
My good friend Grace Dodds was telling me this morning about her experience teaching in a one room schoolhouse in rural Alberta back around 1944.
It was a very cold winter, too cold in fact, for the children to go outside to play at recess. Grace was shocked at the mayhem that ensued when the first recess period began and the kids, aged 6-14, began tearing around. The younger children were trying to avoid being bonked on the head with books, wielded as weapons by the older, bigger children. Grace quickly pounded on her desk bell, got the children’s attention and told them that blows to the head could cause serious injury. She said that the first person to do this again would face the strap.