Coming to TCU, a private Christian university, I’ve encountered many students who have gone to private schools their whole lives. Sometimes I like to share some of the stories from my public school with them as it’s very different from their experiences. Here are some of my favorite public high school moments that have shocked them.
toilet fish
In my sophomore year, some junior boy had the idea to put a red snapper in the boys’ toilets. He then left it there and everyone took pictures of it. It was posted on everyone’s Snapchat story, and suddenly, half the school knew about it. This then prompted more boys to buy fish from the H.E.B. fish market and subsequently throw the fish in the toilets. The school had to close the boys’ bathrooms.
rich hallway
My high school had almost 4,000 students in one building. This made the hallways deathly crowded. We had a main hallway with most of the core classes stemming off of it. During passing periods, this main hallway would get so crowded that I would be stopped in my place for half the passing period. This was especially difficult as my school was on a very small property. One day, an upperclassman brought a fat stack of fake one hundred dollar bills to school and threw them up in the air during a passing period in the main hallway. Suddenly, hoards of kids, probably freshmen, were scrambling to pick up the fake money. They obviously thought it was real. The entire hallway was in chaos as I was pushed and shoved. It became so out of control that teachers had to intervene all because of some fake one hundred dollar bills.
fire alarm
In my freshman year, I was in cross country during first period. Our daily routine consisted of running our mileage before school, then showering and getting ready for school. This was similar to a lot of sports. During one particular morning, I was showering when the fire alarm went off. Shampoo was in my hair, and I was nowhere near finished showering. I had to put on my dirty, sweat-drenched shorts, my silk top I was going to wear for the day, and flip-flops to run outside drenched in the middle of winter. Not only was I mortified, but I was late to get out of the building, so attention was on me.
Instasleep
There was an Instagram account that posted pictures of people sleeping sent in by students. It would range anywhere from people really sleeping in class to people pretending to sleep on lunch tables, in the hallway, and even during sports games. The Instagram page became very popular and half of the school would send in their pictures to be posted.
the bunny girl
Lastly, my favorite high school moment was when a girl came to school dressed as a bunny. She wore a scary bunny Halloween mask, tail, and costume for an entire week during school. She instantly became a celebrity and people would stop her in the halls to ask for pictures with her. After her, others began to dress up as different animals. It became common to see different random animals in the hallways, and part of the joke was to not tell the staff and teachers what was going on. The teachers tried so hard to understand why the students suddenly started dressing as animals, but no one had a reason. Even years later, people would see her and ask, “Are you the Bunny Girl?”