The kids will be going back to school pretty soon, which makes me think about how much schools have changed over the years. For one thing, some of the disciplinary measures teachers commonly utilized “way back when” probably would land them in prison nowadays.
Take, for example, back when my mother was in school. Her most embarrassing moment happened when the teacher caught her chewing gum in class. As a punishment, my mother was ordered to stick the big wad of gum on the end of her nose and then stand in front of the class that way until the dismissal bell rang.
My mother said the kids had a good laugh at her expense because the wad of gum was so big, it made her eyes go crossed whenever she looked at it.
Mom said there also was a boy in her class who was given an even more embarrassing punishment. His buddies had double dared him to run into the girls’ bathroom. So he did, because everyone knows the "double" dare is the Queen Mother of all dares, unaware one of the teachers was in there. His punishment? He had to wear a dress to school the next day, complete with a big bow in his hair.
And one of my father’s teachers frequently used the infamous dunce cap. Anyone who flunked a test or misbehaved in class would have to don the big, pointed cap with "DUNCE" printed on it and sit on a stool in the corner.
Several of my relatives who attended parochial school, however, vividly remember having to hold out their hands, fists clenched, so the nuns could slap them across their knuckles, usually with a yardstick, whenever they did something wrong.
“They weren’t gentle, either,” one of my uncles said. “Some of those frail-looking little nuns could really pack a wallop!”
Things weren’t quite as violent by the time I went to school, but the teachers still had a lot of creative ways to punish us.
I still can recall one of my first punishments, back at the end of first grade when I had to write, “I will not talk in class,” 100 times on the chalkboard. Well, I hadn’t even learned how to write in longhand (a.k.a. cursive) yet, so I had to print out my punishment. And seeing I’d just barely learned how to print, it took me most of the day.
The resulting hand stiffness and pain were called “writer’s cramp” back then, but I’m pretty sure the chalkboard-writing punishment actually contributed to the origin of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Getting caught passing notes in class was another humiliating experience. The poor kid who got caught either would have to read the note out loud to the entire class or, even worse, the teacher would read it to everyone.
I’ll never forget the day one of my notes was intercepted. My friend Cindy and I, who were about nine or ten at the time, had nicknamed one of our teachers “Miss Chi-Chi” because she had an ample bosom (and for some reason, Cindy and I always referred to breasts back then as “chi-chis”).
I had written a note to Cindy that said something like, “Miss Chi-Chi’s dress is real low in the front today. If she runs, she'd better be careful because her chi-chis will fall out!”
Well, I’m not sure who was more embarrassed when the teacher grabbed the note from my hot little hand and read it out loud…me, because my private thoughts were being made public, or the teacher, upon discovering she was “Miss Chi-Chi”…and the reason why.
She wore a lot of high-necked, baggy blouses after that.
Of course, the scariest punishment of all, the one that was guaranteed to make kids shiver in their Keds, was being sent to the principal’s office. I was sent there only once during my grammar-school years, but it was enough to traumatize me for life.
The worst part was I didn’t even know why I had been sent there. My mind raced as I sat sweating outside the principal’s office, waiting for her to come out. Had she, I wondered, found out about the bad name I’d called Gary, the playground bully? Or maybe she’d seen me sneaking into school five minutes late the day before and then slipping into class while the teacher’s back was turned?
As it turned out, the reason why I’d been sent to the principal’s office was because a group of about eight students and I had pitched in for a Christmas gift for our teacher. Three of us had gone shopping together for the gift and ended up with 99 cents left over afterwards. So we used it to treat ourselves to some ice cream, seeing we’d worked so hard walking from store to store in search of the perfect gift.
“You stole money!” the principal accused me. “How could you do such a thing?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d never stolen anything in my life.
“That leftover money should have been divided evenly among everyone who pitched in for the gift,” the principal explained when she saw my completely clueless expression. “It was not meant to buy ice cream for only three of you! That is stealing!”
I burst into tears, expecting the police to come slap the cuffs on me at any minute and drag me off to jail for the felony theft of fudge-ripple with sprinkles.
The principal made the three of us ice-cream eaters cough up the 99 cents and give it back to all of the kids who’d pitched in for the teacher’s gift. And to make matters worse, she also ordered us to personally apologize to them! I mean, those kids had no idea anything was wrong, so why couldn't we just have given them back the money and said, "Here, this was extra" and left it at that instead of having to confess something to them that made us look like Al Capone and his cohorts? I mean, we'd already learned our lesson, so why humiliate us even more?
I'd already spent all of my weekly allowance by then, so I had to ask my parents for an emergency advance so I could contribute my portion (33 cents) toward the refund. I honestly believed I'd end up in jail if I didn't.
What bothered me the most was I couldn't figure out how the principal had found out about the ice cream in the first place. Just as I was believing she'd had spies following us around after school, Pat, one of the three of us who'd committed the alleged crime, confessed she had told her mother about how much fun we'd had shopping, and when she came to the part about the ice cream, her mother immediately had become upset...upset enough to contact the principal and squeal on her own daughter to teach her a lesson about right from wrong.
Sure, I fully understand her reasoning now, but back when I was a kid, Pat's mother instantly became Mrs. Benedict Arnold in my eyes.
Now that I think about it, I guess I was lucky I didn’t receive an even worse punishment. I could have been ordered to stand in front of the class with an ice-cream cone on my nose.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
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