We were of the generation that things changed at school. First year at grammar school at the end there was a ban on corporal punishment in state schools. Ours was independent so it took another year but the school stopped it early. One mate got the case 4 or 5 times in his first year. The way the head made the kid open the sliding glass door of the bookcase behind him to the side of the doorway, reach inside to take the cane off the special stand it was stored on like a Japanese samurai family sword, then hand it to the head and be beaten until he was crying. If that happened quickly less hits but some kids were determined not to and got a few more. They were all sobbing when back in their classroom.
Later on an older teacher stood in for our normal teacher. He was very strict. The first kid to test him ended up the whole lesson holding up a chalk to the blackboard with his nose and both arms straight out of the body. If his arms lowered or the chalk dropped he got a whack with the board chalk wiper from across the room. He then had to pick it up, hand it to the teacher and go back to holding the chalk and his arms up. He was wrecked by the end. That was several years after corporal punishment was outlawed.
Of course we had good teachers too but we remember the bad ones more as they had a psychological effect on you. In my primary school we had a teacher who I modern times would be locked up for a very, very long time. She ruined kids and that's not an understatement. Kids she picked on carried the damage into adulthood. She made turned them from bright and confident kids to victims. I don't mean victims of hers but victims right through school years. She put the target on them and it stuck to them. Oh, she was protected by her head, fellow teachers, unions, LEA and a system that institutionally didn't listen or protect children. Dark ages indeed.
Sorry for being so negative but I'm not even 50 but I have seen things at school that today's school kids would simply not believe happened.
On a brighter side I was lucky in a few inspirational teachers made me. My gcse English teacher, a level physical chemistry teacher who lmerit getting bored so would digress to little shows like chip on fire or hydrogen rocket bouncing dangerously round the kab, etc. Or the deputy head who started at the school as a trainee caretaker without any school qualifications who ended up getting a degree from a very good university then teaching qualification all while working as a caretaker at the school. He worked there all his working life and had great respect from all the kids. He had general studies lessons where he taught us about art, literature, classical music and a whole load of other things that normal lessons never covered.
Basically I got from them a critical awareness of things, chemistry education taught in a daring but effective way and a vast general knowledge/appreciation of things outside of the science stream I was always headed for. It's the rounding of you that good teachers give. The bad ones leave nothing but damage. Indifferent ones simply make things harder to learn.
