I Loved To Teach

But wait! This chapter is about discipline. At Southwestern where the paddle was sometimes the measure of a teacher’s effectiveness, I was once asked into the principal’s office to witness a spanking by the male guidance director. The child was told to empty out his hip pockets and grab his ankles. He complied. Because he was a small boy and the swing of the paddle was swift, he was lifted off the floor and his head hit the wall. He was already crying hard, yet this was repeated twice before he was dismissed, sobbing and alternately rubbing the top of his head and the spot I am sure the paddle left bruised. I was livid, but all I said was, “Don’t EVER ask me to be a witness again.”

I had received very high evaluation marks my first, difficult year, but on the second-year’s evaluation there was a comment indicating that I needed to use the paddle more frequently. (I hadn’t used it at all.) When, in my third year I used the paddle on one occasion, my evaluation improved. That was the year I heard a young female teacher being told by an older female teacher that the very best method of gaining control was intimidation by humiliation, “Figure out what that student is most sensitive about and hit him with your best shot.” I stood to leave to get away from the discussion and remarked at the door, “My advice would be that a teacher NEVER humiliate a student.”

The next day working on scenery after school, Mike Yonts, the eventual valedictorian of the senior class, said that the older teacher had told his English class, “Anyone who says ‘Don’t humiliate the students’ just doesn’t know anything about teaching.” As this teacher got her pick of the best classes and students, I would guess that using this method of discipline had been considered successful for her.

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During scenery time when he and I were the only ones to show up, Mike sometimes allowed me to read his theme for the week that he had written for his senior English class. He would say, “All I have to do to get an ‘A’ on a theme is follow her three-step formula, but that gets boring, so this week I got creative. It won’t get an ‘A’, but my grades are high enough that I can afford it. He was right. Although remarkably clever and well-written, it didn’t get an ‘A’. The only mark on it was beside a sentence that started “Back then…” because, although it had just happened (a car accident after an away basketball game—we all had heard about it) he wanted to make it timeless and had set it in the past. She hadn’t recognized this convention, although it was very deliberate, and wrote, “This doesn’t make sense.”

Sometime later in the semester she wanted to enter some of her students’ themes in a contest at Ball State University. She asked Mike to submit his B+ theme about the car wreck. When he brought it in, she looked at the sentence she had written in the margin and crossed it out. (Because now, the event was “back then.”) As Mike’s theme won a monetary award, she was to take him by car to accept it. He wondered what he should say if she asked him questions about me. I suggested he should just say, “We never talk.” We laughed a bit at that.

Afterwards I asked him what she had to say about his award-winning essay, written, I remembered, at risk because it varied from her “pattern.” His reply was, “Oh, she took credit for it.” (It’s a danger we teachers face, have all been guilty of and should avoid at all costs.) I believe our program at Greenfield was as successful as it was because I gave ownership to the students and parents who shared the labor.

Mike also shared a story he had written in the style of James Thurber—I thought that was a great assignment. He chose to isolate events and, with digressions, relate them out of order. It was a Thurber-like touch and very effective, I thought—obviously intentional and delightfully humorous. Her critique claimed that the paper was seriously flawed and would be strengthened by using chronological order in telling the events.

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