So, if you believe that an individual has a duty to change laws instead of ignoring them, you’re condemning the actions of countless runaway slaves and homosexuals prior to the modern age.
There is simply no way to logically or morally justify a philosophy of “bad laws must be followed until they are changed.”
The non-apology has a commendable snark to it but this student could try different and various methods to create a true impact that could possibly have lasting change, such as: contacting the state board for a clear definition of clothing rules and each school’s agency of that rule, raising the issue at a school board meeting, or perhaps a leggings-in where all students wear leggings (girls and boys included).
A social media post is fine but I don’t see any true change taking place because of it.
Yup. This is because as far as I can tell, school dress codes are for banning anything trendy, because it’s trendy. I can’t decide whether school administrators are honestly worried about fashion trends becoming a distraction, or whether they’re just petty tyrants jumping at the chance to make the kids these days stop wearing/doing/saying stuff the administrators don’t understand.
Understood.
I can actually envision an alternate reality in which this makes sense (i.e., the rules are reasonable and things are set up to help the kids understand why that’s the case).
But that doesn’t seem to be the reality we have here!
(1) You can enjoy seeing an attractive person without being creepy by keeping your reaction in the privacy of your own head (which it sounds like you do). If they notice you staring, you’ve crossed the line into ogling, so keep your glances to a socially acceptable non-staring length of time. Making any remarks out loud where they can hear you is right out (again, it sounds like you already know this).
(2) Yes, most teenagers spend a lot of time thinking about sex. They will do this no matter what people of their preferred gender are wearing, as you say.
(3) I agree that dress codes have little to do with creating an atmosphere of non-harassment and mutual respect at school. In fact, I suspect they can do the opposite, because dress code enforcement can mark kids out for public humiliation.
When I was in school, I often wished that administrators would just institute school uniforms rather than creating tons of arbitrary-seeming, inconsistently enforced fashion rules. It would have been so much easier if they’d just said “You have to wear these pants or this skirt, this shirt, and this sweater” rather than coming up with new bans all the time on whatever clothing or accessories were trendy that season, and making up new rules on the fly whenever someone wore something different or unusual they hadn’t thought to specifically ban.
Maybe she’ll get kicked out, earn her GED, and end up saving two of the best years of her life from being wasted in a US public school.
Incidentally, for those who will inevitably be angered by this sentiment, I am pro-education which is exactly why I am anti-US public school.
As someone who went to a private school on an assisted place scheme, I liked having uniforms. They were much cheaper than most normal clothes and relative wealth wasn’t as much of an issue. Still, I’ve never been to a school where people didn’t try to get away with as much as possible in order to express their individuality or show a little resistance to authority.
Right, I don’t hit on strangers, whistle/cat-call, go out of my way to follow someone for a better view, any of that boorish crap, and never have.
I think i wasn’t fully awake when I wrote that post. Shoulda had more coffee and set it aside for a while, because it now seems to me most of my truly on-topic thoughts on the matter were actually not hopelessly muddled, simply bunched up near the end.
Because of course, we all get to wear anything we want at anytime. When she gets canned from her first job for inappropriate dress, I’m sure you all will still be cheering her on. If she wants to fight the power, then that’s fine, but she also has to be willing to accept the consequences. Like writing stupid essays and being suspended. She sounds like a snotty little teenager who is throwing a hissy because she didn’t get to do what she wanted. Talk about entitled!
I can report a small, possibly unusual (but most likely perfectly on the norm) retrospective study. Of my high-school class (Lexington MA 1972 if you MUST know 
), there is exactly zero correlation between style of dress and academic or employment success in the following 40+ years. Some kids wore pressed pants, patent leather shoes, and ironed shirts (or blouses & skirts of various lengths); others wore jeans with more patches than denim, beatup tshirts, and so on. Probably some of us dress this way today :-).
Now I’ll grant that we had no problem with gangs & gang colors, which is about the only reason I’ve ever heard for justifying any sort of dress code.
oblig.
what you’re saying is that you used to be pretty cool. but not anymore.
That’s a strawman. That’s like telling people who oppose laws prohibiting marijuana use, “Because of course, we all should get to smoke pot anywhere and anytime we like.” Just as people who are against marijuana laws are not being extremists, people who oppose pointless dress codes at involuntary institutions don’t think it’s appropriate for people to dress “anyway they want at anytime.”
Since compulsory education is so different from employment, you have no point, here.
Getting incensed when human beings who are a few years too young to be called “adults” make decisions for themselves that harm no one and call into question the arbitrary nature of the rules created by real adults is a silly thing to do. Authoritarianism is usually pretty silly.
Fuck yeah!
There are many, many examples of kids growing up with “no structure in school,” even no structure at all, who didn’t grow up to break the reasonable laws of society. The idea that not following all rules makes one unable to follow any rules is not only illogical, it’s demonstrably false.
There is absolutely no basis for this claim. There is, however, a lot of evidence that shows that kids don’t learn very well in environments where they don’t feel respected. The authoritarianism you’re espousing has been shown to fail more students than it helps.
This is a strawman. No one is arguing against a line or against a simple, reasonable dress code.
As I’ve said, comparing compulsory education to employment makes no sense. If she was being paid, or even if she had chosen the school and signed off on the rules, you might have a point. As it is, condemning a reasonable response to an unreasonable rule is just more of the authoritarianism that helps to make school such a miserable, awful place for millions of kids every year.
