A teacher left his office after requesting punishment for students who repeatedly failed to complete assignments.
Charles Biles looked after the instructor.
“I had some teachers like that,” he said. ”My dad was one of them.”
Of his father, William Poe Biles, the younger man said, “If you didn’t have your assignment by the end of the period, he’d set you out in the hall and wear your hind end out.”
Charles Biles, principal of Red Boiling Spring School 16 years, still practices what he learned from his father, who served as principal of Enon School and later, Willette Elementary School.
“You need to get your head on straight,” Biles said to a student caught setting off a fire extinguisher. The student was fined and paddled.
Although his punishment is delivered like the sting of a bull nettle, Biles still has a tender quality· he cares for his students. As they move from class to class, he talks with them about everything from boyfriends and girlfriends to studies and farming.
Many of the students in the kindergarten-through-12th-grade school have great affection for their principal. The upperclassmen respect him as a man who is likely to know their kin, having now seen three entire classes through 13 years of learning. And the younger students say a shy “hello” or grab his hands as passes.
But they all also realize that when they step out of line, they must pay the price. Put bubblegum in a girl’s hair or steal the batteries from a child’s toy, and it will get you anything from a terse reprimand to three whacks with the wooden paddle.
Biles ends his day with the same attitude of discipline and affection with which he started. To the student who came to borrow his paddle for another teacher, Biles quipped:
”Bring it back warm; I don’t want it to cool off.”
