Everyone has heard about pranks that others suffer at boarding school or even yourself were sometime a victim of this school jokes that kids play year after year. Some of them are light and others are tougher, here you have most common ones.

“Pantsing”
It is one of the names given to the acts of pulling down a person’s pants in public.

Circle Hand Game
Created by a City College of New York’s Fraternity in 1929 it has been recreated in TV Series “Malcom in the Middle”

Wet Willy
The pranker wet his/her finger with saliva and then introduces the finger in to the ear of a distracted or asleep person.

Towel snap
A very common prank in communal showers in boy boarding school . Prankers twist their wet towels and hit the victim with them, usually causing pain.

Kick me
Probably one of the oldest pranks. A note, in which is written “kick me”, is attached to the back of the victim. The note can be reading another sentence as “I’m idiot” or “My girlfriend cheats on me”

Shoe Lacing
The pranker ties victim’s shoe laces together while the victim is distracted. When the victim tries to walk, he or she usually falls down.
As teenagers  and boarding high school students have been opening and keeping their profiles on social media services many of these “old” pranks  has evolved to multimedia jokes and they have come up with many new ways of laughing at his mates but we will tell you about it another post.

As we looked how boarding schools is a recurrent topic for film makers we can’t ignore that many time films are based in books and telling about English literature boarding schools has become a genre with its own conventions.

There are some notable examples that million of people have read:

“Nicholas Nickleby” serial comic novel written by Charles Dickens and first published during 1838 and 1839. Nicholas Nickleby is a young man who must support his mother and his sister after his father’s death.
Some of the best stories happens at a boarding high school.

“Jane Eyre” famous Charlotte Brönte’s novel was published in London in 1847. It is an autobiography and is written in a first-person narrative. Jane talks about her education at Lowood School, in this girl boarding school she meets her friends but also she suffer many privations.

“Goodbye, Mr. Chips” by James Hilton was written in only four days and center the story much on the schoolteacher or a public boarding school than in the students.

J.S. Salinger’s 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye” has been listed as one of the best novels in 20th century and it has been translated into world’s major languages. Its principal character has become an icon for teenage rebellion. This novel has been related to conspiracy theories on the media and it is said that many famous killers were collectors of different editions of the novel.

Boarding school is always a experience in life, most of times a good one, and those who spend some of their youth years there can forget that time and sometimes they get inspired to write so beautiful books.