The Paddle and the Lie

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The Paddle and the Lie

How School Violence and Injustice Shaped My Education

By Joey Raines

Physical Abuse?

I attended Woodland Elementary School as a child, and I want to share this story because schools can be particularly unfair to children. The memories from those days are still crystal clear, probably because they left such a deep mark on me.

One particular day in third grade stands out. We had a substitute teacher, someone I'd never seen before. The regular teacher was out, and this woman seemed nervous, like she was trying too hard to maintain control over a classroom full of eight-year-olds. We were doing an art project that involved white paste and those rounded-end safety scissors that barely cut construction paper.

I was sitting at my desk, holding my scissors while staring down at my art paper, trying to figure out what to cut next. I had this habit of bringing things close to my face when I was thinking deeply about something. The scissors were near my face, maybe six inches away, as I contemplated my next move. They never touched my lips, never came close to my mouth. I knew better than that.

But the substitute teacher saw me from across the room and immediately assumed the worst. Without asking any questions or coming over to see what I was actually doing, she marched over and grabbed my arm. "You were putting those scissors in your mouth," she declared. Before I could even respond, she was pulling me toward the door. "And I saw you eating glue too!"

I looked down at my hands. There wasn't even any glue near me, let alone in my hands. The paste was in a small container on the table, untouched since I'd used it earlier to stick paper together.

The walk to the principal's office felt like a horror. Other kids stared as we passed their classrooms. I kept trying to explain that I wasn't doing anything wrong, but she wouldn't listen. When we got to the office, she launched into her story before I could say a word.

"This student had scissors in his mouth and was eating glue," she told the principal with absolute certainty. "I saw him myself."

I stood there, probably looking as confused as I felt. "I wasn't eating glue, and I didn't have scissors in my mouth," I said, my voice probably shaking a little. "I was just thinking about what to do with my art paper. The scissors were just near my face, but they never touched it."

The substitute teacher’s face turned red. “Now he’s lying about it,” she said, shaking her head. “I saw what I saw.” The principal told her to return to the classroom because the other students were unsupervised, leaving me alone with him. This was the same principal my brother had told me about. He said the principal had whacked him so hard he had to scoot down the hallway afterward because it hurt too much to walk.

The principal opened his desk drawer and pulled out a wooden paddle. It was bigger than I expected, probably about a foot long, with holes drilled in it. He placed it in my small hands, and the weight of it surprised me. "Hold this," he said, "while I explain why it's dangerous to eat glue and put scissors in your mouth."

Standing there in that quiet office, holding that paddle and listening to a lecture about things I hadn't done, something clicked in my young brain. This was wrong. Adults were supposed to be fair, supposed to listen, supposed to protect kids. But here I was, being punished based on a lie, and no one cared about the truth. That moment changed how I saw authority figures forever. I realized that children have too many bosses: every teacher, the principal, every adult who thinks they know better, even when they don't know what really happened.

The paddle felt heavier in my hands as the principal continued his lecture. I never forgot that day, and it was only third grade.

Two years later, midway through fifth grade, my family moved to a different neighborhood. It was still within the same school district, but I had to transfer to a new school called Summit Elementary. Being the new kid was hard enough, but this school had different rules that nobody bothered to explain to me.

My math teacher was a stern man who seemed to run his classroom like a military operation. He had this rule that if you got three zeros in a row on assignments, you got a whack with the paddle. The problem was, as the new student, I had no idea what 'three zeros' even meant. Were they talking about test scores? Homework assignments? Behavior marks? Nobody explained the grading system to me, and as far as I could remember, my previous school had never mentioned how they graded. The idea of getting zeros was completely new to me.

One cold morning, as soon as I walked into the classroom, the teacher looked directly at me. "Go to room 204 and ask for the paddle," he said matter-of-factly, like he was asking me to get a book or a piece of chalk.

I was confused. I knew exactly what that meant. The walk down the hallway to room 204 felt like a death march. My sneakers squeaked the entire way. When I knocked on the door and asked for the paddle, the other teacher looked at me with what seemed to be excitement, she handed it over without question.

