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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Teacher ‘hit me’ : impact remains
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the 1970s, Berlyn Smith was a special needs student in a regular first-grade class in a Cobb County public school.
One day he came home subdued, a lot less jovial than usual. “He wasn’t happy at all,” recalled his mother, Alpha Smith. She asked him a couple of times what ailed him. All Berlyn, who’d suffered brain damage from an illness, could muster was “[teacher’s name] took a piece of wood and hit me.”
“That’s all he knew how to say,” Smith said. “He’d never had a spanking before.”
The next day, Smith spoke with the teacher. She admitted to spanking Berlyn. The offense: The youngster, while sitting at his desk, had let his feet dangle in the aisle. Smith explained that her son had had no idea why he’d been spanked. She asked the instructor if there might have been a better, instructive way to handle the matter.
Tell Berlyn, perhaps, not to put his feet in the aisle and why - that someone might trip, fall and get hurt.
“To paddle him and send him home without [his] even knowing why he was paddled didn’t teach him anything.”
She shared this story with me after Sunday’s column about corporal punishment, a dressed-up word for paddling, spanking or whipping. It was prompted by the Twiggs County school board’s decision to reinstate paddling in that Middle Georgia district for the upcoming school year.
I gave reasons why corporal punishment should be banned in Georgia’s public schools. They were backed by Alphonsa Foward Jr., director of the New Life Academy of Excellence Inc., a Norcross school that my first-grade daughter, Olivia, attends.
As imagined, the column generated tons of response, and save for one nut who posted an inappropriate comment in my blog, readers were serious. On topic. Many fell in the no-spanking category.
Robert Fathman, president of the Ohio-based National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, e-mailed a response: “Your [child’s] principal is a wise man,” he wrote. “African-American kids are hit at more than twice the rate of white kids, and Hispanic kids are hardly struck at all. There are cultural divides all over, and no one should be in the business of picking up a board and hitting someone else’s child.”
Smith, 72, a retired paraprofessional, explained that she had a personal story of why campuses are no place for paddling. Back to her tale.
When she talked to the teacher who’d spanked Berlyn, she uncovered the truth. The educator had been spending weekends in Tennessee attending to a sick parent. When she returned to Cobb, she’d head straight to school with no respite. Exhaustion was the reason she brought out the paddle. Nothing else.
“She said she just didn’t have the energy to handle it,” Smith said. “And she was a seasoned teacher.”
Just think, Smith asked, how many children might be unjustly paddled - possibly abused - on campuses where corporal punishment is permitted. She’s right. One is too many.
“I hurt thinking how many children are being spanked, beaten - whatever - by teachers and parents who are taking their own frustrations out on the kids,” Smith said. “And not accomplishing anything.”
Today, Berlyn is 44 years old. He lives with his parents in Loganville.
About 20 years ago, the teacher who’d paddled him died. His mother made note of her passing.
“The first thing he said is, ‘She is the one who paddled me, right?’ ” Smith said. “He has never forgotten that.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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