My parents have nothing on the “adults” my school had hired some years before.
I don’t even truly know (though I have a sneaky suspicion I do) what prompted this, but one day when I was in second grade my teacher called me over.
“Patrick,” she said, “[girl 1] and [girl 2] tell me you were absolutely viciously rude to the entire class yesterday.”
I had No. Fucking. Clue. what she was talking about. She didn’t “buy” that.
“What are you going to do to make it up to them?”
Still had no clue, but at that age I figured she must have known something I didn’t, so I said I’d write them all letters of apology.
So I did that. For the next two days during homeroom. I have no clue what would make those two nasty little girls say that about me except that I told my parents they’d beaten me up in a particular way (which was true, every bit of it).
That teacher got fired a few years later, and I haven’t seen those girls in person since grade school. But I vividly remember my hand being sore from writing all those letters. Some of the kids didn’t even know what they were for.
“Vicious to the whole class” my butt. The whipping boy told his parents what they did, and lo and behold they got caught once out of all the times they pulled shit.:rolleyes::mad:
[sub]Issues, he’s got issues, he’s got lots and lots of issues. ISSUES!!![/sub]
I was maybe 7 or 8 years old (late 1940s) when my grandmother caught me scribbling on our neighbors mail box with a crayon. She didn’t get upset, just said, “Fool’s names and fool’s faces always show in public places.”
Not much of a punishment, I guess, but I’ve never been tempted to do graffiti since.
The majority of my punishments were always well deserved. I was a good kid, so I didn’t get in too much trouble (before, now is a different story )
But I distinctly remember when I was bout 10/11 just before my Dad moved out. I had done something (I can’t recall what, I just remember being punished for it. Possibly for talking back?) and he had spanked me. He ordered me to my room but I was sore and crying my eyes out and curled up on the floor near the dining room refusing to move. He yanked me up by the arm and slapped me across the face then ordered me to my room. I scrammed.
My Dad has this thing about crying women… he can’t stand it at all. That’s the one and only time I was slapped and I felt that it was unjust… I was 10, had just gotten spanked and just wanted to curl up and die right there while I was crying my eyes out. The spanking may have been warranted, but not the slap.
My previous post was memorable because the punishment was meted out by someone I deeply loved and respected. It hurt me to have disappointed him. This addition is memorable only because I refuse to forget anything my father did to me. May he someday rot in whatever passes for hell.
My father was the king of bad parenting for so many reasons. I maintain to this day even though it would erase my existance from the planet that he should never have been allowed to breed. I had the most miserable childhood imaginable. Here is a small snippet of life in our house:
I’m about 6 and outside playing with the neighborhood kids. Their favorite games all involved me crying. I cried a lot and pretty readily as it was the only way to get my father to stop with whatever torment he had in store for me. It was a learned behavior. It didn’t work on the kids though… just spurred them on. I went home and my father saw me crying and decided that since I was acting like a baby outside (where the public could see I wasn’t the perfect child tm and therefore a shame to him) he would make me be a baby all day. He went in a closet and found a diaper somewhere and put it on me and then invited all the children inside to tease me some more. (in case you wondered why I was so picked on and ostracized… it would be events like this)
The punishment I remember most (and I wasn’t punished often) was one summer. The family was up at our summer cottage on the lake. One day we were all in the local drug/cutesy gifts store. Being crazy about animals, I collected glass animals and would look at them every time we went in. One of the animals fell off the shelf when I was in another aisle and the owner of the store said I must’ve dropped it. My mother had to pay for it and gave me the broken pieces. The whole summer long I had to go without ice cream cones to repay her for the piece of crap I hadn’t broken. Now, that doesn’t seem bad, but when your four sisters and brothers are all eating their ice cream (a couple times a week) and being very vocal about how good it is, and you’re left holding a broken white cat on a blue cushion, you feel the injustice very keenly. Oh to be a kid again and think the world should be fair.
Once when I first started as a credit rep for the company I’m still at, my boss wrote me up because the computer phone logs showed I’d only made 3 collections calls in a month. Well, there where customers I’d called more than that in one week. I protested the writeup (my one and only) and wrote a very strong rebuttal, including the names and phone numbers of customers I’d called. Finally, a couple months later, he informed me he was removing it form my personnel file. It seems he decided to make a long distance call from my desk and surprise! it didn’t show up on the phone logs. He later told me that I could never depend on him to back me up to his superiors, because he wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t want to hear. Spineless jerk.
I was ten years old when we got our dog, Lassie. That summer, my mom bought one of those corkscrew stakes for the yard to let her in the grass to play. (We abandoned the idea shortly after, as Lassie, being a Westie, a hunting dog, proceeded to dig holes all over the yard-it was a mess!).
Well, one day I was sitting on the porch reading, and had Lassie tied to the stake, when I was went in the backyard and left the dog by herself.
All of a sudden, my mom comes flying into the backyard, holds up the leash and asks me where Lassie is. Before I can answer she said that she found the leash and the dog must have gotten loose or someone had taken her.
Well, eleven-year-old Guin starts blubbering and frantically looking everywhere around the house, calling for her, to no avail.
I ran up to my room to cry, and then I hear my dad call me from the family room (Now my sister’s room-we used to share a room). He was sitting there, with Lassie on his lap, watching tv.
After I covered the puppy with kisses, he told me NEVER EVER to leave the dog alone in the yard by herself again.
When I think of how freaking SCARED I was that I might have lost her. shudder
Other than that, my parents were pretty unimaginative. Time outs and groundings.
My parents weren’t very good at the punnishment thing. Either that, or I was great at getting out of the trouble I got into.
The one incident that is memorable happened in sixth grade. The kids in my class had a long standing grudge against the kids in the other sixth grade class and after several months of sabre rattling we decide we’re going to settle it once and for all on a Friday morning beofre school, gang-fight style in the woods just off of school grounds.
Knowing I was a prime target, I wasn’t going to take any chances. I came prepared to whoop some ass. I brought to school a 4-foot section of heavy chain and my M14 bayonet. My sole intent was to whip out the blade the moment before I was about to be clobbered, sending Bill, Robbie, Stephan and and Jay screaming in terror.
The fight never happened, but still I had weapons at school. Someone told the teacher that I might have weapons, and they were found and I spent the day in the principal’s office until my parents could get off of work to come to school. The principal handed down a 4 day suspension from school. Serious stuff.
But I hit the jackpot since it was the eve of two consecutive 3-day weekends. OH YEAH! 10 days off for the price of 4!
If I may ask, what’s the big deal with suspension? It never happened to me (I never even got detention, if you can believe that), but it seems to me that missing 4 days of school would be nice…
Because my grades were low in the 6th grade, the mother person took all my books and boxed them up and then removed everything else besides my clock and lamp that in anyway could have been construed as entertaining.
She mandated that I would read no other books other than text books. For an entire semester she thought she’d put me in moron hell.
Well GMRyujin… in my school they had a strict absence policy. 10 days out in a term with no waiver and you fail all your classes that term. You got waivers for things like the chicken pox but not for suspensions. One suspension would also lower your citizenship grade. I’m guessing all f’s in citizenship even with passing regular grades might make colleges think twice about taking you. All F’s in all your classes would surely make mom and dad really angry about those free days off.
My worst punishment was at the hands of my grandfather.
We were at a family barbecue. I would’ve been five or six years old. My grandfather was busy cooking stuff on the BBQ and I was watching him from a couple metres away.
He noticed me watching him, and told me to come closer. So I came a little closer. He told me to come closer, so I moved closer again. He told me to come closer again, and I did. By this stage I was maybe a foot away from the BBQ.
At this point, he took a lump of sizzling hot fat off the BBQ and stuffed it into my eye.
