In article , Robert Casey
writes:

N2EY wrote:

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....

There may have been this side effect that, after school I split the
joint as fast as I
could.

Me too.

Never saw any molestation (don't know if my particular school
had any of that, but I wasn't at any risk of that).

How could you have not been at risk?

Then there were the yearly school plays. You had two choices: be in it,
or buy a
50 cent ticket to the play. It was a no brainer: I paid the 50 cents
rather than have
to memorize lines and acts and spending more time at the school.

We didn't have those until high school. Some were pretty good, and were done in
cooperation with the girls' high school next door. Good way to meet 'em...

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.

That's how history class got done. And memorizing names and dates.
Good for playing
"Jeopardy" but otherwise meaningless. It seemed that kings in Europe
would get bored
sitting around their castles and decide to have wars for fun every so
often. Football not
having been developed yet....

*ALL* subjects were done that way by the nuns I had. No real teaching involved.
We learned on our own.

They did have some good stuff. There was this thing called "SRA".

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.

"What was Mr Honey Bunny's wife's name?" I had a bad memory, but being
able to go back and look made it easy.

Exactly! Even though I had a good memory I wouldn't trust it, I'd just
double-check to be sure.

There were a few kids whose mother tongue was probably not English, and had
difficulty. I though that they were just brain damaged or something, as
I had no
concept that there were other languages than English until I was about
ten. Never
heard anything other than English in real life or on radio or TV...

Didn't you hear Latin at mass? They had all of us learn it from first grade.
Not what the words meant, just to blindly repeat the responses in Latin with no
understanding of what any of it meant.

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.

Didn't have that problem. Actually, my parents might have sued if they
knew, but I didn't know that at the time.

Nobody I knew would have dreamed of suing.

Some nuns may have been teenage girls afraid of sex....

None of the ones I saw were anywhere near teenagers!

73 de Jim, N2EY