Sometimes I think about the evolution of education. When that happens I invariably think about my aunt Francis, the only teacher I’ve ever known who used corporal punishment.
Aunt Francis graduated with a degree in 1935 from the Richmond division of William & Mary, a school that went on to become what is now VCU. She taught in Central Virginia for over thirty years. A childhood survivor of polio, Francis had a badly disfigured left ankle and shortened leg as a result of the disease. Her custom shoes compensated for this unevenness with fat three-inch soles. The shoes were one of the few ways to tell her apart from her twin, Sally. They both outlived their husbands by several decades and enjoyed their senior years babysitting grandkids, reading stacks of romance novels, watching The Price is Right, and eating lunch thriftily at the hospital cafeteria. Francis, who had a bleaker sense of humor than her sister, once said that she woke up listening to the local news on the radio every morning. “I wait to hear the obituaries, and if I don’t hear my name announced, I get out of bed.”
She stood a slight 5’1”, weighed approximately 110 pounds, and taught middle school (mostly sixth grade) most of her teaching career, which ended in the seventies. She enforced discipline in her class with a paddle. It was common practice — I’m not sure if was termed “best practice” — to have some form of physical discipline in your classroom in American public school classrooms during the first half of the 20th century. It didn’t have to be a paddle, though. When he was caught in the act of cheating on a spelling test, my uncle had a pencil smashed over his head, breaking it in two (the pencil, not my uncle’s head).
In other classrooms, knuckles were slapped with rulers. Noncompliant ears were pulled. Knees were swatted with switches. These practices, which Horace Mann called “a relic of barbarism” all the way back in 1800s, have been expunged from most of our public schools – but not all of them. Corporal punishment still remains legal in 19 states.
It was legal during most of Aunt Francis’s teaching career, and she made prolific use of her paddle. In fact, we know the names of everyone who she paddled, because she had a curious routine of tracking her discipline, which was another common practice during its time, from what I understand. After discipline had been meted out, she would make the punished student sign the instrument of their punishment:
Over her career Aunt Francis amassed a collection of paddles, all filled with the shaky signatures of impertinent sixth graders. This particular paddle was custom-made by a student of Aunt Francis. He brought it to her a day after her previous paddle had been broken — on him.
I keep the paddle on display in my classroom as a conversation starter and a tribute to my family’s roots in education. It also is the inspiration for my lectern, which I let students sign when they have a moment of significant achievement.
It’s at the other end of the emotional spectrum, a positive reward as opposed to a punishment. While educational philosophies evolve, the human element remains the same. Former students would visit my Aunt Francis years later as adults to try and find their name on one of her paddles. I hope students return to see their name on my lectern.