Forget the strap: teacher prefers force of fairness

DILYS Bossley remembers punishing a 14-year-old boy with a strap when she started teaching in 1957.

Dilys Bossley

DILYS Bossley remembers punishing a 14-year-old boy with a strap when she started teaching in 1957 and holding him around the wrist so not to burst his blood vessels.

It was a one-room class with 25 children in the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick and the school board chairman had instructed her to give the boy "a good strapping" for missing school.

She had been taught how to administer corporal punishment by the book.

"Someone had to inspect the hand first. If the hand's in good condition, put your hand around the wrist so you don't burst any blood vessels," the 74-year-old said during a break between classes at Bullsbrook High School on Perth's northern outskirts.

"There was a regulation strap. You had to hold the hand in the air; you couldn't put it down on a surface. And you had to count to 10 between the whacks. You couldn't do it in rapid succession because it wouldn't hurt as much.

"That was the way it was in those days. Teachers were expected to maintain discipline."

She moved to Western Australia in 1972 with her English husband, following an earlier mining boom, and initially taught at a Christian Brothers school in Bindoon, 90km north of Perth. There, she was given a strip of aluminium window framing coated in plastic to whip the children into line.

But she never used it. "I didn't like inflicting corporal punishment," she said.

"It reflected society at the time. The underpinning of all the discipline was as a teacher you behave as a kind and judicious parent."

As the oldest teacher in a WA public school she has watched approaches to behaviour change over the decades. Corporal punishment was banned in all WA public schools in 1999. But it is still allowed in independent schools, although only three are believed to use it.

Mrs Bossley said disciplinary techniques were more humane now. They were more about the shades of grey: finding out the reasons for bad behaviour.

And the best way to do that was to get to know your students - show you liked them but were not frightened of them. "My own thinking is it's about relationships with students. You establish relationships with students and I've never had major discipline problems. I've become known as someone who's firm and fair."

Such is the authority the 152cm, 45kg veteran teacher demands that she was once told by a former student, much taller and stronger than her, that he always thought she was a "big woman".

Year 12 Bullsbrook student Celsey Rees said: "No one messes with Mrs Bossley."