In article , Robert Casey
writes:

One of the male nuns was going to hit my hand with the blackboard
pointer. I was
to hold out my hand, but I pulled it away by instinct to avoid getting
hit. He broke it
on the floor. He just let it go at that, as I think he may have thought
he went a hair
too far with this stuff. Not that he dialed it back much.... No he didn't
make me buy another pointer.

Typical. Parochial school did more to create millions of excatholics....

Oh yes, but it's usually not needed, because nowadays most kids have
at least been to kndergarten, and most have been in preschool and day
care since diaper time. So they're more used to the whole concept of school.

But back in those days it was common for a kid to have never set foot in a
school or classroom until the first day of first grade. I still remember
other
kids being terrified. I wasn't - I'd gone to public school kindergarten.

Then I learned how different catholic school was...

I never finished kindergarden myself. Got thrown out of it in 2 weeks.
Was likely
partly that my mom had told me to not do anything a stranger tells me
to. Teacher
was a stranger..... I didn't know what the hell was going on with this
strange
place I got dumped off at one day.

HAW!!

In later grades (2 to 4 or so) I got placed in the "poor reader" group.
Because
I'd always be losing my place in the reader when it was my turn to read the
next paragraph out of the reading book. Well, who can keep track of
this while
several slow kids are slogging thru their paragraphs. I'd get bored and
read the
rest of teh story and finish it. And then not know where everyone else
is in it. Teachers never figured this out.

Had several nuns whose idea of "teaching" was to simply have a kid read from
the textbook. At any moment, Sister Mary Elephant would call out another kid's
name and if the kid didn't pick up on the very next word, he'd get a beating.
We became quite good at following along and daydreaming at the same time.

They did have some good stuff. There was this thing called "SRA". Was
a box
of about a hundred different short stories and articles. Color coded
for level
of difficulty. You'd pull one of your current level and you'd read it
and answer
the questions on the back of it by yourself. Pass 5 of these little
tests and you
step up one level. Was an open book sort of test where you were allowed
and encouraged
to look at the story again as you did the questions. There were about
20 levels.

I remember that! By 5th grade they'd run out of levels for me. I'd do 3 or 4 in
the time it took most of the rest of the kids to do one. And since you could
look back and check you answers, it was a cinch.

--

Another trick was that you never wanted your folks to find out when you got
beaten at school, because they'd give you more of the same at home, and a
lecture about how those blessed nuns had sacrificed their lives to teach you
ungrateful kids, etc. Well, we never asked 'em to.

Those were the bad old days.

73 de Jim, N2EY