Offences might range from refusal to do school work to misbehaviour in chapel; an almost unlimited number of possibilities was available. Isabelle Knockwood delighted in defying Wikew's 'Don't dare move a muscle' at bedtime by 'wiggling my toes under the blankets thinking, "You ain't my boss and I'll wiggle all I want."

      More overt were the boys at Lytton who threatened the principal to his face that they would steal food if he didn't provide them with better rations. They were pleasantly surprised when their challenge succeeded. Indeed, the favourite form of misbehaviour among students was stealing food. The young women at Kamloops school organised elaborate schemes to pilfer apples and other food that they shared in the dormitory. Similar stunts were carried out at most schools at one time or another. The boys at Elkhorn in the 1940s killed one of the school's pigs by spraying it with water and leaving it to freeze to death. When the school authorities could not figure out what had killed the pig, they ordered it incinerated. The boys who leapt to dispose of the carcass in fact roasted and hid it, treating the contraband pork as snack for many days.

Brandon school considered these fellows 'future hog raisers,' but some of them in the mid-1920s enjoyed the fruits of their labours in the here and now.