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Walking back with that paddle in my hands, I could feel other students staring through the classroom doorways. When I returned, my teacher was waiting in the hallway. He took the paddle from me and, without any explanation of what I had supposedly done wrong, whacked me right there in the corridor. The sound echoed off the walls. The sting was sharp and immediate, but what hurt was the complete unfairness of it all.

"Take this back where you got it from and go back to your desk," he said, handing me the paddle again.

I never found out what those three zeros were for. He never explained what assignments I had supposedly failed or what I could have done differently. If I had earned three zeros, I was completely unaware of it, he never mentioned the two before the third. After that day, something inside me shut down when I went to school. I stopped caring about grades, about impressing teachers, about any of it.

When seventh grade started, I found myself at Lehman Junior High on 14th and Oxford Northwest. It was a typical morning in winter, with snow piled high around the school grounds. My friend and I were just being kids, horsing around in homeroom before the bell rang. School hadn't officially started that day yet. We weren't fighting, weren't breaking anything, weren't hurting anyone, just being a little loud and playful the way twelve and thirteen-year-olds are.

A teacher spotted us and decided we were being too disruptive. Without much discussion, we found ourselves sitting in the principal's office. The principal used a stern voice that seemed to enjoy the power he held over students.

"You have two choices," he said, leaning back in his chair. "You can take a whack with the paddle, or you can serve three days of detention."

I had learned my lesson about letting school officials hit me. "I'll take the detention," I said without hesitation.

"Detention starts at 6:30 in the morning," he replied. "You need to be here before the buses run."

I looked out the window at the snow-covered streets. "I can't get here that early," I explained. "I live too far away, and there's no way for me to get here before the bus. I'll have to take detention after the bus drops me off."

"No," he said firmly. "Detention is at 6:30 a.m. or you take the paddle."

"Then I guess there's no detention," I said, "because I'm not walking through snow in the dark, and I'm not letting you hit me."

He made me sit there for thirty minutes, probably hoping I'd change my mind. My friend, meanwhile, decided to take the paddle just to get it over with. When he came back to sit beside me, he was trying to convince me to just take the hit.

"It's not that bad," he whispered. "Your parents will never know."

"I’m not letting him hit me," I said loudly to my friend. "And he’s definitely not going to. If he tries, I’m calling my Dad."

I was using my father as a threat, even though my parents had divorced when I was four, and I didn't even live with him. But the principal didn't need to know that detail.

After half an hour of this standoff, the principal finally gave in. "Fine," he said. "You can have detention after school when the bus gets here. But instead of three days, you'll do six."

"That works for me," I agreed immediately.

It actually turned out to be a great deal. Because I had detention, I didn't have to stand outside in the freezing cold waiting for the first bell like all the other students. I could walk straight into the building and sit in the warm principal's office until classes started. That was a win in my book, and more importantly, I had established a firm boundary: no teacher or principal was ever going to hit me again.

A few months later, still in that same seventh-grade year, I got caught doing something that probably should have gotten me in real trouble. I had been selling Bubblicious gum in my health class, and it was turning into a profitable little business.

I worked at a small convenience store near my house in the evenings, stocking shelves and organizing inventory. My boss paid me a dollar an hour for five hours a day, five days a week. Twenty-five dollars might not sound like much now, but in the 1980s, $25 a week felt like a fortune to a seventh grader. The store owner had me stop by before school each morning to pick up packs of gum to sell. I can't remember if it was his idea or mine, but the arrangement worked well for both of us. The gum cost 35 cents retail, but he sold it to me for 30 cents so I could make a nickel profit on each pack.

That nickel added up. I was selling about thirty packs a day, which meant I was making an extra dollar fifty every day just from gum sales. Combined with my after-school job, I felt like I was really making something of myself.

One morning, I was conducting a transaction with a classmate when my health teacher spotted me. He was known as one of the tougher teachers in the school, someone who didn't hesitate to march kids out to the hallway for a whack. When he walked over to my desk, I thought I was done for.

"Are you selling gum in my class?" he asked, looking down at me with what I expected to be anger.

I could have lied. I could have made up some story about just sharing with a friend. But as I had explained earlier about what happened in third grade, I wasn't a liar, even when the truth might get me in trouble.

