The ethics of students we hope is to  not break the rules at all, but for some  the operating principle is more lenient- just don’t get caught.

 I kind of like it frankly when kids are a little afraid of the authority of the teacher or the principal. I don’t want to make them nervous but I do want them to feel that if they break the rules there would be consequences that might at least be unpleasant or inconvenient.

When I know there’s a problem is when the student is not intimidated, is defiant to the teacher, talks back, swears at her, charges out of the room or refuses to do what he was told to do.  That is however, rare.  We have ways of dealing with it also- usually to call in a principal, to keep the student after school, to contact parents.  But kids who test the limits also get familiar with the penalties – do the crime, do the time, on a very small school scale. I think that’s Ok really.  They are learning how life works.  What we do for consequences though has changed.

One might say, as a casual observer that schools are not very strict, that kids have no respect for authority, that there are not enough rules.  I admit that the tolerated noise level in some schools is way higher than it was even in the 50s.  Noisy classrooms where all the kids are doing group work and talking at once seem loud to me but maybe not to others.  I am  more concerned though when students do not sit down when told, do not listen as the teacher makes announcements or teaches a lesson, when they keep talking through the teacher’s words. 

Teachers have fewer options about what we can do about that. We could give a detention but many students take the bus home and can’t miss the bus. We can assign lines or extra math but we don’t want the child to dislike math. We can have the student come in for a  talk over lunch hour or stay in at recess or miss a privilege.  We can phone home but doing that we also are taking a risk because it is not guaranteed that the home will be supportive.  There are some parents who seem to tell the child that the teacher is not competent and as advocates for their child, seem to treat the teacher as the shared enemy.  That is a problem.

Over time we teachers have learned strategies to deal with the defiant and others to deal with the  disobedient but playful.  The important thing seems to be to never lose your cool as a teacher. The louder they get, the quieter I get, the more weighed my words, the more pauses I take. I make sure to never ever make a threat I don’t plan to keep and never to threaten anything that is of course not allowed.

The ultimate is for the child to be kept out of class and miss the lessons for a while. That always struck me as a bit of an irony since for some kids that is their dream come true. It takes a certain maturity to realize that school is a ticket to jobs and good things.

But one thing we definitely can’t do is to touch a child as we discipline. We run lots of risks even touching the shoulder of an angry teen to indicate it is them we are talking to.  The teen may misrepresent any touch as a hit when asked by others what happened.

We cannot of course strike, spank, slap, or strap students, all things earlier generations did permit in loco parentis, because the parents at home also had those rights.  We teachers do not have them and parents barely do either. 

So yes schools seem to be less intense about discipline than they were. But there is another angle to that.  We also have become super vigilant about things earlier schools did not discipline.

A playground  fistfight between little kids  that in earlier years may have been considered minor, shake hands and apologize is now treated very seriously.  If a student brings a knife to class that is itself grounds for suspension while in earlier times most little boys had pocket knives on them and used them to sharpen their pencils.  If there is a gun anywhere near the school we have a lockdown, call the police and the media arrives, hundreds are alerted. In earlier times the schools actually taught riflery and had lots of guns right on the premises. The pioneer observing us might think we are the ones who have gotten overly strict. 

Earlier schools felt it was their job to teach morals, inspect student fingers for cleanliness, make them sit silent in straight rows and not talk unless spoken to.  Parents over time objected that the schools should not butt in so much in the moral upbringing of kids and gradually the schools became more liberal.

We removed the assumption all the students were Christian. We in 2012 do not have Bible reading or prayer officially in school. We do not promote any religion and we don’t even call the two earlier religious holidays of Easter and Christmas by their religious names. They are now spring break and winter break.

I approve of these shifts because we have a multi-ethnic community and many are from Muslim, Jewish, and other faiths, and some doubtless from no particular faith. We must respect that and not impose.  But we have not really departed from character education because frankly, when  you are dealing with children to teach them honesty and sharing you are suggesting a values system.

The schools in 2012 have therefore changed the approach. We now discuss values quite formally with kids, having virtues of the month, focussing on kindness or courage and having’ sharing circles’ to talk of how kids are feeling today.  We talk of good behavior in terms of felling someone’s basket with good messages. 

We are in a process of adjusting.  Our rules on paper sound very strict.  If a person is guilty of leering, unwanted physical contact,  unwelcome remarks, verbal abuse, the student risks being suspended.    A student who makes jokes of a sexual nature, possesses a weapon or even displays obscene language on his T shirt may be suspended. A teacher likewise is under severe constraints. The teacher cannot humiliate, use sarcasm or remove the lunch of a child, cannot make a physical threat or even use mass penalty for the errors of a few or the teacher may be disciplined and suffer loss of career.

