Today I am preparing pictures for the topic that @galenkp gave us, and my wife asks me: "What are you doing with that notebook and branch?"
I smiled and answered: "Personal association".
She didn't understand, so I told her the story, how and what this associated me with...
It was 1984, I was a student in the first grade of elementary school.
Back then, there were no mobile phones, Viber groups, E-mails...
Communication between parents and teachers was mostly conducted in writing. If the teacher wanted to convey a message to the parents, she wrote it in our math notebooks.
My parents looked at that notebook often, because they were not able to go to my elementary school in person, to meet with the teacher.
When the teacher wrote a note in my notebook, I knew I had messed something up...
And that's why I decided to hide the notebook and pretend to have lost it, until she forgets that she wrote a note in my notebook calling my parents to school because of the mischief I was doing.
I hid the notebook (committed a crime 🙂), and pretended to have lost it somewhere in house...
I even, together with my parents, looked for the notebook all over the house, pretending not to know where it was.
The notebook remained hidden, and I was safe from punishment.
After a few days, my dad opened the closet and found that "hidden" notebook.
The fact that I hid the notebook and pretended not to know where it was, as well as the message the teacher wrote in the notebook for them, was the trigger for the punishment.
Can you now conclude, what the branch and the notebook associate me with?
My wife understood immediately.
It was not an excessive punishment, a few punitive lashes on the buttocks, but a very corrective measure.
As soon as I remember that punishment even after almost 40 years, believe me, it was worth it.
During the years of my schooling, I never hid my bad grades, reprimands, absences from my parents.
I even kept a parallel journal where I wrote down every grade I got. If they wanted to know how I was doing at school, they didn't have to go to my school to see the class teacher, they could see all my grades, no matter how bad (or good ) were.
This topic reminded me of that incident from my childhood.
*What was the worst punishment you received from your parents? What was it, why did it happen and how did you learn (or not learn) from it? *
Then I got a punishment, (whipped butt), which taught me a lot. The branch then worked a miracle, like a magic wand....
From that event and those beatings I received then, I concluded that it is not nice to lie to my parents and make them crazy, but something even more important, I learned that I should not hide my mistakes and omissions.
Everything that happens in your life, share it with the closest people in your environment, with your family, because you will probably find a solution easier and faster if you don't fight alone.
If you keep the mistake you make only to yourself, you will be left to yourself, without the possibility to ask for help, and you will probably, as time passes, and you do not solve the mistake you made, get deeper and deeper into a dead end situation.
I can only imagine the beatings I would have received if Dad hadn't found a notebook and the teacher had personally come to my parents...
The rod would probably have been much thicker and my bottom would have hurt much more than it did then.
Thank you for stopping by my post and I hope you enjoyed the photos and the story I shared with you
All photos are my property, taken with a mobile phone