When I was in elementary school, the girls wore dresses to school, because dresses were the proper attire for young ladies. I feel obliged to point out that the “young ladies” of my generation also liked to hang upside down on the monkey bars.

Sometimes, Powhatan winters get very cold. If the temperature got down to the single digits, we were told we could wear pants underneath our dresses. (Ten degrees? No dice.) I remember my second-grade teacher explaining this to us. I sat in my desk wondering why we had to bother putting the dress over our pants, when my teacher cleared up that mystery. “We want to be comfortable,” she said, “but we are still young ladies.”

As I moved into middle school, there were further concessions. We were told that we could wear dresses or a “coordinated pants suit.” Think Hillary and Kamala. As I moved up through middle and high school, the administration’s grip on what constituted a “coordinated pants suit” became more and more tenuous. By the time I graduated, it was blue jeans every day.

I’m sure there were more rules placed on the boys, but the only one I remember was the hair. I guess they had to wear shirts with collars, because the rule was that the hair could not be long enough to touch said collar. These were, after all, the days of the Broadway musical “Hair.” Fast forward to my boys in high school; Jon usually had a ponytail halfway down his back, and Brooks had his flyaway curls.

As a teacher, and especially as a principal, I was tasked with enforcing a dress code that I came to despise. The hill-of-the-hour that everybody was willing to die on, or at least have me die on, was girls in yoga pants. I admit, for someone with my conservative upbringing, the practice took some getting used to, but in the end, who cares? The folks insisting on this rule were the same ones who sanctioned young ladies’ volleyball shorts and cheerleading dresses.

To this day, and probably forever, I cringe when I remember suspending a troubled student because she refused to change her pants. Maybe I’ll get a do-over on that, at least in the pay-it-forward kind of sense.

My Aunt Helen used to interview potential hires for her office. She told us many stories of applicants wearing strange clothes. Two I remember: one woman came in wearing a one-piece swimsuit; another in a full-length evening gown. Maybe these women had been forced to wear coordinated pants suits in middle school, and they were still mad about it.