Nunsense
Posted on | March 24, 2008 at 7:51 pm | 4 Comments
I was somehow inspired by Gil’s post about celebrating Easter as a child to reminisce about my time spent in Catholic school. Thankfully, it was only for two years: first and second grade. For third grade on, my parents sent me back to public school, which is also where I attended kindergarten. It was either because I hated Catholic school and so much and got really bad grades, or because they couldn’t afford to send me there any more. I never found out which. My two older sisters attended Catholic school through eighth grade, I think. But my younger sister was in public schools her whole educational career.
My mom came from a big Catholic family and one of the stipulations in marrying my Dad was that she be allowed to raise the kids as Catholics without interference from him. My dad’s parents were some kind of protestants, I believe, but it didn’t stick with him and he’s largely non-religious. He only went to church with us on Christmas and Easter. When I was young, I could never quite figure out why he got to stay home and sleep in on Sunday morning while the rest of us traipsed down to the church. I don’t remember even asking him about it, but I do know I envied him. Church was never really my thing.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is the Catholic school I attended. It was around a mile from my house and I remember having to walk there from time to time, which is quite a distance for a kid. That was in the days when parents would send kids out anywhere without a chaperon, although I was probably accompanied by my older sister on most of those trips. I don’t think I was ever kidnapped, molested or killed, but maybe I was just one of the lucky ones.
I was always miserable and unhappy at the Catholic school. I remember getting into trouble even though I was trying to stay out of it. Those nuns looked for any excuse to exercise a little discipline. My first grade teacher, whose name I don’t remember, was particularly vicious. I believe she was a nun, because we called her sister-so-and-so, but she didn’t wear the trappings like the other nuns/teachers – she stuck to street clothes. So maybe she was something else. She looked a lot like Mrs. Olsen from the Frazz comic strip. There were a lot of rules at that school. A lot of rules. One of them had to do with staying on the playground at recess and not running around the church building like many kids were wont to do. One day at recess, I saw some older kids I knew making a beeline for the church. The perennial do-gooder that I am, I shouted at them to stop and started running after them. They made it around the side of the church without being spotted. However, me and another kid weren’t so lucky. My teacher saw us and we were accused of The Crime. When class started again after recess, the teacher made the two of us kneel at the backboard, on the hard floor without pads, and pray to be forgiven our sins. I forget how long we had to kneel there with our backs to the class, but it seemed like forever. I believe I spent the whole time going over the injustice of it in my mind rather than actually praying.
Is it any wonder I hated that school? That was only one of several punishments I endured, most of which I felt were unjustified. I couldn’t learn anything because I was always worried about getting things wrong and wondering what I was doing wrong. By the end of second grade, I still couldn’t read hardly at all, and math baffled me. I remember not understanding at all which was a “greater than” sign and which was a “less than” sign. The teacher never accurately explained it, and something in my head just couldn’t wrap around the concept. Whenever that showed up on a test or worksheet, I always just guessed. And it seemed like every other subject we studied had something to do with religion, which really interrupted the flow of actual learning.
So I was really ready to leave that school and was so glad when I got to go back to public school. No more wearing the white shirt with tie. No more living in fear of the nuns. No more weird rules. I did have to face some bullies in public school; the fact that my last name was the name of a cigarette and that I was really skinny made me something of a target. Yet I still preferred it to the hellish Catholic school. And I flourished in public school. By the end of third grade, I went from pretty much not knowing how to read at all to being in the accelerated reading track. I could suddenly figure out the “greater than/less than” thing: the mouth eats the bigger number. I was so much happier and didn’t feel like a social outcast anymore, at least not until I moved from Illinois to Colorado for fifth grade and was suddenly an outsider. I got good grades. I still got into trouble, usually because I would say something that a touchy teacher would interpret as sarcastic, but not as often and the punishments weren’t as bad. I had found my way. I don’t know if my mom ever regretted taking me out of that school, but I’m sure my dad was happy about the improvement in grades and about the money saved. It was one of the best things they ever did for me.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Those pneumatic tubes at bank drive-thru. Surely technology could’ve come up with something better by now? Although I do kind of like watching the carriers zip through.
Comments
4 Responses to “Nunsense”
March 24th, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
I wanna go to your school now. I’m still having trouble with fractions, and not getting beaten up by bullies.
March 24th, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
Hey Flasshe Marlboro: “I remember not understanding at all which was a ‘greater than’ sign and which was a ‘less than’ sign”: man, I still have trouble with that. I always have to mentally place numbers on either side of it to figure out which one it is. Weird.
March 24th, 2008 @ 9:56 pm
I still have trouble with that. I always have to mentally place numbers on either side of it to figure out which one it is. Weird.
I’m halfway convinced I had some sort of mathematical dyslexia at the time, and it took some patience and focus and correct teaching to get me through it. I still see lingering aspects of it in my daily worklife. Maybe you have a similar issue?
March 25th, 2008 @ 7:31 am
I started to write about the differences between my Catholic school experience and yours, but it ended up so long that I just wrote a post on my own blog about it. I’ll just say that our experiences were quite different.