Apply your heart to instruction

Proverbs 23:12-14

“Apply your heart to instruction and your ear to words of knowledge.  Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die.  If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.”

When I was in High School the yearbook had an area for the person who was most likely to succeed; I know you are surprised my name was not on that list.  Now if they had put in the person most likely not to prosper, to achieve little in this life, I would have been high on the list.  But God, He did it all, and it began in many ways in Jr. High.   An Assistant Principal who was having a conversation about my lack of studying with my mother, ask me to go outside, leaving his door open so that I would hear the interview.  This is what I heard as I listened at the door, “Mrs. Rice, Bobby is not a bad kid, and he’s going to make a great garbage man some day.”  That statement got my juices going on that day and I set out to prove Mr. McCloud to be very wrong, not by studying but I learned how to work from my dad and my manager, Bert Thieme at H.E.B. and I resolved that I was going to show him how wrong he was.  What a smart man, it did not make me do all that he hoped, but it did stay with me for many years, and my goal was to succeed at something!

When it came to discipline, my parents told my brother, sister, and myself if we got in trouble at school and got punished to tell them so they could show us what real punishment was at home.  My parents did not have dumb kids, what happened at school, always stayed at school when it came to getting in trouble.

Back in the fifties the teacher could beat your rear end for not doing what they ask, and guess what your parents approved.   The coach took great joy in Jr. High making paddles with holes drilled into them, and nice long handles and all of them had my name on them.

In High School they had other ways of getting the point across, but we did have Snuffy, and he called his paddle Hadacol, and for three licks I got a “C” in his Civics class.  Now that was a great deal, did I say, Snuffy was old and could not hit very hard? 

It is my understanding that some school districts are once again putting corporeal punishment back into the program.  I will believe it when I see it, can you imagine how many moms think their child is perfect, and the teacher cannot teach?

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice