Discipline – we’ve all faced it at one time or another.

Most of us have experienced it as training that corrects conduct or behavior as well as action that perfects moral character. It might have instilled in us some self-control. We tend to think of it as punishment, and it may well have been.

The word comes from the Latin word for “pupil.” That helps explain another meaning for the word – a field of study, one that requires order and self-will to master.

I don’t recall being subjected to much discipline at home – perhaps a few spankings for misbehavior, although there’s one instance for which my mother might be hauled off to jail today. As a lad of two or three, I apparently stood on our front lawn and spit towards people as they passed by on the sidewalk. Fortunately, I never hit anyone because I was too far away.

My mother witnessed my misbehavior from the front window and told me the next time it happened, she’d “wash out my mouth with soap.”

Well, you know what’s coming next – I disobeyed her, and she followed up on her threat. I can still taste Palmolive soap when I recall the experience today! But that did end my naughty activity.
(I do remember teasing her before she died in the early 1980s that if she had gone to jail for child abuse, we’d still have visited her there occasionally.)

Thinking back to my earlier years, my mother used to tell me that if I came home from Catholic grade school complaining that the sister punished me unfairly, she’d take the teacher’s side. Her rationale was that the nun had to ride herd on 30 students, so that whatever she did was quite understandable, and my mom would back her. I was out of luck. I don’t know if my mother’s reasoning was correct, but whatever discipline I had to endure didn’t kill me or mess up my psyche, because I’m still here and in reasonably sane condition. You might want to ask my wife about that last claim.

I still recall that after a wayward student called our nun an “SOB” in front of our whole eighth-grade class, no one complained when she grabbed him and marched him off to the principal’s office where he was expelled. He was reinstated, but not before showing up the next day to apologize on his knees before the class.

That was in the early 1950s. But things have changed today – very few would condone my mother’s rationale. Classroom discipline has taken a much different turn and teachers must be very careful in meting out discipline. We’ve even heard about parents hiring a lawyer to fight real or perceived humiliation of junior – unheard of in my school days.

With all that in mind, as you read this story, you might want to think about what you might have done in the circumstances that follow.

I want to say right off that I don’t condone “violence” of any sort, but sometimes…
In any event, you have to feel for a 65-year old substitute teacher in New Zealand whose actions and mouth got him in trouble. Maybe the resulting dust up wouldn’t have caused this teacher such distress if he’d have kept quiet when disciplining two 12-year old boys, who kept kicking around a soccer ball in the classroom after he told them to “tidy up.”

I’m married to a retired teacher who came home every so often with stories of incorrigible youngsters in her class who required discipline. Fortunately, she kept her cool and handled those situations appropriately all her working years without “violence.” But sometimes she confessed what she really would have liked to do with them.
The New Zealand teacher tried but failed to intercept the ball before grabbing one kid by the elbow and the other by the collar before calling them “d***heads” and putting them in a dark cloakroom. Another teacher found the boys crying and reported the matter.

Despite acknowledging his judgmental error and apologizing, the offending teacher was called before a discipline tribunal which said he “showed a lack of professional judgement and a lack of personal control.” His actions, the tribunal said, weren’t in the students’ best interests, adding being called a profane name was “humiliation a student should not have to endure.”

But the tribunal said the name-calling might not have been so bad. It said it could see “that in some circumstances the use of such language might not be so harmful.” It turned out one of the students had returned the insult.
According to the New Zealand news website “Stuff,” the tribunal concluded that “Relief teaching presents its own set of challenges. The teacher needs to be resilient and have a toolbox of resources ready to use in the face of adversity.” That’s easy to say after the fact.

The teacher apologized again but it still cost him. The tribunal censured him and ordered him to pay $950 in costs.

How might we have handled the situation? I don’t know, but I do know that teachers today have a much more difficult time maintaining discipline. In most cases, my sentiments are with them – it’s as if I’m following my mother’s example of taking the teacher’s side.