Punishment and Lesson

A few moments ago, my younger sister just told us of an assignment that she need to pass tomorrow. It required her to paste five cut-outs of things, places or people that may be useful in learning. She also faced the dilemma of having to fill up a fetcher’s card that will be passed tomorrow, but doesn’t have one. It made mom and I cringe, and as expected, mom would nag her just like she did to me years ago. She could have said it

I thought of a better idea. Of course, it was in my best interests to help my siblings grow without experiencing some degrees of ‘horror’ I experienced while growing up through (what I think were) wrong ways. I don’t want them to be who I am today.

I attempted to halt my mom into her usual nagging and invited my sister to get the job done ASAP. I let her find the necessary images in certain books that they don’t use anymore, and glue it on a notebook, as directed. The catch: she has to do each step within a certain time limit: one minute to search for five images in a book, two minutes in another, and five minutes to review all her images, cut them and paste them. Whatever she finishes in those time limits will be the ones that she will submit tomorrow.

She only managed to cut and paste one image: an image of a book.

Through that punishment, I had hit three birds in a stone: I rebounded her attention from my mom’s nagging (which did a really bad effect on me until now), I punished her so that she’ll learn, and I taught her how to be under time pressure— in easy terms, to cram. After all, she’ll need to get used to it eventually as she continues her journey in the academic life.

Yes, she cried. No, not the outrageous one, but more of a mellow, hurtful feeling. But she needs to learn the lessons of life in a hard way.

And for the sake of her scholarship, I intend to paste the four photos that she cut later when she sleeps. It’s more than her academics, really. I wanted her to realize that we won’t leave her hanging when she makes mistakes. She just has to learn from them.