Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 29, 2009 AND THEN THERE WERE NUNS

Speaking of dinosaurs...specifically the rearing and education of dinosaurs...the "good ol' days".

Three nuns left their impression on me...mentally, not physically.

Sister Roberta...

Sister Roberta was "the principal" of St. Joseph's school for a time back in the 1950s.

In the eye of the beholder...

Being 6 or 7 years old at the time of the incident, my memory of Sister Roberta is that she was probably 7-foot tall and full of muscle. When she bent down, grabbed the front of the shirt of a 1st or 2nd grader and literally lifted him off his feet to her eye level for a few words of "encouragement", well, need I say more.

THAT was when I decided to become Saint Ronnie.

Sister Estelle...

By now, I was in the 7th or 8th grade...a different perspective.

Sister Estelle was maybe 4 feet 6 inches tall and old. One day, we were having some kind of meeting after school. While Sister Estelle was distracted by a few questions, one of my classmates picked up the gavel that we used for the meetings. He wandered behind the good sister and acted like he was going to hit her over the head with the gavel. Well, as he made the motion to strike, the head of the gavel flew off and hit the good sister squarely in the back of the head, causing her to wobble for a few moments. However, have no fear, nuns may wobble, but they don't fall down.

Sister ??? ...

May have been Sister Estelle again, but my memory fails me.

Nuns and their rulers...it must have been in their "basic training". The story below mentions it...anyone who attended Catholic school back in the day mentions it...and that's my third vivid memory.

Back in the day, Cairo had some rough customers...with ties to organized crime in Chicago. While they were hiding out in Cairo, their kids would go to school. Being good Catholics (e.g. the Corleone Family from "The Godfather"), they sent their kids to St. Joseph's school.

Now, teachers today would have enough sense to steer clear of such children...might try to avoid giving them breaks, but definitely would NOT do something to the children that would raise the ire of the family and cause teacher some breaks...of the arms, the legs, or the neck!

But, we're talkin' NUNS here...even 4 foot 6 inch nuns!

One day, one such "connected" child in 7th Grade did something of which Sister did not approve. Sister whips out her ruler and orders the offender to "assume the position"...the prescribed position being palm up. (Sisters weren't cruel. After all, they were semi-human!)

Anyway...

Sister brought her arm up to deliver the "corrective" blow. Just as she lowered the boom, the "connected" child closed his hand and rotated it so that the knuckles of his fist were now up. Down came the ruler, connecting with the knuckles, and breaking in half...the ruler, not the knuckles. The whole time, the child was looking the nun directly in the eyes...and never flinched.

Everyone sat in stunned silence. I don't really remember what happened after that. I think class simply went on as if nothing had happened. I do think that was the last time Sister tried to use a ruler that year and (I think) she continued teaching...living. (Of course, you could probably hide a lot of broken bones and bruises under the robes that all nuns wore back then!)

So, to the writer of the "opinion piece" below..."I feel ya!", although I must say that I still think there is a "happy medium" in the corporal punishment controversy.

There is a lot to be said for the old adage..."Spare the rod, spoil the child."

Abuse...NO!

But, no pain...no gain!

What kids really learn when teachers resort to violence.

By David Noonan | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

Every once in a while I run into someone who, like me, attended Catholic school in the '50s and '60s. These encounters usually follow a pattern. We establish terms of service—I put in 13 years, including kindergarten—test our memories of the Baltimore Catechism and the Latin mass, and recall things like meatless Fridays, the scourge of "impure thoughts" and Limbo, the nice but God-free place where babies who died before baptism spent eternity (and which the church essentially did away with in 2007). There is an odd charm to much of this, a quaint and funny weirdness that only another Catholic from that era can truly appreciate.

But the conversations inevitably turn to a decidedly less charming subject—getting smacked by nuns. I have no idea whether slapping kids across the face was officially sanctioned by the church in those days. I only know it happened, to me and plenty of other kids. The nuns who smacked me and my friends at our small elementary school in New Jersey were Sisters of Charity, a cheap bit of irony that always draws a chuckle when I talk about being on the receiving end of those holy rights and lefts. And let me say right here that not every nun I encountered in the early '60s resorted to physical violence. Most didn't, in fact, but the ones who did established a pervasive atmosphere of low-grade dread that still taints my memories of those years.

The offenses that brought down the wrath of the sisters included "talking back"—which was my specialty—swearing, fighting, fooling around in church, throwing snowballs at girls and so on. In other words, kid stuff. And because each nun had her own mysterious criteria, not to mention her own unfathomable (to us, anyway) moods, there was a nerve-racking randomness to the way punishment was meted out. A wisecrack might bring a dirty look one day and a slap the next.

Certain kids came in for more than their fair share of abuse. Some of these "troublemakers" simply could not contain their outrage at the treatment they received. They overreacted when hit—crying, yelling, stomping out of the classroom—thus establishing themselves as easy targets for future smacks. The rest of us learned early on to take our punishment without flinching. While I don't recall ever seeing a girl get slapped across the face, my brother Michael, two years ahead of me, remembers that the girls usually got whacked across the knuckles with a ruler; that was the method used on a seventh-grade classmate of his whose uniform skirt was deemed too short.

If there was an upside to the nuns' use of corporal punishment (a shameless euphemism that masks the inherent inequality at work when an adult strikes a child), it was the spirit of camaraderie it fostered among the students. It was us against them, all the way. We were united in our defiance of the nuns' authority—and the church's, for that matter—and we each felt every slap, not just the ones that fell across our own cheeks. Our parents weren't much help; they'd been through it themselves when they were kids and they accepted it. So we were on our own, and if it made some of us tougher, wiser and less trusting of people in power than we might otherwise have become, I guess that's a good thing. But I wouldn't want anyone else to go through the crap we went through. The use of physical violence against children in school may or may not create order and improve test scores, but it certainly teaches kids about humiliation and fear. And what fifth grader needs to learn about things like that?