Found this in a box of Dad’s things. He must have gotten it in college. Never used it on us. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt more than the electric paddle!

That was something cold you could say when you and your friend got into something and it was his turn to see the principal and get paddled.

It was a legend at my elementary school. “Mister Blankenship used it on a kid last week and it flipped him over the desk.”

If you’d been there before, you knew it was bullshit. There was no electric paddle and he never hit hard enough to flip you over a desk. If he wasn’t mad enough to do it after my friends and I peed on the little girl’s hat, it wasn’t ever gonna happen.

It was fun to scare the second graders though. In fact, it was kinda fun getting licks – it made me feel like Evel Knievel every day. It didn’t really hurt, and you could sometimes negotiate licks in exchange for them not calling your parents.

I only started behaving when they came up with detention. Licks only stung for a few minutes. Detention could take weeks.

I’m just as glad corporal punishment is out of fashion. At least for me it wasn’t abuse. Or not intentionally so. Most adults who spanked me were doing what they were taught to do: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” But after meeting enough unspanked kids who were better behaved than I was – at best it’s ineffective.

It probably just made me sneakier. It never stopped me from any shenanigans. A kid in my high school got licks for jumping off the back of the football stands onto some pole vaulting cushions. How was that supposed to scare him? He already jumped off a stadium.

#Discipline, #Education, #Corporal Punishment