Dear Editor,

Please allow me to comment on the letter to the editor ‘Teachers asked to perform miracles’ printed in the Monday, December 21, 2015 edition of the Observer.

Teachers are very special people because they don’t have an eight-hour job. Their job is probably 24/7. They take work home, they plan their lessons away from school, they think about their students day and night, so their work is enmeshed in their everyday lives.

Their job requires more than the education they acquire to do it. Like a nurse — who has to have the stomach for the job — a teacher has to have the tenacity to withstand a lot, including criticism. It’s no easy task.

When it comes to corporal punishment of children, no teacher has been trained for that and no training manual has been written on the “proper administration” with “proper” meaning to apply physical force and pain to instill the knowledge of correct behaviour without any physical, mental or emotional consequences thereof by any one of the implements used in the application of corporal punishment (interpretation mine). Their training has come from their own upbringing, their culture, and their gut feelings. If a teacher feels that a child needs to be hit with something, they may do it.

I personally know that in schools teachers have “favourites” among children; some children get more punishment than others. Children who are habitually unruly will receive more corporal punishment, which may or may not increase the unruliness. Therefore, being the “teacher’s pet”, a position I once had the honour to hold, can be advantageous and a deterrent to receiving corporal punishment. But the “bad kid” can inherit many serious licks. After receiving corporal punishment, some of them give the appearance of having reformed — they are like counterfeit money — but in reality their bad school behaviour later changes form in adulthood. So now, in adulthood, they act out in other ways: alcoholism, instability, low work performance and achievement, or they can have high achievement mixed with alcoholism or any other self-abusive behaviours or abuse to other people. If children are being physically punished at home and they are disruptive and punished at school, they may be getting a double dose of corporal punishment. Should the higher dose work more miracles in correcting the child? Or, is a low dose (ie, home corporal punishment only) more effective. If children are physically punished at home and they are well-behaved in school, it serves the school well, but the child may be suffering.

Just because no alternative methods of discipline have been found in a particular school to work doesn’t mean that they do not exist. Some people thank their teachers for using corporal punishment on them as it made them who they are today, or it kept them out of jail. For others, it is just the opposite. Corporal punishment is a double-edged sword, and a complicated matter.

A M Ansari

stop1998@aol.com