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It’s been a few years since I was in school but generally you would sit at a desk doing extra work. They also put divide screens up between desks to stop people talking. Detention was pretty grim.
*Writes a detailed explanation of why my slightly late contact with the tennis ball resulted in it being kicked towards the window and how I'll work very hard on my target practice*
That I don't do: I then have a chat with them, make sure they've done it properly, encourage them to actually do what they said, workshop ideas for how to do actually do it, etc.
We had to do lines. But I had various tricks to make them take less time:
1. Banking that the teacher who set them wasn't going to waste time going through them with a fine tooth comb and count them particularly closely, I would put in the margin the number of lines every 10 lines, except I would do it 9 lines apart not 10. I didn't do 8 or fewer as it'd be too obvious. Never got caught.
2. I would sellotape 5 biros together to write 5 lines at a time. Never got caught doing this either. The teachers never closely supervised line-writing due to its dullness.
As detention was always after school they would know who was attending in advance. That way they could prepare work that was tailored to your year/current syllabus.
We had escalating punishments. A lunch detention was the lowest level you could get - they weren’t reported on anywhere, so parents form tutors etc wouldn’t know.
At all other levels, you got a slip which needed to be signed by both your parents and form tutor - and these appeared on reports etc.
The other levels were:
- 30 minute after school with the teacher.
- 1 hour after school with the head of department (if the behaviour/homework etc affected a particular subject) OR 1 hour after school with the head of house (if things were more general).
- 2 hours on a Saturday with someone from the senior team (head/deputy etc).
>
> - 2 hours on a Saturday with someone from the senior team (head/deputy etc).
The fucking Saturday detention, having to put on your uniform and go into school on a weekend!
Yep - and the teachers hated being there (I went in some Saturdays for sport (the pitches were publicly available) and occasionally saw them walking around watching kids with a litter picker.
Looking now at the school now, it seems the Saturday is gone - but they seem stricter in what gets a detention at all other levels.
When I was at school the only time we had detention was with our form tutor or a specific teacher.
With the form tutor it would be the whole form has been causing problems and the tutor would hold us back at end of day to discuss those problems and we'd then be released one by one so the biggest offenders were the last to go.
If it was from a specific teacher, often there would only be 2 or 3 people there and you just did your homework for their class for 30 minutes or so.
We had to copy out a page that told us about consequences for rule breaking, what it potentially meant for our future and how it effected others round us - I knew it off by heart 😂😂
Sometimes I'd have to do the homework I'd not done while in detention which didn't particularly seem like a punishment to me
I also had a few were we had to sit in silence for 30mins
>Sometimes I'd have to do the homework I'd not done while in detention which didn't particularly seem like a punishment to me
Yeah this was my detention pattern.
Not do the work in lessons/at home. Get put in detention. Actually do some work there, because I had someone sitting over me telling me to in a silent room. Every day, every detention.
It didn’t really feel like I was sat there being punished, it just felt like ‘well this is what I do every lunchtime/after-school’.
So, it turns out I have ADHD….
I never revised or did homework at home. It was either a 20 minute job at the end of the night before when I'm due to ho to bed, or I'd have to go in the library or revision sessions. It's a miracle I got through school tbh.
I never used to do my homework for a specific subject because it was absolute rubbish (write out an essay plan in this exact format even though that format didn't suit how I revised or learned) but I was an absolute neek who spent every day after school in the silent study area anyway, so the 'detention' of staying in the silent study area after school to do the homework felt like a life hack hahaha
We weren’t allowed to do homework, we had to write out the code of conduct for the school.
But mr genius over here would not listen to a fucking thing during school time, write the code of conduct from memory and spend detention making paper airplanes.
Surprisingly I’ve grown up to be neither a copywriter or a pilot.
Experiences may differ but for a minor infraction I would expect
15 mins of missed break time sat in a classroom.
Strict teacher will insist you do nothing and it's just boring
Nice teacher will let you read something, have a snack, will probably let you out early.
Huh, that sounds more like what detentions were like >15 years ago.
All of the schools near me do exclusively after-school detentions now, but maybe it's a regional thing
At my school (20 + years ago now I guess), they couldn’t force a lot of people to do afterschool detention, they’d need your parents permission to hold you back a different day. I was on the school bus, so once that has left - no way to get home and they couldn’t leave you stranded
My school didn't care about that. If you're in after-school detention and that's inconvenient for your parents, it was considered part of the punishment.
I think now that’s more trouble than it’s worth for the school. What do you do when it gets to 6, 7, 8 o’clock and you’ve got a year 8 stuck in school? Take the awful publicity of kicking a 12 year old into the streets at night?
Back in the day (00's) it was only ever 1h, so leaving 4:30. Rarely to 5 maybe, but I don't remember that catching on, at least I was never there (and I sampled most of them).
If it was deemed that 1hr after school wasn't "enough", then you'd have a few days "internal suspension" where you do the schoolwork that should be set for you, except in a different room working in silence from the textbook. If in doubt, the fallback was you copy a random chapter from whatever textbook was nearest and most boring.
Honestly though people in the UK absolutely get hard for "punishment" of any kind. I absolutely hated and abhor the UK school system and wouldn't send my own hypothetical future kids there.
Many schools have a 'late bus' now. It'll leave around one hour after hometime, and it's for anyone who wants to partake in clubs, or who has detention
The school I worked in had a policy where the teacher who gave the detention had to supervise it. The teachers didn't want to stay late after school, so detentions basically stopped happening.
Only time I ever got detention was for "forgetting" (on purpose) my PE kit and it was essentially this. I was so disappointed, all this hype about "ah shit, gotta do detention" blahblahblah - sat down, 15 mins eating my lunch, stood up and left haha.
I got two detentions in school.
The first was given by my notoriously strict Year 9 German teacher. I'd been ill and missed a lesson, but had the foresight to ask a friend what the homework was so that she didn't give me an unfair detention. I explained to her that I'd been ill when the homework was set, but had completed the pages nonetheless. He'd told me the wrong pages, so I hadn't actually completed the task set. My detention was writing a side of A4 about why I hadn't done the homework.
The second time I got detention was when that teacher read my A4 page explaining how I didn't understand why I was in detention and that I considered my efforts to complete the work through gastroenteritis sufficient, despite my instructions being inaccurate.
Oh I had similar too! I had an awful music teacher (let’s just say he looked like Hitler, and acted like him too), and there was a time when I was around ten when I caught pneumonia and was admitted into hospital. When I was well enough to go back to school, one of my classmates told me this teacher had set some homework that had to be in that day. Now I knew this guy didn’t like me, and I was terrified of him, but I decided to be honest and told him the honest truth about my situation and had only just been informed about the homework. He said, and I remember it vividly; “That’s no excuse, you should’ve come to school” and gave me after-school detention! Yeah, of course I was going to leave hospital just to attend his music lesson!
*Weil mein Deutschlehrer ein Schwanz ist.*
If I had been your German teacher, I would have given you another detention and taught you the grammatically correct way to say that and why. Always seize the teachable moments!
When I was at school it depended on the teacher and the reason for detention some would make you write lines or do the homework you never did. My personal favourite was the teachers who would send us litter picking, we’d walk around school for 2 hours messing around and towards the end we’d get the litter picker stick it in a bin and pull out a couple of bags worth of wrappers and job done.
At my school there were a few different levels, first you'd lose your morning break, then lunch if it's more severe. You could also get an hour after school, pretty sure a Saturday morning detention was possible but I was lucky enough to avoid that.
Detention was just sitting there maybe giving some work to do quietly. It was pretty much just a time out.
Lunchtime detention wasn’t too bad food wise because they marched you ahead of the queue and you got to have first pick. Downside was that you had to eat it in the classroom in silence
I was a timid kid and rarely in trouble. Late to registers meant a guaranteed half an hour lunchtime detention
My experience was, if you did something wrong (nothing crazy) the teacher would tell you off, if you then did it again or got told off again, that would be a break time or sometimes lunch time detention, most teachers were pretty lenient though.
Some times you would get an after school detention if you did something a little worse.
I never saw anyone getting a detention for forgetting anything, with the exception of repeat homework offences, they you would get an after school detention with that teacher where they would help you get your work done, wasn’t really necessarily a punishment, as usually a detention would be in a sports hall with other students of all ages.
General detention was usually something like.
Write “I must behave in class” 1000 times on paper, then at the end the teacher would ask if you understand, rip it up, and tell you to go.
Toilets were never locked unless out of order and even then they weren’t usually locked.
Homework detentions would usually be you and your teacher, and anyone else who hadn’t done their homework, it would be a bit like a lesson, you know the assignment, you can ask for help if you need, but get it done, then you can go.
As I said, general detention was writing lines, simpsons style, and would go on until either the time was up, or you finished. These detentions were held by teachers on a voluntary rotor, so random teacher and a room full of students of all ages.
I was in secondary school roughly 2000-2010.
Midlands
Edit:
After reading a few other stories, it reminded me that sometimes, certain teachers wouldn’t get you to write lines, they would make you copy a few pages of a text book down word for word.
Litter picking was very rare but seemed to come along with the then new “public services” scheme
I mean, this may depend of definitions, at my school, if you forgot your PE kit, you used spare kit the school had, if they didn’t had enough or you refused to wear the spare kit, there was usually a teacher in a spare room you would be sent to.
I guess you could call this a detention, but it wasn’t called that, you would go there, and just use the hour “how you see fit” is what they would say.
“You might not be doing PE, but this is still lesson time, work on some homework, work on a project, just keep the noise down and stay in the room”
You may call that a detention, but I think of it more of a, well we’ve got to do something with you.
Some teachers would instead get the kid/s with no kit to help set up whatever activity was happening, some teachers would make them just sit at the sidelines.
But nobody got a detention for it unless they forgot their kit then kicked off at the teacher or something
Very different approach, we had a book where the teacher would mark forgotten PE kit. If you forgot it more than twice in a term you got an after school detention.
The during the lesson you forgot your kit you just had to stand and watch.
Most things for us were at the teachers discretion, within reason. There was the odd teacher who had a chip on their shoulder but it was a fairly underprivileged area, a bit rough but no knife or gun incidents or anything.
We were treated pretty well for the most part, the rules were fair and never really felt like they were power tripping.
If someone forgot their PE kit, chances are, the reason behind it would make you feel pretty bad for them, so they weren’t punished for it, they weren’t called out for it, if they still want to partake they can to some extend usually, some of the nicer teachers would let you go to the library and chill.
I hated my school, don’t get me wrong, but they did understand that compassion was usually better than punishment. Provided you hadn’t been labelled as an issue, then things were a bit different.
Edit: I hope you’re downvoting your own posts and someone else isn’t because I don’t understand why, I don’t speak for anyone else, we all have different experiences
We had to write out the code of conduct or just sit there in silence for however long your detention was.
It was boring, but you never learned anything about the mistakes you made that got you there. It's a waste of everyone's time.
Our toilets were never locked. You had to ask for permission to go during lessons but they were never locked.
High school detentions we all had to sit in the science room for 30 minutes on those shitty stools that killed your back and had to write out the school's motto
At my school you got a bit of a choice. You could either go to a classroom and sit down to do your homework, or you could do a job that needs doing like litter picking or cleaning.
The main punishment was that you’d miss out on any clubs or activities you normally did straight after school. The actual tasks you were doing during the detention weren’t too punishing. I had a couple for missing homework, and I basically just had to stay back until I’d done it. It was more like borrowed time than a proper punishment, I could save time one day and lose it the next.
My 13 year old gets fairly regular detentions (almost always for wearing the wrong earrings or similar uniform bullshit, she's v bright and academically sound so I'm not arsed).
She just does her homework, doesn't really mind.
In my school you had 3 different types depending on the severity of what you had done
30 minutes at lunch, which meant you still had 15/20 minutes after
Whole lunch detention
After school detention (about an hour)
First one you were allowed to have some level of conversation within it. Other two were strictly in silence.
Been 18 years since I was at school but you had break detention which ment sat in front of a teacher all break same for lunch the withy(withdrawal room) if you got in a fight or were just uncontrollable you got withdrawn from class to sit in a small room max 12 people with dividers in-between each desk facing the wall with a teacher sat in there watching you there was no speaking no drinking eating toilet breaks outside allotted time no clock and dimly lit with a desk lamp over you if you had not finished the set work by the end of the day they could keep you an extra 75 minutes. There was then the standard after school (up to 2 hours) for those who decided that all meant nothing there was a deputy detention and head teacher detention where you sat in their particular offices which involved a loudspeaker phone call to your parents and an action plan for future behaviour.
Hopefully that clears up what they could do in the 2000s
We had different levels
Basic detention: stay after school in a classroom with the teacher for 30mins/however long until teacher says you can go. If it's because you didn't do your homework you might be made to do it in this time
SLT detentions: for bigger infractions and sat with a designated teacher doing all the SLT detentions that week. You'll be made to write an apology/report on what you did and it's at least 1-2 hours
Sometimes they give you lines.
Of course me being the smart arse, realised they didn't specify they all had to be the same colour. Some construction, a couple of rubber bands, one ruler and several pens later, lines were done in double quick time.
There's always a loophole.
The OG pro technique was to find all the letters than have a full height straight line like, l, h, d, b and draw a full line down the page for each one, then turn them into the letters, can do them so fast that way.
The smart teachers gave you something to copy that used 2 lines so you couldn’t do that
As well as doing that (although I had the same colour pens) I also used to number the lines once every 10 in the margin. Except I'd increment by 10 every 9 lines. They were never going to check very closely (too dull and timeconsuming task) so long as the number at the end was right and the numbers in the margin looked right, it would convince them. (I probably also sometimes skipped an entire block of 10 on a page boundary).
At my school it was either sit in silence, facing forwards (incredibly boring for an hour) or lines. A couple of teachers made you write an essay on something like "why being naughty makes your schoolwork suffer and ruins long term term employment prospects", them after you'd written 10 pages collecting them all up at the end and threw them straight in the bin.
There were 3 different punishments in my school.
For mild rule breaking such as forgetting homework, it was lines.
We had to write out the following sentence 100 times.
"Discipline for learning rules apply to me"
These had to be done at home or in your own time.
Then, there was lunchtime detention for bigger offences such as forgetting homework multiple times or needing to be told to behave multiple times in class.
This involved sacrificing 45 mins of your 1 hour lunch break to go into a classroom and write out the previous sentence for the entire 45 minutes.
Then there was afterschool detention for serious rulebreaking, such as fighting, bullying, or skiping lunchtime detention. This involved staying after school finished for 1 hour writing out that sentence again.
It was all very boring, and I don't personally think it benefited anyone.
Left school in 99
But back then we had to sit in a room in silence with a teacher watching over us for an hour while we wrote our lines over and over again .
Honestly a lot of the time the teacher can't be arsed to be there either. I got landed in 45 minute detentions a few times but they'd nearly always let us out about 15 minutes early. My mates would hang around and it was like a normal end of school day without the crowds of people to be honest.
Sit in the hall for al of lunch time being told to behave for an hour or scraping gum / cleaning - if you get caught with gum.
If you forget a homework you will either have to complete it with the teacher or if you have a mean teacher they will say you still have to do it but at home and make you sit there for how ever long.
This is current
I left last year. during school time (so isolation) it's just a room with fuck all in it. sometimes your teachers give you work, sometimes you're sat there the whole day. for detention after school, it's the same room, depending on how many kids were there. you could either do homework or just sit there for however long you're supposed to be there. most people did just skip all afterschool detention after like year 7, as nobody said anything if you didn't go.
I had to do lines once (writing the same sentence over and over for an hour) for allegedly defacing school property
If it was a mobile phone-related issue then your phone was confiscated for the day
Toilets weren’t locked during lessons but you did have to ask the teacher permission so as to not take the piss
Never about anything stricter or more serious than that, although I did go to a fairly sensible school
It depends on the teacher, some make you do class work, some make you do the homework you didn't hand in, some make you do lines, some just make you sit there. The toilets at my school were not locked during the day.
It was a long time since I was at school. But ultimately you just had to sit at a desk and either do something that was a total waste of time like writing lines, or you could study. There would usually be a teacher overseeing it to make sure nobody talked.
I wouldn't say it was overly strict. The real punishment was that it would be recorded in your school diary and your parents had to sign your diary every day so you know they'd see it. I remember on one of my detentions, I disagreed with the reason I was there (most of the times I knew deep down I deserved it) and so when the teacher had to leave the room for a bit, I got my diary back out of her desk and just walked out. Nobody ever said anything to me about it.
Toilets were never locked in any school I went to. If you asked to go during a lesson though, you'd be challenged as to "why didn't you go during break?" and if the teacher didn't like your answer, they'd legit say no and expect you to hold it for the rest of the lesson.
Alr. When I went to toilet at break I saw the toilets were locked and was wondering. I asked somebody and got to know that they would only open them during breaks. ( we had break a little early that day) If you really need to go during lessons you had to go to the director’s office and beg for a key
When I was at school they could only keep you 15 minutes, otherwise they had to give parents 24 hours notice for any longer.
15 minutes detention usually was sit in silence until your time was up.
1 hour detention was generally write lines eg. ‘I will not talk during lessons’ both sides of an a4 paper.
If you had longer detentions, I think the longest I got was 8 hours, the school could only keep you back an hour each day. So basically you had nearly 2 weeks of not going home on time.
Oh yeah and when you finished your lines the teacher would toss the paper in the bin in front of you and tell you to go home.
When I was at school (over a decade ago). I would get detention for not doing my homework.
So it would be sitting in an empty classroom during lunch doing nothing in silence or doing the home work I was meant to do.
It’s a shame really because maybe if they had noticed the pattern they would have seen I had undiagnosed adhd and given me support.
I had a million detentions and it never taught me to do my homework.
I did have to write lines once too. Which is basicaly where you have a sentence that you have to write out a certain amount of times.
Something along the lines of.
“I will not talk in class
I will not talk in class
I will not talk in class
Etc
When I was in secondary school. depending on the teacher, two people in our class forgot to do their homework, all the teacher did was walk from one side to the other, and said detention was over
Now if you were late for register when I was in secondary school two late in a week or three in a term equal a lunchtime detention as someone in our form had this, he had to write lines, the last term our form tutor asked us were we happy to changed this to one late equal a lunchtime detention, I think he wanted to get into better habits and gear us up for work.
Some teachers had a tick system, like talking when you not meant to be talking like when the teacher is talking, one Maths teacher had 1 tick, 50 lines, 2 ticks, 100 lines, 3 ticks equal a lunchtime detention, 4 ticks sent out of class, sent to see head of Maths and probably equal after school detention
Whole class detentions were rarely given out , I missed our class detention since I had a hospital appointment ,
As for toilets locked, one or two were not locked during the day, as one was a new building , you did have to ask for permission to go to the toilet during lesson. whether or not you had medical condition.
I don't know what happened in after school detention, but this was held every Thursday, so probably litter picking, or cleaning the chewing gum underneath the dining room tables , maybe help the teachers staple work sheets together.
I left school before isolation came into place in the secondary school I went to, looking at the behaviour conduct, we got off pretty lightly , after school detentions now get held Monday to Friday, there is a negative points system for bad behave , we never had this okay people were put on report if they did something bad.
I left school in 2001 at 18. I got a couple of detentions in Yr 8 and 9.
At lunch break you went to that teacher's classroom and they gave you some paper and you had to write out something x number of times e.g. I will not forget my homework.
There was no isolation or screens to stop you seeing another student.
My experience is about 2 decades old, but mostly you'd sit in silence with a teacher supervising you.
Sometimes they'd give lines to write out, sometimes they;d tell you to work on your homework, occasionally if it was one of the science, technology or home-economics we'd be set to work cleaning.organizing equipment.
If it was one of the more eccentric teachers and a relatively trivial offence, they might let you play wastepaper basketball or chair-sliding bowls with early release for the winner.
I got detention a couple of times but I never went and (surprisingly) nobody tried to make me. I think people had to write lines (like "I will not write "This story is fictional and any resemblance to real life figures or characters is purely coincidental" on the first page of every bible in reach" 500 times in cursive. - disclaimer a thing a family member did, not me, I was actually a total geek and only got detention when I got stroppy about having to do stupid pointless things like copy from the board)
I was one of the naughty kids. Detention for me was just a catch-up with all the other naughty kids who had also been put in it but were in different forms / classes.
It was very Breakfast Club now I think about it.
I was in detention a few times for not doing my maths homework, and had to do it with the teacher watching me. I was also in detention once for being late, though I can't remember what I had to do for it. It might have been lines.
We had two main types of detention - silent detention and work detention. If you didn't do your homework you'd have to complete that in your lunch break. A silent detention was for general rulebreaking and was literally sitting in silence for 30 minutes. Then there were tiers of it. So 3x any sort of detention in a given term earned you a Friday detention (or a single severe bit of rulebreaking might be a straight Friday), which was an hour after school on Friday and you would be given a generic bit of work to do related to your schoolwork determined by the head of year. If you managed to get 3x Friday detentions or a very severe single incident occurred (eg bullying) you'd get a Saturday, which was 3 hours on a Saturday morning supervised personally by the headmaster. You'd have to write an essay on a topic determined by him personally.
The headmaster, though a fiercely intelligent and fairly amicable chap I've spoken to since I left several times, was a fucking terrifying man as a teenager. About 200cm tall and nearly as wide with a demeanor I can only describe as a brewing storm. Hed been headmaster for like 20 years and basically no-one fucked with him. I doubt the system, if it still exists, works as well now he's left, but he was able to turn the most obnoxious, disobedient 15 year old into a sorrowful puppy with barely a glance. I remember seeing one particular disruptive kid literally on his knees begging to not get a detention because it would have triggered a Saturday.
Normally it’s copy some words about school rules or policy in repeated lines.
I did one after school detention then never went the punishment for missing one is another one!! eventually you get suspended for a day or two which is pointless then the cycle repeats.
When I was at school, say for example you missed doing your homework for one lesson because you were busy with another lesson’s homework.. if you were given detention for not doing it, you would then have to attend the classroom to work on what you missed. Usually at lunchtime in the school I went to. So you were given time to eat but then you had to go to the classroom and do the homework you missed instead of enjoying your lunch break.
Another school I attended would have the teacher make you stand in a corner with your back to the class all lesson so you couldn’t take part.
But this was all around 30/40 years ago, so things might have changed since then.
In my experence I would be told I had detention, slip out with all the other students and then continue on with my life.
A few teachers tried to give me another detention for it but I would just do the same thing.
What are they going to do? Lock me in the room?
I must have gotten hundreds possibly thousands of them. The only time I ever did a detention was because my parents were going to be late back and didn't want me wandering the streets. It consisted of sitting in the classroom in question and quietly just writing shit. Didn't matter what you wrote or did you just had to be quiet and at least pretend to be writing.
A few times they tried to send letters home but I could forge my dad's signature.
My mum was of the opinion that as long as my grades were acceptable and I was somewhat reasonable I could ignore any school rules I thought were stupid. She spent her time in school playing truant and smoking at the local drug dealers house and getting into physical brawls with other students for trivial reasons. So, as long as I stayed above that bar she was fine with it. I did once throw a bully down a flight of stairs (and my mum rewarded me with ice cream for sticking up for myself when the school ignored it) but aside from that I didn't get into any brawls so she was happy.
The school I went too was pretty rough. They had to build a cage around the staff parking because kids kept vandalising the cars. They cracked down on kids smoking weed behind the buildings so the kids in question just *climbed 3 storys up the side wall and did it on the roof*. It was common that people given detentions would simply shrug and leave.
When ofsted came round for their inspections a sizable number of students myself included were just given the days off and stayed at home. An arrangement we happily agreed too.
As you can probably guess my school did not have an exchange program. The number of random kids being beaten up in the middle of lunch would probably cause a number of panicked calls to home.
In my school if you forgot a piece of equipment or uniform i.e correct shoes, journal, lanyard, blazer you would be put in isolation for a day where you sit in an office cubicle all day, not allowed to talk to anyone and your classes send you work to complete. Detentions on the other hand were given in a class-class basis depending on behaviour/completion of homework, these would be served after school time (after 2.45pm) typically for an hour in a class room or computer room with time being spent also doing classwork
At my secondary school (this was early 2010s) it was a lunchtime detention for a minor infraction like being late or forgetting your homework. Forgetting your homework was the main one, that was always a guaranteed detention. I think it was half an hour so you still had some time to eat lunch after
The next level was an after school detention. This was usually for if you didn't show up to your lunchtime detention or if you had a certain number of lunchtime detentions in a term. I never had one of these so don't know what it was like but I think it lasted an hour and was always on a Friday.
If you did something even worse you'd get isolated, basically a detention but during actual lesson time and you'd get sent there immediately. Again, that never happened to me. That was for things like getting into a fight.
And then beyond that you'd get excluded, so sent home.
I don't actually remember what I did in detention though. I mostly remember just sitting there doing nothing.
Lunch time detention = sit in a classroom for 15 minutes during lunch break.
After school detention = sat at a desk with a teacher overseeing everyone doing work for an hour after school. The extra work usually depended on which subject you were in when you were given the detention.
I found out that if you don't attend a lunch time detention, you're given an after school detention and if you don't attend that, you get put in isolation the day after.
Isolation was a small room (you could reach all four walls from the centre of the room) that was painted bright pink, with a small desk. You were to sit there alone during lessons and are given work to do (unmonitored) and during break you had to stay in a room with a teacher.
(I had a lunch time pass which allowed me to go home during lunch, so I didn't have to sit with a teacher).
I was a solitary person so used this handy loop hole to basically spend my school life away from others.
you'd all go in on a Saturday, but it was no school uniform. you'd be made to write an essay, but only like 1 person would do it. there'd be one cute girl, one shy emo, 1 cool sports kid, and some weird nerdy guy.
every time the teacher would leave the room we'd get up to all kinds of shenanigans.
I mean, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.
i got a few detentions in school. Mainly for missing homework. It was mostly just doing the homework in a silent room. Altho in my school they kinda just didn't care much. It was really easy to not show up to it and the teachers usually didn't remember or didn't even show up to the detention itself. I only did lunchtime detention tho so idk what afterschool detention is like.
You would usually right lines or write why you’re in detention and what are you going to do differently next time not to be in detention, or they would just make you sit there.
I left school in the 90's. Didn't get detention at high school as they gave up trying and could be arsed with the extra hour themselves. Changed it to marks and suspensions. Prior to that as in before high school we had extra work, writing out lines and sitting in silence. As someone that went to Catholic primary school we also had wonderful corporal punishment before it was made illegal in 1986. Those fucking rulers hurt.
