Dear Editor,
Having read a number of letters and opinions on the primitive practice of administering pain to children in a focused and vengeful effort to get one’s way, I feel compelled to add my voice.
I experienced corporal punishment from one teacher who fell outside the formal education system my father was the Director of at the time.. She tried consistently to sever my fingers at the knuckles with her 12 inch hardwood ruler during private piano lessons. To this day I am amazed that I emerged from that six month ordeal with all my fingers intact. Without fear of contradiction I can state categorically that hovering over an 8 year child with a blunt wooden object viciously striking his fingers at every wrong note is not really conducive to learning the piano. Any thoughts I had of becoming a concert pianist were systematically beaten out of me by these wild attacks on my little bony fingers. In fact I didn’t see the keyboard much during lessons. Concentrating on her hand movements from the corners of my eyes left little time or opportunity to focus on the piano itself. It was just my luck that teacher Payne was ambidextrous and while trying to observe her right hand from the corner of my little right eye the ruler would suddenly descend from the left. The pain was always excruciating making me shoot up off the stool with tears in my eyes. Often as I soothed my aching fingers under my armpit teach’ would sip ice water from a glass making a contented “aah” sound as if relishing her success and accuracy.
Thanks to the ignoble practice of corporal punishment my piano lessons quickly deteriorated in to a contest of speed. The challenge was to remove my fingers from the piano before teacher Payne’s ruler could connect. The more frustrated she became in her failed efforts to dismember me the more she tried. Watching as her anger grew, I was certain of a bad outcome. Boy was she fast but I was faster and after a while my fingers hardly ever left the comfort of my lap. In a few weeks I had thoroughly lost interest in learning to play the piano. Over a few months and with plenty practice I built up a good head of speed so that teacher Payne could never strike home. She began connecting loudly with her veteran upright piano and gouging the highly polished mahogany veneer. Gradually she became feral and short of frothing at the mouth she would glare at me in utter disgust and disappointment.
Teacher Payne was now on a mission. Gradually I was able to detect a cynical glint in her eye as if she knew something I did not. It was that she had teacher power and I had none. Eventually my worst fears were realized when teacher Payne hit me on the knuckles well before my fingers even touched the piano. I was being hit up front and in advance of playing a wrong note. The first time she did it she actually glowed in her triumphalism. It was a clean surgical strike accompanied by a look of muted pleasure, a bit like winner-take-all satisfaction.
In teaching with violence there is a thin line between corporal punishment and assault and as young as I was I realized teacher Payne had crossed that line. Fortunately my father agreed with me and had my mother terminate my visits to piano hell. There are few things in life that I regret and not learning to play the piano is definitely one of them – thanks in large measure to the legendary and redoubtable teacher Payne and her twelve inch ruler.
Yours faithfully,
F. Hamley Case