It is high stakes.  My preferred way to handle a situation is casual, if antics can be discussed in a few words after class. In my experience, the next generation is a good generation and most kids are good kids

The purpose of routine is security  so that kids feel their environment is predictable and safe. It gives them  order in a world that may otherwise have seemed chaotic and it is interesting to me that in times of great stress, during wars or the Depression, Calgary schools did try to still give children this strong sense everything is OK, it’s all under control.

The other purpose of course was to instil respect for rules, for government, for teachers and education.  The strictness of enforcement of  ‘the rules’ in the 1900s  may seem harsh by today’s standards and the schedule somewhat rigid.  However it is apparent that pioneers yearned to give children stability, despite the blizzards or crop failures.  Today’s teachers all know this too. A child really gives you only about 5 minutes to size you up. They become very good at it, the little ones reading body language and voice tone not just words and the older ones also knowing a lot about the challenges a teacher faces and many ways teachers could address them. 

The teacher’s job then becomes to instil as fast as possible, the impression of how this is going to work, how organized they are and how unlikely to be fazed.  The teacher’s first few minutes with any class are pivotal and many teachers convey the sense of dignity of learning by being organized.

 A class is individuals but they are also a group and if a few are disruptive, the others can’t hear well and lose time from learning.  A few rowdies can slow learning and a larger knot of them can nearly shut it down. Kids, being kids, are often amused for a while to lose a day, to let the lesson slide and just see where the mayhem may lead.  Teachers know to avoid those tipping point moments and part of avoiding that is to establish order early.

I taught with some amazing teachers over the years and  I might mention two. One was born in about 1915 and I met him just before he retired. He was a principal at a suburban
Calgary school in the seventies and taught us new young teachers some vital secrets about kids. One was that we must as teachers have a presence. We must be ourselves, dignified, unflappable and a little bit intimidating, just by being there. He said  “Supervise by your presence”. There was no need to yell at the kids. We were to stand and wait for silence, and interestingly this does work. 

He taught us to talk to disruptive children alone. We were not to address their failing in front of their friends, because this would embarrass them and they could become a united force against the teacher. We were to take the child into the hall or have them come back in, after class, alone, and chat.  He said we’d find that most kids, one on one, are quite reasonable.

He also taught us to look the part of a teacher and to respect our role. He himself wore a dress suit at all times. He walked down the hallway slowly, with authority. When he spoke on the PA, which was rarely he said “To the school please” and paused. All pencils got put down. This was the principal himself talking.

When I see drivers on the highway slow down when they see a police car, suddenly becoming very law-abiding as they signal to change lanes, I realize the same idea is at work.  Teachers are for a child the first experience of government, of authority. It is our job to make sure they respect us and it’s not about us. It’s about respect for the law.

The other teacher who impressed me deeply was a man with 35  years of teaching high school . His classroom was super decorated, with barely an inch vacant of wall space for he had so many posters of famous writers. They were laminated, he got them himself, he installed them with a gun stapler that he bought himself. 

He was strict. In fact amazingly strict.  He showed little mercy for kids who did not do their homework. He was sarcastic, ironic, funny,  playful and he loved his subject, English.

Every day of the week he wore a  dress suit, even in the 1990s.  He only wore casual clothes on Friday and the kids noticed this. It was  the dress code of many oil and gas executives  downtown – casual Fridays but dressed up the rest of the week.  His clothing showed his respect for education and for the students . He retired in his sixties, and sadly died of a sudden heart attack, only a year into retirement. 

His funeral was on a Saturday. The room was packed to overflowing. Several hundred high school kids were there, many teary eyed,  all giving up their Saturday. They sat and stood, row after row, formal and in black.

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Calgary in the 1880s was a rougher place.  Authorities tried to create order by sending in the mounted police and that is why  the fort was set up at all.  Early schools tried to create order within the rougher community.  Calgary businesses had to provide rails for horses of the customers, wooden or peg legs people had could not be painted  It was illegal to set fire to a person’s wooden leg and no more than 3 inches of water were to be allowed in a bathtub, to not waste water.  It was illegal to climb trees in some areas and illegal to paint a ladder because the paint would make it slippery when wet.  It was illegal to put caffeine in a clear soda, and it was illegal to pay for a fifty cent item with pennies.

In schools in the Northwest Territories students were supposed to work silently to not hinder their neighbors and to obey promptly.  The school’s mission was to teach a more civilized lifestyle, respect for truth, obedience. A child who swore or told a lie was considered a major problem and few risked it. To be silent meant you were self-disciplined.