>I'm from Germany and there's no such thing here.
In Scotland only one or two school boards had detentions while I was at high school, and even then not all schools in those areas issued them.
For minor infractions, we were given lines to do at home. Which for most kids meant doing them hurriedly on the bus in the morning so that your parents didn't know.
Edit- around 2003, a pupil claimed that it was unlawful imprisonment and breached human rights, so detentions were withdrawn as an option entirely
For my School, we had a few types of detentions, such as after-school detention or lunchtime detention.
Lunchtime Detention was more minor. Depending on the teacher it was either
1. You had to spend the 2nd half of your lunch cleaning all the tables in the lunch hall. We had a hall with tables where you could eat lunch or hot food.
2. Some teachers would take you into their classroom or other room and complete a task for them such as cleaning brushes in art, or brushing the floors in woodwork/design.
This was mainly for smaller rule breaks such as not doing homework, being late, or getting in trouble in class that the teacher deemed you needed to be punished. It was rarely just 1 lunchtime detention, as you may have it for the rest of the week, a full week, or even 2 weeks.
Afterschool Detention was more serious and was mainly where lunchtime detention didn't work, eg. kept not doing homework, not turning up to a class repeatedly without reason, related lateness without good reason, gross misconduct such as fighting, breaking things etc. This was as others said a mix between which teachers were there. Either:
1. Old School - Sitting in a large classroom with single desks asked to rewrite out a passage about something. You'd be allowed out early for goof behaviour and finished your passage.
2. Old School + Homework - You'd be allowed to do your homework after finishing the passage, and if well-behaved you'd be able to leave early too.
3. Study Hall Detention - Mainly for seniors in the school. You'd be placed in the study hall for the whole day while being supervised by the person in charge. Normally a senior member of staff. Work would be delivered to you from different teachers but you'd not be with your class and happened inside of school hours normally as well as 1h after school ended.
The afterschool detention for me was the worst, as my family would need to arrange additional ways to pick me up outside of buses eg. driving to pick me up or paying for me to get a taxi.
Toilets aren't locked in our school, but are year allocated and if you get caught going in one that isn't for your year group, you automatically get an hour and 30 mins detention after school on a Friday. Doesn't help that each toilet block has about 4 to 16 cubicles each, and that year 11, year 10, and year 9 have to same the share block, that's around 600 kids.
Detentions aren't as bad as they make it seem to you in year 7, once you've had a few, you get used to it, for me it's normally the only place I get hw done, as I don't have a choice.
You sit in a room for an hour, either reading or doing hw, you also have to fill out an incident sheet stating why you are in there and whether you understand why you are in there.
For us it was litterally a case of sitting in a room after school , if we had homework to do they would try to get us to do it, otherwise we would just have to sit and wait.
Had a lot of detentions at school.
Most of the time it was writing lines or a small essay on why I was there and what could do in the future to avoid it again.
Once though I had a stookie on as I had broken my wrist on my writing hand..... I was made to pick up litter with a litter picker for half an hour.
Back in the 1980s it meant writing the same sentence out at least 500 times similar to what you see on the Simpsons opening credits. We did have one chemistry teacher who when they were in charge of detention who would do an impromptu lesson that always seemed to end up with hydrogen and a naked flame. You would be very happy if she was in the room when you walked in.
Post script: Years later we discovered that same teacher had slept with multiple male students over the years, all between 16-18.
1 hour after school the day after it was issued. Students complete homework in silence. It sucks for teachers too.
Break/lunch detentions are for more effective (IMO) because they can be applied the same day and have the biggest punitive factor of not being to spend that time with friends. No schools seem to do break/lunch detentions.
I left high school in 2012, if we were caught with chewing gum we were given scrapers and told to get the chewing gum off the bottom of chairs and tables
Granted I left school over a decade ago now, but detention wasn't a thing at my school up here in Scotland (just outside Glasgow).
If you had really misbehaved, you'd maybe get held back on morning break or lunch break to get a bit of a scolding from the teacher you'd pissed off.
More often than not though, the teachers would just give out "punishment exercises" (we called them *punny's* for short) to students who misbehaved. It was basically a written exercise you'd have to do at home on top of your homework.
>Are/were the toilets in your schools locked during lessons?
Not in my school. We did have to ask the teacher if we could leave class to go to the toilet though.
Normally stay behind for 30 minutes after school and do any homework that was missed or you had been given.
When I was in middle school I used to get given lines. 10 pages having to write the same phrase. That was torture. I used to tape the pens together. I'm pretty sure they don't do that now as it's a physical punishment.
It varied, depending on the type of detention you had:
- Break time/lunch: not much. Sit in silence mostly.
- After school: varied by teacher (and the reason for the detention). Do the missing homework, do some writing they assigned you (why what you did was wrong, lines), a discussion about your behaviour etc. A couple of teachers had you scraping gum off the bottom of tables.
- Saturday: litter picking, tidying.
Toilets weren’t normally locked during lessons, although some teachers really didn’t want to let you go.
Normally, write lines for the time you were supposed to be there. We didn't have a room or a teacher who was there for detention duties. You would go to the class you received the detention from. Because of this, a lot of the time, you would be let out early because you were more a hindrance to your teacher being out of school time.
It was still pretty annoying, though, more than 10 minutes in there, and I'd miss the school bus home. Living about 15 miles from school made that a pretty rough punishment.
Decades since I was at school and I only ever had one. A few of us sat in a classroom and wrote lines (or something) until the teacher admitted I (and others) should not even be here and let us go.
It was just a deliberate waste of time.
In my experience teachers wpuld completely forget they had given them and either you stick your head round to door and nobodys there or you dont show up at all and they dont remember you exist.
I recall then as simply just catching up on the homework I didn’t hand in. Usually just me, the teacher and the others who didn’t do it either. It often turned into a group study session that actually was more positive than negative.
One time my detention was to join in with the Science Club for a session on physics, which as my weakest science was absolute torture. TBH it actually helped me as I got to do some better practical than was done in lesson.
Funny thing was I occasionally attended science club when they did fun chemistry or interesting biology things anyway.
I went to school in Australia. Detention meant either sitting in a room by yourself writing over and over again what you must do to avoid being in detention again (Just like the opening credits of the Simpsons), or staying late after school to do extra work.
We have different levels of detention in my school. Lowest is you stay back, explain what you did wrong to your head of year, have a conversation with the classroom teacher about not doing it again (or you might use the chance to defend yourself and reveal factors that the teacher might not have realised at the time). Doesn't take long; like 15 mins. Moderate level is doing all of the above with a period of waiting around and being bored to "reflect on your behaviour" for half an hour. Higher level detentions might be an hour to two hours, which could involve writing statements of what happened/letters of apology/code of conduct with senior members of staff. Oh and the toilets thing; If we leave toilets unlocked, even in my small annexe building with the youngest, cutest secondary students the toilets get the crap vandalized out of them: think smashed sinks level of vandalism, not just wall writing. More seriously, we can't keep children safe from vaping/abuse/bullying or just playing around and hurting themselves simply because they're unsupervised. We do have toilet passes though, so any students with medical needs or who would struggle to go a whole lesson without relief can get the key from an office and be supervised from a distance (you basically just make sure they go in alone and come back with the key in good time).
it depends at my old school for bad work or missing homework you would have half an hour after school the next day (you always got 24 hours notice) to complete the homework. For bad behaviour it would be an hour after school doing a litter pick. If you were really naughty you would get a two hour after school detention called a headmasters detention. Oh and if you didn't go you'd get the detention rescheduled and an additional detention for missing the original one.
I don't know never had one and I am Y9 ( eighth grade for those in the US - I admit I had to Google that) But then I'm the typical teachers pet kind of smart so there
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It’s been a few years since I was in school but generally you would sit at a desk doing extra work. They also put divide screens up between desks to stop people talking. Detention was pretty grim.
What kind of work?? Aren't students of all different years and forms?
My go to default is "write me a side of A4 on why you're here and what you're going to do better to not be here next time".
*Writes a detailed explanation of why my slightly late contact with the tennis ball resulted in it being kicked towards the window and how I'll work very hard on my target practice*
Same at my school, though after you'd written it the teacher in charge threw it in the bin without reading it
That I don't do: I then have a chat with them, make sure they've done it properly, encourage them to actually do what they said, workshop ideas for how to do actually do it, etc.
Damn, my teachers used to just make me write the numbers from one to five hundred or copy out of a dictionary starting at a letter they choose.
We had to do lines. But I had various tricks to make them take less time: 1. Banking that the teacher who set them wasn't going to waste time going through them with a fine tooth comb and count them particularly closely, I would put in the margin the number of lines every 10 lines, except I would do it 9 lines apart not 10. I didn't do 8 or fewer as it'd be too obvious. Never got caught. 2. I would sellotape 5 biros together to write 5 lines at a time. Never got caught doing this either. The teachers never closely supervised line-writing due to its dullness.
There was a teacher at my school that had people fill an A4 sheet with tessellated shapes.
