Ear Pulling

I just realized I said something that wasn't entirely correct on my other blog. I said that I'd only failed one examine my life, but there is another F in my past.

It was in first grade, and it wasn't an exam it was a worksheet. It was a matching exercise, I still remember how the worksheet page looked for some reason - it was trivially easy - and I didn't take it seriously at all.

Mrs. Seal, our teacher, graded the worksheet at her desk, then brought it over to me, dropped it on my desk, and proceeded to pull and twist my ear until it hurt like hell as punishment. That's what she did when she was displeased, she pulled your ear. Hard. This was before bans on spanking in school, and boys were still told to "grab their ankles" before getting hit with the "board". Twisting ears was nothing.

Unless you are a little kid. I never, ever wanted that to happen again. It hurt, it was embarrassing, and I didn't like it one bit. From then on, I was the model of good behavior, mostly out of fear. This was early in the year, and later in the spring my mom came home from a parent-teacher conference and reported that my teacher had said good things, including that she'd only had to pull my ear once all year. My mom seemed proud of that.

I'm not recommending the fear approach, but I probably needed something to keep me on track (an understatement...) and I've often wondered how much that incident, which clearly left a mark on me, mattered for how I did in school in the early years.