“There. That’ll teach you to stand so close to the BBQ”.
I was punished for standing close to the BBQ. I was standing close to the BBQ because he told me to stand near it.
I don’t remember much else about that day. But I’ve never forgotten that my grandfather is a cunt.
Well here are a few stories which left a mark on me:
I once snuck a look at the next card in my stack while playing War with my dad. He noticed and grounded me for the day. That curbed my cheating habits for a long time.
One day I got up and went to my friend’s house, he lived just down the street. Parents called ahead, apparently having noticed after I left that I didn’t tell them. So when I got to his house his mom sent me home. I was grounded for a week because I didn’t tell them I was leaving for his house.
Once I lit a match in the house and immediatley blew it out just so I could smell it’s smoke. My dad of course walked in soon after and smelled it too, I lied about it. So he grounded me for like 3 months, took me to the fire station to hear them tell me about playing with matches. I’m still angry about that one, sure I needed to be punished for lying but 3 months!? Granted 3 months turned into 4 weeks but still.
I can’t think of anymore but I know they’re there.
I used to get spanked, but really, give it a couple of hours to stop smarting and you forget about it…
The worse punishments I got were the being banned from TV or phoen or computer or grounded for weeks.
The most evil thing my dad used to do though was force me to sit on the sofa in the front room in complete silence and stillness while he read his book. Sometimes for hours on end. I was absolutely terrified of my dad as a child, appart from the having to sit still and be quiet thing, I was so so scared of being in the same room as him. To this day I HATE ticking clocks.
Citizenship is a quaint concept, is it? That explains a lot. My daughter’s school continues the tradition and I’m pleased they do. (They do have generally realistic guidelines for what’s appropriate.) What good is book larnin’ if’n you don’t know how to behave in civilized company? Or even if you do know how to behave and choose not to control yourself? Put your shoes on, Susie, don’t you know you’re in The City?
Dave, I well remember those time-outs, sitting on the floor, watching the slim gold of the minute hand jump slooowly across from II to III to IV. (The second hand was rather pretty, with its crescent moon tail and smooth swift circles. I rather enjoyed contemplating it - kinda Zen, actually - but it fell off early in the life of the clock.) Mom was especially sneaky in that, if you had been fighting with a sibling, you had to sit there for your designated time enduring silent company with your adversary. The exchange of this-is-all-YOUR-fault stink-eye gradually transformed into the unspoken solid camaraderie of the “unjustly accused” against the “oppressor”. Yep, she was rotten all right.
Still, if that’s the worst you remember, you musta been the Model Child. I remember one rainy Saturday, or maybe it was summer vacation, when we were stuck inside tearing up the house all day. I can’t remember how old I was; maybe you were too young to be in on this, but there were at least three of us raising holy hell for hours on end. We got escalating warnings until finally I remember running up and down the stairs, screaming at the top of my lungs (we were playing some chasing game), and being plucked up and swatted and sent to my room. Swats were pretty rare around our house but this was mostly memorable because I felt a relieved “Thanks, I needed that!” We were totally out of control, literally hysterical, and I only marvel that she waited as long as she did before reining us in. I think we slept the sleep of the hyperexhausted after that.
The other memorable punishement came when I was about 6 or 7. I didn’t want to eat lunch, so I ditched my peanut butter sandwich in the garbage and said I had eaten it. Of course, Mom found it. Grandma was coming over to visit, so I was sent to my room instead of the middle of the living room floor. Grandma always had gum or mints in her purse and I could hear my older brother greeting her and getting some goodies and I had to sit in my room and not get goodies or a visit from Grandma. I felt it very severe at the time because, geez, what is the point of making someone eat if they aren’t hungry? Served me right for lying, of course, and I have never told a lie since. No, really. Honest. I swear. Trust me.