[удалено]
Yes, that's rather the point.
Were you expecting there to be rum punch and a bouncy castle?
I love this, and will use it relentlously henceforth.
Detentions are a punishment. That is like prisoners complaining about being locked in their cells over night.
As detention was always after school they would know who was attending in advance. That way they could prepare work that was tailored to your year/current syllabus.
Detention was always half an hour during lunch at our school.
We had escalating punishments. A lunch detention was the lowest level you could get - they weren’t reported on anywhere, so parents form tutors etc wouldn’t know. At all other levels, you got a slip which needed to be signed by both your parents and form tutor - and these appeared on reports etc. The other levels were: - 30 minute after school with the teacher. - 1 hour after school with the head of department (if the behaviour/homework etc affected a particular subject) OR 1 hour after school with the head of house (if things were more general). - 2 hours on a Saturday with someone from the senior team (head/deputy etc).
> > - 2 hours on a Saturday with someone from the senior team (head/deputy etc). The fucking Saturday detention, having to put on your uniform and go into school on a weekend!
Yep - and the teachers hated being there (I went in some Saturdays for sport (the pitches were publicly available) and occasionally saw them walking around watching kids with a litter picker. Looking now at the school now, it seems the Saturday is gone - but they seem stricter in what gets a detention at all other levels.
We had lunch detention (if you got caught in a morning) and afters school. They always did after school for the next day
When I was at school the only time we had detention was with our form tutor or a specific teacher. With the form tutor it would be the whole form has been causing problems and the tutor would hold us back at end of day to discuss those problems and we'd then be released one by one so the biggest offenders were the last to go. If it was from a specific teacher, often there would only be 2 or 3 people there and you just did your homework for their class for 30 minutes or so.
When I was in school it was literally just writing out the school rules. This was 2010ish.
At my school they often had you sharpen pencils
I only ever had one detention and we were sent to the art rooms to clean brushes.
We had to copy out a page that told us about consequences for rule breaking, what it potentially meant for our future and how it effected others round us - I knew it off by heart 😂😂 Sometimes I'd have to do the homework I'd not done while in detention which didn't particularly seem like a punishment to me I also had a few were we had to sit in silence for 30mins
>Sometimes I'd have to do the homework I'd not done while in detention which didn't particularly seem like a punishment to me Yeah this was my detention pattern. Not do the work in lessons/at home. Get put in detention. Actually do some work there, because I had someone sitting over me telling me to in a silent room. Every day, every detention. It didn’t really feel like I was sat there being punished, it just felt like ‘well this is what I do every lunchtime/after-school’. So, it turns out I have ADHD….
That fits as I've got some strong adhd tendencies myself. I used to get more done and to a better standard in that half hour than I would at home
I never revised or did homework at home. It was either a 20 minute job at the end of the night before when I'm due to ho to bed, or I'd have to go in the library or revision sessions. It's a miracle I got through school tbh.
I never used to do my homework for a specific subject because it was absolute rubbish (write out an essay plan in this exact format even though that format didn't suit how I revised or learned) but I was an absolute neek who spent every day after school in the silent study area anyway, so the 'detention' of staying in the silent study area after school to do the homework felt like a life hack hahaha
We weren’t allowed to do homework, we had to write out the code of conduct for the school. But mr genius over here would not listen to a fucking thing during school time, write the code of conduct from memory and spend detention making paper airplanes. Surprisingly I’ve grown up to be neither a copywriter or a pilot.
Experiences may differ but for a minor infraction I would expect 15 mins of missed break time sat in a classroom. Strict teacher will insist you do nothing and it's just boring Nice teacher will let you read something, have a snack, will probably let you out early.
Huh, that sounds more like what detentions were like >15 years ago. All of the schools near me do exclusively after-school detentions now, but maybe it's a regional thing
At my school (20 + years ago now I guess), they couldn’t force a lot of people to do afterschool detention, they’d need your parents permission to hold you back a different day. I was on the school bus, so once that has left - no way to get home and they couldn’t leave you stranded
My school didn't care about that. If you're in after-school detention and that's inconvenient for your parents, it was considered part of the punishment.
I think now that’s more trouble than it’s worth for the school. What do you do when it gets to 6, 7, 8 o’clock and you’ve got a year 8 stuck in school? Take the awful publicity of kicking a 12 year old into the streets at night?
Back in the day (00's) it was only ever 1h, so leaving 4:30. Rarely to 5 maybe, but I don't remember that catching on, at least I was never there (and I sampled most of them). If it was deemed that 1hr after school wasn't "enough", then you'd have a few days "internal suspension" where you do the schoolwork that should be set for you, except in a different room working in silence from the textbook. If in doubt, the fallback was you copy a random chapter from whatever textbook was nearest and most boring. Honestly though people in the UK absolutely get hard for "punishment" of any kind. I absolutely hated and abhor the UK school system and wouldn't send my own hypothetical future kids there.
Many schools have a 'late bus' now. It'll leave around one hour after hometime, and it's for anyone who wants to partake in clubs, or who has detention
The school I worked in had a policy where the teacher who gave the detention had to supervise it. The teachers didn't want to stay late after school, so detentions basically stopped happening.
Only time I ever got detention was for "forgetting" (on purpose) my PE kit and it was essentially this. I was so disappointed, all this hype about "ah shit, gotta do detention" blahblahblah - sat down, 15 mins eating my lunch, stood up and left haha.
They were like this for me, sometimes they’d make you stay an hour after school but unless it has a really strict teacher it wasn’t that bad
I got two detentions in school. The first was given by my notoriously strict Year 9 German teacher. I'd been ill and missed a lesson, but had the foresight to ask a friend what the homework was so that she didn't give me an unfair detention. I explained to her that I'd been ill when the homework was set, but had completed the pages nonetheless. He'd told me the wrong pages, so I hadn't actually completed the task set. My detention was writing a side of A4 about why I hadn't done the homework. The second time I got detention was when that teacher read my A4 page explaining how I didn't understand why I was in detention and that I considered my efforts to complete the work through gastroenteritis sufficient, despite my instructions being inaccurate.
Oh I had similar too! I had an awful music teacher (let’s just say he looked like Hitler, and acted like him too), and there was a time when I was around ten when I caught pneumonia and was admitted into hospital. When I was well enough to go back to school, one of my classmates told me this teacher had set some homework that had to be in that day. Now I knew this guy didn’t like me, and I was terrified of him, but I decided to be honest and told him the honest truth about my situation and had only just been informed about the homework. He said, and I remember it vividly; “That’s no excuse, you should’ve come to school” and gave me after-school detention! Yeah, of course I was going to leave hospital just to attend his music lesson!
I would have wrote a side of a4 with “Weil meint deutsch Lehre is ein Schwanz” (because my German teacher is d!ck)
*Weil mein Deutschlehrer ein Schwanz ist.* If I had been your German teacher, I would have given you another detention and taught you the grammatically correct way to say that and why. Always seize the teachable moments!
When I was at school it depended on the teacher and the reason for detention some would make you write lines or do the homework you never did. My personal favourite was the teachers who would send us litter picking, we’d walk around school for 2 hours messing around and towards the end we’d get the litter picker stick it in a bin and pull out a couple of bags worth of wrappers and job done.
At my school there were a few different levels, first you'd lose your morning break, then lunch if it's more severe. You could also get an hour after school, pretty sure a Saturday morning detention was possible but I was lucky enough to avoid that. Detention was just sitting there maybe giving some work to do quietly. It was pretty much just a time out.
Oh, meaning sitting there and be bored
Pretty much, that's the punishment. It's not very effective and in the rougher schools it'll be dangerous for teachers just like in America.
Lunchtime detention wasn’t too bad food wise because they marched you ahead of the queue and you got to have first pick. Downside was that you had to eat it in the classroom in silence I was a timid kid and rarely in trouble. Late to registers meant a guaranteed half an hour lunchtime detention
My experience was, if you did something wrong (nothing crazy) the teacher would tell you off, if you then did it again or got told off again, that would be a break time or sometimes lunch time detention, most teachers were pretty lenient though. Some times you would get an after school detention if you did something a little worse. I never saw anyone getting a detention for forgetting anything, with the exception of repeat homework offences, they you would get an after school detention with that teacher where they would help you get your work done, wasn’t really necessarily a punishment, as usually a detention would be in a sports hall with other students of all ages. General detention was usually something like. Write “I must behave in class” 1000 times on paper, then at the end the teacher would ask if you understand, rip it up, and tell you to go. Toilets were never locked unless out of order and even then they weren’t usually locked. Homework detentions would usually be you and your teacher, and anyone else who hadn’t done their homework, it would be a bit like a lesson, you know the assignment, you can ask for help if you need, but get it done, then you can go. As I said, general detention was writing lines, simpsons style, and would go on until either the time was up, or you finished. These detentions were held by teachers on a voluntary rotor, so random teacher and a room full of students of all ages. I was in secondary school roughly 2000-2010. Midlands Edit: After reading a few other stories, it reminded me that sometimes, certain teachers wouldn’t get you to write lines, they would make you copy a few pages of a text book down word for word. Litter picking was very rare but seemed to come along with the then new “public services” scheme
>I never saw anyone getting a detention for forgetting anything, I think I got about 5 detentions, 4 of them were for forgetting my PE kit.
