INSTEAD OF A HIT, SINATRA (2024)

Janu is on the leading edge of an experiment in American education. Now that paddling is passe and rapping knuckles can land a teacher a lawsuit, educators across the nation are trying "creative detention."

It's the '90s alternative to corporal punishment, a whole array of disciplinary tactics that teach students a lesson without resorting to violence. In many cases, the school even ends up with a fresh coat of paint or a cleaned-up playground in the bargain.

"Today, a true teacher doesn't look at the same old model: paddles, standing in the hall, detention after school," said Catie Angell, who teaches at Highland High School in Albuquerque. "Kids are different today," said Angell, who says having students write things like "I WILL NOT CHEW GUM IN THE CLASSROOM" no longer gets their attention.

In the old days, Joseph Cifelli, the principal of Cedarbrook Middle School in Cheltenham Township, Pa., said students caught fistfighting would automatically get a three-day suspension. But in this new era, where teachers see no point to sending students home to watch MTV, offenders have to report to the "Nature Center."

There, they are charged with caring for a greenhouse of plants and animals ranging from an alligator to a finch.

"The kids who were fighting have to talk it out there," said Cifelli, "and the plants and animals have a calming effect on them."

At a conference in Washington last week for innovative teachers, many instructors said recent budget cuts added to the current thinking that Mark Twain's Aunt Polly had it right. Just as the well-known character sent a misbehaving Tom Sawyer to whitewash a fence, teachers are using troublemakers to scrub or scrape or sod. One teacher said his school recently started making the chronically disruptive fix the school's computers.

In Alexandria, when eight students were caught spray-painting a black-tar parking lot a rainbow of colors, they were sentenced to redo it in basic black.

The penalty could have been stiffer "but they didn't write anything obscene," said John Porter, principal of T. C. Williams High School. He also made them cough up the $200 cost for the repair.

"What has amazed me is that it has taken this long," said Irwin Hyman, author of "Reading, Writing and the Hickory Stick." Hyman, director of the National Center on the Study of Corporal Punishment and Alternatives, said the past six years have brought a "major movement" to stop smacking students and start thinking creative discipline.

Thwarting the movement, he said, has been a resilient faction of parents and students who support "kid-whacking."

Only two years ago, District Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly said in a televised interview that schools would be more orderly if teachers were permitted to spank students.

But that has led to lawsuits around the country -- including one Hyman was involved with in the District five years ago. In that case, settled out of court, a teacher hit a second-grader in the mouth for blowing bubbles, forcing a tooth through the student's lip.

In 1976, only two states banned corporal punishment in schools, Hyman said. Now about half the states do, but a measure to ban it across the nation failed in Congress last year.

Joyce Perkins, a school technology coordinator from Sour Lake, Tex., said in her small town, the paddle has never gone completely out of fashion.

But she sees no point or benefit to rapping a student. She does, however, get good results from her method of stopping students from cursing: marching them to the phone and forcing them to call their mothers and repeat the playground profanity, syllable by syllable.

"I've seen seventh-grade boys in tears," she said.

These days, out-of-school suspensions largely are reserved for the serious offenders, such as those who bring guns to school. The run-of-the-mill disrupters punch their ticket to an in-school "attitude correction center," known as the ACC to teachers and the Animal Control Center to students. There, they must sit quietly and do schoolwork.

At last week's National Foundation for the Improvement of Education conference, some teachers insisted that there is no such thing as a "bad kid." Maybe, they allowed, they have some who are "fidgety" or "distracted" or "affected by an attention disorder."

And they deal with those with the latest education buzzwords: "assertive discipline" and "behavior management contracts."

"Most kids come to school with problems that you and I couldn't even imagine," said Jay Pierson, a high school teacher from Austin, Tex. He finds "constructive noise" in the classroom helps settle some of the restless. "You try to put the fidgety ones behind the keyboard," he said, explaining that the old classroom configuration of neat little rows and hours of lecture went out with disco.

Constantly, the teachers said, they have to be on the lookout for new techniques. Janu, the musically minded disciplinarian, said that when Frank Sinatra wears off, he has another idea: Tony Bennett.