Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
Some of the teachers I had would have been in serious trouble today, they
often bullied children who didn't have an aptitude for their subject. A
maths teacher we had would often pick up 11 yr old boys by the ear if they
got a sum wrong and would also throw the board rubber (which had a wooden
base) at us.

My father said one of his teachers used to do that (this would have
been in the late 1920s). One day he did it to my father's big brother,
when he was dozing off in class. Uncle Frank was just awake enough to
automatically catch the eraser and throw it back at him. I don't know
what the consequences were but I doubt they were much fun.

We had the eraser-tossing, and I had one teacher who used to hit my desk
with her ruler when I was daydreaming more than usual. It startled me,
and perhaps embarassed me slightly, but did me no harm. I don't think an
eraser was ever aimed at me, or hit me. We used to have some really big
tough kids in Grade 8 - the local school system at the time didn't
really do social promotion, and also didn't let us out of what was then
called elementary school until we could pass. Provincial law said you
had to stay in school until, I think, 16, but the federal government
would pay what was nicknamed the 'baby bonus' until about 18 if the
child in question was still registered in a school. So there was reason
for some of them to stay on and on even when it was obvious they weren't
learning anything. Some of the boys - both the regular ones and some of
the big ones were far worse bullies than any of the teachers, and some
of our teachers were pretty strict. There was only one I really hated,
but I got over that years ago. There was another who left the profession
in tears after being in charge of our class for only a couple of months.
I don't really feel bad about that - *I* didn't misbehave - but I do
feel very sorry for him, even after all these years. He went through hell.

I went to a small rural school, and although the curriculum was very
narrow, it was as good and maybe better than that in a lot of similar
schools, and was designed to give you the basic options you needed if
you wanted to go on to one of the local post-secondary institutions,
especially after even the university stopped requiring a second foreign
language (we generally ran to one, and that was French and technically
not foreign). A lot of my classmates, unaware as I was of the massive
social changes ahead, expected and wanted to have lives much like their
parents' - the boys working in the local industry and the women working
as housewives and mothers, with perhaps a job in the local shops or
hospital before they married. The industry shut down years ago and few
of my former classmates stayed in a marriage for a lifetime like their
parents, much less in one that required only one income to live on.
Times change, and we all adapt, well or badly.

--
Cheryl