After one of our coaches left for the day, the remaining college mentor distracted the other teacher while myself and two other students inverted most of the stuff in the first teacher’s room. Computer mice, keyboards, the calendar on his desk, empty coffee mug, we turned the phone around, the clock required duct tape to stay on the wall, things he had pinned above the white board…
good times.
OK, let’s be honest. Stuff like glittery soap in the bathrooms or chalk in the erasers (does anyone actually still use chalk any more?) is cute, but pretty pedestrian. Maybe OK for a quick gag at summer camp, but these are not really the stuff that legends are made from.
The surprising addition of a flag pole (complete with pirate flag) or moving a multi-ton rock is heading in the right direction, and worthy of an honorable mention.
But if you want examples of how the professional leagues do it when it comes to institutional pranks, then there is only one place to go - to the great [b]M.I.T. Hacks.
MIT engineering students have a history of creative, clever and non-damaging pranks that combine the best of an engineering challenges and good sense of humor. They are so good that they have spawned several books to record their history, and are a regular feature on the MIT campus. It is not unusual to find them on the front pages of newspapers around the world each spring.
Some of the favorites include this year’s installation of the Apollo 11 lunar lander on the top of the great dome:
and the Robot Rights Protest
although this has to be one of my favorites:
-dave
.
The high school I attended has a tower that is something like 65 feet tall, with a convenient spire on top. According to my uncle and my father, around 1950, some person or person unknown somehow inflated a truck inner tube to enormous proportions and dropped it over the spire. The school had to hire a professional steeplejack to remove it.
I have no idea how my uncle and father would know this, but they suggest that two war-surplus weather balloons could have lifted the inner tube up there – but neither will talk about how they could have known that.
(I was the third generation of my family to attend Huntington Beach High School. My uncles, mother, father, and great-uncle all went there. Our senior prank did not – unfortunately – involve the tower.)
Dave is right about this one! (not that he’s not right about anything else) Last year for my folklore class, I did fieldwork in the area of pranks and one of the books I checked out of the school library was Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. I ended up not using it as a source because my paper switched from being about “geek” pranks to focusing on how a serial prankster operates, but the book was so much fun to read! It convinced me that being a geek is more fun than being anything else! Of course, after returning the book to the library, I was slightly disappointed with my school… either they are too dumb to realize what having a book like that in their school library could cause or they just don’t think Mason students have it in them…
There was another interesting book, too: If At All Possible, Involve a Cow that is about different pranks from different colleges (it has a whole chapter dedicated to MIT and Caltech’s pranks).
Heidi (who again thanks Dave for the interview for her paper, I’m sure he’s partially responsible for the A+ 
)
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this is your way of pointing out Dave’s serial prankster capabilities? hm?
edit: kudos for the A+
In the manner of pranks…
I would like to submit the following quote for your perusal…
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage…to move in the opposite direction…” A. Einstein
Elegance and creativity in pranking is the hallmark …
I see too many of my students just using the internet to come up with ideas…
You can certainly draw from the masters… (Caltech and MIT…etc…)
but do your own thing… make it good… make it unique…
If you make it destructive be prepared for the consequences…
Destructive pranks are almost universally disliked…
And remember you WILL NOT be able to keep everyone quiet.
Some will ALWAYS talk about it…it is human nature
Use the FIRST model… get together… brainstorm…
develop your plan…
The best pranks are the simplest and most elegant…
the ones that make the observer scratch their head…
good luck
This year our seniors got permission and forked the whole front and the whole back of our school the used sidwalk chalk and wrote all over the side walk in the front of the school they put FORK HHS 09
First bold: we were stumped for two weeks
second bold: did that and ^^^^
third bold: that’s the plan =)
I thought i’d add that my brother’s senior class tied a parking lot of cars together. it was funny until three mirrors got broken off from rope being pulled. and my bro’s antenna got bent.
