Context:

My informant is a 19-year-old student who lives in Philadelphia. There she previously attended an all girls high school where her mom also attended. She talks about a prank that her mom started while she was in school and later became a tradition with later students.

Text:

“When she was there, they had nuns and we had this thing called the mansion, which was like a really old building that the nuns lived in. And she lived walking distance from the school. Like, I could walk to my grandmother’s house, so she would come in and like, after hours and like change the nuns clocks. So they woke up late and like, like school starts like 8 am that she would change it like an hour or two later. So the nuns wouldn’t wake up and they wouldn’t have class and they’d all be at school just doing whatever they wanted.

And then another day, she took frogs from, like, the lab and put them in the pool.”

I asked, “Was this a thing that continued throughout the years?”

She responded, “Yeah, like, she had, like, her younger friends started to, like, adopt the prank on the nuns thing, and then it continued.”

Analysis:

This humorous piece of folklore shows an example of school folklore. These pranks continued through the years with the succeeding classes. This seems to be a version of what other high schools call a senior prank, often conducted in their last year of school to leave their lasting mark. It seems that this prank was not only for the benefit of the class but to leave a legacy for later years.