What things did you hear in high school? Because now that I've actually been here for 6 weeks, I see that what we were spoon-fed as being hard truths about the world was just a bunch of bulls**t. I've come up with some that I can remember or have heard about, but I can imagine some of you might have had even dumber rules, and to that: I salute you.

1. No phones.

Our phones are what connects us to the rest of the world. We make plans on them, talk to distant friends, text our moms to call us out of school because we definitely didn't finish that paper due fourth period. But at my high school, we weren't allowed to have our phones out during any classes or in the hallways. If an administrator saw you with one out, even while walking between class and the front door to go home for lunch (yes, we could all leave for lunch at my school), you got it taken away. Needless to say, many students, including myself, developed a selective hearing when it came to our phones.

2. No hats.

and we didn't ruin the economy, so why does it really matter if we express ourselves a bit?

3. No food/drink in class or the library.

Another weird rule: to cut back on the amount of people that were drinking at school, which already was not a lot, my school made it so every liquid had to be in clear containers as to be able to see if you were drinking water or not. Logic check: there are a whole bunch of alcohols that are clear like water.

But why, really, is it a crime to want to be able to enjoy some nice, low fat, low sugar, low taste (thanks, Michelle Obama), Cheetos in class? As a hyperactive Italian boy, I can definitely say that one of my least favorite things is having my food taken away from me. Seriously, I'll stab you with a fork.

4. Attendance

Ok, bear with me here. At my school, we had this thing called the "attendance incentive program". Basically it said that for as long as you had two or fewer absences and four or fewer tardies in quarter classes (three and six for semester classes) and if you had a B or higher (my school didn't do the plus or minus thing which really f***ed with your GPA) and had no unexcused absences, you didn't have to take the final for that class. It was a really cool rule. Inevitably it made you ration out your two or three sick days over the course of the quarter, but it was still really cool.

But let's say you get really sick, or a family member dies and you have to travel to a funeral. So long as you had a doctor's note or proof that you left for a family matter, you wouldn't lose credit for the class. However, if you were stuck in bed because you had pneumonia and couldn't really move at all, and had proof of it, you still would have to take the final. Like, homies, I was sick. I can't control my body like that.

Another flaw was that if you had a teacher that was just kind of a sadist and liked to watch kids suffer, I'm looking at you, Winter, they would just give you a final test that they made you take. If you still had to take the final because of attendance, they would often give you a second final, that sometimes was the same as the stupid one they made you take in the first place.

5. Grading scales

I moved from a school that had the typical grading scale, the one on the right, to a school that had the one on the left. On top of that, the new one didn't believe in the + - thing at the end of grades, so you could only get GPA's of 1, 2, 3, or 4, and not the typical 3.5, 3.25, etc. The school ended up being much easier than my first but those bastard administrators went in and changed my first-year grades down to their stupid scale and I lost a whole seven-tenths of a point on my GPA. If you had this scale in high school like I did, my heart goes out to you.

Oh, and did I mention they changed it the year I graduated?

6-10. Clothing

You know, it's really odd: I finally got to college and all of a sudden there are girls wearing tank tops, leggings, short shorts, skinny jeans, and belly shirts... and I can still focus on my class work. I thought that my school was protecting me from the horrors of the human body that I had already seen a million times on TV and in movies by the ripe old age of 13 so I could focus.

Seriously, though, my school tried to ban all of those things for everyone. And if you know me you know my hipster wardrobe revolves around black skinny jeans. I ignored this rule vehemently. The rule was put in place to help keep students in class for more time, that there was too much time spent sending students to the office to trade their promiscuous clothing in for that which us normal people of society wear. What ended up happening was that there were actually more illegal clothes and students (including myself for my skinny jeans) were sent out of class to go home and change, wherein we would receive an unexcused absence and would lose quite a few privileges.

Bottom line: yes, there should be some sense of public decency when it comes to public school, but women's bodies really aren't that distracting to us disgusting pig boys. Believe it or not, we can focus on the pointless work that you put in front of us regardless if whether or not we can see the shoulders of the girl next to us.

And ultimately the teachers and administrators (except for him) stopped enforcing it because it was causing their students to fall behind on more work than they previously were, and was just generally annoying. So in the words of my great AP Lit teacher, Ms. Thorson, "You can make all the rules that you want, but if nobody listens, if nobody enforces it, it's really not a rule". Thanks, Thorbear, you were never short on wisdom.

We all had some stupid rules. But not all stupid rules are created equal, and I'm sure there are some people who had some stupider (more stupid? Stupiderer?) rules than me. At the end of the day, though, I hope we can all just bond over one fact:

11. Public education was stupid

Required public education all taught us jack diddly squat about the real world.