I’m pretty cool now, I just grew up a bit is all.
Everyone has an opinion, and thank you for yours. It’s not too far off how I could feel about it at a particular time tbh. However, I don’t feel that associating views about rules in school and Authoritarianism is fitting.
Also, having done, gotten away with, and having friends of various religions, genders and sexual preferences who have done, and gotten away with things like this, and waaay worse than this, to both make points, and simultaneously rebel, as teenagers, for all rebellious forms of liberalisation or feelings of freedom… I still can’t say this is awesome. A waste of said teenagers time, and ours with this banter tbh.
Awesome would be to find pictures of the teacher in similar attire, print blown up versions, and glue them to the side of said teachers car, whilst reporting the story to local media. That would be ‘Awesome’… Whilst also giving decent life and work experience regarding graphic and print design, and incognito exhibition development.
Oh well… Opportunity missed. Looks like she’ll have to be sent home yet again, and miss more learning, simply for wearing items of clothing that she was asked not to wear, by the institution she is frequenting voluntarily in order to achieve a level of learnedness easily achieved by her peers. Schade. 
This is not awesome. I’m a teacher, and I see this kind of BS all the time. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with boys being predators or rules being stupid. Let me tell you what’s really going on here:
The rule is not about boys being predators or “slut shaming” the girls. It’s about not showing your crotch, crack, or underwear in school. There’s a dress code in place because it’s inappropriate to show one’s crotch, cleft, or nipples in school. Leggings aren’t pants. A lot of people think their leggings are totally appropriate, and then they bend over and the leggings become translucent. She needs to wear pants to school, as the boys do. She violated the dress code. Period.
This is most likely not her first dress code violation. Most teachers I know don’t take major disciplinary action on a first offense. Judging by my own experience (and this girl’s statement on the form), she’s probably a habitual offender. I have students who violate dress code every single day, and get reminders every single day, and continue to break the code. At some point, it becomes excessive and further action is required. (Usually it’s the boys, so again, not slut-shaming.)
Being in class is absolutely more important than a silly dress code violation, so it’s probably a case of a teacher telling her to cover herself up, and her acting like a teenager does. She acts tough and rebellious on this form, my guess is she gives the teacher the same attitude. So while wearing leggings might not be enough to get her kicked out of my classroom, acting like a brat would. If I ask a student to correct their behavior, and they become defiant to the point of disrupting the instructional process for everyone, they get removed.
I know from experience, when you give a kid a form like this, you get their side of the story and nothing more. That’s why I stopped giving kids forms like this. When a kid acts like a complete animal, you can be sure the form will say “what was I doing? NOTHING!” I walked into a bathroom and caught a kid throwing a wad of soaking wet paper towels against the ceiling. When I caught him, he called me “****ing pervert” and told me what I should do with my mother. When he filled out the form, it said “what was I doing? I was just washing my hands and the teacher took me to the office.” So yeah, you can trust this girl’s form 100%.
I find it interesting how many people are quick to believe a 16-year-old’s rebellious and flippant account, and immediately jump on the “teachers are assholes” bandwagon. Teachers put up with this crap all day long, and this is a perfect example. Look at how many people are ready to call the teacher an asshole, and nobody’s heard her side of the story. Hooray!
True, but unless we’re talking about art or music or flavors of ice-cream, then there is a varying quality in opinions, usually regarding the opinion’s relation to fact.
Rules in school are frequently the very definition of authoritarianism. When kids are suspended on a regular basis for coloring their hair or shaving it off or giving a mydol to a painfully menstruating friend or chewing a pop tart into the shape of a gun, it is more than fitting to bring up authoritarianism.
Absolutely it’s a waste of time, that’s the point. This student’s time was wasted on top of the myriad ways adults waste students’ time in high school.
So, instead of simply and honestly saying, “Your rule is stupid and I intend to ignore it,” you think it would have been a better idea to, what, dig through the internet looking for a picture of her teacher wearing leggings and blow up pictures of it and vandalize the teacher’s car with the pictures? You didn’t really think about that very much, did you?
How do you know she’s going to this school because it’s the school of her choice? What “level of learnedness” are you talking about? When your response to the refusal to follow a foolish rule (an act with a long, honored history), is, “Oh, well, I guess she’ll just have to pay the price for refusing to do what she’s told,” I’m afraid you prove my point about the quality of opinions.
How do you know this girl was showing her crotch?
I used to be a teacher, too. There are good kids and bad kids, bad kids who used to be good and vice versa. It’s not easy, I know. Especially when you consider how many of the kids would prefer to be anywhere else but school (which is a related problem). But nobody’s saying “teachers are assholes.” They’re saying teachers who penalize students simply for breaking meaningless rules are assholes. Usually, they’re not very good teachers, either.
The reason people are siding with this “rebellious and flippant” teenager are because stupid rules deserve to be ignored and mocked. It’s what thinking people do.
Now, it’s true that this girl could have been dressed like a street hooker, for all we know. But when every week there’s another story of a kid getting sent home from school for basically acting like an autonomous individual by ignoring useless rules, it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine this is just another case of that.
And that’s a problem. For a century and a half kids have been forced to spend their days being condescended to and controlled, as if they were inherently undeserving of respect. It makes sense that there will always be a group of kids who respond to this by acting out. It’s hard to be a good teacher when the system forces you to be mostly an authority figure.
