I cannot agree with the pacifist attitude; I prefer not to be walked over. For my sins, my first 9 years of employment were as a maths teacher. Corporal punishment was still to the fore when I started teaching, although it started to be phased out. My experience was that it did act as a deterrent. There were one or two hard nuts whom it did not seem to bother, but I found that the threat of the cane was sufficient to bring most unruly pupils back into order.