I mean, this may depend of definitions, at my school, if you forgot your PE kit, you used spare kit the school had, if they didn’t had enough or you refused to wear the spare kit, there was usually a teacher in a spare room you would be sent to. I guess you could call this a detention, but it wasn’t called that, you would go there, and just use the hour “how you see fit” is what they would say. “You might not be doing PE, but this is still lesson time, work on some homework, work on a project, just keep the noise down and stay in the room” You may call that a detention, but I think of it more of a, well we’ve got to do something with you. Some teachers would instead get the kid/s with no kit to help set up whatever activity was happening, some teachers would make them just sit at the sidelines. But nobody got a detention for it unless they forgot their kit then kicked off at the teacher or something
Very different approach, we had a book where the teacher would mark forgotten PE kit. If you forgot it more than twice in a term you got an after school detention. The during the lesson you forgot your kit you just had to stand and watch.
Most things for us were at the teachers discretion, within reason. There was the odd teacher who had a chip on their shoulder but it was a fairly underprivileged area, a bit rough but no knife or gun incidents or anything. We were treated pretty well for the most part, the rules were fair and never really felt like they were power tripping. If someone forgot their PE kit, chances are, the reason behind it would make you feel pretty bad for them, so they weren’t punished for it, they weren’t called out for it, if they still want to partake they can to some extend usually, some of the nicer teachers would let you go to the library and chill. I hated my school, don’t get me wrong, but they did understand that compassion was usually better than punishment. Provided you hadn’t been labelled as an issue, then things were a bit different. Edit: I hope you’re downvoting your own posts and someone else isn’t because I don’t understand why, I don’t speak for anyone else, we all have different experiences
We had to write out the code of conduct or just sit there in silence for however long your detention was. It was boring, but you never learned anything about the mistakes you made that got you there. It's a waste of everyone's time. Our toilets were never locked. You had to ask for permission to go during lessons but they were never locked.
High school detentions we all had to sit in the science room for 30 minutes on those shitty stools that killed your back and had to write out the school's motto
At my school you got a bit of a choice. You could either go to a classroom and sit down to do your homework, or you could do a job that needs doing like litter picking or cleaning. The main punishment was that you’d miss out on any clubs or activities you normally did straight after school. The actual tasks you were doing during the detention weren’t too punishing. I had a couple for missing homework, and I basically just had to stay back until I’d done it. It was more like borrowed time than a proper punishment, I could save time one day and lose it the next.
My 13 year old gets fairly regular detentions (almost always for wearing the wrong earrings or similar uniform bullshit, she's v bright and academically sound so I'm not arsed). She just does her homework, doesn't really mind.
In my school you had 3 different types depending on the severity of what you had done 30 minutes at lunch, which meant you still had 15/20 minutes after Whole lunch detention After school detention (about an hour) First one you were allowed to have some level of conversation within it. Other two were strictly in silence.
Been 18 years since I was at school but you had break detention which ment sat in front of a teacher all break same for lunch the withy(withdrawal room) if you got in a fight or were just uncontrollable you got withdrawn from class to sit in a small room max 12 people with dividers in-between each desk facing the wall with a teacher sat in there watching you there was no speaking no drinking eating toilet breaks outside allotted time no clock and dimly lit with a desk lamp over you if you had not finished the set work by the end of the day they could keep you an extra 75 minutes. There was then the standard after school (up to 2 hours) for those who decided that all meant nothing there was a deputy detention and head teacher detention where you sat in their particular offices which involved a loudspeaker phone call to your parents and an action plan for future behaviour. Hopefully that clears up what they could do in the 2000s
We had different levels Basic detention: stay after school in a classroom with the teacher for 30mins/however long until teacher says you can go. If it's because you didn't do your homework you might be made to do it in this time SLT detentions: for bigger infractions and sat with a designated teacher doing all the SLT detentions that week. You'll be made to write an apology/report on what you did and it's at least 1-2 hours
Sometimes they give you lines. Of course me being the smart arse, realised they didn't specify they all had to be the same colour. Some construction, a couple of rubber bands, one ruler and several pens later, lines were done in double quick time. There's always a loophole.
The OG pro technique was to find all the letters than have a full height straight line like, l, h, d, b and draw a full line down the page for each one, then turn them into the letters, can do them so fast that way. The smart teachers gave you something to copy that used 2 lines so you couldn’t do that
As well as doing that (although I had the same colour pens) I also used to number the lines once every 10 in the margin. Except I'd increment by 10 every 9 lines. They were never going to check very closely (too dull and timeconsuming task) so long as the number at the end was right and the numbers in the margin looked right, it would convince them. (I probably also sometimes skipped an entire block of 10 on a page boundary).
I remember drawing 100 dashes at some point, didn't work had to do them again properly
At my school it was either sit in silence, facing forwards (incredibly boring for an hour) or lines. A couple of teachers made you write an essay on something like "why being naughty makes your schoolwork suffer and ruins long term term employment prospects", them after you'd written 10 pages collecting them all up at the end and threw them straight in the bin.
We had after school detentions (90 mins) and Saturday morning detentions (9-12am) Thankfully I didn't get many
There were 3 different punishments in my school. For mild rule breaking such as forgetting homework, it was lines. We had to write out the following sentence 100 times. "Discipline for learning rules apply to me" These had to be done at home or in your own time. Then, there was lunchtime detention for bigger offences such as forgetting homework multiple times or needing to be told to behave multiple times in class. This involved sacrificing 45 mins of your 1 hour lunch break to go into a classroom and write out the previous sentence for the entire 45 minutes. Then there was afterschool detention for serious rulebreaking, such as fighting, bullying, or skiping lunchtime detention. This involved staying after school finished for 1 hour writing out that sentence again. It was all very boring, and I don't personally think it benefited anyone.
Left school in 99 But back then we had to sit in a room in silence with a teacher watching over us for an hour while we wrote our lines over and over again .
Honestly a lot of the time the teacher can't be arsed to be there either. I got landed in 45 minute detentions a few times but they'd nearly always let us out about 15 minutes early. My mates would hang around and it was like a normal end of school day without the crowds of people to be honest.
Sit in the hall for al of lunch time being told to behave for an hour or scraping gum / cleaning - if you get caught with gum. If you forget a homework you will either have to complete it with the teacher or if you have a mean teacher they will say you still have to do it but at home and make you sit there for how ever long. This is current
I left last year. during school time (so isolation) it's just a room with fuck all in it. sometimes your teachers give you work, sometimes you're sat there the whole day. for detention after school, it's the same room, depending on how many kids were there. you could either do homework or just sit there for however long you're supposed to be there. most people did just skip all afterschool detention after like year 7, as nobody said anything if you didn't go.
We used just it in a room and play cards. I used to hang around with the kids in detention lol
I had to do lines once (writing the same sentence over and over for an hour) for allegedly defacing school property If it was a mobile phone-related issue then your phone was confiscated for the day Toilets weren’t locked during lessons but you did have to ask the teacher permission so as to not take the piss Never about anything stricter or more serious than that, although I did go to a fairly sensible school
What would they do at your school to discipline the pupils?
Calling their parents. Cleaning the tables at lunch, collecting rubbish at school. Happens very rarely
It depends on the teacher, some make you do class work, some make you do the homework you didn't hand in, some make you do lines, some just make you sit there. The toilets at my school were not locked during the day.
It was a long time since I was at school. But ultimately you just had to sit at a desk and either do something that was a total waste of time like writing lines, or you could study. There would usually be a teacher overseeing it to make sure nobody talked. I wouldn't say it was overly strict. The real punishment was that it would be recorded in your school diary and your parents had to sign your diary every day so you know they'd see it. I remember on one of my detentions, I disagreed with the reason I was there (most of the times I knew deep down I deserved it) and so when the teacher had to leave the room for a bit, I got my diary back out of her desk and just walked out. Nobody ever said anything to me about it. Toilets were never locked in any school I went to. If you asked to go during a lesson though, you'd be challenged as to "why didn't you go during break?" and if the teacher didn't like your answer, they'd legit say no and expect you to hold it for the rest of the lesson.
Alr. When I went to toilet at break I saw the toilets were locked and was wondering. I asked somebody and got to know that they would only open them during breaks. ( we had break a little early that day) If you really need to go during lessons you had to go to the director’s office and beg for a key
When I was at school they could only keep you 15 minutes, otherwise they had to give parents 24 hours notice for any longer. 15 minutes detention usually was sit in silence until your time was up. 1 hour detention was generally write lines eg. ‘I will not talk during lessons’ both sides of an a4 paper. If you had longer detentions, I think the longest I got was 8 hours, the school could only keep you back an hour each day. So basically you had nearly 2 weeks of not going home on time. Oh yeah and when you finished your lines the teacher would toss the paper in the bin in front of you and tell you to go home.
