I came across the very interesting LA Times article about corporal punishment in Memphis, TN schools. I really don’t know what to make of it, not being a parent or teacher myself.
I’m particularly interested in parents reactions. Students are paddled for reasons like getting bad grades or performing poorly on sports teams, and nearly 30K reported paddlings in a year certainly means that it is pretty routine.
It sounds excessive to me. Most of the people that are pro corporal punishment believe that it should only be used in extreme situations. Not trying your best in basketball is not an extreme situation, and parents need to be the ones that punish their kids for bad grades (and I hope the kid has been tested for disabilities and family issues beforehand).
Talking out of turn…that’s a paddling. Looking out the window…that’s a paddling. Staring at my sandals…that’s a paddling. Paddling the school canoe…ooh, you better believe that’s a paddling.
(Sorry, haven’t read the ‘fine’ article)
I’m not against paddling, but it needs to be for behavioral issues NOT because you didn’t make a good rebound.
I got paddled in public school in Louisana in the 1980’s several times. However, it was always for things like skipping class or disrupting class after being warned. It never really hurt and it was fast and got the point across. We students never considered it abuse and the parents supported it. We also had the choice of detention or suspension if we didn’t want to be paddled. Everyone always chose to be paddled because it was much less painless believe it or not. No one ever got paddled for those things they talked about though.
I got paddled in school. I was a pretty wild little kid, and I had family problems too. My parents got divorced when I was 8 and that hurt me a lot. I was angry and out of control. This struck a cord with me:
This is exactly what it was like in my town of ~20k people. If I did something that was going to warrent me a paddling I knew that I was going to get it. We never had the kind of school violence that other schools had because it just wasn’t tolerated.
While I don’t agree with the coach’s action in the locker room, I don’t think that corporal punishment should be taken out of schools. Kids need to know that their teachers are able to take action if they act up too baddly.
The number of paddlings sounds large, but if it is only 10% of the population that is getting the paddlings then I don’t see it as a problem.
Paddling students is unnecessary and an act of violence. We can’t teach them not to hit each other if we hit them.
One thing that particularly bothers me about Memphis is that they don’t even require parental permission to paddle. In some cultures there is a strong objection to striking children.
Thanks for the link. That’s an interesting article, Jim.
(Retired Tennessee teacher.)
One of my favorite teachers had another approach. Even though the school permitted corporal punishment, he preferred to use other methods. If you talked to your friends in class, he would grab a big roll of masking tape and tape your mouth shut. He also had a ping pong ball that students would have to roll across the room, with their nose. Sleeping students quickly discovered that he could throw a blackboard eraser with speed and accuracy.
One paddling, spanking, canning, or whatever one may call it is one too many. There should be no corporal punishment in a school system—if a child deserves a spanking, assuming that any child ever does, it is the parent’s place to administer it, not some teacher or school administrator who may or may not be objective about it.
Bloody hell! How is this still legal? Though paddling sounds like something done in a swimming pool.
If any teacher/principal tried to take a hand to my kid there would be hell to pay. I send my child to school to be educated not “paddled” if there is “paddling” (shit that word cracks me up) to be done then I will substitute it with evil looks, loss of tv, confiscation of game boy and banning of neopets ( 
). The school can feel free to give him detention, write loads crappy lines, scrap chewing gum off the bottom of desks (I got that one several times ) or any other degrading or time killing activity they feel free to try.
Physical punishment is never acceptable…even if it didn’t kill you when you were a kid!
It could be worse. Check out what happens in Alaska :eek:
The article says Memphis has 118,000 schoolchildren, so this works out to be ~1 in 4 children getting paddled once a year. That doesn’t should too excessive to me, especially given how kids in urban areas tend to act. Some kids simply don’t respond to anything other than physical violence.
We shouldn’t be teaching kids that it is always wrong to hit someone. Sometimes violence is okay to use, sometimes it isn’t, and learning when it is appropriate to hit someone is part of growing up.
It is this very “we can’t punish our kids” attitude that leads to these kids acting wild in schools and having no respect for authority! I agree that parents should have a say in whether their particular child is to be paddled, and in my old school my mother was always called for premission and to be advised of the situation.
“Paddling is an act of violence.” Pff, it’s not as if they are having fingers broken! :smack:
Well this site says Tennessee is the 41st smartest state. Massachusetts is tops, and torture is not allowed there.
Wow, I didn’t know there were states with negative intelligence.
And it’s probably exactly that kind of… errrrr… confusion that caused Alaska to fall TWENTY-TWO PLACES in the “Smartest State” ranking. :eek:
I missed this lesson. When is it ok to use violence?
So you think they only administered 30,000 paddlings?
How naïve!
Well, in self defense or in defense of others, for example.
And how does smacking school kids teach them self defence? Unless of course they are allowed to wallop the teacher back.