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In reply to the discussion: Georgia school to bring back paddling [View all]lisby
(408 posts)right now. Thank you for that.
My own experience with physical punishment at school took me from an already respectful child to a traumatized one with issues that last to this day and this moment.
I was six years old. I had first-grade math homework. I did not understand it and did it wrong. Instead of showing me why I had not gotten it right, my teacher berated me and struck me across the face. From that day forward, I was never able to handle math again without crippling anxiety. To illustrate how bad it was, when I took the SATs I scored perfect on the verbal and 300 on the math.
No one understood what had happened to me and I was too ashamed to tell my parents or even my sister. I did not speak of it aloud until college when I had an epiphany that I had been abused, not corrected.