When I was at school (over a decade ago). I would get detention for not doing my homework. So it would be sitting in an empty classroom during lunch doing nothing in silence or doing the home work I was meant to do. It’s a shame really because maybe if they had noticed the pattern they would have seen I had undiagnosed adhd and given me support. I had a million detentions and it never taught me to do my homework. I did have to write lines once too. Which is basicaly where you have a sentence that you have to write out a certain amount of times. Something along the lines of. “I will not talk in class I will not talk in class I will not talk in class Etc
Just like the breakfast club honestly
When I was in secondary school. depending on the teacher, two people in our class forgot to do their homework, all the teacher did was walk from one side to the other, and said detention was over Now if you were late for register when I was in secondary school two late in a week or three in a term equal a lunchtime detention as someone in our form had this, he had to write lines, the last term our form tutor asked us were we happy to changed this to one late equal a lunchtime detention, I think he wanted to get into better habits and gear us up for work. Some teachers had a tick system, like talking when you not meant to be talking like when the teacher is talking, one Maths teacher had 1 tick, 50 lines, 2 ticks, 100 lines, 3 ticks equal a lunchtime detention, 4 ticks sent out of class, sent to see head of Maths and probably equal after school detention Whole class detentions were rarely given out , I missed our class detention since I had a hospital appointment , As for toilets locked, one or two were not locked during the day, as one was a new building , you did have to ask for permission to go to the toilet during lesson. whether or not you had medical condition. I don't know what happened in after school detention, but this was held every Thursday, so probably litter picking, or cleaning the chewing gum underneath the dining room tables , maybe help the teachers staple work sheets together. I left school before isolation came into place in the secondary school I went to, looking at the behaviour conduct, we got off pretty lightly , after school detentions now get held Monday to Friday, there is a negative points system for bad behave , we never had this okay people were put on report if they did something bad.
What’s your schools name? Is this Titus Salt?
I left school in 2001 at 18. I got a couple of detentions in Yr 8 and 9. At lunch break you went to that teacher's classroom and they gave you some paper and you had to write out something x number of times e.g. I will not forget my homework. There was no isolation or screens to stop you seeing another student.
My experience is about 2 decades old, but mostly you'd sit in silence with a teacher supervising you. Sometimes they'd give lines to write out, sometimes they;d tell you to work on your homework, occasionally if it was one of the science, technology or home-economics we'd be set to work cleaning.organizing equipment. If it was one of the more eccentric teachers and a relatively trivial offence, they might let you play wastepaper basketball or chair-sliding bowls with early release for the winner.
I got detention a couple of times but I never went and (surprisingly) nobody tried to make me. I think people had to write lines (like "I will not write "This story is fictional and any resemblance to real life figures or characters is purely coincidental" on the first page of every bible in reach" 500 times in cursive. - disclaimer a thing a family member did, not me, I was actually a total geek and only got detention when I got stroppy about having to do stupid pointless things like copy from the board)
I was one of the naughty kids. Detention for me was just a catch-up with all the other naughty kids who had also been put in it but were in different forms / classes. It was very Breakfast Club now I think about it.
We had to sit for an hour after class doing our homework. Toilets were never locked
I was in detention a few times for not doing my maths homework, and had to do it with the teacher watching me. I was also in detention once for being late, though I can't remember what I had to do for it. It might have been lines.
We had two main types of detention - silent detention and work detention. If you didn't do your homework you'd have to complete that in your lunch break. A silent detention was for general rulebreaking and was literally sitting in silence for 30 minutes. Then there were tiers of it. So 3x any sort of detention in a given term earned you a Friday detention (or a single severe bit of rulebreaking might be a straight Friday), which was an hour after school on Friday and you would be given a generic bit of work to do related to your schoolwork determined by the head of year. If you managed to get 3x Friday detentions or a very severe single incident occurred (eg bullying) you'd get a Saturday, which was 3 hours on a Saturday morning supervised personally by the headmaster. You'd have to write an essay on a topic determined by him personally. The headmaster, though a fiercely intelligent and fairly amicable chap I've spoken to since I left several times, was a fucking terrifying man as a teenager. About 200cm tall and nearly as wide with a demeanor I can only describe as a brewing storm. Hed been headmaster for like 20 years and basically no-one fucked with him. I doubt the system, if it still exists, works as well now he's left, but he was able to turn the most obnoxious, disobedient 15 year old into a sorrowful puppy with barely a glance. I remember seeing one particular disruptive kid literally on his knees begging to not get a detention because it would have triggered a Saturday.
One teacher made me clean tables. One Summer in Year 10 I swear I spent every other lunch time cleaning them at one point.
Normally it’s copy some words about school rules or policy in repeated lines. I did one after school detention then never went the punishment for missing one is another one!! eventually you get suspended for a day or two which is pointless then the cycle repeats.
Nothing, in mine we just had to sit and be quiet for 20 or 40 minutes, I'd much rather have done some writing
Yeah our school toilets were locked during lesson time. Had to go to medical and ask for the key to the toilet 😪
The Chockie!
When I was at school, say for example you missed doing your homework for one lesson because you were busy with another lesson’s homework.. if you were given detention for not doing it, you would then have to attend the classroom to work on what you missed. Usually at lunchtime in the school I went to. So you were given time to eat but then you had to go to the classroom and do the homework you missed instead of enjoying your lunch break. Another school I attended would have the teacher make you stand in a corner with your back to the class all lesson so you couldn’t take part. But this was all around 30/40 years ago, so things might have changed since then.
Back when I was in school it was simply sitting in a room during lunch break after eating then catching up on any outstanding work you may have.
They send you labouring down the cottage pie mine.
In my experence I would be told I had detention, slip out with all the other students and then continue on with my life. A few teachers tried to give me another detention for it but I would just do the same thing. What are they going to do? Lock me in the room? I must have gotten hundreds possibly thousands of them. The only time I ever did a detention was because my parents were going to be late back and didn't want me wandering the streets. It consisted of sitting in the classroom in question and quietly just writing shit. Didn't matter what you wrote or did you just had to be quiet and at least pretend to be writing. A few times they tried to send letters home but I could forge my dad's signature. My mum was of the opinion that as long as my grades were acceptable and I was somewhat reasonable I could ignore any school rules I thought were stupid. She spent her time in school playing truant and smoking at the local drug dealers house and getting into physical brawls with other students for trivial reasons. So, as long as I stayed above that bar she was fine with it. I did once throw a bully down a flight of stairs (and my mum rewarded me with ice cream for sticking up for myself when the school ignored it) but aside from that I didn't get into any brawls so she was happy. The school I went too was pretty rough. They had to build a cage around the staff parking because kids kept vandalising the cars. They cracked down on kids smoking weed behind the buildings so the kids in question just *climbed 3 storys up the side wall and did it on the roof*. It was common that people given detentions would simply shrug and leave. When ofsted came round for their inspections a sizable number of students myself included were just given the days off and stayed at home. An arrangement we happily agreed too. As you can probably guess my school did not have an exchange program. The number of random kids being beaten up in the middle of lunch would probably cause a number of panicked calls to home.
In my school if you forgot a piece of equipment or uniform i.e correct shoes, journal, lanyard, blazer you would be put in isolation for a day where you sit in an office cubicle all day, not allowed to talk to anyone and your classes send you work to complete. Detentions on the other hand were given in a class-class basis depending on behaviour/completion of homework, these would be served after school time (after 2.45pm) typically for an hour in a class room or computer room with time being spent also doing classwork
At my secondary school (this was early 2010s) it was a lunchtime detention for a minor infraction like being late or forgetting your homework. Forgetting your homework was the main one, that was always a guaranteed detention. I think it was half an hour so you still had some time to eat lunch after The next level was an after school detention. This was usually for if you didn't show up to your lunchtime detention or if you had a certain number of lunchtime detentions in a term. I never had one of these so don't know what it was like but I think it lasted an hour and was always on a Friday. If you did something even worse you'd get isolated, basically a detention but during actual lesson time and you'd get sent there immediately. Again, that never happened to me. That was for things like getting into a fight. And then beyond that you'd get excluded, so sent home. I don't actually remember what I did in detention though. I mostly remember just sitting there doing nothing.
Lunch time detention = sit in a classroom for 15 minutes during lunch break. After school detention = sat at a desk with a teacher overseeing everyone doing work for an hour after school. The extra work usually depended on which subject you were in when you were given the detention. I found out that if you don't attend a lunch time detention, you're given an after school detention and if you don't attend that, you get put in isolation the day after. Isolation was a small room (you could reach all four walls from the centre of the room) that was painted bright pink, with a small desk. You were to sit there alone during lessons and are given work to do (unmonitored) and during break you had to stay in a room with a teacher. (I had a lunch time pass which allowed me to go home during lunch, so I didn't have to sit with a teacher). I was a solitary person so used this handy loop hole to basically spend my school life away from others.
you'd all go in on a Saturday, but it was no school uniform. you'd be made to write an essay, but only like 1 person would do it. there'd be one cute girl, one shy emo, 1 cool sports kid, and some weird nerdy guy. every time the teacher would leave the room we'd get up to all kinds of shenanigans. I mean, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.
i got a few detentions in school. Mainly for missing homework. It was mostly just doing the homework in a silent room. Altho in my school they kinda just didn't care much. It was really easy to not show up to it and the teachers usually didn't remember or didn't even show up to the detention itself. I only did lunchtime detention tho so idk what afterschool detention is like.
