[@LaurenRae Did you earn other school punishments like detention or suspension? I doubt it! They work really well, for any basically good kid!
I had one 90 minute detention once. We were not allowed to study or to do anything useful. We were given a beat-up paperback copy of a dictionary and forced to make exact copies of a specified page. We all had to copy the same page and our work was destroyed upon serving our time. The goal was to totally waste, in my case, 90 minutes of my life. It was very memorable and I still have angry feelings about being forced to waste that hour and a half. Even real prisons allow constructive use of an inmate's time.
I suppose I did learn something along the lines of "If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime." A dubious lesson as has been shown by the results of inmates who choose to avoid parole and thereby choose to serve their full sentence. They get out and do not have to meet with any parole officials. They are not in a good mood!
My crime: I was guilty of flicking cherry pie at another student at lunch.
A much better use of my time would have been to ask me to compose an essay about how I would manage lunch time and how I would prevent food fights. I haven't thought deeply about the structure of such an essay and I might well have been unable to improve on time-wasting detentions. But I would NOT have come away from the event loathing the teacher who wrote me up. I never got over it. I never sought revenge irl but I sure thought about it. In that era we all knew what sugar in an automobile gas tank did to engines! I don't know if the chemistry is still true given the modern refining formula! (So, don't count on it still working -- not that I think anyone reading this would do something as vicious as that. It did force an upper engine overhaul or so we believed.)
