Want a Pickle?

First, let me do the math. About 50 years ago I was in the 5th grade. I believe you can say that our class left an impression for years after we moved on. We had some teachers that would paddle you at the drop of a pencil. I'm going to go ahead and name two of them. Mrs. Robinson taught Science, and Mrs. Dees taught History. Was I an academically good student? Heck no! I pretty much kept a D average (60 to 69) in both of their classes.

Mrs. Robinson probably holds the record for the most paddlings in one setting. She once lined up 19 boys and gave them paddlings. I don't recall why they got the paddlings. Experience in getting paddled was not to be near the front of the line but towards the end of the line. We figured the teacher was bound to be tired and wouldn't hit near as hard. I remember one boy going home for lunch and coming back with an extra pair of shorts under his blue jeans knowing he was going to get paddled.

Mrs. Dee was my home teacher. Every year near Thanksgiving students brought canned goods to their class to be donated to someplace or someone. Well, someone brought a gallon glass container of big dill pickles. My good friend at the time was Tommy Burgess. One day after lunch Tommy and I returned back to the classroom before going to our Music class. The temptation of that big container of pickles got the best of us. We just had to toss it back and forth. In my mind of being a good ball player catching this big container would be no problem.

Tommy and I were in the music class and we could see Mrs. Dees looking through the window of the door before coming in. I've wondered for a long while how she knew it was Tommy and I that had broke the container. Surely she could not smell the pickle juice all over us from across the room. Even though there was only two of us, you still did not want to be first. Hopefully the teacher would be tired after giving 3 licks to the other guy.

My mom would always say "If you get a paddling at school, you're going to get one when you get home." What boy ever went home and told his parents he got in trouble at school. Looking back on those days and what my parents said, they backed the teachers up and reinforced discipline being applied at school. No questions asked.

I've been teaching school now for 25 years. So often the parents now say "You're not going to whip my boy!", "My son said he did not do it" or "My son would never do that". Today a conference with a parent is more like a confrontation than a conference. My parents or any of my friends never had a conference with a teacher. But, somehow if I got in trouble at school, she knew about it.