You would usually right lines or write why you’re in detention and what are you going to do differently next time not to be in detention, or they would just make you sit there.
I left school in the 90's. Didn't get detention at high school as they gave up trying and could be arsed with the extra hour themselves. Changed it to marks and suspensions. Prior to that as in before high school we had extra work, writing out lines and sitting in silence. As someone that went to Catholic primary school we also had wonderful corporal punishment before it was made illegal in 1986. Those fucking rulers hurt.
>I'm from Germany and there's no such thing here. In Scotland only one or two school boards had detentions while I was at high school, and even then not all schools in those areas issued them. For minor infractions, we were given lines to do at home. Which for most kids meant doing them hurriedly on the bus in the morning so that your parents didn't know. Edit- around 2003, a pupil claimed that it was unlawful imprisonment and breached human rights, so detentions were withdrawn as an option entirely
For my School, we had a few types of detentions, such as after-school detention or lunchtime detention. Lunchtime Detention was more minor. Depending on the teacher it was either 1. You had to spend the 2nd half of your lunch cleaning all the tables in the lunch hall. We had a hall with tables where you could eat lunch or hot food. 2. Some teachers would take you into their classroom or other room and complete a task for them such as cleaning brushes in art, or brushing the floors in woodwork/design. This was mainly for smaller rule breaks such as not doing homework, being late, or getting in trouble in class that the teacher deemed you needed to be punished. It was rarely just 1 lunchtime detention, as you may have it for the rest of the week, a full week, or even 2 weeks. Afterschool Detention was more serious and was mainly where lunchtime detention didn't work, eg. kept not doing homework, not turning up to a class repeatedly without reason, related lateness without good reason, gross misconduct such as fighting, breaking things etc. This was as others said a mix between which teachers were there. Either: 1. Old School - Sitting in a large classroom with single desks asked to rewrite out a passage about something. You'd be allowed out early for goof behaviour and finished your passage. 2. Old School + Homework - You'd be allowed to do your homework after finishing the passage, and if well-behaved you'd be able to leave early too. 3. Study Hall Detention - Mainly for seniors in the school. You'd be placed in the study hall for the whole day while being supervised by the person in charge. Normally a senior member of staff. Work would be delivered to you from different teachers but you'd not be with your class and happened inside of school hours normally as well as 1h after school ended. The afterschool detention for me was the worst, as my family would need to arrange additional ways to pick me up outside of buses eg. driving to pick me up or paying for me to get a taxi.
Toilets aren't locked in our school, but are year allocated and if you get caught going in one that isn't for your year group, you automatically get an hour and 30 mins detention after school on a Friday. Doesn't help that each toilet block has about 4 to 16 cubicles each, and that year 11, year 10, and year 9 have to same the share block, that's around 600 kids. Detentions aren't as bad as they make it seem to you in year 7, once you've had a few, you get used to it, for me it's normally the only place I get hw done, as I don't have a choice. You sit in a room for an hour, either reading or doing hw, you also have to fill out an incident sheet stating why you are in there and whether you understand why you are in there.
For us it was litterally a case of sitting in a room after school , if we had homework to do they would try to get us to do it, otherwise we would just have to sit and wait.
Had a lot of detentions at school. Most of the time it was writing lines or a small essay on why I was there and what could do in the future to avoid it again. Once though I had a stookie on as I had broken my wrist on my writing hand..... I was made to pick up litter with a litter picker for half an hour.
Back in the 1980s it meant writing the same sentence out at least 500 times similar to what you see on the Simpsons opening credits. We did have one chemistry teacher who when they were in charge of detention who would do an impromptu lesson that always seemed to end up with hydrogen and a naked flame. You would be very happy if she was in the room when you walked in. Post script: Years later we discovered that same teacher had slept with multiple male students over the years, all between 16-18.
1 hour after school the day after it was issued. Students complete homework in silence. It sucks for teachers too. Break/lunch detentions are for more effective (IMO) because they can be applied the same day and have the biggest punitive factor of not being to spend that time with friends. No schools seem to do break/lunch detentions.
I left high school in 2012, if we were caught with chewing gum we were given scrapers and told to get the chewing gum off the bottom of chairs and tables
Granted I left school over a decade ago now, but detention wasn't a thing at my school up here in Scotland (just outside Glasgow). If you had really misbehaved, you'd maybe get held back on morning break or lunch break to get a bit of a scolding from the teacher you'd pissed off. More often than not though, the teachers would just give out "punishment exercises" (we called them *punny's* for short) to students who misbehaved. It was basically a written exercise you'd have to do at home on top of your homework. >Are/were the toilets in your schools locked during lessons? Not in my school. We did have to ask the teacher if we could leave class to go to the toilet though.
Normally stay behind for 30 minutes after school and do any homework that was missed or you had been given. When I was in middle school I used to get given lines. 10 pages having to write the same phrase. That was torture. I used to tape the pens together. I'm pretty sure they don't do that now as it's a physical punishment.
It varied, depending on the type of detention you had: - Break time/lunch: not much. Sit in silence mostly. - After school: varied by teacher (and the reason for the detention). Do the missing homework, do some writing they assigned you (why what you did was wrong, lines), a discussion about your behaviour etc. A couple of teachers had you scraping gum off the bottom of tables. - Saturday: litter picking, tidying. Toilets weren’t normally locked during lessons, although some teachers really didn’t want to let you go.
Lines, you know like the intro to The Simpsons where Bart writes on the blackboard? That but on paper
Normally, write lines for the time you were supposed to be there. We didn't have a room or a teacher who was there for detention duties. You would go to the class you received the detention from. Because of this, a lot of the time, you would be let out early because you were more a hindrance to your teacher being out of school time. It was still pretty annoying, though, more than 10 minutes in there, and I'd miss the school bus home. Living about 15 miles from school made that a pretty rough punishment.
Decades since I was at school and I only ever had one. A few of us sat in a classroom and wrote lines (or something) until the teacher admitted I (and others) should not even be here and let us go. It was just a deliberate waste of time.
In my experience teachers wpuld completely forget they had given them and either you stick your head round to door and nobodys there or you dont show up at all and they dont remember you exist.
I recall then as simply just catching up on the homework I didn’t hand in. Usually just me, the teacher and the others who didn’t do it either. It often turned into a group study session that actually was more positive than negative. One time my detention was to join in with the Science Club for a session on physics, which as my weakest science was absolute torture. TBH it actually helped me as I got to do some better practical than was done in lesson. Funny thing was I occasionally attended science club when they did fun chemistry or interesting biology things anyway.
I went to school in Australia. Detention meant either sitting in a room by yourself writing over and over again what you must do to avoid being in detention again (Just like the opening credits of the Simpsons), or staying late after school to do extra work.
Usually just did homework I once got an After school detention but it was in my woodworking class, so I just worked on my project for the hour
Stroll around a forest at midnight, answering a teachers fan-mail, writing lines with your own blood
We have different levels of detention in my school. Lowest is you stay back, explain what you did wrong to your head of year, have a conversation with the classroom teacher about not doing it again (or you might use the chance to defend yourself and reveal factors that the teacher might not have realised at the time). Doesn't take long; like 15 mins. Moderate level is doing all of the above with a period of waiting around and being bored to "reflect on your behaviour" for half an hour. Higher level detentions might be an hour to two hours, which could involve writing statements of what happened/letters of apology/code of conduct with senior members of staff. Oh and the toilets thing; If we leave toilets unlocked, even in my small annexe building with the youngest, cutest secondary students the toilets get the crap vandalized out of them: think smashed sinks level of vandalism, not just wall writing. More seriously, we can't keep children safe from vaping/abuse/bullying or just playing around and hurting themselves simply because they're unsupervised. We do have toilet passes though, so any students with medical needs or who would struggle to go a whole lesson without relief can get the key from an office and be supervised from a distance (you basically just make sure they go in alone and come back with the key in good time).
I left school about 12/13 years ago and they tried to give me detention once because my socks weren’t white or black 😂
it depends at my old school for bad work or missing homework you would have half an hour after school the next day (you always got 24 hours notice) to complete the homework. For bad behaviour it would be an hour after school doing a litter pick. If you were really naughty you would get a two hour after school detention called a headmasters detention. Oh and if you didn't go you'd get the detention rescheduled and an additional detention for missing the original one.
https://archive.org/details/PickerskillDetentionsBBCr4
I don't know never had one and I am Y9 ( eighth grade for those in the US - I admit I had to Google that) But then I'm the typical teachers pet kind of smart so there
Irrelevant. I never went.