Do Teachers Still Care That Much About Shoulders?
I volunteered to help with hall monitoring at my old high school last week, the PTA was short on bodies because half the regulars were out with that spring cold that’s going around. I didn’t mind, it’s 10 minutes a day between periods, I get to walk the halls and see how much (and how little) has changed since I graduated 18 years ago. I wasn’t prepared to see the exact same dumb shoulder drama I lived through playing out right in front of me.
It was third period, right before the bell was about to ring, and a freshman girl in high-waisted jeans and a thin ribbed tank top was hurrying to class, when one of the veteran math teachers stepped right in front of her, blocked her path. I couldn’t hear every word, but I saw him point to her shoulders, then dig around in his pocket and pull out one of those leftover blue disposable COVID face masks, the kind we all had stacks of in our junk drawers three years ago. He gestured for her to put it on over her shoulders. She just stared at him, and he said it again, louder, so I heard this time: “School policy. No bare shoulders. Cut a hole in the top for your head, it’ll work fine.”
She took the mask, her face went bright red, and she hurried off to the bathroom. I just stood there by the water fountain, awkward as hell, because I’d seen the whole thing and I didn’t know if I should say something or just pretend I didn’t. It brought me right back to 10th grade, when I got sent to the office for a spaghetti strap sundress on an 88 degree day when the whole school’s AC was broken. The assistant principal made me wear a giant gray men’s PE t-shirt that smelled like old pool chlorine and cut grass, and I had to sit on the hard bench outside his office for 45 minutes waiting for my mom to bring me a different shirt. I still remember how the neck of that shirt was all stretched out and it kept slipping off one shoulder, which was just the most ironic stupid thing I’ve ever lived through.
Later, I was waiting for the vending machine to spit out my Coke (it ate my dollar, had to wait for the secretary to come unlock it, same as it did when I was a student there, actually) and a 26 year old English teacher I know from the neighborhood started complaining about the same incident. She rolled her eyes so hard I thought she’d strain something, said she hasn’t said a word to a kid about their shoulders in the three years she’s been teaching. “Last week I had a girl come in with a backless halter top for spirit week, I didn’t even blink. I’ve got 38 essays on The Great Gatsby to grade by Monday, I don’t have time to care if someone’s collarbone is out. The boys don’t care, the other kids don’t care, only the old guys care.”
That lines up with what my friend Sarah told me a couple days later, when we got coffee. Sarah’s been a biology teacher at a different high school in the district for 12 years. She’s the kind of teacher who lets kids sit on her desk if they don’t want to sit in chairs, brings extra granola bars for kids who forget lunch, and marches in every pride parade with her students. But she told me she still reminds kids about the shoulder rule sometimes, even though she thinks it’s total garbage. “Admin does walkthroughs every Friday,” she said. “If my principal, who’s 62 and still talks about how ‘kids these days have no respect’, walks in and sees a kid with bare shoulders, I get a written warning. It goes on my file. I don’t get a bonus for a clean file, but I can get passed over for department head, or yelled at in a staff meeting in front of everyone. It’s not worth the fight for me, honestly. I pick my battles with the curriculum and the budget for lab supplies, not with a stupid rule about how wide your shirt straps have to be.”
I saw that freshman again at lunch that day. She was sitting with her friends by the main entrance, and she’d tied the blue face mask around her shoulders like a weird little shrug. It was so thin you could see right through it, and it kept slipping off her left shoulder every two minutes. She’d yank it back up, her friends would tease her, and she’d laugh, but her eyes kept darting around to see if any teacher was looking. Halfway through lunch, she just yanked it off, stuffed it in the bottom of her backpack, and no one said anything. The only teacher who cared was the one who stopped her in the hall, and he was back in his classroom teaching by then.
I’ve been thinking about this all week, actually. I see it on TikTok sometimes, teens posting about getting dress coded for shoulders, and the comments are half “this happened to me too” and half “schools have way bigger problems”. Which is true, obviously. My old high school’s roof leaks in three places in the gym, they can’t afford enough new textbooks for chemistry, half the kids don’t have access to a therapist when they’re stressed, and we’re still out here stopping kids from going to class over an exposed shoulder.
I don’t have some big neat takeaway here. I didn’t march down to the principal’s office and yell about the rule, I didn’t go give the girl a new shirt, I didn’t even comment on that local Facebook post her mom made about the incident. I think the answer to the question is: some do, some don’t. Most are just stuck in the middle, following rules they didn’t make and don’t even agree with. The people who make the rules still care a whole lot, the people who actually spend all day with the kids mostly don’t, unless they’re forced to.
It’s just this stupid, embarrassing, pointless thing that keeps happening, same as it did 18 years ago, same as it’ll probably happen 18 years from now when my kid is in high school. I just keep picturing that blue mask slipping off her shoulder, over and over, and how no one even bothered to check if she kept it on. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? No one cares that much, except the few people who still have the power to make everyone else act like they do.
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