Do kids today even get what Bart is doing in this picture?

When I was a kid, writing lines on the chalkboard or foolscap was a pretty common consequence - at least at my school. The worse the offense, the more numerous the lines to be written.

I once has to write a few pages worth of, "I will not stand up on the school bus", but I still maintain that I was totally justified. Norma Oxebin took my Muppet Show lunchbox and wouldn't give it back. Anyone in my position would have done the same thing: stand up on my seat, which was coincidentally right behind the driver. A sneak attack from above would have been totally unsuspected, and would have worked, too, if Mr. Heinz had just been cool and hadn't shouted for me to sit down.

My most memorable instance of someone else writing lines was in grade six, when one of my classmates was talking while the teacher was out of the classroom. She assigned him fifty lines, and at first, we all scoffed. Fifty? Are you new here? She started to write them out on the board for him ... and his "lines" turned out to be a paragraph that took up an entire chalkboard.

However, I think my teachers were on the right track. If this isn't still being used in schools it should be, because it works. When I had my first job, I kept making a mistake in how I wrote up the hot dog orders. I assigned myself to write out the correct way 100 times and never forgot for the rest of the summer.

Not to mention: I never stood up on the school bus again.