The teacher might make a disobedient child sit in a corner, or detain the child for a few minutes after class. Some teachers had a child write lines on the blackboard, promising to behave better.  One child was asked to write “no more misdemeanours’ and not knowing how to spell the word wrote “no more Mr. Meanors”

In 1886 some teachers spanked the children, while others would just match the offence with a consequence, such as taking away for the day the child’s marbles if he had been fighting over marbles.  When students at a school in 1910 were caught sliding down the bannister, one teacher simply made them climb up and back the steep stairs four times.

The rules did not permit a teacher to give a detention that interfered with lunch, that lasted after the teacher went home or that exceeded 20 minutes. When teachers recorded length of detentions as they had to in the school register, these often lasted only 5-10 minutes. The teacher in 1910 was told that he or she must not display temper, injure self-respect or use ridicule, though anecdotally students reported that rule was sometimes broken.

We know that the effect of some discipline was to humiliate the child, to make him sit alone in a corner facing the wall, to make a boy sit with the girls, which apparently was punishment, or to make him sit with his nose touching a circle on the blackboard and not move.  A child who had been absent suspiciously might be given a note to take home to the parent and in 1910 schools had to contact the home if the child was absent two consecutive days.

The record of discipline procedure of the 1920s clearly counts on the back-up of the home. Early registers, now preserved in museums, show us what happened. In the 1920s a teacher would often record that he had contacted the parent- “Notified father who promised to have a talk with him”. “Notified parent who promised to deal with it”.

Some teachers made children who got poor marks do extra lessons, and those who misbehaved got extra chores. A few who scored poorly might be made to wear a pointed paper hat or ‘dunce cap’.  For a farming community when breaking a horse was well known to kids, all about establishing who was boss and breaking the will of the horse to resist, raising children was not seen as so different.

School boards did hold the teacher and the school to a high standard though. The school was responsible in 1910 for the behavior of the student not just at school but on the way to and from school unless the parent or guardian was there.  A record of punishments in the 1920s lists offences like smoking in front of the building, smoking a cigarette on the school grounds, throwing stones at telephone wire insulators, wrestling and squabbling on the way home, ‘disgusting behavior’ on a city street car. In 1930 one school principal even patrolled around the school exterior to see how kids were acting as they arrived or left. One principal, seeing girls blocks away making chalk marks on a city sidewalk in hopscotch pattern, disciplined them right there for defacing the sidewalk.

A teacher might just hit the desk of the child with a ruler to surprise him, but on occasion this caused the ruler to splinter.  If a child swore, some teachers, like the parents back at home, might make the child wash his mouth out with soap.

There were debates as early as 1892 however among the public about the pros and cons of actual physical punishment of students.  Many teachers used the strap only as a last resort.

In 1910 one teacher covered a grade 11 student’s mouth with adhesive to stop him from whistling.  One teacher lifted a misbehaving student out of his desk and shook him.  Some teachers cuffed a child’s ears, or tapped the side of his head. We now know that some of those actions can cause injury but it was an era where the expectation of such discipline was high.

People spoke routinely of getting a lickin’, being smacked upside the head, showing the child the back of their hand, giving the child the ‘what for’, and parents paddled the child with a spoon or took him back behind the barn for disciplining at home.  The threat parents used was common, even humorously given that the child was ‘cruisin for a bruisin’. The threat was much more common that the action.

In 1900 drills for cadets, having to sit in orderly rows, and line up were seen as subtle ways to instil in the young a sense of order and discipline though.  In 1901 the city, after all, did punish its criminals dramatically and Calgary had a hangman.

In 1911 rules for how a teacher conducted a class were very specific. She should ring the bell once to get attention, use a hand signal moving downwards to have children sit, upwards to have them stand.  Signals indicated need of books or washroom privilege.  Silence and decorum were to reign.  Even penmanship was  highly valued and all children were told to use their right hands and create a basic cursive stroke, no variation.  They were to sit up straight and not slouch.

In 1915 when the city discouraged youth from loafing on the streets, hanging around pool halls or drinking or smoking, school was a vehicle to teach more upstanding values..  Cadets at training might be tapped with a stick between the shoulder blades to make them stand straighter and that was not just seen as reasonable punishment but wise enforcement. A boy whose rear end was up too high as he lay on his stomach for rifle practice may have it tapped to make him lie flatter.

