The "hands-off" policy changed very dramatically within a couple years in the late 90s, at least here. In elementary school, we played extremely violent soccer, so violent that it was more "beat up the guy with the ball." That was cool. There were broken this's and that's.
Two years later, in middle school, I got suspended because a teacher saw me shaking the shoulder of a guy in the hallway. It was a friend of mine who had arrived late for school, I jogged up to meet him, gave him a little shake and said, Hey. You know, that little shoulder clamp that most people on the street expect? The teacher calls my parents and says he witnessed me punching him in the stomach.
I have known people suspended for kicking a pen down an empty set of stairs or swearing at lunch break. I was threatened with expulsion a while ago when I said "retarded" in reference to how teachers treated normal students who did bad in a course and so got filtered into the "special education" curriculum. Apparently when a 16 year old fails a math test, asking them how to spell words like "cat" and "bat" no longer qualifies as treating them like retards. If not as a matter of verity but of vocabulary, I still think saying retarded instead of special needs does not merit expulsion or the threat thereof.
However, if you are routinely bad, they will give you good marks, let you go to the gymnasium as you please, and not suspend you if you do something bad again. God bless America.
