Newsletter 146: Back to School With Corporal Punishment

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one, in honor of everyone being back to school, is about corporal punishment at Mattoon High School. Or as we called it back then: Swats!

Last month, my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lawyer, died at the age of 88. She was a grown woman with a family and a life of her own, but like all kids, I believed she lived at Columbian Elementary School in Mattoon and never left the building. If you were to really break me down on it, I’ll confess there is a large part of me that still believes this. She will, after all, be known as “Mrs. Lawyer” to me forever.

I learned all sorts of facts about her from her obituary, not least of which that she was 88. This would have made her, let’s see, [does math], 55 when she taught me in 1985. She was married at the age of 20 the year after my father was born, she had three children, her husband died in 2017 after 57 years of marriage, she had a brother who lives in Seattle, she had a beloved cat named Buster, she “enjoyed quilting and socializing.” It sounds like she had a lovely life.

But my memories of Mrs. Lawyer are mostly about fear. She was a tough teacher, fair, but clearly a figure her fifth grade class took care not to cross. Ten-year-olds aren’t quite…