Before, the class as an entity was impersonal. In an era of intense competitiveness the best pupils won the attention of teachers while the rest were relegated to anonymity. Many pupils remained known as ?Next? because teachers were not interested in their person. Today more and more pupils are living in a challenging environment. At least 10% of every school are made up of pupils suffering from fractured backgrounds. In a few classes, if the rector is undiscerning the victims of broken homes may be huddled. Poverty has undiscovered faces and when the masks drop under peer pressure outside the pale of authority or at times in the very teeth of authority, the distortions of character reveal themselves. These distortions come from home or one?s childhood. The young person who died by drowning in a river on the school sports day had been exposed to alcoholic drinks in a relative?s house.

Violence at home has grown into untold proportions. Children beating parents is now a common feature, which elders conceal from public eye. Old fathers are heard to be only threatening to report battering children to the police. They never execute their wish. If the teacher is seen as an elder, he will no doubt be subjected to the same violence the child metes out to his parent at home. There must be solutions to the problems leading to corporal punishment. They are indubitably more difficult to implement if one believes one can effect a change of heart and mind by a sleight of the hand.

● Rules of class management and forms of punishment must be discussed with the whole class and consensual agreement must be reached.

●The teacher must make a conscious, deliberate effort to ensure that he does not wound the pupils?s dignity. Too often the teacher who has himself lived in a challenging environment does not realize that every sentence uttered by him carries an insult. The more one is exposed to abuse, the less aware one becomes of it.

●Avoid mass punishment.

● Review your teaching methods. You may be explaining difficult concepts in a manner that alienates and excludes some learners. Half the problems of discipline in class can be solved by a pedagogical approach, which is compatible with the learner.

● Pay attention to the disruptive child because he demands it. Approach him and promise you will attend to his needs as soon as you can and keep your promise.

● Misbehaviour in your class is not just your problem. It is the whole school?s challenge. Your colleagues must participate in finding a solution to the problem. 60% of good behaviour in a school are the result of effective management. The rector should not feel that a pupil?s misbehaviour in class is only the teacher?s problem.

● The school must develop a mentorship scheme, which provides for every disruptive child to be accompanied by his form teacher or a surrogate. We cannot persist in an impersonal relationship pattern. What is the child?s home profile? Who are his friends? What does he do outside school? What traumas has he undergone?

The mentor-mentee relationship must be holistic. The child?s academic performance is related to a larger context in which he is living. The mentor must be aware of the larger context. If he cannot solve certain problems, he needs to be counselled. Then the school psychologist can assist. The emphasis has to be on an accompaniment of the disturbed child.

Teachers can?t spend their free time in the staff room when their pupils are demonstrating their real atavistic nature on the school premises. Because the accompaniment of disturbed children is a long winding task, many schools abandon the challenge and allow the situation to degrade till the child who could have been retrieved is expelled. Teaching is a vocation and human lives cannot be governed by administrative facts.