brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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I thought the days of corporal punishment for students were from a bygone era, as outdated as gas lanterns and horses and buggies. I thought we lived in a kinder, gentler, more enlightened nation that understood violence is never the answer.
I guess I wasn't paying attention. Apparently corporal punishment — deliberate infliction of physical pain by hitting, paddling, spanking, slapping, or any other physical force used as a means of discipline — is allowed in 15 states and unregulated in eight. It’s prohibited in the remainder of states. According to a recent article, a school district in Texas approved paddling as a disciplinary measure in a 6-0 vote by the school board (one member was absent). The principal or “campus behavior coordinator” are the only ones allowed to administer the “disciplinary management technique.” Parents may opt in or out. I’m not sure if this makes it better or worse. So Johnny and Billy commit the exact same infraction, but Johnny gets paddled and Billy doesn’t because Johnny’s parents gave the go-ahead and Billy’s didn’t? What kind of message does this send? And what if Johnny and Billy are different races, religions or ethnicities? Or if it’s Johnny and Suzy? My mother was a public school teacher in Massachusetts, one of the states where corporal punishment is prohibited. The law stated a teacher couldn’t strike a child in anger. “So smile when you smack them,” she and her colleagues used to joke. My mother did strike a student once. It was during dismissal and students were lined up on the sidewalk getting ready to board the buses home. One of my mother’s students, a sixth-grader named John, must have acted up. He was always pushing the limits of my mother’s patience. She said something to him and he called her a word she claimed she had never before heard spoken aloud (it begins with an “m” and ends in “er”). She slapped him across the face without thinking. I think she was as shocked by the slap as he was. It’s a wonder my mother wasn’t fired. She did this in plain view of many students and teachers. Surely if John had told his mother, she would have marched into the principal’s office the next day and demanded my mother’s dismissal. No such thing happened. John’s father had died earlier that year. He and his father had had an argument and his father went to bed and never woke up. This was why John acted up in class and at dismissal that day. I think John knew in spite of the slap, my mother cared about him. He straightened up his act shortly after that — or so my mother always said when relaying this story — and years later she ran into him and he told her what a difference she had made in his life. But this wasn’t because my mother lost control that one time and hit him in the face. It was because she consistently showed him, in a variety of ways, how much she cared. My mother was a nurturing and maternal figure in many of her students’ lives. For some it filled a void. For others, like John, it helped them through difficult times or provided consistency and guidance through the ups and downs of adolescence. She was also trusting. My siblings and I considered her naïve, especially when we got away with our own adolescent antics. But for her students, it showed a certain amount of faith not just in their abilities, but their innate goodness. If your teacher trusts you, you are less inclined to want to let her down. I’m not sure where paddling fits into this scenario. What next — dunce caps?
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |