Also (meandering off topic, but following up friendships with teachers.)

The standard punishment in my school was a few strokes of a leather strap about 1cm thick, 3cm wide and perhaps 30cm long. I was really interested in Chemistry - to the extent of borrowing textbooks from the Public library, which I preferred to novels - but I was not interested in drawing pictures of Bunsen burners or Blast furnaces. So my Chemistry teacher and I soon settled into a routine where every week I did not do the homework and every week he would strap me. But I was also a member of the British Association of Young Scientists (BAYS) and through that got involved in computing and set up a group at school under his authority. So we had two quite separate relationships: since he had no specific computing experience I was in effect teaching him and it was entirely amicable and friendly- in the end I wrote the syllabus for a CSE exam - and in the other he was 'strapping' me every week...