My school had “office suspension.” You’d still have to go to school, but instead of going to class, you got to sit in a chair in the hall outside the principal’s office. The only supervision these kids got was through the open doors of the principal’s and secretary’s offices. They started this after deciding that the stay-at-home sort of suspension wasn’t effective in curbing bad behavior.
There was one kid in particular who got punished with the office suspension deal at least once a week, sometimes for as much as 5 days. It got to the point where, whenever he got punished for it, he’d avoid coming to school just so he wouldn’t have to sit there all day. Of course, that didn’t count against his sentence, so he still had to serve his time in the hall whenever he came back.
Fortunately I never came close to that level of punishment. I can’t imagine spending 7 hours a day for an entire school week sitting in a chair with no one paying attention to you and absolutely nothing to do. I can’t really blame him for trying to avoid it.
Of course, none of this ever altered his behavior in the slightest. That seems to be the truism for all punishments concocted by schools, as I remember it.
Mmm, my high school had in-school suspension. They had a classroom set aside for naughty kids. I guess the idea was you had to sit there all day in silence, but I, being the wonderfully behaved person I am, never had it. Actually, a good friend of mine, who’s a much much better person than myself, missed a day due to illness and forgot to get her parents to write her a note - which landed her in in-school. I asked her why she hadn’t gotten the office to call her parents to excuse her, and she told me that she thought it would be an interesting experience and wanted to know what it was like. Knowing her, she probably spent the day in prayer and contemplation.
I cut a couple classes in seventh grade with a friend. We got caught and I had to do detention every day for a week. Worst of all, I got yelled at by the vice principal. But seventh grade! Who doesn’t want to cut out of seventh grade? Worst. Year. Ever.
I can’t think of any punishments from my parents. Mine mostly involved a lot of yelling - my dad has a lousy temper and can get worked up over really stupid things. But I was never hurt physically, and I was never even once grounded. My sister, on the other hand, has tested my parents’ ability to come up with creative punishments time and time again.
I shared an upstairs room with my brother when I was about 13. We had each been sent to bed normally but we started jumping on the beds soon after. My father called out from downstairs for us to stop. We didn’t.
My father’s ankles used to make a cracking noise as he came up the stairs. Terrified, we dove under the covers when we heard that.
He walked in, picked up my brother by one arm and one leg and threw him high against the wall. No more monkeys jumping on the bed.
When I was eighteen I was in a fight with my brothers in the dining room and we broke two of my mother’s collector plates. I was told to move out. I borrowed a hundred dollars from a friend’s mother, bought a tent and moved my chopper, tent and a guitar to the woods behind the junkyard.
Right after I started kindergarten, I took it into my head one day to go see my grandmother after school. I was supposed to walk to the babysitter’s with her older kids. I just thought it would be okay, I really did not know that I actually had to go to the babysitter’s. I just walked out of the school after class and went to grandma’s. She lived right around the corner from the school.
Apparently she wasn’t home because I wandered around by myself most of the afternoon. I don’t know why it never crossed my mind to go to the babysitter’s, but it didn’t. I remember meeting some kids in the park. I knew some of them and went to one girl’s house with her. Her mom must have figured I was supposed to be somewhere else and called my parents, I guess. My dad showed up not long after.
He took me home and beat my bare legs & ass with a huge belt. I peed involuntarily from the pain (and terror.) I couldn’t sit down or walk for a few days and my mom stayed home with me during that time. My parents hit us all the time but that was the worst. That was over thirty years ago but I’ll never forget that beating, it was fucking brutal.
And way, way overboard. All they had to do was tell me that I had to go to the babysitter’s, that they had been worried about me and I would never have done it again. I was only five or so, I was a good kid, just confused about what was expected of me.
I was utterly terrified of him for a long time after that. Perhaps he also scared himself, neither myself nor my sister ever received that severe a beating again.
)
And that was 15 years ago… from what I hear now there are no jackets, backpacks, bookbags allowed among other silly rules.