In regular school classes physical discipline was common. Most teachers were issued, right along with their bell and register, a strap, made of rubber, leather, canvas, or even part of a belt from a threshing machine. It was intended to be used, expected that the teacher would need to instil discipline and this was how to do it.  It was usually two inches by fourteen inches. There were rules for how to use it.  It was not to be used for young children or older teens.

It could be administered to the open hand or on the arm up to the elbow but not higher.  Early teachers actually did not like to use it. A few even were massively embarrassed if when they did they misfired and hit nothing, and the child smirked. A few after strapping the  child and sending him out to play, themselves cried.

The purpose was not so much to use it as to have it as a last resort threat. Sometimes students who were given a punishment to miss recess for a week requested the strap instead because it was over fast and they wanted to get out and play.  Seniors report now that calloused hands of kids who did farm labor really did not hurt much when it was used and some kids knew how to soap their hands up first to make it hurt less.

The registers show how many strikes/ slaps were used per hand and the number is usually two. In some homes if the child got the strap at school, he also got one at home. Other parents however felt it was too harsh and eventually advocated to have it banned. I taught in the 1970s and it was still used at some schools.  In BC the strap was banned in 1973, in Calgary in 1975,  in Nova Scotia in 1989. It was not banned in all Alberta schools until about 2004.

In 1930 many private schools also engaged in physical discipline and the age -old tradition there was to use a paddle or cane to on the child’s hand or buttocks. A few might permit having a teacher hit the child’s hand with a ruler or pointer and a few teachers even threw chalk at the student.

Teachers in early schools had to write down any time they used the strap. The inspector wanted to see this record and such journals are now in museums. The language is formal, nearly legalistic. The offence is described with words like untruthfulness, ‘salacious ‘ note, neglect of work, inattention, disobedience, truancy, second offence after being admonished and giving a promise not to do it again.  A longer description of the offence may even read ‘on or about June 5th the student…” -a very legalistic phrasing.

So what were the offences students committed in those early years? The register records them. Fighting in the classroom, fighting and hitting in the eye, horseplay in shop, idleness, marking on the walls. We read of someone ‘leaving class after roll call and playing truant’, not delivering a letter sent to mother, chewing gum after being told not to, hiding in the washroom, resisting the strap and clenching the hand. We read of students putting legs on a desk, leaving school without permission.

There are cryptic recordings of offences from the 1930s and 40s. There are some which we might consider very serious today – being in possession of material taken from electric shop- and some which are surprising- spitting at grade one child, speaking out by saying “six bells and all’s well’. We read of a student throwing books during class, shooting bent wire at girls, shoving others, throwing garbage out the classroom window, disturbing another class, throwing snowballs at vehicles, being ‘saucy’ in class, continued neglect of work, eating candy in school, tripping girls in the aisles, copying answers. Swearing at the teacher could earn more slaps – one entry does note 12 slaps.

Discipline was also meted out for badly written exercises, for careless mistakes in an arithmetic exercise, for bad spelling, in case of forgetting to bring books to school . Some of those behaviors we today might not even view as discipline issues. Times change.

Kids in 1906 tried a few ploys – for instance that if enough people misbehave the teacher won’t be able to punish them all, or that if they skip school the Friday before a week-long holiday, the teacher will have forgotten it by the time school restarts. The records show teachers however did remember.

Nowadays kids are not allowed to throw any snowballs on school property.  We have learned that they can hurt if kids put ice or rocks in them. But earlier schools did allow them, apparently, just not near the school windows or not directed at vehicles.

Most rural teacher memories note few actual discipline problems. They often speak of the amazement they felt at how cooperative kids were, how helpful the older ones were with the younger ones to learn, how mutually supportive in a blizzard or hitching up horses, how respectful of the teacher.

One female teacher found that when she started to part her hair on a different side, within weeks most of the girls in her class also changed how they did their part.  When one retired teacher met a bunch of her former students years later, they told her that one reason they had never taken up smoking was that she had said to them once in class that she never smoked. 

When older people talk about their childhood they speak with great affection about a parent who on rare occasions spanked them, and of their teachers, even though they were sometimes physically punished.  They understood the purpose.  To respect someone and to fear someone’s anger were equated, as if to fear displeasing them.

In later years the schools had kids write lines, and the story is told of one student who, misunderstanding, drew actual lines across the paper. In the  1980s and 90s there were fads of giving upset children have a ‘time out’, or sending them to a screaming room designed for them to vent anger.  Such rooms are currently being questionned in the US for times when children got injured and were bleeding after being in such rooms alone.

There are no easy answers. Ideally we could just take a child aside and reason with them. It still seems to work best.  But childhood is a journey and some kids try out pushing the envelope and that won’t change.