lissa explains detention
In my first year of high school, I was deeply immersed in the burgeoning subculture of teenagers with blogs. Nobody at school knew about my website - it was like a glorious secret world I could escape into after school. I did take a computer science class with a web design focus at school, though. In that class, we worked on the school’s website, largely unsupervised, in the computer lab. The iMacs that filled the room were far more powerful than my home desktop and were loaded with cool programs like Photoshop. Still, I very rarely did anything related to my own site in class—and when I did, I hid it well.
There were plenty of other sites to explore in my downtime, though. One I’d found at home and browsed during class might be familiar to some. Lissa Explains it All was (and, to my knowledge, still is) an infamous hub for kids and teens learning to build websites from scratch, with tons of helpful guides and information.
While some sites—including a few belonging to people I knew online—wouldn’t load on the school’s computers, Lissa Explains it All certainly did, though some links were a bit patchy. You see, my high school’s internet connection was censored in a strange way. I suspect it relied on URL blacklists and keyword filtering, but I never really looked into it. Nowadays, school filters probably use an LLM, but back then? I really don’t know.
Put simply, if you tried to access a blocked page, it would redirect to an image of a monkey shaking his finger at you, as if scolding you, alongside a message stating the material was inappropriate. Yes, this was real.
People from other schools often have trouble conceptualizing—or even believing—when I explain “the Monkey,” as we called him. But he was a very real, omnipresent part of my high school experience. He appeared when I tried to bring up anything Aristasian on school computers, whenever I (oddly) tried to look deeply into online shopping, and even when loading pixel art sites.
It varied a lot. Ah, yeah, the Monkey. My school’s defender against smut? Playboy wouldn’t load, so I guess he did his job. Some of my ultra-favorite fanfic sites wouldn’t load, probably due to certain “suggestive” keywords, so I mostly relegated myself to almost nearly doing my work in computer science by reading about programming instead.
We were typically supposed to be working on the school’s website by completing a series of exercises from a site the teacher had linked. If I remember correctly, it was a relic of the early 2000s, like most of our assigned material. It took hardly any time to finish, leaving most of us sitting around. That sent me back to Lissa Explains it All—for help with my own website, mostly.
One day, I came across a tutorial explaining z-index. This was incredibly important because the boys were struggling with it, and I was too. By “the boys,” I mean a clique of tragically cool, generally kind, but snarky guys who also took computer science. They rarely bullied me and were usually safe and worth being around. I wanted to help, and I also wanted to get the school’s site moving ahead. So, I immediately linked the Lissa Explains it All page to both the boys and the teacher.
Perhaps linking it to the boys had been the right decision. The teacher? Not so much. She skimmed the tutorial, then started rifling through my other open windows. They were similar—some Photoshop tutorials, some other web assets—but a few were pixel art sites or my friends’ blogs. Her immediate question?
“Why aren’t you on the designated sites I gave you for studying these things?”
Technically, we were supposed to be learning from a series of textbook-affiliated sites—fairly decrepit ones. I explained that those sites didn’t cover z-index well and that Lissa Explains it All did a much better job. I had no excuses, however, for the pixel art sites or visiting my friends’ blogs. Having multiple tabs open, I was lucky she didn’t find my site that time.
With much trepidation, she announced that I was “off-task” and assigned me a demerit. She asked for my task book to record it. These books were supposed to function as planners but mostly just tracked when we got into trouble. I handed mine over but didn’t see the problem. I tried to explain that nothing I’d done was truly off-task for a computer science class studying web design. I guess that was technically a lie since I’d also been visiting dollz sites?
Demerits weren’t that big of a deal at my school. Technically, if you got three in one day or three for the same infraction in a week, you were assigned a detention. But that was rare. The rule wasn’t enforced strictly unless you made yourself a problem or were purposefully rebellious. I wasn’t exactly doing that—I just didn’t care about demerits because I never expected to get detention for the things I was doing. People got demerits constantly, but they rarely added up.
Then, I remembered: I’d already received two other demerits that week for being off-task. One for turning on the television in the band classroom during study hall, another for leaving the lunchroom during lunch. Technically, three demerits in a week for the same infraction meant detention.
There was no way the computer science teacher would actually enforce that, though, right?
Well. She did.
I held my tongue at what I saw as the absurdity of the situation and took the detention slip. At my school, detentions weren’t long or particularly grueling—no writing lines or anything weird. The real punishment was that they started at 6:30 a.m. While sitting there in the wee hours, I made a mental note to be more careful on the school’s iMacs.
I thought that would be the end of it. I was wrong.
Not three weeks later, we started a new unit in computer science. Our curriculum wasn’t exactly rigid—always a bit cobbled together by the teacher, likely because web design was such a new subject. This time, the focus was shifting from HTML to CSS.
We’d used CSS before, but now we were starting from the very basics and working our way up. Exciting, right? The teacher gave us a list of six or seven sites to use as references.
And guess what was on the list?
I was livid. But there wasn’t much I could do. I made a snarky comment about how I “thought Lissa was ‘off-task,’” but the teacher quickly shut me down. She made it clear she was sick of me using the iMacs for “weird things” and even warned that if she caught me in Photoshop doing anything besides working on the school’s logo, I’d get another demerit.
She did, however, add that I should be grateful—because, as she put it, I was “well-prepared” for the lessons that used Lissa Explains it All to demonstrate concepts. She was not anyone’s favorite teacher, as you might guess.
The boys, on the other hand, were pleased to discover Lissa Explains it All. They bristled a bit at how utterly girly the site was, but quickly found it a solution to a million different problems. While I kept on with my grousing and holding a grudge against the teacher, they wasted no time unleashing lots of marquees and custom cursors on the school website. I got a B+ or something like that in the class, and didn’t return for the second class (more “design”-focused or whatever) in the series, opting to take World Cultures as my elective instead.
Such was life in simpler times, I guess. Nowadays, I’m sure computer science and web design curricula are dictated by some regulatory board. Back then, our teachers didn’t really know what to do with this new subject, except that they had to teach it because it was sure to be incredibly important. So many awkward situations ensued, and we all (teachers included) were pretty confused. I’d argue that the internet confused everyone for a good decade or so after it first became ubiquitous.