Here’s true-life story from the “stone age.” Young people today will surely not believe that this is the way things were.
When I was in grammar school — a long, long, long time ago, before World War II — things were different. You behaved. You respected your teacher. You did not speak unless you raised your hand. You were not noisy and out of control. You did your homework. You asked permission for almost everything.
Back then; every classroom had a small block of wood called a Hall Pass that usually sat on the blackboard (uh, whiteboard) rail in the front of the class. It had the room number painted on it. You’ll never guess what it was for.
If you needed to go to the bathroom, you raised your hand until the teacher recognized you. Then you asked permission to go to the bathroom. Then the teacher would ask you, “No. 1 or No. 2?” (I swear this is true.)* You answered the question and then you took the Hall Pass and “did your thing.”
Why did your teacher need to know whether it was No. 1 or No. 2? To this day, I’m not really sure. Perhaps he or she figured that if it was No. 2, you would need a few more minutes away from class. But it never occurred to any of us to question the teacher’s right — not to mention the rest of the class — to have that personal information.
Another thing was the ominous threat of being sent to the principal’s office. This was for some major infraction of some kind. I never had to find out what happened to you, but I remember thinking that there was the danger that if you were ever sent there, you might never be heard from again. Perhaps he had some sacrificial hole you would be thrown into or something. The horrors of the principal’s office were too terrible to think about.
And now that I try to recall, I do remember what usually happened when you were sent there. It was worse than being thrown into a deep, black pit. What happened was that your parents had to come to school for a “conference” with you and the principal. That in itself was bad enough, but just wait till you got home from there! This was in the days when it was a real hardship for your parents to take off from work, travel to school and sit down with the principal. Believe me, the punishment you could expect from your parents was far worse than any black hole.
This was so many years ago that back then parents were not afraid to spank their kids for fear of being arrested. Believe it or not!
Like they say, today it’s not like it was in the good old days.
* I have a confession. I lied once. I said No. 2 when it was only No. 1.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Click here for previous Paul Burri columns. Follow Paul Burri on Twitter: @BronxPaul
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