This last month, a couple of my columns have been about the good things I learned from the Sisters at St. Fidelis, my parish school in the Humboldt Park area. I think the columns went over well. In fact, I got my first fan letter ever after that first column about the parish school!
This week I want to complete the picture of what I learned in the Catholic parochial school I attended.
Like I said in those previous columns, we learned great things. We learned how to succeed in high school and college, how to be comfortable around people of the opposite sex, how to make and do things that have helped us throughout our lives, and how to develop friendships that have lasted for decades.
But we also learned and saw stuff that we wished we hadn’t.
A couple of the priests were pedophiles, and I’ve written about that here in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy before, and I’ve also written about it in my mystery novel Little Altar Boy. I don’t think I need to drag that up again.
The other stuff we learned and saw that we wished we hadn’t mainly involves the meanness of some of the Sisters. Generally, the Sisters were good people, people devoted to their vocations, people devoted to teaching us. There were several nuns, however, who weren’t good people. Some of our worst memories were of seeing kids in the class being punished by some of the nuns. It didn’t happen often, but those memories stay with you.
We remembered boys kneeling in the front of the class with books balanced on their arms. We remembered kneeling on a bag of hard peas with our arms reaching for the sky. We remembered kneeling on our own hands.
We remembered having our hair pulled by the nuns for laughing about something in class. We remembered being whacked across the shoulders with a ruler for speaking without raising our hands first. We remembered being struck on our palms with a ruler for getting a math question wrong.
We remembered being forced to stand at the front of the class sucking on pacifiers because we were acting like babies. We remembered being told to put our heads on the desk and being hit on the head with a book. We remembered a boy who did something to annoy a nun, and she punished him by sticking his head out the window and closing the window down on his neck.
There are those memories, memories that are hard to escape.
Today, if a teacher were to do these things, she would be fired, possibly arrested. It wasn’t like that back then. We assumed that the sisters had a right to whack us and yell at us and pull our hair and make us feel stupid. We didn’t complain.
Thankfully, some things have changed in our schools
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