Tuesday, December 20, 2011

"Will the teacher who slapped you be there?"

That was my father's question when I updated my parents on the latest about the reunion. 

Obviously, he was referring to how I was slapped silly for no fault of mine--something that he came to know about only a few years ago, and a long time since high school ended.

"No, our reunion is only about the classmates.  No teachers or anybody else" I replied.

I visualized father at his 82 years of age walking up to the teacher, who is perhaps sixty years old by now, and slapping him. 

One of my favorite jokes about this "slapper," which makes me practically laugh loudly is this: we were getting ready to line up for the assembly and this "slapper" was my class teacher as well. (The "home room teacher" in the American parlance.)  The "slapper" was not around.  So, a classmate whispered that perhaps he forgot his wristwatch and, therefore, didn't know what time it was.

I quipped that given his size, "slapper" didn't wear a wristwatch but wore a big wall clock around his wrist.

Before you think that this was why I was slapped, well, no ma'am.  It was a long time after this joke, if one can call it thus, that I was slapped for I know not why :)

Or, maybe he slapped me because quite some time prior to that, he had asked us in the class which teacher we feared the most.  I said I was afraid of the chemistry teacher, because the word was that he would even take tubing used in the lab to beat the crap out of boys.  So, was it the "slapper" teaching me a lesson on why he ought to have been feared more?

The other day, while I was waiting for my bag to arrive at the carousel at the airport, a mother and two kids were standing immediately to my left.  One kid, perhaps about eight or ten, leaned over the carousel and the mother whacked him on his head almost instantaneously.  The kid turned around and looked at the mom perhaps wondering, as much as I did, at the senselessness of the whack.

Slapping just ain't funny!

It is violence.

So, yes, I am mighty glad, and so is father, that the teacher who slapped me won't be at the reunion.

1 comment:

Ramesh said...

Oh well - we schooled in a different era when a caning was considered quite OK. Come to think of it, it wasn't the caning that hurt as much as the "injustice" of it when you were caned for no reason. Although corporal punishment is banned now, getting yelled at or scolded for no rhyme of reason is as hurtful to today's kids. Not sure if academia is spared this, but in the corporate world, yelling, screaming at, etc etc is quite common and equally hurtful I would guess.