Hypothetical 2
Corporal punishment is permitted at your school. It is a district goal to not paddle any students in the first nine weeks. After about 7 weeks, some students you write up come back complaining about getting “burned” or just admit that their “tail hurts.” Their discipline forms indicate that indeed, they are getting paddled.
There is no intermediate step like detention between parent contacts (which are largely ineffective anyway) and write-ups, so you continue to write up students and they continue to get paddled. The administration, though careful to not make it overt, subtly indicate that they would prefer if you “handled classroom discipline” yourself. There are practical and perhaps moral problems with you paddling, but you have witnessed a few and feel comfortable that you know what to do.
A student throws a book across the room at another child. If you write it up, the friction with your administration increases. And the kid still gets paddled. If you do it yourself, you cross a moral line, perhaps. What do you do?
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Swing away. Well, I think I would wait until I was positive that I wouldn't mind going through with it. Once you cross that line, there's no coming back. Also, don't use corporal punishment unless you're really going to let them have it, because if it doesn't make an impact on them, you've got more problems. If you're not prepared to start paddling kids, then either come up with another consequence or continue to send them to the office. I use writing assignments in between the warning and corporal punishment. If they won't do the writing assignments, they get paddled. If you keep sending kids to the office though, they'll keep getting paddled, so if you're against CP, don't send them to the office. If you're not against it, swing away.
I would suggest having your own set of class rules. I really don't send a lot of students to the office unless it is necessary. For one, this shows the students that you run your classroom. It also shows the administration that you are teh authority figure in your class. Next year, I am going to include push-ups in my consequences list. The school doesn't really support detention, so you really have to be creative. I wouldn't suggest making them do writing assignments because students will then cognitively relate writing to punishments. I hope this helps some because I'm certain that other people are having moral inner conflicts about corporal punishment.