This has little to do with the topic, but I've noticed several comments about how corporal punishment isn't used anymore. My question to you guys is where do you teach/coach, every school I have been employed by used the paddle whenever necessary, and I have been to several schools since 1996. I'll list them: Novice, Cisco, Hermleigh, Richland Springs and San Augustine, and student taught at Brookesmith. All of them gave pops frequently. My wife is a junior high principal of 235 students, and she must average four or five kids per day getting pops, and she never gives less than two at a time. The other day I called her to see how her day was going and she said that her right thumb was extremely sore. When I asked why she said she had just administered her twenty-second pop of the day. My response was well, that many pops this late in the year means corporal punishment isn't working. Her respose was that the great majority of the kids walked a straight line, that the number of students who needed it was vastly smaller because of the willingness to use a board. Her term for those who still needed occasional pops was the Dirty Dozen, and had once been called the Dirty Thirty...and of those 12 at least three were about to be sent to alternative school. Occasionally a parent will demand their child not be paddled, but when my wife tells them to come pick up their suspended child they always change their tune and support the decision to use the paddle. Funny how quickly they change their opinion. So, don't think just because your principal is too scared to use it means that not being allowed to use CP is the law of the land.
In the state of Texas there have been over twenty court cases challenging the legality of a school to use CP; in every one of them the school and state won. Don't know the name of the case, but in one the
accidental bruising of the student was even defended by the courts.
I made the decision long ago that I would never teach in a school that did not allow CP, and so far I haven't had to. Choosing not to use CP is most often the decision of misinformed or overreacting administrators. I know of a couple of schools whose administration chose not to use CP despite the support of the school board. These individuals usually hide behind exaggerated fears of being sued.
At RS we used CP whenever needed. Well, some of us did. The teachers knew who would and wouldn't swing the board, and usually sent their stubborn, repeat offenders to us or my wife to address the situation. One member of our coaching staff had the best swing I have ever seen. I swear that man could lift our biggest boys off the floor. He said it was "all in the hips".
I guess I should admit I was a member of the so-called dirty dozen group as an 8th grader, There were only three of us so I'll call us the Terrible Three (we didn't really have a name. We were just punks). We were pretty good size kids. Besides myself it was Mike Richardson(future all-american LB for two years, played at TX. A&M one year, and Johnny Rockwell, the largest upper body I had ever seen on a junior high kid. He didn't play football because he had to cut pulp wood every day after school. By the third week of school we had collectively chased off two english teachers and an interim principal. My dad, the superintendent of the school, decided to handle the problem the old fashion way---he hired an ex-marine just out of the Vietnam war to be our temporary principal.
His first day on the job he walked into our math class and pointed at the three of us to follow him to his office which was located between two classrooms and apparently had extremely thin walls...I'll explain why later. After a brief laying down of the new law I guess our faces had the wrong expressions upon them because he immediately pulled out the biggest dam_ board I have ever seen. I swear to you it looked like Buford Pusser's club. It wasn't even totally flat, was more of a 4x4 fence post with one side slightly sanded slick. Well, when we realized what was happening next, we all put on our "we're bad" act and took it like a man. Then he did something that gave me flashbacks for weeks. He walked over to the door and double-locked it. Now, that may not seem too frightening today, but in the 1970s, a time when nobody locked their doors before turning in for the night, I was stunned :shock: Up to that moment of my brief life...... the next five minutes were the most frightening moments of my pathetic existence. That man whooped us like he was the devil himself. I think he even took it easy on me because he put Mike and Johnny over the desk, literally, and Mike was a six footer and probably dressed out at 180 lbs that year. Later at lunch the seventh graders said they heard the sound of wood on flesh and high pitched screams so clearly that Mrs. Meeks, their english teacher left the room for fifteen minutes. I later overheard my dad tell my mother that she had called my dad to report the incident. Dad told her the new principal was just getting to know a few of the boys. That was a monday. By Friday I had received seventeen whoopings, not individual pops, seventeen times I had received a whooping by that man. One time he even strapped me for wolf whistling at the high school girl who walked around picking up the roll sheets. Did it work? Johnny transfered to another school until we were freshmen, and Mike played hooky the following Friday through Wednesday. Me, I'm not sure, but I think I was sterile until I was twenty-one years old.
