Discipline...yes discipline (and punishment)
- Mr Feiglin used the cane; Mr Ranoschy, Mr Kenny and Mr Doyle administered the strap; Mr Segal opted to hit the back of the legs
- ..and talking of Mr Segal...- If Mr. Segal caught you chewing gum, he would make you spit it in his hand and then he would take it and rub it in you hair. This caused many girls to wag class and spend hours in the bathroom trying to remove the offending P.K or Juicy Fruit mess
- Mrs Fuzy used alternation of very soft and very loud speech to instill fear and obedience into her students, most of whom were taller than she was. Students who came late were sometimes made to stand for the entire lesson. Students who had failed to memorize a sentence were also made to stand. Sometimes this was just an efficiency measure, so she could then give a black mark to all those who were standing.
- Mr Hayes' punishments were to write 'manners', 'obedience' or 'silence' 50 or 100 times. Most of the time he was very relaxed and friendly, and told us many details of his life. His full name was Gerald Raymond Hayes, born 22/12/1928, 2 children named Brendan and Veronica, who was aged 4 and whose favourite food was 'sholocolate'. By the end of the year, he became convinced that his efforts to make us behave better had failed, and confided in his Form 1 class that he was leaving Scopus in spite of having been offered $7400 a year to stay.
- Mr Kosky would explode in fits of anger, which sometimes involved flinging his collection of National Geographic magazines all over the room. When he didn't feel like teaching, he let us read these to study the traditional wardrobe of African women. Come to think of it, there were boys in them too.
- Mr Jagger talked about giving Psalm 119 to copy, but I don't know if he actually did.
- Mrs Elsner liked to talk about 'undercurrents' of noise in her class. Perhaps David Hendel remembers the imitation he did of her.
- Mrs Wunderlich (the primary librarian) yelled all the time.
- Mr Kenny once told our class that he had taught in the slums of Fitzroy, but had never encountered such insolence there as he did at Scopus. (Fred Tryster)
- Miss Ring had to contend with frequent fights between Steven Ehrenreich and Joseph Baladi. The solution she found was to stage a fight and a mock trial. Only 5 students were in on the secret: Steven, Joseph, Steven Prawer as judge, Naomi Medding as Joseph's lawyer, and I (Fred Tryster) as Steven's lawyer. Steven started the fight by knocking Joseph's books off his desk, and Miss Ring put Steven on trial. Unfortunately, I had seen very few courtroom dramas on TV, so concepts like objections sustained and overruled only became known to me during the trial itself, and as a result I did a terrible job as a lawyer. This, together with my distaste for hearing about blood, seriously limited the choice of respectable professions open to me later in life. Besides, everyone saw that Steven really did start the fight. Passions were running high by the time he was convicted, and Miss Ring quickly explained it was staged before things got out of hand.
- Mr Feige, who replaced Mr Ring when she left mid-year, described any ideas of which he disapproved as 'barmy' or 'ludicrous'.
- Mrs Katzenelenbogen made so little progress teaching us Mishna that she handed over the job to Steven Prawer and me. (Fred Tryster)
- Mrs Rubin was the custodian of all primary school children who were too naughty to take part in sport, and also those who had medical reasons for not taking part. I was allergic to the pollen from grass, which gave me hay fever, so I was usually exempt from sport lessons. Since I was not being punished, and was in her class every week, Mrs Rubin called me 'gorgeous' and gave me respectable jobs to do, like cleaning the blackboard. It didn't occur to me at the time, but this was probably worse for my hay fever than sport would have been. (Fred Tryster)
- Mr Morgan showed what he thought of our infantile behavior by drawing a picture on the blackboard of a baby with a dummy in its mouth. Thereafter, instead of just misbehaving randomly when we were supposed to be working, we drew babies on the blackboard.
- Mr Berns nipped any dissent in the bud by announcing in the first lesson, "Last year's Form 4 were a pack of whingers".
- Mrs Meakins would drape a ruler across the back of your knees as her way of discipline.
- Most Hebrew teachers gave written punishments, e.g. "You will copy chapter xxx 3 times with dots". Mrs Hirsh excelled in this. Her lessons all began with collection of punishments from the previous lesson, listening to reasons why punishments had not been done, and assigning new punishments. Then she spent several minutes attempting to get us to open our books, usually drew a freehand map of Israel on the board, and gave some more punishments. Towards the end of the lesson, she usually managed to get someone to read the first one or two sentences of the day's chapter, gave some more punishments, the bell went, and she assigned the rest of the chapter as a homework reading assignment.
- Particularly serious offenses were punished by detention. Most teachers did not resort to this, because there is a theory that punishment needs to be swift to be effective, and detention had to be announced in advance with a letter to the parents. However, Mrs Malady found a way around this. She would send home notes with everyone in the class, saying, "Your child MAY have a detention tomorrow".
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