Our seniors pulled off a nice one this year:
All of the seniors smuggled fake swords armor costumes into school a few days back. Then roughly halfway through third hour one of them distracted the people in the office and someone got a hold of the intercom and announced: Attention all seniors. The battle begins now! All of the seniors then proceed to rush out onto the front lawn and have a massive mock medieval brawl. I later learned that in addition the guys in one of the design classes had constructed a functioning catapult which they dragged out and used to fling cardboard projectiles into the crowd. A lot of the people in my class thought it was stupid but hey no one got hurt, and the seniors had a blast.
Our English teacher also told us her classes senior prank. have all the seniors bring in alarm clocks, set them for the same time, and have all the seniors leave. Time comes the bells rings and just doesn’t stop 
Just a note for the community, the swords and armor were made out of cardboard. Not in any way harmful.
And I saw videos of that, it was a really good senior prank. Everyone had fun, and I don’t believe that the administration really cared…
We did a series of pranks. We built Snowmen inside the school, and many other small ones.
One of my personal favorites was buying a community park benh for ths school. These are the kinds that they engrave the donors names on them. Our bench was sponsored by John Galt. It was fantastic when we were walking by it one day, and someone looked over and asked there husband, “Who is John Galt?”.
Most of my other pranks were saved for the dorms in college.
Some friends and I help out with an antique tractor show. We pull a prank every year on a friend of ours. One of the best was wiring in a spare truck horn to his brake lights. Quick, simple, irritating, and quite humorus. If possible buy the same horn that the vehicle has for extra confusion.
Depending on the type of lockers the school has, during class get a couple students to go around and ziptie a large amount of lockers shut while “going to the bathroom”, between classes there will be quite the frustration as students cannot get their stuff for the next class. It only causes minor problems and delay in school, but it would be nice to watch.
If done right, students could only get to their stuff if everyone opened their lockers at the same time. This could be an interesting experiment in cooperation…
MIT engineering students have a history of creative, clever and non-damaging pranks that combine the best of an engineering challenges and good sense of humor. They are so good that they have spawned several books to record their history, and are a regular feature on the MIT campus. It is not unusual to find them on the front pages of newspapers around the world each spring
…
-dave
.
Well my class did theirs today. Took 4 classrooms and moved everything in the room somewhere outdoors (busloop, courtyard, etc) and made a “virtual classroom” outside. It was pretty funny when all the teachers and underclassmen had to go to school outside.
We did ours last night we strung up the whole school with rope, string,yarn,fishing line, duck tape, toilet paper, ect… it was epic! It got so bad that it took 15 minutes minimum to get from the first floor to the third floor, beacuase you would keep getting tangled in it all. It was very satisfying. 
That sounds awesome…as far as I know no senior pranks were pulled at my school, which kinda stank
Wohoo, digging up an old thread.
Yesterday was our senior spirit day. To celebrate, a large group of seniors “tailgated” in the parking lot starting at 5am, complete with griddles in the backs of student cars, and food. They even had a bounce house! The only thing that the police asked of them was to move their cars out of the circle that they had been parked in, for safety reasons.
GOOD SENIOR “PRANK”.
A few minutes before the start of first period, three seniors let 18 chickens loose in the hallways. It created a little chaos, but it wasn’t exactly a huge problem, since the teachers, administrators, and custodians did a great job of keeping it under control. It was all fun and games, until things started happening. Two of the chickens got kicked to death. One jumped into the toilet out of fear and confusion, and drowned.
The administration reviewed the security tapes to find out who had released the chickens. The three seniors were caught, and were suspended, banned from fall sports, and I believe that there were a few other punishments. I heard rumors that they went to jail, but I haven’t heard official confirmation of it.
BAD SENIOR PRANK.
Please, when it’s your senior class’s turn to have their glory, please act responsibly.
Moral of the second story: Use Rubber Chickens.
Chaining a full toilet to your principal’s parking spot is fun. That’s all I gotta say. 
Watching them not being able to take the chain off and then realizing they can break the chain- priceless.
