Sometimes, the harder adults try to control kids, the faster they find creative ways to make it fun.

So, what would you do if your school painted traffic lanes down the hallways to keep everyone moving faster between classes, but the students started pretending they were driving cars and taking things a little too far?

Would you stay out of it? Or would you grab an imaginary steering wheel and join the chaos?

In the following story, one middle school teacher finds themselves in this situation and decides to have a little fun.

Here’s what happened.

Hallways had “lanes” for students to get them to class faster

I was a teacher at a middle school in 2014/2015 that was a Title 1 School (extremely low income and test scores). The state government removed all administration staff for the whole district two years prior, as the student outcomes were so low.

The new admin came in with a micromanaging, authoritarian directive to improve test scores. One of their brightest ideas was to put lanes in the hallways to manage flow and get students to classes faster.

There were three lanes: two one-way ways along the walls and a middle “teacher-only lane.”

Suddenly, everyone was having fun with it.

Within about three days, all the students were driving imaginary cars. They orderly followed one another, would let people in to merge, used turn signals, and generally were pretty fun for a few days.

The teachers directed students at intersections and played along for a bit. The flow did slow down, though, as students wouldn’t pass each other and would have trouble merging into traffic around doorways.

Another thing that took time was the students parking their imaginary vehicles outside the classroom. They would spend time backing them into spaces or have trouble parallel parking.

Getting from one side of the hall to the other was a pain.

The admin didn’t like this and really started getting angry at the staff and students, as so many kids were still tardy to class. They actively handed out detentions and were pretty angry at the staff for playing along.

This really triggered the students to start getting malicious.

The students couldn’t cross the middle lane, so they would have to walk down long hallways and make U-turns to see their friends or get to their lockers/classrooms.

They started cruising the long hallways with their tricked-out imaginary low riders. They would even have shock noises.

Then, things really started to get out of control.

Some of the really popular kids started a bus system. They had a schedule to pick up other students and deliver them to other classes. They would hold shoulders and move as a block. Sometimes, the bus broke down at an intersection and blocked traffic for everyone.

Drag racing started, where students held up traffic and raced down the hallways. Police would pull people over and write tickets.

The most annoying part was students needing to leave the classroom to check on their cars to make sure no one stole them.

Sometimes, a student would come back from the bathroom and ask if anyone was driving a type of car as it was being towed. The disruptions in class started to really get out of control.

The system was scrapped in lieu of a new rule.

The admin thought it was going to be a phase and that the students would get bored. The best part about school for the students turned out to be the time in between classes. Everyone was constantly tardy.

Eventually, the lanes (tape) were ripped up, and they shortened the passing period time by 2 minutes, so students had to rush to class and couldn’t spend any time in the hallways.

The cars slowly died out, and the new ‘fad’ was needing to use the restroom during class time because the passing period was like 3 minutes long and not enough toilets to satisfy all the students legitimately.

Students were written up for needing to use the bathroom, so kids just started clogging toilets and peeing wherever.

Yikes! This sounds so crazy that it doesn’t even seem real!

Let’s check out what the folks over at Reddit think about this lane system.

This person thinks the teachers could’ve used the game for lesson plans.

At some point, this would probably take too much time.

That’s not cool.

This reader loves the story.

What a weird system! The admin should’ve known this wasn’t going to work.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.