Excerpt: My Kind of Corporal Punishment
The following is an excerpt from the book "Strippers, Guns, and The Holocaust Museum: OR: How I Survived My Time as a Chicago Public School Music Teacher"
Adults beating the crap out of students is never acceptable—just as teachers who sleep with their under-age students should be drummed out of the system, teachers who beat kids up should not be allowed in a classroom.
It is, however, not nearly as black and white as all that. Contrary to the blissful portrait of our youth painted by their parents, kids are just like us only they're stinkier, stupider and haven't figured out how to balance the good and evil in their grubby little hearts yet.
When I taught on the west side, I encountered a systematic belief that children were not to be punished in any way. The cult of thought that says punishment as opposed to reward was an evil to be removed as a tool made all teachers like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 2 where the students were the bad guys—South African citizens living in the US who would kill people and then claim diplomatic immunity.
Trust me, all a reasonable person under the constant stress of teaching 30+ kids needs to snap is an asshole eighth grader looking him or her in eye after punching another kid in the face and saying "You can't touch me. You'll get fired." After that same kid does the same thing fifty times and you're told the only way to control the situation is to call security or just kick him out of class, all you're going to see is the blood red color of impotent rage.
The key for me as a teacher was to get unpredictable and creative. I had to understand that the whole experience of maintaining a sense of control in your classroom was an elaborate game of chess and that I was smarter than these occasional thugs that pop up in Chicago Public Schools. And, yes—I understand that these kids are products of their home environment and need guidance but to devote your precious 45 minutes a day ignoring the 25 other kids who are hungry for some education because you're trying desperately to reverse the shitty parenting skills of ignorant and neglectful parents is just a waste of everybody's time.
Sometimes some quick and creative punishment is in order.
Here are a few methods that worked for me—please keep in mind that in every single case, I was cited in my file as using corporal punishment.
THE HOT ROOM
I taught on the fourth floor of the school and in the hallway leading to my music room were a series of small practice rooms. They all had windows that opened and radiators that worked with varying degrees of success.
If you misbehaved in my class, the first punishment available to you was fifteen minutes in "The Hot Room." Beginning every year, I would tell the (fictional) story of a kid I put in the Hot Room and forgot about. By the end of the day (in my fictional, cautionary tale) the kid had been in the room for three hours and was drenched in sweat and passed out from the heat. I told the kids that the radiator was broken in the room and it got very, very hot in there.
The truth was that the room was like all the other rooms—it was neither hot nor blocked from access to windows. But the fiction did its trick and every kid that got put in the Hot Room imagined how incredibly hot it was and would tell everyone (students, parents, teachers and administrators) about the brutal torture I had executed. And, more often than not, those parents were quick to demonize me as a monster for putting their children at risk.
Until, of course, I put the parents in the Hot Room.
THE MASKING TAPE ABUSE
Masking tape was a personal favorite of mine. Once, a kid kept running through the hallways slamming the doors to every classroom. He was suspended three times but he realized that if he kept doing it, he'd keep getting kicked out of school—so he kept doing it.
One day, he thought it was a wise choice to come up to my hallway and slam doors.
I caught him and he said, "Now you gotta take me to the office."
"No. Not going to do that. Here's a choice for you. You can spend two hours with me after school OR you can suffer the tape."
He knew the drill. After school with Mr. Hall was the worst nightmare he could imagine. He chose the tape.
So I taped both of his hands with wads of masking tape making the ends of his arms look like giant cue tips. He couldn't grab onto anything. "If you remove the tape before the final bell today, you get to spend five days with me after school."
He couldn't grab the doors so the afternoon was quiet. And the punishment fit the particular crime.
THE WORST PUNISHMENT EVER
...an hour after school with Mr. Hall. I figured out pretty early that using schoolwork as punishment was counterproductive. Reading and writing should be fun; should feel like rewards. So when a kid spent time after school with me, he sat there for an hour and did...
...nothing.
No talking. No writing. No reading. Just sitting and staring at the wall. Or the desk. Or me as I did stuff. That hour felt like an eternity and, once almost any student spent that hour watching the clock slow down like The Matrix bullet time, I rarely had a repeat visit. What made it worse is I would talk out loud about things that were interesting to me as if they were part of the conversation but the child was not allowed to respond. I'd practice monologues, learn lines for plays I was in, listen to MY music, or sit and do my grade work. And smile the shit-eating grin of a guy that got one over on you.
The worst thing I could do was to waste their time (like Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.)
What it all boils down to is that I understand why a teacher might want to beat a child.
The system takes away every possible means to enforce the rules of basic human behavior in public schools and then expects miracles from underpaid and, often, under qualified employees. What is required is the realization that punishment can be carried out as long as it is not designed to harm the child but to educate him through some creative justice.
For more of Strippers, Guns, and The Holocaust Museum: OR: How I Survived My Time as a Chicago Public School Music Teacher go to Amazon and purchase either a Kindle edition or the paperback version.
