at the back of the bus and kids would say in a grave tone of voice "DON'T LOOK AT RICH..."

Because if you established eye contact with him, he'd wait until your stop, follow you off the bus, and kick your ass. Every day, at least one beating happened on (or shortly off of) that fucking bus.

But we did have a stabbing there once. I was in high school 1972-1976.

stabbed.

Her girl's room was littered with syringes and a couple of times she was assaulted in those rest rooms.

She lived in fear all through high school.

in a small town in TX. The most violent thing that happened was the FFA guys castrating their pigs.

A fight now and then, just like any neighborhood might have. I grew up in a fairly small town, though. My grad class was around 247 I think.

It was an offshoot of ongoing racial violence in my high school following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., though this happened many months after.

A liberal high school in a liberal college town, the least likely place, but there were groups of kids roaming around beating up other kids. A friend was badly beaten enough to end up in the hospital. No guns or knives, though.

I was attacked by someone I barely knew, and by defending myself got suspended, too. It was almost comical in nature; it was mid-winter, we both were wearing parkas and gloves, and rolling around in about a foot of powder snow. A powder puff fight, though my nose bled all over the place.