A long switch and cheating at spelling. Our class room had three grades in one room. This resulted in hearing oral teaching three times. You heard it in the fourth grade. You heard it all over again in the fifth grade and again in the sixth. This sets up the thing that happened in a spelling exercise that was going on in front of the class room. One grade was line up in front of the room and the teacher was giving spelling test in turn to each student. The teacher was named Jo Wasson. She was single and pretty and I loved her and had plans to marry her when I grew up. She kept close discipline when she taught. To help her in the task of discipline she had a long switch which was green and pliable. As she was giving out the words for the students to spell my cousin J. D. Watts was setting on the front row. He decided to help the slower students by mouthing the letters for the students. Jo caught him doing this and gave him a warning to stop doing it. He tried to be more subtle and continued. She caught him a second time and gave him a stronger warning. He keep it up and the next time she caught him she said nothing but turn to him with the long switch in her hand and administered a cut across the neck and the top of his shoulder with the full force of her power. He stopped mouthing words after that. But he made another error in judgment.  He went home and told his daddy what the teacher did to him. For this he received a very hard thrashing from his father.  There was a time when parents expected their children to obey their teachers.