It was a pretty common feature of the schools I grew up in.

My second-earliest school memory was being asked to sit on my nametag in Kindergarten (the standard time out). We were doing an activity where we were supposed to circle whether something made a short or long O sound, and were listening to an audio tape with headphones. The words were printed on the worksheet, though, so I went ahead and circled all the correct ones and then sat quietly doing nothing. When the aide noticed she sent me to the tag on the carpet and then everyone forgot about me because I was so quiet. I would guess I was there for quite some time, but my 5 year old notion of time was wacked.

I have many more memories of similar things: being punished for doing math problems in different ways, or completing work early, mutually agreeing to play a board game by different rules during "free time", or responding to an essay prompt in an unexpected way.

I am now a teacher at an independent school which my 3 sons attend. Faculty tries really hard to avoid doing this. It is aggravating and difficult when you have 20 kids and a subset go off in a completely different direction than you were hoping to reach with the activity. I can totally understand that with larger classes like most public schools have, a worse behavior baseline, etc, how one would be tempted to leap to chastisement.

this was my entire experience in "computer" classes K–12 in the 90s–00s. never once were we encouraged to play around or try new things. we were taught to follow instructions to the letter to use computers to complete arbitrary tasks exactly as prescribed. the closest thing to letting us "color outside the lines" was letting us literally pick the color and bgcolor attributes for the HTML4 web pages we made for some assignments in "Web Development" class... in 2008. (of course about half of our graduating class had all already taught themselves rudimentary CSS to style their MySpace profiles a few years prior!) around 2004(!!) we spent a couple weeks learning HyperCard (in the Classic Mac emulator OSX used to ship with), and while I immediately recognized the possibilities for making games and interactive stories and all kinds of neat stuff using this then-ancient software, nope, just shut up and make this slide presentation about snakes or whatever like the assignment tells you to. I've posted about this here in the past but looking back I have this vague feeling that, at least in these computer classes, the teachers like barely had a grasp on how to do anything with computer outside of specifically prescribed tasks of the assignments they had us do, and were sort of scared of anyone like me who wanted to eff around and see what all we could do with the technology. part of me has always wanted to be a public school computer class teacher just so I can instill some of the sense of discovery and creativity that access to these powerful machines grant us, that I was never given in school growing up.

In a computer class in the 90s, it would actually have made some sense. Schools have never had good IT staff, and it was easy to screw things up accidentally. Hell, in '94 I was in USAF tech school and watched a guy answer yes to the "WARNING: This will remove all data on non-removable disk drive C:" prompt not 30 seconds after the teacher explicitly said that getting that message meant you had mistyped. Allegedly an adult, and actually a pretty smart guy, but still managed to render that particular workstation unusable for a while.

Today, the school uses disposable VMs which are built on demand and nothing the student does can render them inoperable. And Chromebooks that are similarly unkillable. Different world now than 25 years ago, for sure. My kids' school gives the students wide latitude to screw up.

reasonably fair assessment, but the problem with Chromebooks is that they're basically glorified smartphones as opposed to desktop PCs, in that they're consumption devices as opposed to creative devices. sure you can get various chrome extensions (presumably not on these school Chromebooks though) that let you get part of the way there—I passed my first semester of CS using only a Chromebook with the Secure Shell extension to remote into my linux box at home—but by and large the era of everyone having the untapped creative power of a cheap commercial desktop PC in their home is kind of over now, and in my opinion we largely squandered that wonderful time by not encouraging more young people to play around with them creatively.

In my last year of high school in the 70s, the school acquired a Business Basic 4 computer to do some of the administration work. They also created a computer class for the students, where we punched out programs on punch cards, and the teacher would batch run them overnight.

The teacher did not allow any students near that computer, as he was sure we were going to hack it and wreck everything.

(Yes, hacking was a thing even in the 70s!)