"Yes," I said softly, my voice barely steady. He was an intimidating man, the kind who didn’t need to raise his voice to make you feel small. I didn’t even know if I could avoid the paddle. Gum was completely against the rules, and I knew it. As I stood there, heart pounding, I had the sinking feeling that no matter what I said, it was already too late. And even though I had always told myself that I would never let a teacher hit me, I wasn’t sure I could fight this. He was that intimidating. In my mind, I was already preparing to just take the whack and find something soft to sit on afterward.

He stood there for a moment, looking thoughtful rather than angry. Then he surprised me completely.

"Okay," he said. "If you're going to sell gum, make sure you do it before the bell rings, not during class time."

I was completely shocked. This was out of character for him. I had expected the whack. Instead, he was essentially permitting me to continue my business.

I figured out what probably happened. Teachers talk. Word had likely gotten around about my refusal to take a punishment from the principal a few months earlier. This teacher had probably heard about my stand, and maybe he respected it. Or maybe he just didn’t want to deal with a confrontation from a student who wouldn’t back down. I was sure that it was the latter.

Whatever his reasoning, it worked out incredibly well for me. If he had tried to whack me, he probably would have succeeded. But from that day forward, he took a different approach. Before the bell rang, he would announce to the class, “If anyone wants to buy gum, you can get it from Joey before the bell rings.”

Students lined up at my desk every morning. I sold out every single day, all thirty packs. It became my first successful business venture, and it was happening right there in school, with a teacher’s blessing.

Held Back

My troubles with school had started much earlier than these incidents. Back in first grade, I was held back for not knowing my ABCs. Looking back now, I believe that was a failure of teaching rather than learning. If a six-year-old doesn't know the alphabet, the solution should be better instruction, not making them repeat an entire year. The teacher should have found a way to help me learn, but instead, I was labeled as behind and made to start over.

Being held back in first grade was embarrassing. Watching my friends move on to second grade while I stayed behind with a new group of younger kids was humiliating. It made me feel stupid, even though I knew I wasn't. If you ask me, that teacher was terrible at her job.

Years later, I was held back again in seventh grade. I'm still not entirely sure if I deserved it academically or if it was punishment for refusing to let the principal hit me. The timing seemed suspicious. Either way, being two years behind by the time I was in high school made everything harder.

All of these experiences, the physical punishment, the unfair treatment, the academic setbacks, contributed to my decision to drop out in tenth grade. I was eighteen years old and still two years behind where I should have been. I had moved around a lot as a kid, attending eleven different schools in total, which made it nearly impossible to maintain any kind of academic consistency.

When the No Child Left Behind policy was introduced years later, I was happy about it. Many people criticized that policy, but as someone who was held back twice and never finished school, I understood its importance. If a child isn't doing well, maybe teachers should spend more time teaching them instead of just holding them back. Schools could develop special plans to help struggling students instead of simply making them repeat grades. The approach of holding kids back ruins too many lives. I know that from experience.

The truth is, school felt like a place where adults had too much power and too little accountability. Where a substitute teacher could lie about a student and face no consequences. Where a teacher could hit a child without explaining why. Where a principal could try to force compliance through the threat of violence. These weren't isolated incidents, they were part of a system that seemed designed to break down students rather than build them up.

I learned to stand up for myself, but it came at a cost. My relationship with education was damaged early and never recovered. Even now, decades later, I can still feel the weight of that paddle in my little hands, still remember the sting of being called a liar when I was telling the truth. Those experiences shaped who I became, for better and worse.

School should be a place where children feel safe to learn and grow. For me, it became a battleground where I had to fight just to maintain my dignity. That is not how it should be for any child.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, I told her plainly that if any teacher or anyone else ever tried to hit her, she was to tell me immediately. And I would take care of it myself, just as I would have wanted my dad to take care of it for me if I had told him.

Looking back, I realize that no teacher, no principal, and no one in a school should ever have the authority to hit a child based on their own judgment. Sometimes I wonder if some of them actually wanted to do it, as if it gave them a sense of power or satisfaction. That thought chills me.

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Thank you for reading. If this story meant something to you, inspired you, made you think, or just kept you reading, I’d be honored if you’d tap the ❤️ to show some love, hit subscribe to follow me for more, and if you feel like it, you can leave a tip, totally optional, but always appreciated.

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