During teacher training, I was not allowed to use corporal punishment on the pupils. Instead, I had to send or take miscreants to the headmistress. One particular day, at the end of the last lesson with the fifth form, a girl called Georgie had been in a mood all lesson. Just before the end, someone said something to her I did not catch, but it resulted in a volley of very unladylike expletives coming from her mouth. “Stay behind at the end of the lesson, Georgie. You and I are going to see the headmistress,” I said calmly. “That’s not fair, she
Category: School & College Punishments
School and College Punishments
It was the final week of our last term at junior school before we all moved up to the high school in the nearby town. We were both excited and worried about transitioning from being big fish in a small pond to very small fish in a huge pond at the new school. Life was now marking time before the summer holidays, and five of us were playing rounders during afternoon break. Well, one batting, one bowling, and three chasing the ball. As it was unlikely anyone would be caught, it was strictly 6 balls and then all moved round. The person
It was Thursday. The school never had parents evenings on a Friday when we girls would have the weekend to recover from our punishments. The teachers liked to see us on Friday morning, to see the effect their words had on us as we sat fidgeting uncomfortably on the hard wooden chairs. “Well Harriet, I don’t suppose you’re looking forward to this evening.” She said it with a smile, but I could not be sure if this was by way of sympathy or whether she was enjoying my discomfort. “No Miss,” I replied quietly, my head bowed to avoid eye contact.
At the girls’ school I attended from age eleven, corporal punishment was a regular occurrence, but back at primary school, spankings were rare and when they happened they were big news. Only the headmaster ever spanked the pupils, with a female teacher present if the pupil was a girl, and although very few children ever experienced it, it was an accepted fact that when he spanked he spanked extremely hard. So I was understandably nervous on the one occasion I found myself outside his office, my destiny unknown. I was seven or eight years old and sitting at a table
I attended high school in Oklahoma, leaving for college in 2018. When I was in 8th grade, I was in an English class taught by Mrs T. She was a lovely lady really, quite thickset and not that tall. She usually wore beige or brown skirt suits that kind of went with her mousey brown hair. Normally, I was well-behaved, especially in her classes because she made things sound interesting and I really liked her. One day, though, I was in a kind of mischievous mood and concentrating on the lesson wasn’t high on my agenda. I fooled around a
It was English double period. Mrs Bateman was droning away about Shakespeare. “Who is ever going to need to know this tripe?” whispered Vicky, whom I sat next to. “Too true,” I confirmed as quiet as a mouse, because Mrs B had the hearing and stealth of a barn owl. And the looks too, actually. I am sure her head could swivel the whole way around. Mrs B finished the lesson. Vicky dashed out of the room. “What did the old bat say at the end? I missed it,” I asked Chelsea, who was sitting in front of me. “She said to
I was in the supermarket yesterday when I bumped into a woman I had been at school with. We got chatting about the usual stuff, what our children were doing now, grandkids, the hideous new office development blocking all the sun from the town hall square, etc, when suddenly we heard shouting. Looking around, we saw a younger woman and her daughter, who looked about nine or ten. I don’t know what the girl had done, but the mother had had enough of her doing it, and was letting her know. To make sure she understood, her words were followed by a
It was the first day back to school after Christmas and the New Year in 1969. The first men ever had just orbited the moon in Apollo 8. The world was full of love. Yet here we were, stuck in an English O level class with it blowing a gale and rain beating against the windows of the classroom. The mood was very blue. After all the festivities, we were studying ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and being taught by Miss Yates. Miss Yates was usually a bubbly young teacher whom we had had since the third year. There was great excitement when we noticed a rather nice diamond on her ring
It is a bit sad when you get to the age when, thinking back to your school days, you remember the spanking, but not the name of the spanker. It was the geography teacher, and we’ll just have to call her Mrs Gee. I think it began with a ‘g’ or maybe that was a nickname, or ‘g’ for geography even. I don’t know. One of my class-mates, Linda, not a particular friend, had asked me if she could borrow my homework essay if I had already done it, as she’d lost some time off-sick and she just needed to
I attended a boy’s grammar school in west London between 1959 and 1966. The events described here took place in 1962, when I was 14 years old. I was generally a well-behaved boy, respectful of authority and, if truth were told, probably a bit of a wimp. I was not spanked at home and my only prior experience of physical discipline was having my socks pulled down at primary school to have my calves slapped long and hard. At grammar school, corporal punishment seemed to acquire a new dimension and significance. It was by no means ubiquitous and many masters