What was the strangest fad at your school?

Girls would wear the boys ties instead of the newly introduced dickie bows. The girls would send the guys into the uniform shop to buy an "extra tie" Teachers started handing out detentions for girls wearing ties even though this was the standard uniform the previous 40 years.
— duck_matter

Zip-tying became huge in my high school. You had to always make sure you kept track of you backpack or someone would zip-tie all the zippers together and then zip-tie it to a fence or something. At first it was funny and as long as you kept scissors on you it would only take a minute to get your stuff free, but soon people bought industrial strength ties that had a metal interior and also started to flip people's backpacks inside out and tie the zippers inside so I basically became impossible to open your backpack. It got banned when some idiot made a mistake and flipped and tied a track coaches backpack at a meet and he couldn't get any of his things.
— specious_statements

Scooping. I'm not sure if this was widespread or not, but for a year it took over my school. It started out with boys cupping their hands and using them to scoop other boys man-titties upwards while shouting "scoooop" in a high voice. Eventually you didn't need man-titties to get scooped, dudes would just scoop your flat chest as best they could. It happened all day, every day. In class, in the halls, during lunch, while you were peeing at a urinal, nowhere was out of bounds. It stopped abruptly after the first girl got scooped.
— Mass-Delirium

Seniors were allowed to leave campus for lunch. One year it was cool to go to Burger King for lunch and wear the cardboard Burger King crown all afternoon.
— FatuousOocephalus

Trading pencil lead as a form of currency after trading cards got banned. Kids would sharpen pencils, snap the lead off of them and then trade that for other goods. Worked pretty well for half a month, then died when some kid bought a 200 pack of pencils and caused runaway inflation
— CometFuzzbutt

Pacifiers. Yes the things you jam in a baby's mouth to make them shut up. Every "cool" kid had to have one on a necklace. I think this was middle school. I was fucking dumbfounded, even then.
— Invincidude

I think this happened at a lot of schools, but one year the girls in my high school started carrying little kid's backpacks. Like Dora the Explora and other kid's show themes. It started with the seniors and worked its way down. Eventually some of the guys started carrying them too, but theirs were more traditionally "boy-themed," so Thomas the Tank Engine and stuff like that. It always just seemed really inconvenient to me since the bags were so small.
— karspearhollow

My high school got into that "wear a bunch of polos" fad. [Example](http://blog.shareight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/166bb22bd0816524051492469bd0008c1.jpg) It never got as crazy as that, but some people would wear 3 polos at a time. Like what? How much laundry are you doing a week?
— ksmitttyy

There was a fad where you would scrap a pen super fast on a table and the metal tip would get extremely hot. Then kids would proceed to burn people by poking them in the neck or arm with the pen, like a cigarette burn. Also, rubbing an eraser on the back of ur hand till your skin peeled/burn.
— violets1017

In high school they sold pints of iced tea at the cafeteria for a quarter. People (mainly the guys) started competing to see how many they could drink in a lunch period, to the point where people were buying literal cases of iced tea and building pyramids with the empties on the lunch tables to show dominance. This went on for weeks until several people vomited/pissed themselves in afternoon classes because of the liquid intake, and they stopped selling the iced tea shortly thereafter.
— Eatswithducks

We collected ring-pulls as a form of prestige, but I'm not really sure why. Silver ones were fairly worthless, being on pretty much every can of Coke, Pepsi or other popular drink. Gold ones, being commonly found on cans of lager, were worth a bit more but not much. I think red was next, as they were found on Diet Pepsi which was fairly common, then you had rare ones such as blue, green and black. Purple and orange were legendary. This was in the mid 90's where there weren't as many canned drinks with fancy designs kicking around in shops. Kids would pick up used cans from the street to pop the ring-pull off, scrounge them out of bins or forage for rare cans discarded in bushes. It was pretty gross in hindsight. Then they'd come into school with clear carrier bags just FULL of ring-pulls, and the more colorful your bag the better. Went on for a solid year.
— Jazashi

When I was in grade school there was a fad of making your own cinnamon toothpicks. You got a vial of cinnamon oil from somewhere and dipped the toothpicks in it and then let them dry out. Yay, cinnamon toothpicks. Till one kid decided to dump his oil on some kids corn at lunch time. The kid did not eat it, but the oil ate right through the Styrofoam lunch tray. There was a big crowd of kids ogling this fact, and the principal banned cinnamon oil.
— BlorfMonger

For some reason the mullet became popular at my high school mid 2010, no idea why but for 4 months every dude had one. Edit: For the people asking I'm from the most redneck part of Washington Second Edit: Forgot how many other redneck parts of Washington there are, but this was in Orting
— almostrabidhobo

For a brief period girls who were dating someone made it official by giving them a pair of their knickers, which the guy would then tie to his backpack to show he had a girlfriend. This led to one guy getting in trouble for stealing a pair of his sisters knickers to pretend he had a girlfriend at a different school
— Emily_Starke

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